“Don’t worry about your car none, Kelly,” Caleb had told her as he climbed into the cab of the pickup. “Anybody looks at that whiz-banger crooked, Billy’ll wrap a gun barrel round his fool head. Slept out here on the porch last night with a shotgun ’crost his lap. Lucky thing a dog didn’t bark or he’d of blowed off a toe.”
Much of the vastness of the Florida Everglades is roadless, trackless, “where the hand of man has never set foot,” as the saying goes. The Jeep tracks that lead into it, like the one we’d used to reach the Broussard abode, tended to peter out in a few miles. Then, here and there, the passage of a few four-wheel-drive vehicles a week has made some informal routes along what little ground isn’t four feet deep in quicksand or gumbo mud. Some of them are indicated on maps, others aren’t. But we didn’t need any maps with Caleb leading the way. He knew them all, or claimed to.
This was not the Florida I knew. I could identify some of the plants from seeing tamer versions in people’s yards or in city parks. They grew differently out here. But I’m a city boy, don’t know much about plants even in town.
Don’t know much about birds, either, but this was the place to come if you wanted to learn. I never saw so many birds. They’d explode from the reeds and moss-hung trees when they heard us coming. Big birds, little birds, great big flocks of black birds, thousands of egrets or cranes or something like that who just stood there and watched us go by.
Me and Alicia both craned our necks the first time Dak pointed out a big old alligator sunning himself beside a ditch. We watched him glide powerfully into the water and vanish up to his eye sockets. Wow!
Two miles later it was here a gator, there a gator, everywhere an alligator. Ho-hum. We actually had to wait for one to get out of the road in front of us. The gator probably thought of it as a gator track… and he’d be right. He was here first, he’d watched the dinosaurs come and go, and maybe he’d be here still once this critter calling itself “humanity” killed itself off.
[172] They say the Everglades are in trouble, what with the water being siphoned off up north, Miami advancing from the east, pesticides, global warming, I don’t know what all. And I believe them. But just driving through for the first time, I was in awe at the sheer numbers of the wildlife we saw.
Unfortunately, among that wildlife you had to count the mosquitoes.
Billions of mosquitoes.
Now we knew why Caleb had tossed a big plastic bottle of Off! on the front seat of Blue Thunder. We coated ourselves with the stuff, Alicia slathering it on Dak as he drove. Blue Thunder didn’t have an air conditioner-one of the few vehicles in Florida without one-but it wouldn’t have mattered, because we all knew we’d be out in the open soon enough, whenever Caleb got where he was taking us.
The repellent helped, but about one in a hundred of those critters seemed to think Off! was just there to oil up their bloodsucker, make it easier to slide it into the skin. It appears we’re breeding a better, stronger skeeter out there in the swamps, and when their kids grow up, look out!
OUR DESTINATION TURNED out to be the rotting remains of a dock, smack in the middle of nowhere. I know, because somebody had put up a sign: middle of nowhere. Redneck humor, I guess. The sign was about to fall over.
A flat-bottom Cajun pirogue could have made it through the shallow channels we saw winding around the hammocks and cypress knees and mangroves, but you’d have to pole it. An outboard propeller would have stuck in the mud.
Caleb and Travis pulled a big canvas tarp off a big lumpy thing sitting next to the dock and I wasn’t too surprised to see it was an airboat. Where the four-wheel tracks end, that’s where the airboat trails begin.
It was a wide, flat-bottom aluminum hull, extremely shallow draft, designed to skim over the water rather than cut through it. At the back was an aircraft engine mounted high in a safety cage. In front of it, almost as high, was a sort of crow’s nest seat for the pilot to sit in, way [173] up where he could more easily pick out his route. An airboat didn’t need much water under the hull. An inch was plenty. If you had a good head of steam and kept going, it would glide right over mud, too. Even dry land, for a while. “Don’t need no more water’n a skeeter can spit,” Caleb said as we boarded.
This one had once been a tourist boat. There were four rows of comfortable bench seats, with pads faded and cracked open by the relentless sun over the years, yellow foam stuffing showing here and there.
We all piled out of the vehicles, the mosquitoes swarming again now that we’d stopped. We put on more repellent, but nothing was going to make them go away completely, so we worked quickly, hoping to get moving again soon.
Travis and Jubal lifted a big cardboard box out of the back of Blue Thunder. It didn’t appear too heavy. They opened it and for the first time we saw the experimental test vehicle Jubal had cobbled together.
I can’t really say that it looked too impressive.
It was a five-foot tube of heavy-duty six-inch gray PVC pipe, the kind you’d buy for an ordinary plumbing project. A tapered nose cone had been fitted on the top of it. Below were three metal fins that also acted as legs for it to stand on. Under the tube was a spherical metal cage, the only part of the contraption that looked as if a fair amount of work had gone into it. Without knowing about Jubal’s Squeezer dingus, I’d never have known what it was for. It was intended to hold a silver bubble about the size of a softball.
I’d seen better rockets at the school science fair.
They put it on its side on the front bench of the airboat and tied it down with bungee cords. Two aluminum suitcases were set on the floor in front, and we were ready to go. Caleb climbed up into the pilot’s seat and started the engine.
Soon we were flying along on the smooth water.
THE WIND IN our faces whipped away even the steroid-pumped Everglades mosquitoes. The day had not yet begun to get hot. The water below us was the color of weak tea and the sky above blue and [174] cloudless. We barreled along through a primeval world where I could easily imagine duck-billed dinosaurs browsing in the trees. Kelly squeezed my hand and smiled at me. I’d had worse days.
ON A MAP you can see hundreds of what they call hammocks scattered through the Everglades. There are also islands, streams, creeks, sloughs. The hammocks on the maps could be miles long, but even the smallest-scale maps didn’t indicate the ones that were only an acre or two, because they weren’t very permanent features.
Caleb finally beached the airboat on a bare knuckle of cracked mud that might have had enough room to park a dozen cars… if you didn’t mind seeing them sink like mammoths in the La Brea Tar Pits. We had to step carefully when we got out. My first step cracked through the skin of dried mud and I almost lost a shoe. The footing was a bit firmer in the center of the little island.
Looking around, I wasn’t sure why Caleb had selected this place, an hour’s ride from where we’d left the vehicles. Most every mile of swamp we passed through seemed just as isolated as any other mile, though I knew this wasn’t strictly true. We saw other airboats passing in the distance, and once came close enough to wave at the driver.
We quickly saw that we were basically just along for the ride, and because Jubal wanted us there. Travis and Jubal set the rocket on its end near the center of the hammock, then started placing other devices around it. Neither of them had anything to say, they just worked steadily stringing wires, plugging things into other things, sweat dripping off their foreheads. The rest of us stood around, slapping at mosquitoes.
It occurred to me that, if this thing worked, we might be about to witness something as historic as the Wright brothers’ first flight. But to tell the truth, all I wanted to do was get it done and get out of there. I was getting eaten alive!