So my brother and I went out on another kayaking expedition, starting from the same place as this time, only we went in a different direction. A very different direction. My brother, in a scene not unlike something that would happen at the beginning of a remake of "The Legend of El Dorado", made claims to a magical canal that he saw on a map but could never find. Now was the time he said, only together could we solve the clues and find out way to the legendary golden city.
It seemed the perfect day for it, and things started out similarly enough. Nice wide open channels, the gnarled branches of the mangroves merely a part of the scenery at this point. Certainly nothing to be afraid of, you're not imagining each branch covered in mother spiders ready to release their offspring on to the first thing that brushes against their home. Neither was I.
But we'll get to that part, don't worry. For the time being it was smooth sailing. But we did eventually get to a crossroads, the last exit to the intra-coastal.
"Wait wait, take a picture when the boat's going through!" says my brother from behind me.
"ok, why?" I ask as I time it just right.
"I dunno".
So enjoy, courtesy of my brother's artistic direction. A boat. Little did I realize I'd soon yearn to see such signs of civilization.
We continued to go further in the mangroves, going through more narrow openings like these that led in to open waters once again, but limited access to those of us in smaller vessels.
I remember already at this point noticing how glassy and still the water was. The only ripples on the surface were the ones created by us, implying that nobody or nothing had come by in quite some time.
At this point we had gone back and forth along this one section of mangrove looking for the channel that my brother had seen on the map. I remembered that the program I use on my phone to track my walking workouts could probably also track our kayaking expedition, at least helping us figure out where we had already been and looked.
Well the map it pulled up was pretty much the same as the map my brother had seen, and it definitely implied that there was an extremely wide channel directly in front of us.
Here is what the channel actually looked like:
The only thing that we could figure out was that the map had been drawn based on depth and not the actual width of the waterway. On the map it was comparable to the size of I-75, so I guess it's no wonder we didn't think we'd be passing through this amazing mangrove path.
At this point the map was confirming that we were on the right path, and let me tell you, nothing compels me to carry on more than a mysterious twisting pathway through an erie mangrove swamp.
It seemed like every time we'd start to get out of it and get our hopes up that we were on the right track again we'd just get right back in to the thick of it.
At least at this point we were only getting up in the gnarled roots of the mangroves when I would be trying to take a picture and my brother would paddle us directly in to the wall. But when we were both paddling we could stay pretty much right in the middle, just out of their reach.
It was pretty much constantly like this through this whole part, you could see that it kept going but ultimately the path would twist just out of sight. The further we went in the more we talked about remembering how far we were going and that we'd still have to go back at some point, yet we continued to push forward. At this point we were still on one path, it wasn't like we'd have to remember how to get back, just turn around.
oh what's that? It looks like it's opening up ahead, just have to push through these last overhanging branches!
umm ok, well still kind of overhanging, but I can see sunlight ahead! Surely just around this next turn it will open up.
Just kidding! I think this was the point when my brother took his paddle apart so it was like two mini paddles and used those to get us through. I was in charge of getting rid of all the spiderwebs. I decided my face would be the best tool for the job so for the most part I would just sit looking at the beautiful foliage until I realized a spiderweb was wrapping around my face at which point I would scream and claw at my face.
My brother would offer helpful comments from behind me like, "Oh my god you're covered in ants!!" followed by, "I'm just kidding i'm just kidding, you're not. But you are covered in spider eggs."
I think this was the first time that we started noticing that the plants at the waters edge were changing. We continued through this passage for a bit longer and then it suddenly opened up and seemed to be completely brackish. It was like a whole new world.
We were beginning to realize that we were heading deeper in to town. We had somehow gotten ourselves hooked in to the city.
It was kind of weird. Do you ever drive over a meandering stream and wonder where it goes and what it would be like to travel down it?
Well this is it baby!
The further in we went the more the landscape started to change. It was crazy to think that we had started out so close to the gulf and now we were in almost completely fresh water.
And just when we would think that we were reaching the end of the line, that we must be in the absolute middle of nowhere, we'd turn a corner and come upon something like this:
Oh somebody's house. Somehow we are now in a neighborhood. I guess we're not so much "lost in the middle of nowhere" as "in the middle of suburbia".
So of course we had to keep going.
We had seriously gone so far and had so many times when we thought we'd reached the end of the line only to have it open up into a scene like this that we actually called our father to ask if he would come and get us if we got stuck somewhere and couldn't get out. We figured that it would eventually get dark and we didn't particularly want to have to go through the creepy mangroves at night.
But no sooner had we called our father than we actually did reach the end of the line.
I know it looks like it keeps going, and I suppose that it probably does, but it was super shallow through here and neither one of us wanted to get out and pull the boat through so we used this as a good place to stop and turn around.
I didn't take any pictures on the way back, partially because I figured I had taken enough, and also because we were concentrating on not dawdling and getting back before dark. I was also using the program on my phone to retrace our path. We definitely got lost at one point going back, but our timing ended up being perfect for when we finally found our way our of the mangroves and back in the channels that lead out to the gulf and back to the truck. Here are the last pictures that I took from the kayak:
And because blogger will only let me put videos i've uploaded at the end of my posts, here is a video I took at the beginning of this day. I wish I coulda gotten better detail cause it was pretty wild. The totally saw us and swam directly over to our boat to check us out!
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