Day 5 (19 May). Okefenokee boat tour; ride to Florida

From: Fargo, GA

To: Palatka, FL

Miles today: 197

Total miles: 1261

After riding through some of Georgia’s interior yesterday, I ended up in the town of Fargo (GA), just outside the entrance to the Okefenokee National Wildlife Refuge. This morning I drove the 20-mile road into the Stephen C. Foster State Park, and took a 1.5 hour boat tour of this largest “black water” swamp in North America.  (In small sample sizes the water is a sickly brown in color, but this is due to natural tannins from decaying vegetation.  These tannins actually kill bacteria, so you can drink the water, although I did not do so.)

Jeremy, our guide, holding some "black water" from Okefenokee.

I mostly wanted to see the Cypress forests (which I did), but there was no getting away from the alligators; they were everywhere.  Interestingly, we did not have to wear life vests (perhaps because the water was only a few feet deep), and no one told us to keep our hands out of the water.  In fact, the only warnings at all about alligators were not to feed them!

"Hi, got any snacks, or small children?"

From Wikipedia:

Although folklore and many references state that the word, okefenokee, is a Native American word, meaning,"land of trembling earth," it is actually the anglicization of the Itsate Creek Indian words, oka fenoke, which mean "water- shaking."

None of this made much sense to me (Earthquakes? Whirlpools?), but our tour guide, Jeremy, cleared it up for us.  When you walk on the spongy land, it is springy – sort of like walking on Jell-O.  Thus a better translation of okefenokee might be “jiggling earth” or something to that effect.  

Cypress trees grow very slowly, but live a very long time.  From about 1910 to 1930, the Okefenokee was heavily logged; as a result all of the Cypress trees today reasonably large but not gigantic, virtually all of them being less than 100 years old.  

As is the case with the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia, the Okefenokee burns.  From April 2011 to April 2012, in extreme drought conditions, about 80% of the park burned.  This, apparently, is the nature of peat bogs. Much of the area that was spared was the part I was able to see today.  

The Okefenokee is only a few thousand years old, but if it were to continue in its present form for a few million more the result would be that the peat would become coal.  In fact, all the areas where coal is found today – Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Wyoming – all looked like the Okefenokee.  Today, even before logging and swamp draining by humans, the fraction of the world’s land area that is blackwater swamp is quite small today.  In the Carboniferous period, 360 – 300 million year ago, vast areas were covered by these shallow swamps, and even larger areas were covered by shallow inland oceans, of which there are few analogies today.  Earth was a very different place back then.

The Carboniferous, uh, I mean the Okefenokee

 After departing the Okefenokee, I headed east and south on a number of small roads through southern Georgia and northern Florida.  It was hot, over 90 degrees, but I had the roads all to myself with the exception of the occasional logging truck. I am far enough south now, and it is late enough in May, that I am now seeing rain showers every afternoon.  This reminds me of my days in Houston.