The swamp air was still and thick, the only sound the scraping of lily pads against the hull of our kayak. We hadn't seen another human since the fisherman we passed over an hour ago.
That made it all the more startling when I shouted: "HOLY SHIT!"
The humongous alligator basking on the bank in front of us looked like he could swallow our torsos as a midmorning snack.
He saw us coming and heaved his bulk straight toward us. Fear clawed at my gut, drowning out my rationalizations that American alligators are shy and don't attack kayakers... right?
The gator slid into the water, still heading our way. With a lash of his tail, he sank beneath the surface and out of sight.
Nash and I held our breath, waiting for jaws to close around our vessel and drag us into the murky depths. But, before I could even think to grab my phone and document our deaths for posterity, the giant gator had vanished like he never existed.
It's funny to think that, after almost a month in the Southern United States, I had begun to doubt wild alligators existed at all.
Or at least I didn't believe that they existed in the numbers implied by the warning signs that decorated even the smallest puddle of water: "DANGER! Alligators in area". I saw neither scale nor tail of the creatures, so I began to believe they were a made-up scheme to prevent trespassing. "Get off my lawn or the gators will getcha!"
My best chance of encountering a wild alligator seemed to be the Okefenokee Swamp, in southeastern Georgia. According to creepy surveys made by counting their glowing eyes at night, around 12,000 alligators live in North America's largest blackwater swamp.
Plus, ever since I first heard the name "Okefenokee" in a standardized test in school, the word has been steeped in a kind of goofy-sounding mystery.
Nash and I rented a kayak from Okefenokee Adventures in the national wildlife refuge.
We launched down the Suwanee Canal, which was a failed attempt to drain the swamp for farmland.
The first alligator appeared within minutes, just a little guy. I gasped with delight and tracked him with my finger as we drifted past, just in case Nash somehow missed the two-foot long reptile sitting out in the open.
"He's so cute!" I whispered in wide-eyed adoration.
From then on, it was just a matter of keeping our eyes open.
The reptiles were everywhere: basking in the sun, swimming across the canal, or floating with just their eyes and nose visible.
I made a game of pointing them all out - "There's two over there! And another one... wait, that's a stick. No, it just moved, I was right! Ha!" Who knew how many more lurked just out of sight in the muddy water?
After the first mile, we left the canal and paddled into the Chesser Prairie. There, the cypress-tree-lined banks gave way to an open, reddy grassland dotted with wading birds.
The openness had its own dangers. We grew distracted trying to identify carnivorous plants and lost the trail. Everywhere we looked was still more pondweed.
Then our kayak decided to lodge itself on some kind of muddy mat of vegetation. Oh, great. We were stuck fast.
“So, should I, like, climb out and push?” I asked. I was none too keen to test my footing on the “Land of Trembling Earth”, which is also the land of alligators and snapping turtles and venomous snakes. I valued my ankles too much.
Instead, we shoved at the peat with our (ridiculously heavy) paddles and, inch by painful inch, scooted free.
It was shortly after that when we stumbled upon the monster gator. I never thought I'd actually be afraid of an American alligator, especially not from the safety of a kayak. How could they compare to the cow-killing saltwater crocodiles I'd seen in Australia? But I had no idea they could grow so big!
Like, I'm talking really, really big. Check out this Youtube video (yes, it's real, no, I didn't film it):
It seemed like a good moment to head back, before we found ourselves stranded in the middle of the swamp with hungry predators closing in on all sides. There were even swamp bears out there!
By the time we returned to the visitor's center, I was more excited to see turtles than yet another alligator. My mission to see gators in the South was a runaway success, and I couldn't have picked a better place to do it than afloat in the Okefenokee.
What wildlife would you most like to kayak with? Let me know in the comments! (P.S. I upvote my favorites.)
Thanks for reading! All photos and words are mine, apart from the Youtube video. If you want to take the adventure to the next level, there are also designated water-access campsites out in the swamp (couldn't talk Nash into that one haha).
- Katie, @therovingreader
!steemitworldmap 30.738495 lat -82.139803 long Head into Okefenokee Swamp aboard a kayak! d3scr
More "That Time I..."
- That Time I Rode the Ferry Dressed as a French Maid
- That Time I Spent a Week Swimming With Wild Dolphins
- That Time I Rang the Opening Bell at Nasdaq While Wearing My Brother's Underwear
- Plus more to come each Wednesday!
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