Blue Goose ~ Day 227

January 9, 2015 ~ Niceville, FL to Crawfordville, FL

I left Niceville mid-morning moving east along the Gulf thinking about Ivory-billed Woodpeckers because I had just finished Geoffrey Hill's book, Ivorybill Hunters: The Search for Proof in a Flooded Wilderness.

So I got the map out and took an unmarked turn-off to the Choctawhatchee River.

Choctawhatchee River - MS

It was a firm sandy road and only a couple miles to the river. Still, I get mildly anxious straying too far from the highway hereabouts, both because of the vehicle I am driving and (pathetically) for what I will call The Deliverance Factor. I am easing some on that, but I was raised Up North and the South is still pretty foreign to me with its swamps and moss hanging from the trees and water, water, water everywhere... I almost turned around but went just a bit further and came to a nice little picnic area at a river landing with no name that I could see on either my Google map or my paper map. The river looked exactly like I expected - opaque (all the better to hide the gators and snakes), with grey bare trees and little obvious current. A swamp is a flooded woods so a river course is sometimes indistinguishable from the surrounding land. I walked out on the landing and looked and listened and of course didn't see an Ivorybill. But as I said on Facebook, "Ya never know..."

There are people who love these southern swamps, who fish and hunt in them, who canoe and boat and kayak the waters, who live peaceably in the solitude such swamps offer.

My personal opinion is that there is a good chance Ivorybills exist in remote swamps in the southeastern US and that people (ornithologists / locals) know where they are but are reluctant to publish this knowledge fearing the inevitable onslaught into their habitat. On the other hand, maybe they are extinct, but as the welcome message on www.projectcotyote.com concludes: "While others have given up on the species, we’re not prepared to do so. There is simply too much smoke . . ."

Anyway, such is the beauty of this Blue Goose Adventure; I am not constrained by time or a strict agenda. 

Where to spend the night? Maybe Apalachicola. I actually stopped in front of The Gibson Inn there, googled it and drove on. It was too costly but would have been a relaxing stop. I started seeing waterfowl again - a flock of shorebirds (dowitchers?) probing furiously in the shallows as they do and a few large rafts of ducks settling for night near shore. The sky in the west was shades of grey mixed with blushy colors at the horizon. The Gulf waters shimmered silver. 

Along the Gulf in Mississippi

I kept half looking for a motel but didn't find one so ended up in Crawfordville, driving an hour in the dark on a two-lane, but a two-lane with clean lane markings, wide shoulders and small orange lights to guide night-time travelers. 

I had a delicious Subway sandwich for dinner and starting reading Ebola by David Quammen.