The Everglades

the sound ecosystem

The baby alligator looked soft, like one of those squishy bath toys that lets out streams of soapy water when squeezed. He was small, only about nine inches in length, and black in color with yellow stripes down his back. His tail made up about half of his body length, his snout was short and wide, and there were two bumps on the top of his head for his eyes. He was half-swimming, half-floating on a heart-shaped leaf in the marsh’s water. His legs jutted out on either side of his body, bent at near-right angles, his webbed toes gripping the leaf’s surface. Occasionally, when the leaf started to slip away from him or when his body dipped too far under the water, he swam to a new leaf. He swam with his tail, swinging it back and forth like it was an oar—an appendage to the boat that was his body. He didn’t need to swim far. The water was full of spatterdock leaves, green and heart-shaped.

It was late May when Luca and I visited the Everglades. It was hot and humid, as is typical for south Florida in the summertime. We were on the Anhinga Trail, a short trail less than half a mile long near the entrance of the park. A boardwalk loops through the marsh, then merges back onto the paved road at the end. Much of the marsh is made of sawgrass, long and thin strands of green that swayed like skinny ballerina dancers. The marsh was still and quiet, the only sounds being the chirp of grasshoppers and the occasional rustle of the sawgrass. Everything was flat, so close to the ground that it left much room for sky.

The marsh was full of life, animals and plants, but there was an aloneness in each of them. Beneath the baby alligator, there were fish, mostly bass and the occasional spotted gar, a long fish shaped like a bathroom pipe, brown with irregular patches of black. A few meters away was a pond apple tree with thick roots coming up out of the water. At the tree’s base, atop a mat of wet leaves and roots, sat three Florida red-bellied cooter turtles. Their legs dangled out from under their shells, their toes just barely touching the roots beneath them. I thought the cooters’ shells looked oddly large for their thin necks and small heads, as if they were once snakes who had been warped to fit under a heavy shell. The baby alligator kept swinging his tail from side to side, moving along toward the next leaf. The fish swam beneath him, glimpses of their bodies sparkling against the sun’s rays. Further up and away, an anhinga was perched at the top of a tree, her dark wings spread out to dry like a kitchen towel on a summer’s clothesline. The baby alligator kept swinging his tail, stopping only when he reached the next spatterdock leaf, seemingly unbothered by the other animals.

New York City, where I live, is much louder than the Everglades. People in New York City talk all the time. It’s hard not to listen when you understand what they’re saying and it’s hard to exist alone when there’s so much to listen to, because listening makes you bound to things outside of you. Conversations fade in and out, one in what sounds like Spanish and then another in what sounds like Italian, then both disappearing into the hundreds of other voices, the rolling Rs swallowed up by a crowd of people’s angry Ks and Fs. Unlike in the Everglades, sounds in New York City run all over each other. Mainly, this is because there are many more sounds and much less silence in New York City. But also, it is because most sounds in New York City are concentrated in the same horizontal plane. The average human mouth lives the same distance above the ground as the average car and the average bike, the average motorcycle and the average scooter. The average human ear, not too far higher up from the mouth, catches all the noise.

In the Everglades, the few sounds that exist are separated in space. The birds are in the air, the fish underwater, the baby alligator at the water’s surface. The sounds in the Everglades go all the way up and down the vertical axis. Unlike in New York City, free space hangs between sounds in the Everglades.

Luca and I watched as the baby alligator swam, swinging his tail back and forth, making little ripples through the marsh’s water. The ripples went on for as long as they could, like a series of valleys moving up and down in empty land, until they eventually became so small that they blended into the water. Up and away, in the tree, the anhinga bent her foot and the tree’s branch quivered, vibrating in the free air. Minutes passed and the branch slowed, its quivers shrinking until they eventually disappeared, stopped by nothing but the branch’s own tiring into the air around it. The voices in New York City are swallowed up in a far more violent way. One person’s sounds are cut off by another person’s sounds, before both are swirled into the stream of city noises. In the Everglades, there is no interruption, and so the baby alligator is free to reverberate through space.