The mouth of the creek was indistinguishable from the mangroves that hid it, as if the narrow waterway were only willing to reveal itself to those who knew to look.
We scanned the banks for wading birds and alligators. A white ibis is hunting in the shallows with its long curved bill, and it is in front of us.
We found ourselves under a canopy of overarching branches a few minutes later. I lifted my paddle and felt my kayak being pulled along by the mangroves and their many inhabitants, scrolling past my peripheral vision.
I closed my eyes and focused on the sound. A fish leaps from the water. The wind is blowing through the trees. Silence.
I was close to a moment of pure tranquility in the deep waters of the Everglades National Park, hidden away in Gopher Key Creek.
This wasn't as fast as I wanted it to be. A day and a half earlier, I set off with my sister and a friend on the 99-mile paddle route through large bays, wide rivers and narrow creeks. We made arrangements to complete the route in eight days, with an average of 15 miles per day. We couldn't fully account for Florida's volatile weather.
After pressing forward with our itinerary despite high winds and an incoming storm front, Bobby Miller Jr. would swoop in and fetch us with his boat should the weather really go south. The bad news was that a tornado was on its way. We sheltered against the coast in a cluster of mangrove roots and waited for Captain Bobby to rescue us as the storm cut through Everglade City.
We changed our plans back on land. We conceded that completing the full waterway was no longer a realistic goal after we lost a day on the water and the weather continued to get worse. Instead, we rearranged our itinerary and planned for a less ambitious loop, with fewer miles and more time for close observation.
The largest wilderness reserve on the North American continent, Florida's Everglades, is best known for its vast stretches of freshwater marsh and sawgrass prairie.
The marsh is only one of several distinct habitats, which also include pine rocklands, tropical hardwood hammocks, mangrove forests and marine and estuarine areas. In the last of these two habitats, we spent our days, paddling through scenery that was described in a 1938 report as a study in halftones.
The campsites in the wilderness are unlike anything I have seen before. The Calusa, a Native people who dominated southwest Florida for many hundreds of years, built shell mounds in the mangrove forests in the interior of the waterway, some of which sit a few feet above the water line.
The beach campsites that line the Gulf side of the waterway offer an airy respite from the dense confines of the interior.
The most visually distinctive of the campsites are the chickees, a term derived from the word for house in Mikasuki, a language spoken by many members of the Miccosuke. The simple structures, each only 10 feet by 12 feet, are little more than elevated platforms and are unforgiving of footsteps.
The tranquility we experienced atop the Sweetwater Chickee, tucked away from the Wilderness Waterway by a mile-long tendril of water, was broken in the early afternoon by the sudden screeching of an osprey, grasping a fish in its talons, as it tried to evade a pair of bald eagles. In the middle of the night, the heavy exhales of an animal breathing at the surface of the water sounded different from the dolphins we saw the night before, leaving us wondering how close the tide would lift the water.
Though it now covers more than 1.5 million acres, the original ecology of the area is still protected by only 20%.
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The early Calusa people, whose fishing and foraging communities were concentrated along the coast, found reason to engineer the landscape by building mounds from hundreds of millions of oyster shells.
It wasn't until the late 1800s that the flow of fresh water from Lake Okeechobee began to be impeded, first by settlers and land developers trying to drain the marshland, and later by the Army Corps of Engineers, which built an artificial lake.
The detrimental effects of those drainage, water-diversion and flood-control schemes have been worsened by pollution.
The legislation aimed at reviving the environment by restoring the historical flow of fresh water has progressed only in fits and starts.
The Everglades is an extraordinary place for wildlife. Hundreds of wading birds were seen in our six days on the water. Bald eagles, red-shouldered hawks, and ospreys were frequent visitors along with American alligators, bull sharks, and a wealth of colorful flora.
The wildlife would usually show up only after startling us with unexpected sounds: the loud chattering of the dawn chorus, the violent splash of a dolphin on the glassy water, the heavy whoosh of a blue heron as it lifted from its perch near a creek.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, bird populations were nearly wiped out by plume hunters, who supplied unquenchable millinery markets in New York and London. Alligators and old-growth cypress groves were targeted for their hides.
I wonder how different our experience would have been if we had been able to see the rookeries.
The trip had its moments of difficulty. It was a heavy burden to haul our water in thick containers that weighed 150 pounds. The park recommends bringing one gallon of water per person per day. In the middle of January, temperatures ranged from the 40s at night to the 80s in the midday sun. During our first night on the water, the moon hung over our tents like an unforgiving flood light.
No-see-ums and mosquitoes were present. At our campsite on Mormon Key, the mosquitoes swirled so thickly that the sound of their buzzing kept me awake at night, despite my feeling exhausted after our longest and most active day on the water. The bugs were separated from me by the mesh of my tent.
The transformational experience of being in the Everglades with an abundance of time to look closely, listen intently and to absorb the scenery around me was worth any number of bites, scratches and blisters.
After four days of exploring bays, rivers and creeks, we paddled to the mouth of the Chatham River, where we would camp for the next two nights on the beaches of spindly keys, just a few feet above the high tide line.
The trip took a different turn out in the Gulf. After leaving the waterways and confined campsites, we were free to wander along the shell-scattered sands and see the endless horizon beyond.
The mangrove forests still dominated the interiors of the islands, forming a wall on the backside of the beaches.
On Pavilion Key, the last of our campsites, I had time to reflect on their ubiquity, and on their central role in the Everglades, as a buffer against erosion and floodwaters, and as key nursery habitats to crustaceans, fish, birds and reptiles.
The first day on the water was when my thoughts came back to me. Our instinct was to paddle toward the shore as the tornado approached. It was close to low tide and we were able to stand in the shallows.
There, clinging to the mangroves, as the winds swirled ever more intensely, I experienced a kind of momentary kinship, I realize now, with the many other life-forms we would encounter in the days to come: the oysters, the crabs, the snails.
The mangrove shift in South Florida is a response to rising ocean and air temperatures and inland is a response to rising sea levels.
Mangrove forests on the coast will face intolerable conditions in as little as 30 years because of the rate of sea-level rise. The trees migration inland will be halted by the many man-made impediments that litter the landscape. According to some scientists, mangrove forests may be replaced by open water by the end of the century.
With many of our ecological crises, time is running out. Will we act in time to protect the mangroves, which are among the first organisms to bear the burden of rising seas? Will we be able to protect the flora and fauna in time? Will we save them from the storms? Will we allow the oceans to rise and then drown them?
The watery world of the Everglades can't answer those questions. It is for us to decide. Instead, the South Florida ecosystems quietly offers up a vivid reminder of what is at stake, first for the migrating mangroves and then for us.
Stephen Hiltner edits and contributes to the weekly World Through a Lens column for The New York Times. You can follow his work on social media.
Do you have a question about the Wilderness Waterway? Ask him in the comments.
Audio production by Tracy. Audio design by Matt Ruby. Dan Powell is an audio engineer.
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