The storm that churned the Gulf Coast waters into café au lait has finally blown itself out, leaving a bright, sparkling day in its wake. Halfway through a ten- day Everglades canoe journey, Dan Berns and I welcome the reprieve from fighting big waves, headwinds, and cold lashing rain.

Now, resisting the urge to bask in the warm south Florida sunshine, I tug on the broad brim of my hat and roll down my shirtsleeves to guard against the intense subtropical rays. I take a stroke, then another. The canoe slips forward, gains momentum. As I glide across the glassy waters I peer over the gunwale to sound the ocean depths.

A mile off the coast of Lostmans Key in the Gulf of Mexico, deep in the heart of the Ten Thousand Islands, way out on the wild edge of Everglades National Park, the distance to the bottom is measured not in fathoms, but in inches. Looking through the flashing surface with my polarized sunglasses, an absolute necessity here, I see there's a good two feet of water beneath the hull.

Suspended between earth and sky, I'm captivated by the sight of blue crabs scuttling along the ocean floor. Turtle grass sways languidly in the gentle current. Big fish --sheepshead, sea trout, redfish-- dart ahead of the canoe, pushing up big bulges of water as they streak across the shallows. Not so easily spooked, a tarpon hangs motionless in the water like a hundred-pound, armor-plated submarine. Drifting in and out of view like a phantom, a sawfish waves his lethal snout back and forth, no doubt hunting a school of mullet. Further on, a stingray flies gracefully past on undulating wings, searching for mollusks and crustaceans to crunch in its powerful jaws. Sometime later I watch the triangular dorsal fin of a blacktip shark shear the water not twenty feet off the starboard bow.

The bottom drops off. I pass over a channel cut by the ebb and flow of Lostmans River, a brackish, alligator-filled estuarine passage slicing through the thin green swath of mangrove islands marking the eastern horizon. Suddenly, the water all around my canoe explodes in huge boils and violent upwellings that rock the boat back and forth as gouts of water burst in the air. I reach out and slap my paddle flat against the water in a low brace to keep from capsizing. As I do I can just make out the enormous dark shapes of a half-dozen West Indian manatee, who are probably every bit as startled as I am.

Heart pounding, adrenaline rushing, I head to shore, slog the last thirty yards across the sienna mud flats and razor-sharp oyster beds, and relax on the beach against a desiccated driftwood log. Still keyed-up from my encounter with the thousand-pound manatees, I focus on a cloud of white ibis settling onto an emerging sandbar. The birds probe the flats with scythe-shaped bills for shrimp and crabs. Great blue herons stalk the shallows with the infinite patience of true hunters. A squadron of brown pelicans dive-bombs the water, smacking the slick surface and gulping hapless mullet. From time to time the mullet leap clear of the water in frantic attempts to get away and get on with their own feeding.

My breathing has barely returned to normal when I hear something large smashing through the hardwood hammock directly behind me. Alarmed, I turn towards the sound as a feral hog bursts through the ferns, vines, and gumbo limbo trees onto the beach a few yards away. I expect him to flee when he sees me but instead he raises his snout, catches my scent, and takes a few quick steps in my direction.

Eyeing his sharp tusks, impressed by his clear intent to possess the beach, I back off until I reach my canoe and paddle away to rejoin Dan, who detoured to fish near the mouth of Lostmans River. Satisfied that I've abandoned the beach, the hog turns to root through the brush. Oblivious to both the pig's presence and mine, a white-tailed deer emerges from the dense vegetation and walks slowly down the beach. Above us all, a bald eagle circles on broad black wings. Riding a thermal lift in a wide and graceful spiral, he climbs higher and higher in the pale blue arch of sky.

Traveling slowly and quietly under my own power, totally immersed in this watery environment as only a canoeist or kayaker can be, I'm learning that everything in the Ten Thousand Islands is part of the food chain, including, I remind myself, the occasional unwary paddler. But that's the hallmark of an intact, functioning environment and a true wilderness, and I wouldn't be here otherwise.

A world away from the banalities of Orlando, the throbbing, high-voltage enticements of Miami Beach, and the sprawling suburbs of Tampa, the Ten Thousand Islands are one of this country's last great wildernesses, a place almost no one knows and even fewer visit. Situated far from any road, the islands are a lost labyrinth of mangroves, hardwood hammocks, and dark, brackish rivers flowing to the white sandy shores of the Gulf of Mexico.

Fringing the southwest coast of Florida from Marco Island to Cape Sable, the Ten Thousand Islands are home to some of the Western Hemisphere's most extensive mangrove swamps, a vital transition zone where fresh water seeping from the Everglades mingles with the salt water of the sea. The result is an almost unimaginable profusion of marine, terrestrial, and avian life. And the mangroves themselves, sometimes called "walking trees" because of their stilt-like root structures, are a key to this incredible fecundity.

For all their visual monotony, the mangroves provide numerous benefits to the prolific life of the tide-flooded coastal swamps. Rising from the mud deposits overlying the limestone substrate that forms the Florida peninsula, the nearly impenetrable mangrove roots offer important nursing grounds and critical sanctuary for numerous species of fish and crustaceans, including many that are commercially valuable as adults. West Indies spiny lobsters, for example, spend their first two years of life in the shelter of the mangrove roots. Above the tide line, the mangrove's upper branches provide important roosting and nesting sites for the astonishing wealth of bird life found here: herons, egrets, white ibis, brown pelicans, frigatebirds, among many others. The entire archipelago forms a many-miles-wide protective barrier for the otherwise exposed interior environments, blunting the devastating effects of violent hurricanes, tropical storms, and floods.

Although the Ten Thousand Islands are now uninhabited, they weren't always so. The region's first human occupants were the Calusa, who took up residence some two thousand years ago. Remarkably, the Calusa actually built much of the high ground required for human habitation in the islands. Their shell mounds, literally the result of centuries of oyster shucking, remain above sea level even in hurricanes. Some of these mounds are enormous. Chokoloskee Mound, where Dan and I began our trip and where the Calusa are credited with slaying Spanish explorer Ponce de Leon in 1521, spans some 130 acres and reaches a height of twenty feet in places. You can still see the shells as you paddle by places where the current has exposed clean cross-sections to view.

The Calusa, who numbered perhaps 20,000 at time of first contact, died out in the mid-1700s, the victims of Spanish conquest, the slave trade, and European diseases for which they possessed no immunity. They were replaced by Indians of various tribes fleeing white encroachment in Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina. Banding together, these Indians called themselves Seminoles, from the Creek Indian word "semoli", meaning "runaways." Harried by the U.S. Army during the mid-19th century, the Seminoles took refuge here in the backwater rivers and islands. An estimated 200 Seminole survived the Army's last attempt to wipe them out in 1858; their descendants live in small Everglades communities to this day.

The Seminoles weren't the only people to hide out in the Ten Thousand Islands. Escaped slaves, convicts, outlaws, hermits, and other odd and eccentric characters found refuge here. Edgar J. Watson, rumored to have been an outlaw and murderer out West, showed up in the islands in 1892. He farmed sugar cane and vegetables on an old Calusa shell mound along the Chatham River, shipping his produce to market in Key West and Tampa.

Watson prospered in the islands, in part because he saved on labor costs by killing his hired hands. In 1910, after committing a triple murder at Lostmans Key, Watson was gunned down by vigilantes on the dock at Chokoloskee. According to some sources, more than fifty graves were later discovered on his property, now a National Park Service backcountry campsite.

Plume hunters and gator poachers moved into the area in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the wildlife suffered grievously. But the havoc caused by a few individuals pales when compared to the destruction wrought by more than a half-century of unbridled growth and development, growth that shows no sign of slowing. Politically powerful agricultural and development interests have disrupted and polluted the historic flow of life-giving water to the Everglades with an extensive system of canals and levees. The number of wading birds nesting in the southern Everglades, for example, has declined 93 percent, from 265,000 in the 1930's to just 18,500 today.

The outlook for the "River of Grass," as conservationist Marjorie Stoneman Douglas described the sheet of water seeping across south Florida from Lake Okeechobee to Florida Bay, remains grim. But it's not just special interests that are to blame: Florida's human population grows by nearly 1,000 people daily. An additional 200,000 gallons of water must be diverted for human use every twenty-four hours.

In efforts to stave off disaster, Congress has made some funding available to acquire critical parcels of neighboring land, to restore wetlands, and to reroute the vast web of diversion canals in order to ensure a more natural flow of water to the Everglades. But the magnitude of the problem is daunting, and the price tag for restoration is currently projected to reach $5 billion. However, the Everglades are simply too precious to lose.

In camp at Highland Beach just south of Lostmans River Dan and I set up the tent and put the dinner pot on the stove to simmer. Here in the Ten Thousand Islands, the battle over the Everglades seems mercifully distant. Relaxing on this long lonely strand out on the far edge of the world, I've succeeded in putting it all behind me, if only for awhile. Now, it's time to enjoy being here in the islands, to study the bands of pastel evening colors washed across the enormous sky. It occurs to me that after five days, there are still parts of this sky I haven't seen. I make a mental note to pay more attention.

The Everglades may be in trouble, but this is still one of the most mysterious and bewitching places I've ever been. Watching the big red sun sink into the Gulf, I remember paddling among a family of bottlenose dolphin slashing like thunderbolts through a school of mullet off Rabbit Key. Four or five of them broke off from the pack and swam alongside my canoe for a hundred yards or so, close enough to touch, rolling over time and again to look me in the eye.

A warm breeze rustling the palm fronds behind me brings me back to the present, and I watch a large shark cruise past the beach not ten yards from where I'm perched on the sand in my camp chair, writing these words in my journal.

As if I could ever forget.

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