Maggie’s Kingdom
By Ryan Sullivan
Around noon, my girlfriend Liz and I pulled off into an empty parking lot next to a tangled, mossy forest. The place was desolate, and quiet other than the buzz of cicadas. A relentless Florida sun thrummed the air into waves of convection and mirage around us. We didn’t know where to go. We had driven a long way for this, and I turned over to Liz with a questioning glance.
Then we spotted a gap in the trees. A dirt road carved a narrow path leading to a clearing, where a small hut stood, guarded by a painted cut-out of a manatee named Maggie. We gathered our things and headed for Maggie's hut.
Inside, we got in line behind the other visitors to the park, a large German family of about 12. The hut was adorned with gift store merchandise on all four walls and ceiling. The employees worked quickly to process us. We signed our waiver, we paid for our kayak, we checked the boxes that said we’d been given instruction on boat and wildlife safety (we hadn’t), we got our life jackets, we picked up our paddles from a huge pile, and we were herded towards the river. The whole process took about five minutes, conducted with a Disneyland-like efficiency.
Down at the river, we paddled out and surveyed our surroundings. Where the spring begins, a couple of miles east of us, water comes from underground through the crack in the earth and forms a concentrated stream that feeds a winding river, snaking through the floodplain forests and eventually emptying into the Gulf of Mexico.
Within two minutes of drifting, we could see the snout of a manatee snorting and heading straight for us, moving quickly (for a manatee) and apparently booking it for warmer water upstream. She swam directly under us, huge flat tail silently pumping and pushing her through the water. Her eyes, glassy polished stones, were directed to a single purpose. The water was so clear that I could see the algae starting to grow in small clusters and patterns on her broad gray back.
Overhead, a canopy of oak and pine arched and stretched and shaded us from the noon sun which only came through in bursts. Cypress trees stood near the banks with their bell-bottom bowed trunks and their stalagmite roots poked up around them like evil minions. There were also dense palms, ferns, and wildflowers crowding around the riverbank. We were floating through a long winding tunnel, haunted and beautiful.
The other springs I’d been to hadn’t protected this vegetation lining the river. There, development had gone right up to the waterline, and most of the riverside was lined with houses, grass lawns, and small docks with little boats moored. Liz told me the vegetation here—called “riparian edge”—is critical for the wildlife that lives in the spring. It works as a natural filtration system, protecting the river from excess nutrients, pollutants, and sediments. That was why this particular spring was so clear.
We continued our curving path, the world beneath us as transparent as the air above. We were floating, suspended. Gazing below, I saw striped mullet traveling in small schools upstream. They swam over and between huge pastures of underwater eelgrass that swayed like fields of wheat in the wind. Besides the eelgrass, the riverbed was a fine sand, almost powder that was sculpted into miniature dunefields by the current.
Every so often, I did a little too much watching and not enough steering, only to be jolted out of my daze by Liz’s urgent paddling as we drifted right into the ferns along the riverbank. Fortunately for me, she was in the front of the kayak and bore the brunt of the branches. After a brief struggle to untangle ourselves, we were back on course.
I heard the dull rumble of the highway nearby. Sometimes, the sound of a siren echoed through the woods. It was astonishing that this protected area was only a few hundred yards away from the road and the rest of Florida, the land of alternating strip malls and golf courses. I felt that I was on the threshold of two worlds, with two vastly different philosophies.
Despite living in Florida for a couple of years, I had yet to feel at home. Back where I grew up, in Colorado, I had easy access to wide open spaces when I needed to clear my mind. Here, the momentum of my new life could feel oppressive—like the humidity that weighed me down, like swimming through molasses. But here in the spring, I felt that clear, light feeling again. The beautiful places in Florida were just more hidden, tucked away in the forest and shrouded in mist.
We floated on. Flitting and perching in the branches were small, stocky kingfisher birds. We heard their rattling calls before we saw them, and they patrolled the waters hopping from branch to branch tilting their head to look for small fish in the spring below. Through the gaps in the trees, we could see the occasional osprey hovering high above, lurking.
Suddenly, as we rounded a final bend, we spotted the dock on the right and the workers clad in orange shirts that would help us out of our kayak. We had hardly done any work at all. The current had slowly carried us through this amazing place, a lazy river through a magical kingdom. Like clockwork, the shuttle to bring us back to Maggie’s hut would be there in 5 minutes.
As our shuttle rumbled away from the spring and back onto the highway, I found myself taken by dark ecstatic visions of a Florida returned to the swamp. Abandoned beachside restaurants tangled in mangroves. Disney World overgrown with ferns, populated with alligators, sunbathing on coasters. Mar-a-Lago sunk into the mud. Just a couple more decades of hurricanes, I thought, and Maggie the Manatee would be queen of this land again.
Ryan Sullivan grew up in Colorado and now attends medical school at the University of South Florida. He enjoys writing in his free time. Ryan is famous for being unable to keep a house plant alive beyond two weeks, yet still wants to become a doctor. God help us all.
