Tomorrow a winter storm will be hitting the Gulf Coast and late afternoon I left Sarasota Miami bound. Storm clouds westrising over the western horizen and I thought about stopping for the night.
Pam Vaughan, my hostess on Siesta Key, had holidayed at the Rod and Reel Club and suggested staying the night at a famous fishing lodge that had been a popular fishing resort for presidents, corporate leaders, and the famous since the turn of the century and I turned off Alligator Alley connecting the Gulf with Miami.
Everglades City showed serious damage from a recent hurricane. Nothing was open not even a bar. Further into the swamp windows down mosquitoes splattering over the windshield. Listening to salsa from a Miami radio radio. The air smelled with the primordial reeking of rot vegetation. I imagined alligators feeding on me, if I drove off the road and devoured body before I could get to the causeway. I recalled the book The Foundling and Peter Mathieson’s about the Thousand Miles. Pirates, Indians, murder, gators, snakes, smugglers at al. Once the Seminoles existed on these swamps for centuries and centuries and centuries before the white man and they still ran here alligator wrestling shows on the Miami to Tampa Highway. I drove up to the hotel. A classic hunting club from the 1920s maybe even before. I shut up the car, got my bags, and checked into a single room. $25 a night. Happy to have some place to sleep in the Everglades. Even happier with a gin-tonic on the veranda, listening to the ‘gators roar in the night.