Day 1: If this is paradise, I wish I had a lawnmower

On Monday, in a national park named after a pirate, they handed me a machete and said, "Chop down that jungle."

Katrina knocked down a lot of trees—half of the trees in Jean Lafitte, if I remember aright. That's great news for undergrowth, which gets to bask in a lot more sunlight than it's used to, and in that hot humid environment that translates to rapid growth. Sometimes this is okay, but often it's not—invasive species like Chinese tallow and air potato choke the native life, and perfectly nice native plants like palmettos encroach on the park paths. It was our job to cut things back from the path and remove invasive species where we found them, which was a kind of coordinated destruction we were well-suited for. Machetes, it turns out, are fun—thwack, whack, and a palmetto leaf the size of an umbrella is sailing into the forest.

It was pushing 100°, so we all had bottles of water dangling off our hips at all times, and we kept pouring them down our throats. Mel roared up on an ATV to resupply us when we ran dry. By lunchtime, I was able to wring the sweat out of my T-shirt, as if I'd just gone swimming in it. Like an idiot, I'd left my machete half a mile back along the path, so when everyone else broke for lunch I had to go for a nice long walk. By the time I got back, the air conditioned park education center felt like a walk-in freezer. A freezer stocked with pudding cups—score!

The park was bursting with life, lush with it; every possible niche, at every scale, had something squirming or crawling or hopping around in it. The most visible (and numerous) inhabitants were the golden orb-weavers, variously known as banana spiders and golden silk spiders, which spin huge pollen-yellow webs like billowing sails above the paths. We constantly had to duck and sidestep to avoid getting a faceful of wiry golden web. The females grow to the size of your hand; males are much smaller, and gently tap the females' abdomens when they want some nookie. (They have three penises, all of which break off during sex.) Other arachnids included thumb-sized wolf spiders, spiked yellow "crab" spiders (aka "smiley face spiders"), arrowshaped micrathenae, and argiopes with their zig-zags of UV-reflectant webbing. The palmetto leaves sheltered Lymon™-colored squirrel treefrogs (named for their scolding chirp) and brown pine woods treefrogs, visible through the leaves by the shadows they cast. Five-lined skinks rustled and skittered through the leaf carpet, and once I saw an oily black narrowmouth toad down there. My big gas-powered weed-whacker skimmed half an inch from a fire ant nest, gray dry dirt the size of a football, and hundreds of ants boiled out to swarm over the surface within moments. Crawfish chimneys sprouted eight inches high in the muddy areas.

Most of these can be found in my photoset for day 1, which is highly nature-oriented. ( A sample is here. )

(I do not shit you—fifteen seconds after I typed in my subject, the song in my Music: field started playing in iTunes.)

Day 2: All these beauties in solid motion

It looks like a painting, doesn't it?

Our second day was a lot like our first, except that we were working on a swampier path, trimming the edges of a boardwalk using weed whackers and loppers instead of machetes. We were joined by Jenny, who graduated from Oberlin just before adfamiliares and I moved there (in 2004), which gave us things to chat about. We all missed the machetes, but swampier paths mean more alligators! Mel pointed out one third-year juvenile when we broke for lunch, and I saw another lurking just a foot or two off the path on my way back from replacing the whacker strings. (Nobody was eaten.)

After lunch, Ranger Nancy took us, five at a time, on airboat rides deep into the swamp and marsh. (The difference? Swamp has woody trees, marsh doesn't.) I saw half a dozen gators dive underwater as we roared past, disturbed by the flat-bottomed boat thunking over submerged logs and the scream of the five-foot fan that powered it. Egrets and herons and ibises flapped off in a huff. We drove through (formerly) tranquil waterways overhung with cypress trees, live oaks, and Spanish moss, and through hyacinth-choked channels cut in the flotant marsh—floating rafts of plant matter, held together by their roots, strong enough to bounce on. Tiny mosquitofish swam in the channels, nibbling on mosquito larvae—go mosquitofish!

Back at the PMC, I took a long walk along the water-filled ditch that bordered the property, determined to find an alligator of my own. Tiny frogs hopped across the water—so tiny they didn't disturb the surface tension, if they kept moving. Crawfish claws littered the banks. Half a mile or a mile down, beneath an irrigation pumping center, I watched a three-foot spotted gar rise lazily to the surface to snap up an insect or take a breath, then sink, submarinelike, back into the murk. A turkey buzzard with a six-foot wingspan blew silently past me at shoulder-height, not ten feet away, which scared the bejeezus out of me. But no alligators.

I returned, defeated, to the PMC—and found a four-foot juvenile gator hanging out in the water just across from the center. I have to assume he wasn't snickering to himself as he watched me hike all the way down to the far end, 'cos gators aren't that smart. Right?

ruthling made excellent burritos for dinner, and I spent most of the rest of my time before bed kneading dough for Wednesday's pizza.

Day 2's photos are here, and the usual highlights are ( behind the cut. )