Everglades National Park

Listen for a moment. A soft rustle runs through the sawgrass as the wind passes over it. Somewhere close, a bird lifts off the water with a slap of wings. The air is warm and heavy, and it smells of wet earth and green growth. Under your feet the ground is almost perfectly flat. Ahead of you, the land stretches to the horizon in shades of gold, green and silver. This is Everglades National Park, and what looks like a still meadow is actually moving.

That is the first surprise of this place. The Everglades is not a swamp in the usual sense. It is a river. A very shallow sheet of fresh water flows south from the Lake Okeechobee region toward Florida Bay. The flow is so slow that you cannot see it with your eyes. Yet the water is always on the move, often only ankle-deep or knee-deep, spread across a channel many kilometres wide. The land drops only a few centimetres over long distances, and that tiny slope is enough.

The writer Marjory Stoneman Douglas gave this idea its famous name. In 1947 she published a book called The Everglades: River of Grass. Before her book, many people saw these wetlands as useless land to drain and develop. Her writing helped change that view. In the same year, 1947, the park was formally dedicated, with President Harry Truman taking part in the ceremony. Douglas went on to defend the Everglades for decades, well into her old age.

Now look closely at the grass itself. Sawgrass is not truly a grass. It is a sedge, a grass-like plant with edges lined by tiny teeth. Run a finger along a blade, carefully, and you will feel why early travellers dreaded crossing it. Between the stems, look for brown or yellowish mats floating in the water. This is periphyton, a living layer of algae and microbes. It feeds small creatures at the very base of the food chain, and it holds moisture through the dry months.

The park is large — the biggest subtropical wilderness in the United States. It reaches across three Florida counties: Miami-Dade, Collier and Monroe. Here is a fact many visitors miss. Monroe County holds a large share of the park's land, yet most of that area has no roads at all. It is a world of mangrove channels, open water and remote islands. People reach it by canoe, by kayak or by boat, and some never see it at all.

The Everglades is also the only place on Earth where alligators and crocodiles live side by side. The American alligator prefers fresh water. It has a broad, rounded snout and a dark body. The American crocodile is rarer and lives in the salty and brackish water near the coast. Its snout is narrower, and its lower teeth show when its mouth is closed. In the southern part of the park, around Flamingo and Florida Bay, the two worlds meet.

The landscape is not one single habitat. Watch for low domes of trees rising out of the sawgrass like islands in a sea. These are tree islands and hardwood hammocks. They grow on ground that sits just slightly higher than the water around it. A difference of less than a metre can change everything here. On that higher ground, tropical trees such as gumbo limbo grow, with its red, peeling bark. Locals jokingly call it the tourist tree, because it looks sunburned.

Closer to the coast, the scene changes again. Mangrove forests line the shore with tangled roots that stand above the water like stilts. These roots trap mud and shelter young fish, shrimp and crabs. Mangroves also soften the force of storms. In 1992, Hurricane Andrew struck this region and badly damaged parts of the park. Many mangroves were knocked down. Over the following years, much of the forest grew back, which shows how this coast is built to recover.

People have lived with this water for thousands of years. Long before European contact, the Calusa and other Indigenous peoples fished and built settlements along the southwest coast of Florida. They made tools from shells and travelled the channels by canoe. In later centuries, the Seminole and Miccosukee peoples made their homes in and around the Everglades. Their communities remain in the region today, and their knowledge of the wetlands runs deep.

The twentieth century brought a hard turn. Engineers built canals, levees and dikes to drain land for farms and growing cities. Much of the natural flow of water was cut off or redirected. The Everglades shrank, and wading bird numbers fell sharply. Today the park is part of one of the largest environmental restoration efforts in the world. Federal and state agencies work to send cleaner water south again, along a path closer to the old one.

The world has noticed the value of this place. The park is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, an International Biosphere Reserve, and a Wetland of International Importance. Few parks anywhere carry all three titles. It shelters rare animals such as the Florida panther, a large wild cat that is seldom seen, and the West Indian manatee, a slow, gentle mammal of warm coastal water. It also faces new threats. Burmese pythons, released or escaped pets, now hunt native wildlife here.

The seasons shape every visit. In the dry season, during the cooler winter months, water collects in deeper pools. Fish gather there, and birds and alligators follow the fish. Wildlife is often easier to see. In the wet season, during the summer, afternoon storms build quickly and roll across the sky with heavy rain. The water spreads out again, and the mosquitoes arrive in force. Both seasons are part of the same breathing rhythm of this river.

So take one more look around you. Notice how the light shifts across the sawgrass as clouds pass overhead. Watch the surface of the water, even if it seems perfectly still. Somewhere beneath it, the river of grass is still moving south, as it has for thousands of years. As you walk away, listen again for that soft rustle in the wind... and remember that you stood beside a river you could not see.