Uncertain Waters

How the Okefenokee became “land of trembling earth”

The Okefenokee Swamp serves as the headwaters for the Suwannee River, which runs to the Gulf of Mexico, and the St. Marys River, which flows to the Atlantic. The main trail that we have been traveling is a canal that was originally dug in the 1890s by a company that planned to drain the Okefenokee Swamp and connect the two rivers. The venture failed, and in doing so, it allowed what is now believed to be the largest undamaged peat swamp in Earth’s temperate zone to remain intact. 

Archaeological evidence shows human activity in the swamp starting about 4,500 years ago. It is believed that numerous Indigenous communities inhabited the area for millennia. Spanish missionaries arrived in the 1600s, and white settlers lived in or around the swamp starting in the 1800s, surviving as hunters and loggers and receiving deeds from the U.S. government. By the mid-1800s, federal and state militias had driven many of the Seminole inhabitants out of the area.

In the early 1900s, writers and naturalists who visited the swamp advocated for the protection of the Okefenokee from logging and development. The refuge was established in 1937 by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the New Deal era. The national wildlife refuge protected important wintering grounds for migratory birds while establishing a work area for the Civilian Conservation Corps’ program to create reliable jobs during the Great Depression. In the late 1970s, The Nature Conservancy donated more than 14,000 acres of land to expand the refuge. Today, it spans about 400,000 acres, covering more than 90% of the swamp.

The word “Okefenokee” translates from the Creek Indian language as “land of trembling earth,” and it’s not hard to see why: We paddle by many unstable peat islands along the canoe trail. The smaller ones have the consistency of a wet sponge. They shake or squish underfoot. 

The peat in these tufts of ephemeral land gives the water its dark tannins and distinct coffee color. Bread loaf-sized clumps of peat float by our boat. Up close, peat looks like dead leaf matter that has been pulverized into a coarse, wet dust. Luke keeps trying to catch some with his paddle, but the clumps immediately dissolve into underwater clouds at the slightest touch. 

“I’ve never been somewhere more alive than here”

After six hours of paddling, we arrive at our reserved campsite in the southeastern corner of the refuge, a secluded spot called Monkey Lake. There’s a small dock with a composting toilet. A 100-foot-long boardwalk leads through a forest of cypress trees and thick bush to a covered wooden deck big enough for a picnic table and some tents. 

Luke sets up our hammocks and bug nets while I start cooking dinner on our little camp stove. Earlier that day at the outfitters shop we were warned that the mosquitoes come out in droves right before dusk. So we button our shirts up, roll down our sleeves, pull up our socks and cover any exposed skin in insect repellent. Just in time, too. Once the sun gets low, mosquitoes show up in quantities rivaling a Bible story’s plague of locusts. 

This will be the beginning of one of the loudest nights of our lives.

As the sun sets, the birds around us start singing, tweeting and calling in numbers that I’ve never heard before. Like any self-respecting teenager, Luke whips out his iPhone to record the sounds. It’s an absolute cacophony of owls, hawks, wading birds, cranes and dozens more smaller birds all at once.

By the time dusk has settled into darkness, the bird calls are overtaken by the croaks of frogs—thousands and thousands of them. Luke walks up and down the wood-plank walkway to the dock enthralled by a curious phenomenon: The din of the frogs gets louder wherever he stands. By 11 p.m., the frogs go quiet. In their silence, we hear a low hum that vibrates across the landscape—millions of mosquitoes working the night shift. We marinate ourselves in insect repellent once more, double-check the bug nets on our hammocks and nod off to mosquito-generated white noise. 

An hour before sunrise, we are awakened by the sound of birds again. By 8 a.m., the birds quiet down, the mosquitoes go away and the Okefenokee becomes tranquil again. 

“I always imagined swamps to be these big dead places where nothing could survive. But I’ve never been somewhere more alive than here,” Luke muses as he packs our gear and I cook breakfast. “Everywhere we’ve gone in the Okefenokee, we’ve been surrounded by animals. Something is always watching us.”

Almost on cue, the low bellow of an alligator probably 50 feet beyond the trees that surround our campsite startles us into silence. It has the deep baritone of a lion. This bellow is matched by two more nearby alligators, each rumbling louder than the last. (I later learn that these could be mating calls or territorial claims.) Luke once again grabs his phone to record the sounds to share with his friends when he gets back home.

During the day’s paddle back, we are amazed at the life around us. We count five different colors of dragonflies. We notice hundreds of carnivorous plants—pitcher plants and bladderworts busy digesting meals of insects. We cheer for some little green anole lizards as they scramble and swim from one lily pad to the next, evading hungry fish.

I’m struck by something Lusk, the refuge manager, said to me earlier. “This is what [a healthy swamp] is supposed to look like, how it’s supposed to function. And that’s what makes it so unique,” he said. “It is worth protecting.”

As a magazine editor, I have worked on articles about efforts to repair Florida’s Everglades and the Great Dismal Swamp in North Carolina and Virginia. The former is polluted with runoff and invasive species, and the latter is a fraction of its original size. Both swamps were dredged, channeled and drained to accommodate a variety of industries, but now they are the subjects of long, expensive work to restore their broken hydrology and ecosystems. Those projects cost hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars every year. Right now, the Okefenokee needs none of those restoration efforts. 

On our drive home, I can’t stop thinking about our night in the swamp and the threats facing this unspoiled spot. Luke, in the passenger seat of our minivan, focuses on his phone, typing messages in a group chat. It’s the classmates from his school’s camping and boating club. “I’m telling them about our trip,” he says as his thumbs tap the screen, “and I’m trying to see if we can do a trip to Okefenokee in the future. They need to see that place.”

“Yeah,” I say. “More people do.”