It wasn’t until I was flying away from South Florida that I could appreciate the first two syllables of the name “Everglades.”

The plane swept up above Miami, which quickly dropped away to a mere strip along the coast. But on and on the Everglades stretched, stunning even the chattering teen-agers in the seats behind me. “God, what’s that?” one of them asked the other. “I dunno,” the second said. “It’s huge.”

Never mind that they could have spent any time in South Florida and not known about the Everglades. What were they doing? Visiting the sites where “CSI” was filmed? What puzzled me more as we flew over the glinting water and low hammocks of palm and pine was that anything so seemingly endless could be endangered by its proximity to the city and the surrounding farm fields. 

I had spent three days in the Everglades and the adjoining Big Cypress National Preserve, but that had not been my original goal; I had come to snorkel in the Keys, until a cold snap and unsettled seas changed my plans. I consoled myself by hiking and driving through the big parks, all the way down to the tip of the mainland, where the mangrove shoreline seems to break up and float away on little islands into the calm waters of the gulf. 

Before I got to Florida, my greatest hope had been that I might see an alligator, if I was lucky. As a Midwesterner I had no idea that spotting an alligator in the Everglades is more likely than spotting a deer in an Iowa cornfield. It turned out that gators were as common as blown-out tires on the roadside, and looked about the same until you were right on top of them. 

During my first trip into the park, I hiked along a boardwalk called the Anhinga Trail. I did not seen a single anhinga bird (I thought I had and later learned they were cormorants), but I lost count of the number of alligators I encountered, from the first little baby that greeted me at the trailhead, to the 10-foot monsters waiting around the curve. I do not know what they were waiting for, but I wondered if, seeing a herd of humans, they would pick me out as the slower, crippled one and make a lunge. At any rate, something made them smile.

What impressed me most, however, was the amazing density of life in this place. It was like walking in a zoo: Every few yards I came upon another animal I had never been face-to-face with before: Florida gars thick in the water, stately herons watching them from the banks, white egrets, black vultures, sleek cormorants, flashy lubber grasshoppers, more and more alligators…I began to wonder if the closer one gets to sea level, the more life one encounters. Two years ago I’d driven and hiked through the heights of Rocky Mountain National Park and scarcely seen a living creature; here I was in danger of stepping into their mouths.

The next day I hiked into Big Cypress swamp and had to amend my theory: I hardly saw anything but grass, trees and pesky cypress knees poking up through the path and polished bright by all the people who had tripped on them before me. On my third venture into the Everglades life seemed even less dense. It was as if on my first visit everything had turned out to see the new guy and now had gotten bored. I did manage to encounter one of the elusive crocodiles during that last trip, but I had to seek him out, guided by signs posted at the ranger stations. I was more astounded when I stumbled across a freshly crushed Mountain Dew can, wondering who would pay to get into a national park and then trash it. 

Nevertheless, on those subsequent visits I knew that living creatures were all around me. I sensed them watching and aware, and it was both unsettling and a comfort. When it crossed my mind to take one of those airboat rides around the fringes of the park (they aren’t allowed inside), I decided against it because I didn’t think it would get me any closer to where I already was. I go to parks for that sense of isolation that makes me feel part of the whole, not to isolate myself by scaring the rest of the world away.