HEY.

BIG CYPRESS NATIONAL PRESERVE, FLORIDA-2025

Florida has spent an extraordinary amount of money trying to become more interesting than Florida.

A company spent decades and billions of dollars building castles, artificial mountains, manufactured jungles, animatronic dinosaurs, a fairly convincing volcano, so people could pay to be safely startled. Meanwhile the actual state already had swamps, hurricanes, ten-foot reptiles. Walt looked at a peninsula that was already one of the strangest places in America and thought: needs more.

And suddenly I'm in a swamp sunburnt scratching my head. I want what Walt Disney was on.

Kayaking Big Cypress is mostly this: black water you can't see two inches into, cypress knees at odd angles, heat that sits on you rather than passes through, and the low-grade awareness that you genuinely do not know what's underneath the boat.

People walk their dogs past alligators the way you'd walk past a parked car. Kids ride bikes near canals with animals in them that could end an afternoon. Nobody seems bothered. Found this insane for about four minutes.

Then again, I live in grizzly country. People there hike, camp, fish, drink beer on a porch, all inside the same square mile as something that could kill them in eleven seconds if it felt like it. Nobody there thinks twice either. Maybe every place has one animal the locals voted to stop finding alarming.

Saw an alligator. He saw me. Started coming my direction. Then considerably faster.

This altered the mood somewhat. Yelped like a little girl, if I'm being honest.

Got the shot. That's the encounter. Don't know why he came at me like that. Hungry, curious, annoyed, no idea, not going to pretend otherwise. He moved. I photographed it. He kept going. I did not.

Somewhere north of the swamp, people are standing in line to be gently menaced by a fiberglass dinosaur and good lighting. Somewhere closer to where I was, somebody's walking a Labrador past the real thing, thinking about dinner.

Still don't have a good theory for Walt. The place was already Florida. He looked at it and thought it needed help.