Lost Woods (17 page)

At breakfast the next morning there were grins on the faces of the men. “Hear anything last night?” they asked. Both of us wore our most demure expressions. “Well,” said Marie, “once we thought we heard a mouse, but we were too sleepy to bother.” They never asked us again. And after a night or two we really did sleep through the night.

One of the most vivid impressions I carried away from the
Albatross
was the sight of the net coming up with its load of fish. The big fishing trawlers such as this one drag a cone-shaped net on the floor of the ocean, scraping up anything lying on the bottom or swimming just above it. This means not only fish but also crabs, sponges, starfish and other life of the sea floor. Much of the fishing was done in depths of about 100 fathoms, or 600 feet. After a half hour of trawling the big winches would begin to haul in the cables, winding them on steel drums as they came aboard. There is a marker on every hundred fathoms of cable, so one can tell when to expect the big net to come into view, still far down in the green depths.

I think that first glimpse of the net, a shapeless form, ghostly white, gave me a sense of sea depths that I never had before. As the net rises, coming into sharper focus, there is a stir of excitement even among the experienced fishermen. What has it brought up?

No two hauls are quite alike. The most interesting ones came from the deeper slopes. Georges Bank is like a small mountain resting on the floor of a surrounding deeper sea – most of the fishing is done on its flat plateaus, but sometimes the net is dragged down on the slopes near the mountain’s base. Then it brings up larger fish from these depths. There is a strange effect, caused by the sudden change of pressure. Some of the fish become enormously distended and float helplessly on their backs. They drift out of the net as it nears the surface but they are quite unable to swim down.

Then one sees the slender shapes of sharks moving in to the kill. There was something very beautiful about those sharks to me – and when some of the men got out rifles and killed them for “sport” it really hurt me.

In those deep net hauls, too, there were often the large and grotesque goosefish or angler fish. The angler has a triangular shape, and its enormous mouth occupies most of the base of the triangle. It lives on the floor of the sea, preying on other fish. The anglers always seemed to have been doing a little fishing of their own as the net came up, and sometimes the tails of two or three large cod would be protruding from their mouths.

Sometimes at night we would go up on the deck to watch the fishing. Then the white splash of electric light on the lower deck was the only illumination in a world of darkness and water. It was a colorful sight, with the men in their yellow oilskins and their bright flannel shirts, all intensified and made somehow dramatic by the blackness that surrounded them.

There is something deeply impressive about the night sea as one experiences it from a small vessel far from land. When I stood on the afterdeck on those dark nights, on a tiny man-made island of wood and steel, dimly seeing the great shapes of waves that rolled about us, I think I was conscious as never before that ours is a water world, dominated by the immensity of the sea.

However, it is a curious thing that one sometimes experiences a sense of the sea on land. A few years ago I had a wonderful opportunity to go far into the interior of the Everglades in Florida. Many people have crossed this great wilderness by way of the Tamiami Trail. That is better than not seeing it at all, but until one has penetrated far into the interior, into the trackless, roadless areas of the great swamp, one does not know the Everglades.

The difficulties of travel there are great, and no ordinary means of transportation will do. But a few pioneering individuals have developed wonderful vehicles called “glades buggies.” They were first used, I believe, to prospect for oil in the interior of the Everglades. They are completely independent of roads; they can go through water, they can navigate the seas of “saw-grass” or even push through low-growing thickets of trees and shrubs; they can make their way – painfully but surely – over ground pitted with holes and strewn with jagged boulders.

I learned about the glades buggies when I was on a trip for my office to the area that is now the Everglades National Park. At that time the Fish and Wildlife Service had responsibility for protecting the wildlife of the area. Two of us were staying at a hotel in Miami Beach, visiting various wildlife areas in the vicinity. When we heard about Mr. Don Poppenhager and his wonderful glades buggy, we decided to try to arrange a trip.

Mr. Poppenhager had never taken a woman into the swamp and at first he was hesitant. He warned us that it was a very uncomfortable experience; we assured him we could take it and really wanted to go. So he agreed to meet us at a little store on the Tamiami Trail kept by a character known as Ma Szady.

I think our elegant Miami Beach hotel had been a little suspicious of our comings and goings on strange errands and in strange costumes, but the morning we left for the Everglades trip was almost too much for them. One of the Fish and Wildlife men was to pick us up at 5
A.M.
and take us over the trail. This was in the summer, and a tropical darkness still hung over Miami at that hour. Not wanting to arouse the hotel, Shirley [Briggs] and I crept down the stairs laden with all our strange gear. As we tiptoed through the lobby, the head of a very sleepy but thoroughly suspicious clerk rose above the desk. “Are you ladies checking out?” he asked. I don’t think his estimate of us rose when a very noisy, two-ton Government truck roared down the street and stopped at the hotel for its passengers.

The glades buggy that was waiting for us was a wonderful conveyance. It was built something like a tractor, with six pairs of very large wheels. Its engine was completely naked and exposed, and during the trip blasted its heat on the three of us perched on the buggy’s single seat. There were various tools – pliers, screwdrivers, etc. – in a little rack against the motor block, and from time to time Mr. Poppenhager leaned out as we jogged along and turned something or jabbed at the motor. It seemed to be in a perpetual state of boiling over; and now and then Mr. P. would stop and get out with a tin can and dip up some water – there was water everywhere – and pour it into the radiator. Usually he would drink a little – “the best water in the world” he would say.

But as I said a while ago, there was a curious sense of the sea there in the heart of the Everglades. At first I couldn’t analyze it but I felt it strongly. There is first of all a sense of immense space from the utter flatness of the land and the great expanse of sky. The feeling of space is almost the same as at sea. The cloud effects were beautiful and always changing, and rain came over the grass, making a beautiful soft play of changing color – all grey and soft green. And again I found myself remembering rain at sea, dimpling the soft grey sheet of water. And in the Everglades the coral rock is always cropping out – underlying the water and raised in jagged boulders among the grass. Once that rock was formed by coral animals, living in a shallow sea that covered this very place. There is today the feeling that the land has formed only the thinnest veneer over this underlying platform of the ancient sea – that at any time the relations of sea and land might again be reversed.

And as we traveled from one to another of the “hammocks” of palmetto and other trees that rise here and there in the great sea of grass, we thought irresistibly of islands in the ocean. Except for scattered cypresses, all the trees of this part of the Everglades are concentrated in the hammocks, which form where depressions in the rock accumulate a little soil. Everywhere else there is only rock, water, and grass. The hammocks are famous for their tree snails, which live on certain locust-like trees, feeding on mossy growths on the bark. The shells of the tree snails are brightly colored, with an amazing variety of patterns. They are so much sought by collectors that the more accessible hammocks have been stripped bare. On our steaming iron monster, we rode along through the hammocks, passing under the trees and picking off tree snails, as in childhood we used to snatch the iron rings on a merry-go-round.

During the day we went calling on several alligators known by Mr. Poppenhager to inhabit certain “holes.” The first one was not at home; the second was. He was apparently out in his front yard, but at our approach he went crashing through the willows and into his pond. In the Everglades, a “ ’gator hole” is typically a water-filled depression in the middle of a small hammock. Usually there is a rocky cave in the floor of this pond to which the alligator can retreat.

The Everglades is, of course, the land of the Seminole Indians. Far in the interior of the Glades we visited the sites of two ancient Indian villages. Some of these are being studied by archeologists who have found evidence of early tribes who antedated the Seminoles by several hundred years. Near one of the modern settlements, Mr. Poppenhager took us to visit an Indian grave. Because of the solid limestone floor of this whole region, there is no burial in the ordinary sense; the coffin is placed on the ground and the man is given his gun and other equipment he will need for his life in the next world.

To us the whole area seemed as trackless and as lacking in landmarks as the sea, but our guide knew exactly where he was going. Our only bad moments came late in the afternoon, when there began to be some question whether we had enough gas to get us back to the Trail. Mosquitoes had been with us all day, settling in clouds every time we stopped moving. So the thought of a night in the swamp wasn’t pleasant. However, we made it about dusk, just as the Game Warden and the Fish and Wildlife patrolman were beginning to line up cars along the Trail to guide us back by their headlights.

That Fish and Wildlife patrolman was such an unforgettable character that I must tell you a little about him before we leave the Everglades. As Service patrolman for the area, it was his job to protect the birds and alligators and other wildlife from being molested. That meant he had to live far out in a wild part of the Everglades, where days went by without his seeing another person. The Service had had trouble filling the job. There were few men that would have taken it; and perhaps no one else as beautifully fitted for it as Mr. Finneran. He was tired of the northern cities where he had spent most of his life, and for about ten years he had known this wilderness of southern Florida. He had somehow gained the confidence of the Seminoles, who ordinarily have no love for the white man. But they admired and trusted Mr. Finneran – so much that they had given him a name and practically adopted him into their tribe. When the Service offered Mr. Finneran this lonely job, he took it gladly, and moved into the little shack that was to serve as home and headquarters. There he lived with a little dog, a few chickens, and a blue indigo snake named Chloe. He had five tree snails on a tree beside the house. He was very proud of them, and when we returned from our glades buggy trip, we brought him a few snails as a gift. He couldn’t have been more pleased if they had been pure gold. I remember how feelingly he spoke to me of the beauty of the Everglades in the early morning, with dew on the grass and thousands of spider webs glistening. He spoke of the birds coming in such numbers they were like dark clouds in the sky. He told of the eerie silver light of the moon, and the red, glowing hordes of alligators in the ponds. His paradise had its flaws, as he acknowledged. He couldn’t have a light in his shack at night because of the terrible Glades mosquito. Sometimes, on rainy nights, fire ants invaded the house and even swarmed into his bed. The Indians said ghosts haunted the place because it was built on an old Indian mound; but Mr. Finneran had heard no ghosts he couldn’t explain. When city dwellers asked him how he stood the loneliness out there, he always asked how they endured sitting around in night clubs. “I wouldn’t trade my life for anything,” he told us.

From what I have told you, you will know that a large part of my life has been concerned with some of the beauties and mysteries of this earth about us, and with the even greater mysteries of the life that inhabits it. No one can dwell long among such subjects without thinking rather deep thoughts, without asking himself searching and often unanswerable questions, and without achieving a certain philosophy.

There is one quality that characterizes all of us who deal with the sciences of the earth and its life – we are never bored. We can’t be. There is always something new to be investigated. Every mystery solved brings us to the threshold of a greater one.

I like to remember the wonderful old Swedish oceanographer, Otto Petterson. He died a few years ago at the age of 93, in full possession of his keen mental powers. His son, also a distinguished oceanographer, tells us in a recent book how intensely his father enjoyed every new experience, every new discovery concerning the world about him. “He was an incurable romantic,” the son wrote, “intensely in love with life and with the mysteries of the Cosmos which, he was firmly convinced, he had been born to unravel.” When, past 90, Otto Petterson realized he had not much longer to enjoy the earthly scene, he said to his son: “What will sustain me in my last moments is an infinite curiosity as to what is to follow.”

The pleasures, the values of contact with the natural world, are not reserved for the scientists. They are available to anyone who will place himself under the influence of a lonely mountain top – or the sea – or the stillness of a forest; or who will stop to think about so small a thing as the mystery of a growing seed.

I am not afraid of being thought a sentimentalist when I stand here tonight and tell you that I believe natural beauty has a necessary place in the spiritual development of any individual or any society. I believe that whenever we destroy beauty, or whenever we substitute something man-made and artificial for a natural feature of the earth, we have retarded some part of man’s spiritual growth.