THEIR EYES combed the lush jungle landscape as we stood waiting at the gated entrance to 907 Whitehead Street. With a quiet gasp from my travel companions, the first orange splash of cat appeared, a bold stroke sauntering on four legs before the chartreuse shutters of the porch. It paused for a moment, gazing toward us as if daring the children to skip the queue, then turned to walk through the open door as if it owned the place.

“Do you think it has six toes?” my son whispered.

I held up crossed fingers where he could see and whispered back, “I hope so.”

As the official travel planner for our family, I often walk a fine line. Drag everyone to an activity too esoteric and risk mutiny, but build a trip around too many child-themed activities and at some point I may feel compelled to jab something sharp into my eye. For the most part, we’ve kept a good balance in our family’s travels. Though I wasn’t so sure how our visit to The Hemingway Home Museum in Key West was going to play out. After all, what did my three young children know of Ernest Hemingway?

(Note: This post may contain affiliate links, which help support this independent site.)

Still, I vowed I would not travel all the way from San Francisco to Key West and miss my chance to stroll along Mr. Hemingway’s bookshelves, peer into his private chambers, and possibly gaze into the very bathroom mirror where he’d examined his beard on so many mornings, including the one after a favorite poet of mine purportedly broke his fist against it.

It would be a literary pilgrimage for the parents, and—I secretly hoped—a possible antidote to the plague of the blank page I’d been battling of late.

But what would it be for the kids?

I imagined myself giving a parental preface upon arrival, something like, “A famous American writer lived here. He wrote novels, short stories, and nonfiction books, and some of his best and most important works were created here—right in this room in fact. And on THAT (we assume) typewriter.” But I already knew better. It doesn’t matter how many times you tell a child a place “is important because it’s important.” That’s not what will make it important to them.

There was only one thing I could think of that final day in Key West, one card to play that would get my young entourage to walk without grudge through the sweltering blocks of Old Town to visit the Hemingway Home Museum. It was the prospect of seeing cats there, “And quite possibly…” I widened my eyes for effect, “the legendary six-toed grandcats of Mr. Ernest Hemingway.”

“SIX toes?” cried the littlest.

“Wait a minute,” challenged the biggest. “How many toes do cats usually have?”

Cat research was quickly underway, and there was definite interest in visiting Hemingway’s cats at least, if not his home. Even better? Polydactyl—the scientific term for cats born with more than the standard set of five toes on the front or four toes on the back—could also be, the kids were quick to point out, the scientific term for their grandmother were she a dinosaur.

At last, we strode up the path toward the stunning Spanish Colonial that had stood abandoned and a shambles in 1931, the year that Ernest and Pauline moved in (his second wife of four). As the guide preparing to lead the next tour greeted us on the steps, the kids darted past her without salutation. On the far end of the porch, they’d spied a snoozing patchwork calico draped across the stonework corner.

I overheard a quiet counting followed by a very loud confirmation: “SIX TOES!!!”

I cringed, but the cat simply yawned in response and continued its siesta as if it were used to such invasions by small, paw-prodding visitors.

One of many polydactyls (sometimes called mitten cats or Hemingway cats) at the Hemingway Home Museum.

The guide called us to join our group in the dining room, with its many portraits of Hemingway, African sculpture, and photos of the famed second family that called the house home, but the room was packed. I did my best to listen from the doorway as my husband wandered down the hall taking in the rooms of the lower level on his own, and I wondered if we shouldn’t follow his lead and see all we could before the kids lost patience. Though I hated to miss the storied details of the place I now stood after imagining it for so long.

I’d at least hear the introduction.

When the Hemingways arrived in Key West in 1928, planning only to stay long enough to retrieve a Ford Roadster that Pauline’s wealthy uncle had purchased for them, the town was nearly bankrupt. It hit upon hard times well before the Great Depression owing to the end of the shipwreck salvaging era that had built the community and the recent demise of the local sponging industry which had, for a time, sustained it.

Since the car had not yet arrived in Key West, the couple stayed on. And in the three weeks they waited for the Roadster, an inspired Hemingway managed to finish the manuscript for A Farewell to Arms while he simultaneously fell in love with America’s southernmost city. When the Roadster finally arrived, it remained in Key West along with the Hemingways.

Kids splashing in what some believe is the “World’s Most Expensive Cat Drinking Fountain,” in the gardens of the Hemingway Home Museum.

As we listened on, a sociable tabby padded down the hallway toward certain inspection. “Only five toes,” the kids confirmed.

Three years later, Pauline’s Uncle Gus purchased the two-story villa as a gift for the couple—along with two other houses on the same property—from the City of Key West for a mere $8,000 in back taxes. The Hemingway’s home itself had been built in 1851 for Mr. Asa Tift, owner of one of the most prosperous salvaging operations in Key West history, with no expenses of architectural detail, marble fireplace, or carved wooden baluster spared.

Just days before, we’d seen Tift portrayed by a costumed interpreter at the Key West Shipwreck Museum, but when I turned to remind the kids, they were nowhere to be seen. I politely sped through the first level of the house—and checked the status of the calico sleeping on the front porch—but didn’t see a one. Up the narrow staircase I went.

I found my stray children, along with two others, quietly gathered at the end of a long display case filled with odds and ends from Hemingway’s life: war service medals, a signed baseball, old snapshots, and tax receipts for the property. The kids were not admiring the treasures within the case, however, but the tabby sprawled comfortably atop its glass lid. Beside the bold feline on display was a sign reading: “Please do not lean on the glass.”

“I guess they should have written it in Cat,” my daughter grinned, giving him a gentle scratch between the ears.

Hemingway artifacts–and cats–on display in the Hemingway Home Museum.

Seeing that kids, cat, and museum artifacts appeared safe for the moment, I stepped into the neighboring room to see what I could learn from another tour in progress. It was the master bedroom, and the guide explained that the carved headboard had long ago served as a garden gate on the property. Ernest and Pauline had discovered it during their renovations to the house and both liked the look of it. When they discovered it was exactly the width of their bed, up the narrow staircase it went.

Above the bed hung an oil painting of the home with wide-footed cats in the foreground. And on the bed itself—which was chained off to prevent any person from presuming they could sit on it—was a cat. With an exaggerated stretch, it rolled over to its other side, the black of its tuxedo fur commingling with chenille nubs of coverlet. The humans in the room, including the guide, looked on with affection.

Though this painting of the Hemingway Home in Key West looks right at home here, it wasn’t painted until 1975 by artist and poet Henry Faulkner.

How these cats, numbering somewhere between 40 and 50, came to be at the Hemingway Home is a subject of much debate. While some argue they couldn’t possibly be related to any cat or cats the Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winning author kept here in the 1930s, others insist they are indeed the direct descendants of the original six-toed kitten young Gregory and Patrick Hemingway named Snow White.

What is widely agreed upon is that Snow White was the polydactyl progeny of a six-toed seafaring cat named Snowball, whom Hemingway had often admired on the docks of Key West. Snowball belonged to Captain Harold Stanley Dexter who had sailed down to the Keys with her from Massachusetts, where polydactyls are not only more common but have been traditionally thought to bring good luck to sailors. Knowing how fond Hemingway was of Snowball, Dexter gave him Snowball’s kitten as a gift.

As we ventured out to the patio between the Hemingway home and the carriage house, a full five cats quickly came into view. Our original guide stood surrounded by the stripes, patches, and black tie get-up of the resident Hemingway cats. As they snacked on treats delivered with a casual toss of the hand, I overheard her quote a letter from Hemingway: “One cat just leads to another.” Indeed, the cats appeared to multiply in the laughter as more crept in from the nearby shrubs to pursue her offering.

Hemingway made a tradition of naming his own cats’ six-toed offspring after famed celebrities, a tradition which the caretakers of the estate continue to this day. In the  shaded cat cemetery beside us, we quickly paid respects to the generations of four-legged stars laid to rest on the property—Willard Scott, Joan Crawford, Kim Novak, and Ezra Pound among others—before moving along with the tour.

The cat cemetery, filled with celebrities (or at least their names) at the Hemingway Home Museum.

At last, it was my chance to see Hemingway’s writing studio, which was the upper story of the adjacent carriage house. In Hemingway’s time here, there was an upper story walkway between the master bedroom of the main house and the entrance of the studio. But all that remained now was a narrow iron stair case labeled “UP” on the left and “DOWN” to the right, with tourists in transit on each.

For just a moment, I felt the fleeting pangs of envy for the stark separation of space “Papa Hemingway” kept between his writing world and that of his young family. The kids, quite engaged with the cats on the ground, might not miss this, I thought. “I’ll be right back—I’m going up to have a quick look in the writing studio,” I said, gesturing up toward the pinnacle of steep steps beside us.

With cocked heads and curious eyebrows raised, I could see my daughters read more into the statement than I’d imagined they would. My eldest daughter stood, her gaze suddenly level with my collar bones. Her younger sister crossed arms, and furrowed oddly familiar eyebrows.

“Do you want to come with me?”

Heads nodded quickly. They did.

So, slowly, together, we made way up the crowded steps toward the entrance of the room where Hemingway spent his early morning writing hours during what most agree was his most prolific period, toward the room where celebrated short stories like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” the nonfiction book The Green Hills of Africa, the novel To Have and Have Not, and many other well-known works were penned, punctuated, and percussively typed.

Yet when we reached the top of the stairs, instead of entering a writing room we stepped into a holding cell. It was just a small entryway from which visitors could view the studio between decorative iron bars. So there we stood, pressed against the bars, as more and more visitors insinuated with shoulders and elbows that we should hurry up and snap our photo, genuflect, and exit the sacred space so that they might have a quick turn, too.

But I refused to be rushed.

If there is such a thing as “good writing vibes,” this room had to have plenty of it, and I would absorb every bit I could before I exited the staircase “Down.” If I couldn’t actually walk through Hemingway’s studio, I would at least take a moment to explore what I could of it with my eyes. And if I couldn’t stand next to his writing table, I would at least take in the air, deeply as I could, as it breezed from an open window over the keys of his typewriter to me.

Ernest Hemingway’s writing table and typewriter in Key West, Florida.

“Look!” my daughter pointed her slender finger through the bars.

At the far end of the studio, in an open window slept a cat, the long stripe of its tail hanging down from the sill like a limp exclamation point.

I inserted the lens of my camera between the bars that the cats could easily transgress, accepting that it was as close as I might ever get to Hemingway’s typewriter.

“If you just showed up and didn’t know better, you’d think this writing studio belonged to the cats,” my daughter laughed.

“Maybe it does,” I shrugged, adjusting my focus on the typewriter.

Both daughters laughed in spite of the throat clearing behind us.

“People: Do not enter,” my big girl warned.

“Cats only!” the middle sister cried.

With a giggle, I snapped the shot.

“Imagine what stories they might write…” I dared, and of course they did.

We descended the stairs with visions of polydactyls pouncing on typewriters and running their own small publishing empire from a writing studio that once, long ago, was used by a man called Hemingway.

In the nearby shade of a banana tree, we found my son crouched down in quiet observation of an enormous orange tabby. “Look at his toes,” he whispered. He gently lifted a forepaw as we all leaned in for the count. “SEVEN TOES!” he squealed.

A seven-toed spectacle snoozes at the Hemingway Home Museum in Key West.

The kids could have happily spent another hour hunting polydactyls in the shade of the African tulips, plumeria, and palm trees that surround the Hemingway home, but eventually it was time to leave and begin packing up for the long trip home.

—

Post script: A poem

Among the many souvenirs we brought back with us from Key West, I discovered something so small and nearly invisible I hadn’t even realized I’d acquired at the time. I only noticed it when I was suddenly compelled to pick up a pen—and write.

What if, like a six-toed seafaring cat,

I could slip between the iron bars

that separate His hallowed hall

from the daily deluge of onlookers?

If I could pad over to His typewriter

in the hours when no one can see?

If I could type one sentence upon it—

what would mine be?

If you go:

The Hemingway Home Museum in Key West is open 365 days a year, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Admission includes a 30-minute guided tour, and kids 5 and younger visit free of charge. Please note: The museum accepts cash only at this time.

For more information about the museum, visit www.hemingwayhome.com or call  (305) 294-1136. For more help planning your trip to the Florida Keys and Key West, take advantage of the many free resources at www.fla-keys.com.

Where to stay? For the best Key West hotel offers for your dates, check here. And to see family-friendly Key West vacation rentals, check here. And don’t miss our other recommended Key West and Florida activities for families below (with more great family destination ideas).

Reader’s note: This travel narrative was originally published June 6, 2015 on FamilyTravel41.com. It received the Lowell Thomas Award Honorable Mention for North American Travel Stories and the Silver Award in Animal Encounters from the Solas Awards for Best Travel Writing from Traveler’s Tales Publishing. 

You might also like:

Diving into the Key West Shipwreck Museum

West of Key West: Daring the Day Trip to Dry Tortugas

Dry Tortugas with Kids: Tips for Your Day Trip from Key West

Swamp Buggy: A Tale of Family Adventure in Big Cypress National Preserve

Into the Everglades: A Post-Hurricane Airboat Adventure at Sawgrass Recreation Park

Review of the Lumix DMC-TS25 Waterproof Digital Camera

Ten DEET-Free Ways to Help Prevent Mosquito Bites

Northeastern Puerto Rico with Kids – Caribbean Family Vacation Guide

St. Thomas and St. John with Kids – USVI Family Vacation Guide

St. Croix with Kids – USVI Family Vacation Guide

Havana with Kids – Cuba Family Vacation Guide

Ten Unforgettable California Family Vacations

Six Great Mexico Family Vacation Destinations

The post If Cats Could Type in Key West: A Visit to the Hemingway Home Museum appeared first on Family Travel 411.

Captain Beto slows the boat to a stop, but the whales continue edging closer, now a mere fifty, and thirty—suddenly twenty feet from our little blue panga. He cuts the engine as we gawk at the strange side-feeders sliding through the water, their bristles of baleen in full view, the signature fluting of the humpback’s “chin” glistening beside the open jaws.

“Do you see that! Do you see the baleen?!” I shout to the kids, though not one of the three is sitting more than five feet away from me. It’s a textbook illustration brought to life and at closer range than I’d ever imagined I might see.

Understandably, the squeals from our small crew do not stop. A fin rises up just a few feet from my son as if in salutation.

“This one is a juvenile,” our bilingual guide points as the fin splashes back into the water.

“I thought whale-watching season was over!” I gasp, half laughing.

Edgar grins and shakes his head, “I don’t think anybody told them.”

The whales stop feeding for the moment and sink down into the sea. What they will do next, where they might appear again—if at all—is anyone’s guess.

We sit in silence looking nervously in every direction.

“Over here!” shrieks my mother-in-law.

A mass of mammal glides past us portside, the juvenile next to her. The wooden boat leans as we all look over its side at the enormous back passing slowly beside us, a mottled map of barnacles and scars revealing its journeys of tens of thousands of miles. At last, the tail fin follows, tracing along the surface of the sea. It’s at least as wide as the boat.

Will they bump into us? What would happen if they did? Are we all still wearing life jackets?

“Zip up your front!” I wave a nervous hand at my daughter’s open life jacket, catching sight of my wet suit sleeve.

Was it really just this morning that we were in the water swimming beside a whale shark that was two stories long—but now seems suddenly small? Has it only been–what? Three hours since I first tried on this wet suit in La Paz, which I’ll also wear snorkeling with sea lions this afternoon? It’s already two bucket list experiences of a lifetime packed into a single day–not counting our picnic lunch on Isla Espirtu Santo, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

But now these whales, too? These enormous, incredible, bigger-than-a-bus-sized humpbacks suddenly beside us? They were never even in the plans.

“Look!” my husband’s arm flies starboard as I lunge forward with my camera. The third whale surfaces on our other side.

I leap up to the bow where my son kneels, his grip still fixed on the coarse rope as it has been since Captain Beto first spotted the whales and we agreed to alter our course. I scramble to adjust the focus, but pause. What am I seeing through the lens?

I lower the camera.

On the island of mammal beside us, a small hole opens up. A great groan erupts from the sea as if the boom of Triton’s will. It reverberates through my every bone as I suddenly question everything.

The sound is eerily familiar yet foreign. I realize it’s the sound I’ve heard whales make on the kids’ favorite wildlife TV shows, but a sound that—until this moment—I thought could only be heard under water using special equipment.

It stretches on, a sonic yawn, removing any doubt that this is indeed the voice of a whale. If someone screamed in surprise, it could not be heard for the thunder.

And then, in sudden silence, a wave of laughter washes over us.

“THAT WAS AMAZING!!!” my daughter shouts, still pressing the brim of her sun hat protectively against her ears.

I feel the heat of tears washing down my face as I gasp and laugh and look around at our three generations of enormous grins bubbling over with laughter. I raise the camera again, trying frantically to figure out how one captures such a moment in a photograph, with whale parts here and whale parts there as the humpbacks roll at play. Between us and the barren hills of Baja, there’s not another boat in sight.

Soon, a motion much closer captures my attention and I peer down in the water beside me. Startled, I realize it’s the side of a face passing by. The line of a massive mouth curves in a downward smile and at its endpoint—an eye.

Another barnacle-edged fin rises up from the water and, I quickly gauge, it must be taller than the children.

“WHOAH! Get a picture—get a—!”

I turn to see a waterfall in reverse, a great geyser rushing up from the other side of the boat to a cloudless sky. I click in rapid succession uncertain of what the camera may see, until at once we are drenched in its downpour.

For a moment, we’re surrounded by a mist of sea-salt spray, and between us and the whale there shines a rainbow.

“Oh—look,” is all anyone can say.

I raise the camera, suddenly realizing it’s as wet as the rest of me. I look at the lens in a panic. Salt water? The stench of fish breath hangs in the air.

“Kids, you can now say you’ve been sneezed on by a whale!” my husband exclaims.

All I can think to do is protectively lick the glass clean.

“And now…we’re covered in whale snot!” he cackles.

I spit starboard and take aim.

     The kids squeal, “Whale snot!” and suddenly the rainbow is gone.

The whales continue to appear and disappear as Edgar fills us in on the lifestyle details of humpbacks passing through the Sea of Cortez, all the while getting completely upstaged by the subject of his discourse. It seems the whales are every bit as curious as we are.

They stay with us, passing about the boat for a good several minutes more leading me to wonder whether we are in fact the observers or the observed? Whale watchers or the whale-watched?

After we finally bid our farewells to the whales, I wonder how the adventurous mother whale might later describe the encounter to the rest of her pod.

“Humans were not even on the agenda, yet there they were in their little boat on the sea—and so close to us.”

Our adventure was booked through Mar y Aventuras on our own dime. Contact them to schedule your family’s own adventure on the Sea of Cortez.

You Might Also Like:

The 411 on Mexico’s La Paz with Kids

Save

Save

The post Whale-Watched on the Sea of Cortez appeared first on Family Travel 411.

My daughter, still confused by the breach in safety protocol, shoots me a worried look—her safety belt will not budge. Captain Cliff’s seat swivels around as he reaches out toward my firstborn, jabbing a calloused thumb into the stubborn square at the center of her abdomen. He rises from his seat to get a good look at each of us, making sure that no one in the swamp buggy is actually buckled to it.

“Now look,” he explains, “If there’s some kind of emergency comes up,” bronze arms rise like exclamation points protruding from camouflage, “if this here buggy catches fire or something, I want to be able to get you guys off of here quick!”

I peer down from my seat on the back row bench guessing the floor of the buggy is at least as far above the ground as I am tall—and, I imagine, with good reason.

Cliff sinks back into the driver’s seat and hollers, “You guys ready for this?”

My husband’s arms extend protectively around our three children seated at his sides. With a couple of spats and a chug we lurch forward toward the road that will take us from our rendezvous point into the heart of Big Cypress National Preserve. We’ve already driven a slow seven miles of dirt road on our own, along which the only other souls we saw were our first night heron (as confirmed by our laminated Birds of Coastal South Florida guide), alligators number seven and eight, and an unidentified serpent slithering over the road as my foot leapt from the gas pedal.

The swamp buggy crosses half-way over a canal, but then slows to stop. For some reason, the engine shuts off.

Cliff turns and asks quietly, “So where’d you say you’re from?”

“San Francisco,” the kids whisper back.

“San Francisco?” he asks in a hush. “And have you seen any alligators yet on your trip to Florida?”

“NINE!” they shout back, suddenly pointing to the water beside us. My son climbs onto his sisters for a better view.

“Good,” Cliff grins. In a courteous, quiet voice apparently reserved for large reptiles he explains, “Now there is your American alligator.” He walks toward the side of the swamp buggy and whispers, “Come on closer, you don’t have to stay in your seats.”

We gather at the railing, gazing down at the glistening crags of the foreboding island below. The children’s faces are alight.

“Now who can tell me the differences between an alligator and a crocodile?”

It’s as if they’ve been waiting for someone to ask them this all their lives. Cliff nods, surprised but pleased, as the three siblings quickly exhaust the list. “That’s pretty good,” he grins. “But do you know how you can measure an alligator when all you can see are the bumps of his eyes and nose sticking up from the water?” They fall silent as he explains.

I give my husband a quick wink and he grins back in one of those rare moments when two parents feel they’ve done something very right by their children. A sigh of relief escapes me as I remember an awkward conversation with a friend just weeks earlier.

“So, let me get this straight. You’re flying your whole family all the way to Florida and you’re not taking your kids to Disney World?”

“Nope,” I offered with all the confidence I could muster. “I want to show them real Florida.”

“And you don’t think they’re going to hold this against you—for the rest of their lives?”

There was laughter, including my own. But secretly, I still worried about the final outcome of our trip, particularly this 3-hour “swamp buggy tour” of Big Cypress National Preserve, the unsung neighbor of the Everglades. It might be everything my budding wildlife biologist and survival enthusiast children could hope for. Yet I knew in my gut the excursion still had potential for disaster.

Three hours riding in the swampland’s answer to a tundra buggy—without the polar bears? Would it just be too long? Too boring? Too hot? Or worse: Too buggy? And, as I’d confirmed by phone when making our non-refundable booking for five, with only a bucket for a bathroom?

“Now, so far, the alligators you’ve seen out there along the highway and canals are either the females or the juvenile males. This here is a small female.” In the surprisingly clear water, she almost appears to float on air. A school of fish encircles her motionless snout, oblivious to the proximity of their demise. “The giant breeder males,” Cliff continues, “are over on this side,” he gestures to the road ahead of us.

“Giant breeder males?” I test the words aloud, stifling a laugh.

“Yes ma’am.” He adjusts his cap. “Hopefully we’ll get to see one today.”

With a spat-chug-spat, the swamp buggy engine fires up and we roll on past the canal, past the sign reading PERMIT REQUIRED, as Cliff tells us how the alligators we’ve already viewed from the platforms at the Everglades and Big Cypress Visitors Centers, and along the Tamiami Trail, were nowhere near the size of the ‘giant breeder males’ who would fight to the death—and even eat—any other male who came near him or the gator hole he currently occupied. And it’s these wet depressions, made deeper and wider by their resident gators, that give rise to the cypress domes, “Like that one there.” He points across a sweep of prairie grass to where a group of trees arcs against the Florida sky, the tallest trees growing at the center where the deepest water lies.

“These giant breeder males,” he slows the buggy and turns to extend an illustrative arm, “are often around 15 feet long and sometimes bigger.” Cliff resumes swamp buggy cruise speed to somewhere around 10 miles per hour and grins over his shoulder at us, “You haven’t seen one that big yet, have you?”

I try to imagine a one-and-a-half story house turned on its side—with teeth and a tail. “Definitely not!” I shout from the back row bench.

Trees begin closing in on both sides of the buggy and ping-ping-pinging against the soldered pipes at our sides as we lean in to avoid the occasional whap of a too-long branch. Cypress boughs drag over our roof of camouflage tarp and flop down behind us as we pass through what feels like an arboreal car wash.

There are two types of cypress trees in Big Cypress National Preserve, Cliff points out, and we’ve arrived at a convergence of both. He shuts the engine off and reaches out past the railing to break off a sprig of each. His driver’s seat swivels toward us once again and he shows us the difference between the wild tangle of deep green pond cypress needles and the neat and orderly fine needles of the key lime-colored bald cypress. The pond cypress is evergreen. But each winter the bald cypress sloughs off its needles.

Cliff rises from his seat again and walks to the front corner of the swamp buggy where he snaps off a leafy twig, then ceremoniously smashes the leaves between his fingers. He holds fingers and leaf bits up to the kids: “Smell this.” The kids lean in eagerly. “What does that smell like to you?”

The kids shrug as he tears a few leaves from the twig and lets them each hold their own. “That there is a natural insect repellent.  So say you were out here when there’s more water on the ground like there is most of the year—not like this—and the bugs’re likely to make you crazy, you could smash some of these leaves and rub them on you.” He nods, “Problem solved.”

The kids tear at their leaves, rubbing them with great fervor against their necks and cheeks and the backs of their hands, the only parts left exposed beyond the insect-repellent-treated clothing I’d insisted they wear for the day.

“That’s how the Indians could survive out here when just about nobody else could.”

The kids stare off between the trees a moment, as if expecting a tribe of Seminole or Miccosukee to suddenly materialize.

“So kids, do you know what the deadliest animal in the world is?”

The kids nod and shout, “Mosquitoes!”

Cliff grins and adjusts his cap, “That’s right—and they’ve sure got plenty of them out here.”

The children nod back in silence and continue staring out at the wilderness surrounding us. Not a building, not even a telephone pole is in sight.

“Now the other thing you can do with wax myrtle,” he begins stripping back the thin bark of his twig, “is to brush your teeth.” He rubs the thin white stick against a crack in his smile to demonstrate.

As the sun rises higher, the parched surface of the road becomes a near-blinding white. It’s a strange road–not exactly dirt, and though gravely in places, not gravel. To our left, a field of prairie grass and pine trees has Cliff’s full attention, and he slows to point to a mother deer and two fawns watching us roll by. A little farther down the road he stops.

“So, you know about the cypress domes now, but what we’ve also got out here in Big Cypress are the hammocks.”

“Hammocks?” the kids laugh.

“I love hammocks!” my younger daughter exclaims.

Cliff points to a pine hammock in the distance, the opposite of a cypress dome. He explains how a hammock is a raised area that continues to build on itself as debris from a group of trees collect beneath them. Over time it makes a small hill, and in the swampiest months of May through December, the island-like hammocks are an important last retreat for the land mammals. Naturally, this captive supply of fauna also makes the pine and hardwood hammocks all the more attractive to south Florida’s invading Burmese python—the population now thought to be around 100,000 between the Everglades and Big Cypress.

“Trouble is,” Cliff explains, “the pythons don’t have any natural predators here,” the exception being an occasional giant breeder male alligator, he is sure to point out.

Otherwise, the American alligators don’t seem to be making a dent in the Burmese python population boom, and even a 30-hour duel documented by wildlife researchers between a 13-foot python and a 6-foot alligator ended in a draw. Though the python managed to finally swallow the exhausted alligator whole, as is its custom with prey, the alligator’s feet eventually broke through the python’s sides in protest. In the end, neither side lived to tell the tale.

Cliff points to a tall, dead tree at the center of the hammock, much taller than the others around it. He explains that the tallest pine trees are easy targets for lightening, and when they’re struck, the sap inside transforms into a highly flammable resin. “Lighter pine,” Cliff digs into his pocket and removes a splinter of wood, “is bug-proof.” While early Florida developers were anxious to harvest and build pest-proof houses with this  valuable lumber, they soon realized the folly of their ways. Lighter pine, sometimes called fatwood, ignites more easily and burns more intensely than regular wood–even when wet. When a pest-proof house caught fire, there was no way of putting it out.

Cliff explains that’s why lighter pine is the best campfire starter around, and any self-respecting survivalist would not leave home without a small piece. He pulls a cigarette lighter from the same pocket, “Even if you got lost out here in a storm, you could still make a fire with some of this,” the splinter flashes into flame as the kids sit up, startled but intrigued. “That’s lighter pine.”

The road becomes a strange mishmash of earthen blobs and chalk-like rocks. Palm trees appear, both short and tall, and there’s a sudden flash of scarlet among a new stand of bald cypress. Cliff shuts the engine off and turns to us. “What do you hear?”

We sit there a moment, the five of us looking at each other, then looking at Cliff.

It is ominously quiet. For a 720,000-acre preserve populated by wood stork, egrets, anhingas, ibis, assorted raptors, and several types of heron, you’d think at least one of them would have something to say.

“The wind?” my youngest daughter asks.

But there isn’t any wind, no breeze to be had in the heat. No leaves rustling. No branches creaking. It’s as if even the trees are holding their breath for some reason.

Cliff nods with a sudden grin and whispers, “Nothing.” He cackles, “I get some people out here from big cities and it’s the first time they’ve ever heard ‘nothing’ in their lives!” He steps toward the side of the swamp buggy and points to a cypress trunk beside us. “Now who can—”

“Epiphytes!” shout the kids.

“Good,” he nods at the kids.

“Is it a bromeliad?” I ask.

“And, good!” he nods at me. “Yes, those there are air plants.” And they’re suddenly on every cypress tree I can see—clumps of spikey leaves stuck to the crags and cracks of tree trunks like questionably placed bird nests. Cliff points out a dainty orchid also living on the tree nearest us–

“Orchids? Out here?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He explains that more than thirty types of orchids can be found in Big Cypress National Preserve, and proceeds to point out three we can see just from our current vantage point on the swamp buggy: two growing on trees and the third growing on the ground.

“Well, how about that…” Cliff leans over the rail of the swamp buggy. “Come take a look,” he whispers, the kids already ejecting from their bench. “Do you see it there?” He points.

Before I can get to the rail to look over, my husband whispers, “A track!” Just to the side of the road, where the ground is lower, softer, and still moist in spite of the heat, we see the traces of thick-toed pads from what could only be—

“A panther!” the kids squeal. They spot a companion track near it, just where the grass begins to thicken.

I squint toward the trees that the tracks point toward, but see nothing but cypress and bromeliad.

Cliff retrieves a long walking stick from the edge of the swamp buggy, which, when fully upright, is even taller than him. “You want to get down and take a closer look?”

Before I can absorb the fact that he is serious, the kids are scurrying down the ladder behind him and leaping from its last rung. My husband wastes no time following.

Surely no panther in its right mind would stick around here with the noise of the swamp buggy coming through. “Surely  not,” I say aloud, gripping the rails of the ladder down. But still, how recently might that panther—or any one of the 36 known to live within Big Cypress National Preserve—have passed through here? There are reasons we are riding in a swamp buggy, I want to remind the co-creator of my petite offspring. And so far, water on the road is not one of them.

By the time I reach the ground, they’ve also spotted the smaller tracks of a bobcat in the mud, but they pale next to the magnificence of the large cat tracks before us. Just as I’m thinking it’s a good time to get back up the ladder and make sure the engine still starts, Cliff offers, “Now, if you want to, we can make a cast of it.”

The kids blink.

“You know, a plaster cast? You can take it home and show your friends what a real Florida panther track looks like.”

“YEAH!” the kids gasp.

“Cool,” their dad grins.

“Well, okay!” their mom shouts loud enough to startle any wildlife within earshot.

Back up on the buggy, Cliff opens a bucket—the bucket I’d assumed was our emergency toilet—and produces a small mixing bowl, an old coffee can, and a spoon. “You guys ready for some water?” He flips open the ice chest and passes down water bottles for each of us as he cracks an extra open adds it to the mixing bowl. It’s already hot enough that we’re as tempted to guzzle the water as we are to dump it over our heads.

The kids crouch down to watch as Cliff meticulously fills the panther tracks with the batter-like plaster of Paris. We retreat to what little shade there is at the side of the buggy, the kids panting next to its tractor tires that are nearly the height of my son. Cliff finishes off a water bottle, then holds it up for all to see. “Do you know why they make water bottles like this?” he rubs a finger down the bumpy side of the plastic bottle. In one swift motion, the plastic bottle flattens between his hands, folding compactly at the ridges in the exhalation of an accordion. “That’s so it doesn’t take up so much room in the trash.”

I flinch a moment, expecting the kids to tell him he means “recycling,” but they are too busy finishing their waters so that they can smash their own bottles, too. Then I remember what I learned at our motel—the curbside recycling we take for granted at home still has not come to most parts of south Florida.

“Hey, you kids see that rock right over there?” Cliff points to a chalky white rock at the edge of the chalky white dirt road we stand on. “Go get a good look at it and tell me what you see.”

The kids scurry after the rock as I search my memory for what I may have learned about any dangerous insects in Big Cypress.

“Go on, pick it up.” The kids turn the rock over and stare a moment, “You see anything?”

They stare intensely until my eldest daughter looks up. “It looks like a seashell!”

Though we stand many miles from the Gulf and even farther from the Atlantic, Cliff explains, that wasn’t always the case. Words like “sandy limestone,” “cap rock,” and “Pleistocene era” spin around us as we leap to the realization that, yes, the kids are holding a prehistoric fossil in their hands.

“Ohmygosh, ohmygosh,” the big sister repeats.

“Can we take it home?” the little sister begs.

“I’m pretty sure that if we’re not supposed to take pine cones home from national parks, ancient fossils are off limits, too,” I sigh. “But we can definitely take a picture.” I zoom in  and snap the photograph. “So…” I hesitate a moment, “Cliff, how did you know there was going to be a fossil under that rock?”

He shrugs, “Easy guess, ma’am. They’re in most of these rocks out here.”

With that, the kids disperse and begin picking up every sandy limestone rock they can see along the sides of the road. Sure enough,

“Another fossil!”

“I found one, too!”

“Get a picture of this one, Mom!”

“Now stay together guys—and close to us!” I insist, reminding them of the panther and bobcat tracks.

Without being 100% certain our plaster casts are ready, no one’s willing to risk moving them. So we decide to move along and vow that we will not forget to stop and get them on the way back. With only two swamp buggies allowed at one time in this part of the preserve, and no sign of any other going out that morning, our plaster paws seem ominously safe.

Cliff starts the buggy, but after a chug and a chug and a spat it stops. “We’ll just give it a second here…” he clears his throat.

There it is again: nothing. I look at the road stretching back behind us, curving like a stream through the bald cypress. I realize I have no idea how many miles we’ve traveled since starting the journey in the swamp buggy.

I peel back the children’s sun hats, “You can let a little steam out now—we’ve got shade,” I glance up at the camouflage tarp, silently hoping circumstances won’t force us out from beneath its protective cover. “So about how deep does the water get in this part?” I ask.

“About one to two feet along here.” Cliff points to some bald cypress trees near the edge of the road. “You see those funny-looking roots by the trees?” Knobby roots flank the cypress, not growing down but rising up from the ground as if in defiance. “They call those tree knees. They grow like that so they can still get air even when the ground is covered in water.”

“Kind of like snorkels for trees?” I laugh.

“That’s right.”

Cliff turns the ignition again and with a chug and a chug and a spat the motor turns over and we lurch forward, rolling on through the bald cypress as they open up to another sweep of prairie grass. Gradually, a group of pond cypress comes into view.

Cliff shuts off the engine and reaches down for his stick. “You guys ready to go for a walk?”

My tribe hurries down the ladder behind him as I take a long drink of water, and then take a good long look around us. “Now be very quiet,” he whispers, “’cause you never know what you might get to see.”

His words in no way speed my descent. But the others are suddenly following him down a faint trail through dry prairie grass toward a forest of pond cypress. As I hurry to catch up, the ground beneath our feet gets softer and finally turns to mud.

Soon the wide-hipped cypress surround us and we’ve entered into a Seuss-like forest, where the trees appear animated enough to wobble off of their own free will. Bromeliads spike from them like scattered pom-poms sprouting scarlet tongues.

As we arrive at a small clearing among the trees, Cliff asks, “So what would you do if you found yourself lost out here in this heat—without an ice chest full of water bottles?” He nods, “Or a cellphone?” He grins, “Hell, they don’t work out here anyway.”

We look around us and can only shrug.

“Panic?” I offer.

“Climb a tree?” my eldest daughter asks.

“Lighter pine!” whispers my son.

“Watch this.” Cliff carefully inserts the end of his walking stick into the mud between us. He pushes and turns in a corkscrew motion until much of it has disappeared into the ground. With a quick pull up he releases the stick and points down, “There. You see that? Some of the cleanest, purist water in Florida—and it’s all just a little ways beneath our feet.”

The surface of the small hole glistens.

“Don’t forget that if you ever get lost out here in Big Cypress now, all right?” he taps my son’s shoulder.

“Okay,” he nods, still absorbing this significant survival tip.

As we walk deeper into the pond cypress, their ample bases grow wider still. I want to ask if we’re in a “dome,” but I’m not sure I like the reptilian implications of that terminology. Cliff stops suddenly and raises a finger, pointing through the trees.

Between layers of cypress and bromeliad, we see a deer, her gaze fixed upon us. A moment later, she turns and walks calmly away as if humans poking around the pond cypress are the least of her concerns.

Cliff reaches out to an eye-level epiphyte. “Watch,” he whispers. With a gentle pinch, he releases a cottony fuzz and sends it adrift with his breath. “Those are the seeds,” he whispers. “They travel on the breeze until they stick against the bark of another tree.”

We watch, giddy, as the seeds drift like tiny fairies through the air of this strange and wonder-filled world we’ve wandered into.

“Watch yourself there son,” Cliff inserts his walking stick between my son’s heels and the decaying gnarls of pond cypress knees behind him. We lean in for a close look as Cliff explains, “That’s where the snakes like to be.”

I scoop up my son in my arms and offer to carry him the rest of the way through the mud, but he will not have it. After all, he’s in kindergarten now, at the same school as his sisters.

“Well look here,” Cliff raises the walking stick and points just off to the side of us. “You see that track there?”

I quickly survey the distance to the swamp buggy—but I can no longer see it through the cypress trees.

“Right…there…” his walking stick makes a slow and graceful squiggle in the air, mimicking the serpentine smears on the wet earth below.

“A snake?” my husband asks not quietly.

“Yes, sir,” Cliff nods as if he expects we’ll find it as interesting as we did the panther tracks.

“Whoah,” a child whispers.

The impression in the mud is at least as wide as my arm.

“I think the kids are getting hungry,” I smile.

“Oh, sure,” he offers apologetically, “You guys ready for your lunch?”

Back in the elevated safety of the swamp buggy, we devour our peanut butter sandwiches, crunch away at our crisp apples, and dive into the party-size bag of of potato chips we’d packed along for our picnic. I can’t be sure if we are truly ravenous or just glad to be alive.

Cliff points over at a grouping of palm trees, “You see those there?”

Through a collective crunching: “Yeah.”

“That’s the sabal palm tree—the state tree of Florida.”

“Sabal?” I repeat, relieved to take up the topic of flora rather than fauna in the preserve.

“So the black bear…” he holds out a level tan hand toward the trees, “just love to climb up and, well, they smash up the top of the palm and rip out and eat the heart of the tree. Unfortunately, it kills the tree.”

I swallow my last bite of sandwich. “Bears?” Somehow, besides south Florida’s native panthers, alligators, crocodiles, and four species of venomous snakes, it had escaped me that bears also called the region home.

“Yes, ma’am. They can get up to about 8 feet tall out here. Anyway, when you see a sabal palm tree like that and one of them has the top all smashed in, you know that a bear’s climbed up there and enjoyed himself a good meal.” Cliff smiles and takes a last bite from his own sandwich.

Bears.

I take a napkin to the peanut butter smear across my son’s cheek.

“The nice thing about it though,” he explains, “is how they all help each other. The deer, which eat the—you know, kids?”

“Prairie grass and stuff?”

“That’s right.” He nods. “And who eats the deer?”

I flinch.

“The panther!”

“Yes, indeed.” He smiles. “And who cleans up when the panther can’t finish his meal?”

I smile, “The bear, of course.”

Cliff turns the swamp buggy around and we begin back down the same road in anticipation of our plaster cast panther tracks. But the mid-day heat is stifling. And the late night of jetlag-fueled visiting in our motel room–and early morning to follow–seem to be catching up with us as the swamp buggy hums and lulls us into a post-lunch coma.

Cliff slows the buggy and points to a “panther scratch” in the middle of the road. He explains how the panthers kick back a pile of tree needles and dirt, and then urinate on top to leave as a calling card.

“Was that there when we came out this morning?” I ask.

Cliff shrugs. “I don’t think so.”

We roll on past pines, then bald cypress, and I make note of a sabal palm tree–not smashed. In a shady patch, the buggy stops. “I have one more thing to show you,” Cliff grins as he picks up his walking stick.

My son sighs, collapsed over the near-empty sack of potato chips, his eyes half shut. “Can I just stay here?”

“What is it?” I ask Cliff.

“A giant breeder male.”

“Yes you can,” I answer my son. “He can wait here, can’t he?” I look around the buggy for signs of panthers or their clean-up crew.

“Sure, we’re not going  too far.”

Just steps from the road, the mud deepens, sklooshing out around our shoes and threatening to hold one captive at any step. We’ve been instructed not to speak, but to watch Cliff’s hand signals for cues. I try to imagine how we will get a look at this giant breeder male without any viewing platforms, without any paths or fences, and without accidentally crossing paths with it. Cliff leads us deeper between the trees, a firm grip on his walking stick.

We’re already farther from the swamp buggy than I’d imagined we might go. I look back through the trees but can no longer see it, nor the blond little boy we left on it alone with a sack of potato chips.

The trees part and open up onto a pond draped over by shrubs and hemmed in by cattails. Cliff stops and we freeze behind him, our daughters bookended by parents who suddenly wonder what they’ve gotten their children–and themselves–into.

Cliff motions for us to stay back as he steps closer toward the water, scanning every bit of the pond he can see for signs of an enormous alligator. He steps back toward us, whispering, that he’d seen it in the same place twice already, but he’s not there now.

I look around us nervously, “So should we go?!”

He  shakes his head and again motions for us to stay put while he ventures toward the water. He slowly inserts his walking stick into the pond and with a slow, rhythmic motion, he traces a silent invitation.

To our relief, there is no reply.

After a moment, he traces a different message, one with more of a rocking motion, side to side, and I remind myself to breathe.

We wait in silence, and he tries again, but nothing stirs in the pool except Cliff.

At last he turns toward us, clearly disappointed.

“That’s okay, I whisper,” ready to high-tail it back to the swamp buggy. “We’ve seen a lot out here today!”

He turns back a moment as if reconsidering the pond.

“And we still have to get our casts of the panther tracks!”

As we walk back through the trees, I pause a moment, seeing odd scratch-like markings in the mud and, in between them, a long sort of smear. “Is this some kind of track?” I ask, not certain if I should have whispered or yelled.

Cliff confirms it’s the marks from an alligator leaving the pond and, I note, traveling in the general direction of our swamp buggy.

“The giant breeder male?”

He gives a half-smile and shakes his head with a confident no. “Too small.”

Back at our rendezvous point, with plaster casts in hand, we bid our farewells to Cliff, who suddenly leans down toward the kids. “Did you learn anything out here today?”

“Yes!” they agree.

He smiles. “You know, every day, people drive by on the highway and look over here at the hammocks and the cypress domes thinking it’s scary. But now you’ve been out here, you’ve seen it for yourselves up close. And now you know it’s not so scary, now is it?”

The kids nod enthusiastically, “Nope!”

I just take a deep breath and smile, and I thank Cliff for the incredible day our family will never forget.

But as I walk back toward the rental car, I suddenly find myself wondering. After spending the better part of four hours feeling nervous about our surroundings, was it Big Cypress that I found so scary? Or was it the fears that I’d brought there with me? It took a swamp buggy–or the idea of one–to get us out into it, but did it take the swamp buggy to actually keep us safe once we were there? Clearly, we were in the habitat of creatures that had the potential to do us much harm, yet there wasn’t one that took any interest in our passing through or our presence–not even when we trod in their own footsteps.

I notice my firstborn lagging behind us, staring at the plaster cast in her hands. As I walk back toward her, she looks up at me and beams, “It’s real.“

I laugh softly, “That’s not real.”

“No, but the panther is.”

I may go down in history as the mom who never took her kids to Disney World, but I can live with that. Instead of the Magic Kingdom, we saw Florida’s magical kingdom. And instead of mouse ears, we returned home with a greater treasure by far: the tracks of a real Florida panther–and the story of the day our family found them.

See Full Photo Gallery (digital downloads available) –>

If You Go:

We not only highly recommend our outfitter for this trip, Captain Steve’s Swamp Buggy and Airboat Adventures (paid for on our own dime), but so does National Geographic! Call them to book your reservation and tell them Family Travel 411 inspired you.

On the web: Captain Steve’s Swamp Buggy Adventures

Toll free: 1-877 -871-5386

Get more information about Big Cypress National Preserve and tips for planning your visit at https://www.nps.gov/bicy/index.htm.

You might also like:

West of Key West: Tips for Your Day Trip to Dry Tortugas

History on the Rocks: Diving into the Key West Shipwreck Museum

If Cats Could Type in Key West: A Visit to the Hemingway Home Museum

Why South Florida Should Absolutely be on Your Family Travel Bucket List

Slide Show with Additional Photos from our Visit to Big Cypress

The post Swamp Buggy: A Tale of Family Adventure in Big Cypress National Preserve appeared first on Family Travel 411.