Florida Wilds

My sister and I grew up 11 miles outside of the nearest city, 7 miles to Alabama, and 4 miles away from the closest communities.

A lot of the time it was just us as kids, so many of my stories from then are mostly just her and I. I can't imagine now raising my children as we were. Most of the time we were barefoot and fancy free on 10 acres of various topography, the best Florida has to offer.

Our house was set on a hill of hard, rich Alabama clay. There was a slope to the north that led through a small garden with scuppernong and muscadine vines. Further down this slope and going across to the other side of the property was a trail of quartz sand, almost as fine and white as the sand on the emerald coast. Behind us were the tall pine trees of a forestry company. A dangerous state road ran at the foot of our hill and passed by the edge of our property. And nestled between all these very different types of terrain was a swamp.

The swamp was fed by a natural underground spring that ran through most of our area. It was never dry, even in the winter when the cold would still the humidity in the air and evaporate the water before it really got a chance to fill it.

You couldn't just walk across it. The swamp maintained enough coverage to trap the moisture and has such a layer of leaves and debris that trying to walk across when at its driest, even now, just pulls you in with such a strong suction it is almost like quicksand. I lost a lot of shoes and toys to the pull of that muck.

Now that you have an idea of where I was raised, I can tell you about the day I learned about how dangerous that suction was. I can laugh at it now, but at the time, I was absolutely terrified I was going to get eaten, bitten, or just swallowed in the swamp.

My parents had their own life when I was growing up. A lot of it didn't include us really. We were allowed to go as we wanted if we were back before the sun had set. I was born in the 80's and life was a lot more lenient then. We didn't have street lamps living there. We had just the sound of nature and twilight.

We were explorers, going where no one dared before, in our minds at least. We jumped the clay hills behind our house, traversed the sandy trails, and went to the swamp to pick wild blueberries and flowers.

At some point, I was probably 8 or 9 and my sister was two years younger, we decided we wanted to explore the swamp. Not just visit the edge, but go into it. There were tall cypress trees all throughout and that was our opportunity. We concocted a plan to find boards, an old play kitchen set, and other cast off items and limbs to make bridges across the cypress stumps.

There were gators and snakes. Around summer the bigger alligators came to feed on turtles when the water was full, and it was a safe haven for so many kinds of wildlife I could not name them all.

We were taught early about wildlife safety, and then sent out to play, alone. This is why I cannot imagine raising my kids as I was. It is comical to me now how dangerous this really was, insanely dangerous. My parents however, thought it was a great lesson in learning safety in the outdoors. I wouldn't trade it, even now.

We gathered up our boards and limbs and play set and drug it through thorny bushes, spines as long as two inches sometimes, thick brush, and soft ground that your feet sank on. We were often barefoot doing these things so we had thick skinned feet, and had navigated our trail beforehand.

We set up on the bank where the water was fairly receded and began to push boards across, trying to find one long enough to reach the first set of roots. None worked. We finally decided we could float the hollow plastic wall of kitchen set on the water and jump across.

We set it floating on the water, using a sunken limb to hold it in place. We then realized our weight would cause the wall to sink into the water. We would have to jump quick if we were going to get across before it sank. We were fine with this. One of us was stationed as a look out while the other tried to reach a piece of wood to the next stump. There was no way to focus on getting the wood over and watch the water at the same time.

Finally, we found a piece of wood that worked and used it to cross to the next one, having to carefully balance on the floating wall. Try as we might though, none of our pieces were long enough, or sturdy enough to balance on the next set of roots.

We heard our Dad yell for us. Why it mattered that we were trying to cross the swamp when we literally had free reign of our time, I don't know. We knew though, that if we were caught trying to get across the water we were going to be in trouble.

My sister dropped the piece of wood into the water and we both frantically tried getting back across to the bank. We crossed the first piece of wood with no problem. However, getting back across the floating kitchen wall, my sister barely made it, but as she did she had pushed hard to make a jump onto the bank so when my foot landed, I slid right off the smooth plastic and right into the water since it had not fully buoyed back up to the top.

I was terrified as my foot went down into the leaves, and deeper, into what I imagine is long decayed debris and soft, silty clay and soil. My first thought was moccasins. The idea of a snake sneaking up on me was always more worrisome than some huge reptile from the Triassic.

I was able to get my left leg onto the bank, but my right leg insisted on sinking as there was no foot hold, no matter how hard I pushed. I just forced myself deeper. My sister tried to pull me out and something clicked.

My Mom was always big on education and so we were taught to read at an early age and devoured books like most people devour dessert. I had read about how to get out of quicksand, probably in the Childcraft library set she had bought, and I went limp, trying to force my weight onto my left leg and just pull on my right. I was to my knee probably when my Dad came and pulled me the rest of the way.

Once I got over the initial shock, and saw my sister laughing until she couldn't stop about what I looked like in my moment of horror, I started laughing until I couldn't breathe. Laughter has been the coping mechanism for us since we were little and endured worse horrors so the swamp was not that big of a deal once I survived it.

My Dad was furious and we honestly do not understand the anger because we were free roaming spirits with no adult supervision.

We tried more than a few times to finish our original endeavor. We never did get it done though. I think we were both worried about landing in the water and what might be in it was a lot scarier after that. I don't know if the second time around would be as hilarious. It was funny though, then and now. At that age the world wasn't so big and the dangers much more isolated.

I know this reads more like a horror story for those who have never spent time in nature, or the dangerous parts of nature, but there is something to be said about the adrenaline rush that comes from doing dangerous things and being able to tell the story later.

I don't think I would ever let my kids roam so freely, even if I had the land. I do think though that I would take them out and show them what it was like to have enjoyed such adventures and laugh about it. We had fun in that wilderness and those, even the swamp, are the only moments of childhood I wish I could go back to and laugh about again.