It Sweats. It Oozes. It's Crazy with Life.
The Fakahatchee harbors many strange things reluctant to come out. So you need to be willing to go in after them.

By Susan Orlean

You would have to want something very badly to go looking for it in the Fakahatchee Strand. The Fakahatchee is a preserve of 70,000 coastal lowland acres in the southwestern corner of Florida, about 25 miles south-east of Naples, in that part of Collier County where satiny lawns and golf courses give way to an ocean of saw grass with edges as sharp as scythes. Part of the Fakahatchee is deep swamp, part is cypress stands, part is wet woods, part is estuarine tidal marsh, and part is parched prairie. The limestone underneath it is six million years old and is capped with hard rock and sand, silt and shell marls, and a grayish-greenish clay. Overall, the Fakahatchee is as flat as a cracker. Ditches and dents fill up fast with oozing groundwater. The woods are dense and lightless. In the open stretches, the land unrolls like a smooth grass mat and even small bumps and wrinkles are easy to see. Most of the land is at an elevation of only five or ten feet, and it slopes millimeter by millimeter until it is dead even with the sea.

People live in and around the Fakahatchee, but it is an unmistakably spooky and inhospitable place. In fact, the hours I spent there were probably the most miserable I have spent in my entire life. The swampy part is hot and wet and buggy and full of cottonmouths and diamondbacks and alligators and snapping turtles and poisonous plants and wild hogs and things that stick into you and onto you and fly into your nose and eyes. Crossing the swamp is a battle. You can walk through it about as easily as you could walk through a car wash. The air has the slack, drapey weight of wet velvet. Sides of trees look sweaty. Leaves are slick from the humidity. The mud sucks your feet and tries to keep ahold of them; if it fails it will settle for your shoes. The water in the swamp is stained black with tannin that is so corrosive it can cure leather. Whatever isn't wet is blasted. The sun pounds the treeless prairies. The grass gets so dry that the friction from a car can set it on fire, and the burning grass can engulf the car in flames. The Fakahatchee used to be littered with burned-up cars abandoned by pan-fried adventurers — a botanist who traveled through in the 1940s recalled that he was most impressed by the area's variety of squirrels and its great number of charred Model T's.

The swamp's stillness and darkness and thickness can rattle your nerves. In 1885 a sailor on a plume-collecting expedition wrote in his diary, "The place looked wild and lonely. About three o'clock it seemed to get on Henry's nerves and we saw him crying, he could not tell us why, he was just plain scared."

"Fakahatchee" is a Seminole word that means "forked river;" "strand" is local slang for any long, narrow swamp forest. The Fakahatchee Strand includes the world's largest strand and a chain of sinkhole lakes connected by natural channels that are watered by a 60-mile-long drainage starting to the north at the Okaloacoochee Slough and the Caloosahatchee River. Some of the area's sinkholes are nearly 100 feet deep. Otherwise the land is so level that wherever there is even just an inch or two of elevation gain, the habitat completely changes. On these elevated inches trees have taken hold and formed clusters — cypress islands, oak heads, pine islands. More than half of the Fakahatchee's trees are tropical, but it is essentially a temperate forest. The two coexisting environments mean that things live there that aren't usually found together — for instance, it is the only place on earth where royal palm trees, which are tropical, and cypress trees, which are found in temperate regions, live side by side. The Fakahatchee's central royal palm hammock has 3,000 trees and is the biggest and healthiest in the world. The royals are a rare sort of palm with a monumental cement-gray trunk and a tuft of slim green leaves — the form of a 100-foot-tall feather duster. Explorers remarked on them as early as 1860, but they didn't become famous until the 1920s, when the owners of Miami's Hialeah Race Track transplanted some from the Fakahatchee to the racetrack's infield. Bromeliads also flourish. In some of the deep sloughs, every tree is weighed down with Guzmania monostachia — huge, flaring bromeliads in green and brown and red. More native North American orchids grow in the Fakahatchee than anywhere else, and 11 of its orchid species are found nowhere else on the continent.

The Fakahatchee looks utterly wild, but it is in fact a corrupted wilderness. It has been meddled with and invaded. For a while, people cleared and plowed parcels of its wet prairies and tried to grow oranges, tomatoes, and winter vegetables. The swamp made for lousy farming. The homesteaders eventually left, but even now you can see crop rows under the native grass and weather-beaten citrus trees among the palms and cypresses. Melaleucas and Brazilian peppers, nonnatives, roamed into the strand and multiplied. So did walking catfish, which swam in through the sinkhole lakes and stayed. And armadillos, descendants of armadillos used in leprosy experiments in a Jacksonville hospital that managed to get away. And so for a while did wild cows, which were normal cows that escaped and lived comfortably in the swamp until the state hired marksmen in 1948 to do away with them. The biggest unnatural success in the Fakahatchee has been pigs. Hunting clubs used to raise and fatten ordinary pigs on local farms and then let them loose in the swamp so the club members could have fun tracking them down and shooting them. Some managed to not get shot, and their offspring have been transformed from mild barnyard animals into gigantic, nasty swamp pigs, totally mad and totally wild.

Spooky places are usually full of death, but the Fakahatchee is crazy with living things. That bounty has drawn people into the swamp for ages. Birders used to come from as far as Cuba and leave with enough plumes to decorate thousands of ladies' hats; in the 1880s a group also took home eight tons of birds' eggs. One traveler wrote that he had caught 200 pounds of lobsters, which he ate for breakfast. That night he made a dinner of a fried blue heron and a cabbage palm heart.

In the Fakahatchee there used to be a carpet of lubber grasshoppers so thick that it made driving hazardous. The swamp had so many orchids that it was like an orchid supermarket — so many that visitors described the heavy sweet smell as nauseating. Plant hunters hauled out thousands of orchids, piled them into horse-drawn flatbed carts, boxed them, shipped them, went back into the Fakahatchee again. I once came upon a graying photograph of one of these shopping sprees — two horses, four men in sun hats and short sleeves, two carts groaning with loads that look like brushy rubbish but are in fact stacks and stacks of orchids.

In 1844 a Belgian plantsman, Jean Jules Linden, discovered a wonderful snow-white orchid in Cuba; 50 years later the same species turned up in the Fakahatchee. Polyrrhiza lindenii, the ghost orchid, is the only really pretty orchid in the strand. It has no foliage — it is nothing but roots, a tangle of flat green roots about the width of linguine, wrapped around a tree. The flower blooms once a year. It is a lovely papery-white. It looks like the face of a man with a Fu Manchu mustache. Its whiteness is as startling as a spotlight in the grayness and greenness of the swamp. Because the roots are almost invisible against tree bark, the flower seems magically suspended in midair. People say a ghost orchid in bloom looks like a flying white frog — an ethereal and beautiful flying white frog. Carlyle Luer, the author of The Native Orchids of Florida, once wrote of it, "Should one be lucky enough to see a flower, all else will seem eclipsed."

Of all the loot in the Fakahatchee, the ghost orchid has always been the most prized. People who love orchids love them madly. They will go anywhere, pay any price, do anything, to get a specimen they want. The rarest orchids have sold for as much as $25,000, and serious collectors employ orchid baby-sitters and orchid doctors and orchid boardinghouses for their dormant plants, and even designate orchid heirs in their wills. Thousands of species are bred and cloned and groomed in hothouses and labs, but some, like the ghost orchid, remain uncultivated. State and federal laws now make collecting wild ones illegal, although many people still find it too hard to resist. It is to no avail anyway, since almost no one has had any luck growing them. If you could figure out how to housebreak and clone a ghost orchid, you would probably become rich. It would be as if you had figured out how to multiply gemstones or Siberian tigers.

I suppose I could have gone looking for ghost orchids in the Fakahatchee alone, but I knew it was a hard place, and even the few brave-seeming botanists I had talked to told me they didn't like to go in by themselves. At last I was introduced to a park ranger named Tony, who knew where the ghost orchids grow. "I'll take you," he said, "but only if you know what you're getting into." A few days before we were to go, Tony called and asked if I was really sure I was ready for the Fakahatchee. The next day he called again and asked if I was sure I was sure. I wasn't sure I was ready for the Fakahatchee, but I knew I wanted to see the thing that people lusted after: I wanted to see a ghost orchid in the wild in full bloom, and I wanted its roots to spread as broad as my hand and each root to be no wider across than a toothpick, and I wanted the bloom to be white as sugar, white as teeth. I told Tony I was ready. He said it wasn't too late to reconsider, but when he called again I didn't answer the phone.

It was a warm and blowy morning when I set out for the swamp, zigzagging from West Palm Beach across Palm Beach County and Hendry County and round the bottom of Lake Okeechobee before cutting across the Everglades and past the Seminole reservation, past the ghostly signs for long-gone tourist stops like Gatorama and Native Village, on the small state roads that go off at right angles as if drawn with a box cutter. I passed sugarcane fields that went on forever, miles long and miles wide, with cane as high as my head or cut down to dry stubble. Trucks pulled in and out on field roads, but otherwise there was no one around. My eyes grazed across the green band of ground and the blue bowl of sky and then lingered on a dead tire, a bird in the sky, a rusted barrel. I passed so many vacant acres and looked past them to so many more vacant acres and looked ahead and behind at the empty road and up at the empty sky; the sheer bigness of the world made me lonely to the bone.

I'd been driving three hours, and I was desperate for something to drink. I stopped at a little store that looked abandoned except for a man out front sweeping the dirt drive. The door made a horrible sound as I pushed it open and stepped into the nearly lightless interior. The wooden floors were pitched and buckled. The shelves were set at funny angles, and the refrigerator cases had almost nothing in them except sticky cans of soda and some dusty brown bottles of beer. Two stocky women sat behind the cash register with tart expressions on their faces. I bought a Coke and went outside to drink it but it tasted weird and for a moment I entertained the thought that it might be poisoned so I poured it out and went back to get something else. The women were following me with their eyes the whole time. Neither of them moved when I put a small plastic container of raspberry Jell-O down on the counter and took out my wallet. Finally, the bigger one picked up the Jell-O and twirled it around in her hand and said at last, "Oh, nope, miss. This one's not for sale."

I gave up on the store and went back to my car and bumped along a bad road for a few more miles until I found the Fakahatchee ranger station. Tony was outside, tinkering with a beat-up swamp buggy. He was short, muscled, and jaunty, with high cheekbones, black hair, and a tan that cracked around his eyes and the corners of his mouth. He greeted me and said he was surprised I'd been so committed to going into the swamp, although in the next breath he confessed that he was an orchid collector himself and that he was obsessed with trying to cross a maroon Cattleya with a pouchy-lipped Encyclia.

After digging around in a pocket, he pulled out a map and waved his hand over the center, saying that we'd be heading north, into a part of the preserve that was wild now but in the past had been logged and drained to make way for the biggest subdivision in the world. In 1947 the Lee Tidewater Cypress Company began logging the Fakahatchee's cypress. To penetrate the strands, the company built dozens of elevated tramways. Dirt was scooped out and piled into banks and the tracks laid on top of those, which meant that every elevated tramway created a carved-out trench. Every trench filled with water, and the water level in the Fakahatchee dropped by more than two feet. Once a mature cypress was sighted by a logging crew, it was grooved, sawed, dragged down, and hauled out by chains to a double-saw mill. The timber cruisers and groovers and sawyers and skidder crews lived in tent villages on the edge of the swamp. Several sawyers claimed they kept coming across skeletons in the woods, and a few quit because they said the place gave them the creeps. But the work got done: Lee Tidewater took one million board-feet of cypress out of the Fakahatchee every year. By 1952 the cypress was almost entirely logged out. The tramways had cut up the woods; the trenches had drained it; the falling timber had pulled down brush; the dragged-out logs had gouged long, deep channels into the swamp floor. Surveyors described the place as "a green Hell."

In 1966 Lee Tidewater sold 75,000 acres of the Fakahatchee and surrounding land to a real estate salesman and two brothers from Baltimore who had made a fortune marketing a homemade baldness-curing shampoo on TV. They platted and subdivided and surveyed the land and laid a grid of 300 miles of roads on top of the dried-out swamp and named the place Golden Gate Estates. By this time the water table had dropped another 14 feet, and the swamp had gradually transformed from grass plains and cypress stands into an upland system of underbrush and trashy trees.

Almost no houses were built in Golden Gate Estates or its sister property, Remuda Ranch Grants, though the sales brochures gushed over the swank houses, graceful boulevards, and "elegant Mediterranean-styled buildings towering over the horizon like Spanish castles." Building lots were given away on The Price Is Right. The land was advertised as waterfront property with boating access to the Gulf of Mexico — which it wasn't, unless you planned to paddle to the Gulf by way of the drainage canals. If it had ever been completed, Golden Gate Estates would have been the largest subdivision on earth. No elegant buildings went up, no tennis courts, no Golden Gate Inn, no Petit Gourmet. In 1967 the developers pleaded guilty to "using false, misleading, deceptive, and unfair practices" to sell the land, and after their bankruptcy and the most complex corporate reorganization in Florida history, much of the company's land was forfeited to the state.

One hundred families did eventually move into Golden Gate: They live in isolated houses without telephones or electricity or city water supply. The vacant lots around them are now reverting to swamp, but the grid of streets is still in place. People drag-race on them now and dump trash on them and land airplanes carrying drugs on them and stash smuggled goods alongside them, and now they also chase bears and panthers across them and go fishing for snapper and needlefish in the drainage canals. It is odd to hear people using street names to describe a place where they've run across a bear or a panther or a feral pig, odder still to realize that years ago it was going to be someone's address.

Tony and I walked north for what seemed like hours toward the spot where he'd last seen ghost orchids. It was slow going. The swamp water was heavy and the mucky bottom held tight, and each step was really three steps — a test step to feel for alligators and snakes and a second step to feel for cypress knees, those shin-cracking knuckles of wood the trees send out from their roots to help them breathe. Then the real step. Something is always brushing against you or lapping at you or snagging you or tangling in your legs in the Fakahatchee, and the sun is always pummeling your skin, and the wetness in the air makes your hair coil like a cartoon character's. You never smell just air in the swamp — you smell the tang of mud and the sourness of rotting leaves and the cool musk of new leaves and the perfumes of a million different flowers floating by, each distinct but transparent, like soap bubbles. The biggest number in the universe would not be big enough to count the things your eyes see. Every bush or tree is girdled with another plant's roots, and every root is topped with a flower or a fern or a swollen bulb, and every flower is the pivot around which a world of bees and gnats and dragonflies revolves. The sounds you hear are twigs snapping underfoot and branches whistling past you and leaves murmuring and water slopping over the trunks of old dead trees and every imaginable and unimaginable insect noise and every kind of bird peep and screech and tootle, and then all those unclaimed sounds of something moving in a hurry, something low to the ground and heavy, maybe the size of a horse in the shape of a lizard, or maybe the size, shape, and essential character of a snake.

It was acre after acre of sameness, of too many living things to notice any single one. I saw strap lilies and water willows and sumacs and bladderworts, and resurrection ferns springing out of a fallen dead tree; I saw pines and pop ash and beauty-berry and elderberry and yellow-eyed grass and camphor weed. At one point we wandered into a nook in the swamp that was surrounded by tall cypresses, a place the rangers call the Cathedral. I closed my eyes and stood in the stillness for a moment hardly breathing, and when I opened my eyes and looked up I saw dozens of bromeliads roosting in the branches of almost every tree. They were bright red and green and shaped like fright wigs; some were spider-size and some were as big as me. The sun shooting through the canopy bounced off their shiny leaves. Hanging up there on the branches the bromeliads looked not quite like plants. They looked more like a crowd of animals, watching everything that passed their way.

A mile or so past the Cathedral, Tony pointed out some little green straps on a young tree and said they were ghost orchids. I could see right away that none of them were blooming, and I felt the air leak out of me in disappointment. They had probably flowered early in the year and wouldn't again until I was long gone from the Fakahatchee. I ran my fingers up and down the smooth, rubbery orchid roots and up and down the nubbly tree bark, and then we slogged along for another hour, and Tony pointed out more bloomless roots on more trees along the way. By now the light was flattening out, and I was muddy and scratched and boiled and dizzy. My legs ached and my head ached and I couldn't stand the sticky feel of my own skin. I began having the frantic, furtive thoughts of a deserter and considered what Tony would do if I suddenly sat down and refused to keep walking.

Then I started wondering if the hard-to-find, briefly seen, irresistibly beautiful, impossible-to-cultivate ghost orchid was just a fable and not a real flower at all. Maybe it really was a ghost. There certainly are ghosts in the Fakahatchee — ghosts of rangers murdered years ago by illegal plume hunters, and ghosts of loggers cut to pieces in fights and then left to cool and crumble into dirt, and ghosts of the thousands of people who might have lived in the dreamy golden version of the swamp that might have been. For years an apparition has wandered the place, the Swamp Ape, a.k.a. Skunk Ape, which is said to be seven feet tall and weigh 700 pounds and have the physique of a human, the posture of an ape, the body odor of a skunk, and a special fondness for lima beans. There's also the phantom human being the Fakahatchee rangers call the Ghost Grader, who brings real — not imaginary — construction equipment into the swamp every so often and clears off the vine-covered roads.

I really did want to see a ghost orchid, but I was almost relieved to know I probably never would, because then it would never become something ordinary to me; it could never disappoint me; it would forever remain something I wanted to see. It was late in the day and the sun had given up trying to murder us, but black shadows were hanging like curtains from the trees. It would be impossible to find anything in the Fakahatchee now, so we turned around and trudged 5,000 miles or so back to Tony's buggy and rode straight out of the swamp on the empty road.

Susan Orlean is a frequent contributor to Outside. This article was adapted from her forthcoming book, The Orchid Thief, to be published next month by Random House.