Everglades

The water moves so slowly you cannot tell it is moving at all. Sawgrass runs to every horizon, broken by the dark hump of a mangrove island or the motionless shape of an alligator on a mud bank, in a landscape that is neither land nor sea but something stubbornly between.

The Everglades is not a swamp but a river, the one Marjory Stoneman Douglas named a river of grass, sixty miles wide, inches deep, easing south from Lake Okeechobee toward Florida Bay. The national park protects 1.5 million acres of its wetland, forest and marine habitats, home to alligators, wading birds, turtles and the shyest resident of all, the Florida panther. At the brackish southern fringe, American alligators overlap with American crocodiles, the rare ground on Earth where the two coexist. The Anhinga Trail boardwalk passes close enough to nesting birds that no long lens is needed, and the dry winter months concentrate the wildlife along the sloughs where everyone, feathered and scaled, comes to drink.