The irony wasn’t lost on me that the novel and movie made about the ghost orchid in the Fakahatchee Strand featured characters who got lost in the vast cypress swamp looking for the extremely rare and elusive orchid. Here I was, not knowing exactly where I am, with my imagination running wild with thoughts of spending an unplanned and unprepared night in the Fakahatchee. Nobody would know I was missing till sunset and the search wouldn’t start till morning.
If you’ve never been knee deep in the Everglades in August you have no idea what it’s like. The alligators, water moccasins and the wolf spiders are the least of your worries, the unbelievable hordes of mosquitoes is what to be afraid of. It’s stinking HOT and humid and there is stagnant swamp water everywhere! The perfect storm for mosquito breeding. At night it would be unbearable.
The plan for the afternoon was for a short walk into the Fakahatchee to a place I was familiar with, just a quick hike to photograph this ghost orchid just as I had on several different occasions. Being I had been to this area many times I didn’t bother bringing a compass, map or a GPS. Somehow on the way back I got completely turned around. To this day I have no idea what I did but I could not find the tram road I hiked in on and would lead me back out. The term “tram road” in the Fakahatchee is a bit misleading. They are sixty year old temporary railroad beds built for logging cypress in the 40’s and 50’s. Sixty years of overgrowth in the Everglades can make them extremely hard to find today.
It seems every year there is a story in the Naples Daily News about some fool who gets lost in the Fakahatchee Strand and is found the next day after spending an extremely miserable evening in the Everglades. I think the embarrassment would be about as bad as spending the night out here with the mosquitoes. I had only been planning on a short trip so I didn’t have much with me. Because the mosquitoes were so awful I was thankfully wearing my bug suit top, but my legs were exposed. I had doused my legs with bug spray at the trailhead, but I had left the bug spray can in the pickup. All I had with me was my camera, tripod and a liter of water. In short time I lost the water bottle, and of course there is NO cell signal in the Fakahatchee.
After wandering back and forth for an hour and getting a bit panicked because I was not finding the tram road. I had to come to the realization that I didn’t know where I was. More wandering was just going to dig the hole I was in even deeper. I gathered my thoughts and decided to just start walking in one direction before I completely get lost. I knew that the road I drove in on (Janes Scenic Drive) crosses the Fakahatchee in a mainly east-west direction so if I walk north I would eventually hit it. Or at least that was my best recollection without a map. In boy scouts they teach you that “moss grows on the north side of trees”. Without a compass I was about to put that theory to a true life field test. Not to mention, here in the Everglades there is an awful lot of stuff growing on all sides of the trees.
After what seemed like an eternity of slogging through the swamp with continuous self doubt about the moss theory and cursing myself for being so stupid and unprepared, I very thankfully stumbled out on to Janes Scenic Drive.
To this day I now keep a compass in each camera bag and backpack I own and will never go into the Fakahatchee again without being completely prepared.
The ghost orchid is one of the rarest plants in North America. A book and movie have been made about this rare orchid and the amazing place it grows. “The Orchid Thief” is a novel that was made into an academy award winning movie named “Adaptation” written by Charlie Kaufman. Which by the way is a great movie. It actually has very little to do with a flower in a swamp, It’s one of the most creative plots I’ve ever seen. Worth a watch if you get the chance.
These were some of my very first digital nature photos I had taken, before I had a good sense of how to organize digital files. Which explains how I misplaced them for 8 years. They got tucked away in a lost folder without a searchable name. While doing some organizing on external hard drives in recent months I thankfully came across them again.
The ghost orchid is a leafless plant that is usually just an ugly green root clinging to a tree above the swamp water. The green in the root is it’s only mechanism to photosynthesize sunlight. Once a year in summer the root shoots out this amazing blossom. The ghost only grows in the small tropical microclimates created by the most dense cypress swamps in South Florida.
