Marilynn Brandenburger

Just as I was concluding my residency at Everglades National Park, what should appear? Well, not eight tiny reindeer, but a summons for jury duty! Because my mail had been forwarded, the summons didn’t reach me until just a few days before I was to report. No more basking in the tropical sun for me! It was time to turn tail and run home.

But on the way, north of the park, were the Kissimmee River, Lake Okeechobee and the Everglades Agricultural Zone, and I had to see each of them. To explain why, I need to tell you a story.

Once upon a time in Florida the rains came and filled the winding, weaving Kissimmee River until it flowed into Lake Okeechobee, which in turn periodically spilled over its banks out into the broad flat land, and the water flowed slowly, slowly south all the way to Florida Bay. This is what author Marjorie Stoneman Douglas called the “River of Grass” and this was the Everglades. Birds thronged its edges, alligators probed its shallows and deer, panthers and raccoons wandered its woody hammocks. But at the turn of the last century, men wanted this land for farms and towns, and began gobbling it up, draining, dredging, channeling and paving as they went, until the River of Grass ceased to flow.

The once-meandering Kissimmee river, dredged and straightened into a lifeless agricultural canal.

Big beautiful Lake Okeechobee, second largest lake in the continental U.S., choked off from its surroundings by a man-made dike.

Sugarcane in the  Everglades Agricultural Zone, where the waters of Lake Okeechobee used to flow into the “River of Grass.”

In 1947, afraid this unique ecosystem would soon be gone, people rallied and convinced Congress to make what remained of the Everglades a national park. But a lot of damage had already been done and the park’s plants and wildlife had begun to die, especially birds, whose populations have sine fallen an astounding 90%. Thus began a 60-year fight to save the Everglades. It was a long, tough fight, as political fights usually are. But to everyone’s amazement, in 2000, an unlikely coalition of politicians, farmers, environmentalists and private citizens finally came together and created a Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan. It will take 30 years and cost $10 billion dollars, but the miracle is, it is underway! Levees are being torn down, canals refilled, roadbeds raised, the Kissimmee returned to its meandering — and there’s even talk of sugarcane fields being cleared! — so the water can flow again into Everglades National Park. Still, urban sprawl, with its pollution, insatiable water needs and invasive species, creeps closer and closer every day.

So, will the Everglades be saved? No one knows for sure; this effort — saving an entire ecosystem — has never been tried before. But I, like the many park service and water management personnel I talked to, am cautiously hopeful. The plan cannot fail. There are no other Everglades in all the world.

To learn more about this amazing story, read The Swamp, by Michael Grunwald, and see the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan website. Better yet, go see the incredible, beautiful Everglades yourself.  As an unknown environmentalist said years ago when the fight to save the park was in its infancy, “The Everglades is a test. If we pass, we may get to keep the planet.”

Having gotten home in time to do my civic duty as a juror, I am now going to settle into my cozy studio to relive my Everglades adventures in paint. Have a happy holiday and watch for my new paintings after the New Year!

US Highway 1 island-hops its way to Key West between azure waters of Florida Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Along this highway is a seemingly never-ending parade of marvels:

Old railroad trestles, the remains of industrialist Henry Flagler’s 1908 railroad, parallel the highway bridges. Built to shuttle the wealthy to winter resorts on Key West, the railroad was a marvel of its time. After the train and most of the track was destroyed by a hurricane in 1935, the railroad was dismantled and replaced by the Overseas Highway, but the old steel and concrete bridges remain a testimony to turn-of-the century engineering.

A stunning variety of ocean-side parks and wildlife refuges line the highway.  Among them: the Key Deer National Wildlife Refuge, the only sanctuary in the world for these endangered miniature deer. Just a little over two feet tall, they’re about the size of a beagle. They are easiest to spot mornings and evenings, like this Bambi caught in the afternoon light….

But it’s hard to really appreciate how small the deer are without something that gives them scale, like this mailbox:

At the end of the highway is Key West, as weird and wacky as only a tropical island thronged with tourists at the southernmost point in the country can be. But Key West is not as west as you can go. The Dry Tortugas, a gaggle of uninhabited islands that comprise one of the most remote of our national parks, lie 70 miles further. On one of the islands, Garden Key, is Fort Jefferson. To get to the island you take a 2 1/2 hour boat ride….

and eventually the fort appears on the horizon, immense and forbidding — made more so the day we visited by menacing clouds and a cold rain. (I was told it rains only once a year in the Tortugas.  My lucky day….!)

The fort’s purpose was to defend the mainland during the Spanish-American and Civil Wars, but its troops never saw battle. Instead they fought yellow fever, dysentery and mind-numbing boredom. Samuel Mudd, the doctor who set John Wilkes Booth’s broken leg and was thus judged an accomplice in the murder of Abraham Lincoln, was imprisoned here, but pardoned and set free after saving soldiers from dying of yellow fever.

Given all these interesting sights, you’d think I’d have sketches of islands or islanders to show. Alas, no. I traveled light to the Keys and left my scanner back at base camp.  I’ll have more to show next week after I take my leave of Everglades National Park. On the way home I’ll be taking a look at the sugar cane fields and the Kissimmee River, both of which figure prominantly in the Everglades story. Until then, a last look at Everglades:

Long time, no post!  I’ve been on south Florida’s west side, in and around the city of Naples. In the midst of this bustling metropolis, a variety of environmental and civic organizations have been working feverishly against the rapid pace of development to preserve what’s left of some irreplaceable, one-of-a-kind ecosystems. One of those is the Big Cypress National Preserve, an immense tract of dwarf cypress and pine that shelters birds, reptiles and the elegantly striped, endangered tree snail, which was almost collected out of existence.

Just north of the Big Cypress the Audubon Society has set aside a beautiful sanctuary, Corkscrew Swamp, that preserves the very last remaining stand of giant Baldcypress — some of them 12 feet in diameter — in the U.S. All but this small preserve of trees was cut in the building booms of the 40′s and 50′s. The trees were breathtaking in their width and height, but what delighted me most were the dark, quiet pools of ferns, flowers and baby alligators. This is the most serene place I’ver ever seen. It’s immense, cathedral-like quiet was so compelling, visitors spoke in hushed voices.

My final excursion was to the western corner of Everglades Park to take a boat tour of the Ten Thousand Islands.  Well, not all ten thousand…..dozens, maybe. The tour heads out from Everglades City into the main channel that leads to the Gulf of Mexico.  Wading birds, dolphins and sharks are the kinds of critters seen out in these waters. Our group, however, saw none of that, as a storm from the east that had been threatening all day suddenly hit, and heavy wind and surf prompted the captain to turn the boat rapidly back to shore.

But that in itself was an interesting lesson. Boaters going into these mangrove islands need to know what they’re doing; it would be easy to get lost in the mangroves or undone by the weather. In fact, we saw a poor couple walking their sailboat back to shore (the water here is only 4-6 feet deep), having given up on making headway against the wind.

I’m now back at “base camp,” my tiny apartment on the southeast side of the park, regrouping before heading down to the Florida Keys. I managed to finish two new paintings. The first, a scene at Shark River Slough, is a bit of a disappointment to me. I’ve decided the road, which serves to lead the viewer into the painting, is out of place. Yes, there are roads in the park, but they tend to be noisy, full of cars disrupting the quiet serenity of nature.  I wish I’d left it out.  Oh well, next time…..

On the other hand, I was pleased with this study of what I think is a “leather fern.” It evokes the rich, tangled, jungle-y world along the trails, a world where you can get away from it all.

Speaking of getting away, as I sit here in Starbucks, “White Christmas” is playing in the background. Imagine how bizarre this is! Temperatures are still in the 80′s, the tropical sun is blazing and palm trees are waving against an impossibly  blue sky. Sometimes it feels like I’m on another planet.

And that may well be where I find myself next week: Key West on Thanksgiving — Margaritaville, here I come!!! So long ’til then.

Now that I’ve gotten the mechanics of painting figured out, I want to wax a little poetic about this place. The three things that impress me most about the Everglades are the the big open spaces, the big silence of that openness and the ethereal magic of birds in flight.

I went out see the dawn yesterday morning, giving in to the mosquitoes — a blood sacrifice for art. It was worth it. The rising sun over the glades in an immense quiet was breathtaking.

There are so many beautiful wading birds here — egrets, herons, storks, coots, loons, ducks, spoonbills — and more coming each day as the wet season ends and the ponds dry up and the fish concentrate in the ponds and the birds gather to feast on them. Along the main road through the park birds are everywhere, in the sawgrass, in the trees, in the air. When they take flight they are magnificent, their rhythms a sort of melody across the sky. Here an endangered wood stork cruises the thermals over the sawgrass:

The birds I find difficult to appreciate are the vultures, and there are plenty of them here too. One of the odd facts about them is that they love to peck the rubber on parked cars and they’ll do big damage if you don’t frighten them with something strange like this plastic I’ve draped over my car.

Other interesting facts:

• There are more foreign tourists here than Americans right now!  Sometimes I feel like I’m the one in a foreign country.
• There’s a Cold War Nike Missile site right here in the park! Remember the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis? — when Khrushchev had missiles in Cuba poised to strike the US and President Kennedy stood up to him? The site here in the center of the park had four nuclear missiles pointed toward Cuba, ready to blow Russian missiles out of the sky.  Who knew? The park service opened the site up for tours on Saturday in honor of Veterans Day and I got to see the old buildings where the warheads were assembled, where the missiles were loaded and where the brave young men who stood at the ready were bunkered.  Chilling, with a host of memories of those scary days. Here’s where the missiles were loaded and rolled out to the launch sites:

But that was then and this is now and my thoughts return to the poetry of birds.  Here’s my latest painting, a watercolor of a tricolored heron along the Anhinga Trail, poised to spear dinner.

It’s noon, so I’ll leave you with that image, head to lunch and then turn to preparation of the slide show I’ll be offering park visitors tomorrow afternoon. I’ll be showing images of my paintings from other wilderness residencies and the materials I have brought with me to paint.  It’s scheduled for 3:00 pm in the Coe Visitor Center, so if any of you are in the Miami area, I invite you to join me.

I am back in business! And it feels real good to be painting again. The little Selphy printer is — as one reviewer said — the greatest thing since sliced bread.  I’m able to photograph this magnificent Everglades wilderness at dawn, dusk and in the intense midday sun, then come back to the apartment, print photos from the little Selphy and paint from my photos in cool comfort.  A great solution to the problem of the 43 different, hungry species of mosquitoes here. Here’s the Selphy printer on the left:

Is that cute or what?  Look closely and you can see the print it produced on the little shelf in front of the printer.  It’s made by Canon and I got it for a mere $80 at Office Depot.  Here are some of the sketches I’m making from the prints.

First a warm-up sketch. (I always find that I need to create a few small exploratory sketches at the beginning of a residency before I can get down to business. Something about getting comfortable in new surroundings.) There are panthers skulking about in the hammocks (alas, so few; they’re incredibly endangered), so these signs show up frequently in the park.  The danger is not that they’ll pop out of the bushes and eat you; it’s that your car might collide with them at dawn or dusk when they’re on the prowl.

Took an boat ride up into the mangroves yesterday.  They’re those shore-hugging trees that prop themselves up with big root systems. Snakes, orchids, birds and air plants fill their branches while crocodiles (yes, crocodiles!) swim between their prop roots.

Here’s a colored pencil study of one of the most common of the air plants, Spanish moss.

Flowers bloom here all year, so I’ve also been collecting images of a variety of luscious tropical blooms.  This watercolor is of a morning glory called Railroad Vine.  The colors of many of the birds and plants here are pretty intense (these are the subtropics after all), prompting me to cut loose with the chartreuses and pinks.

So that’s it for today.  Gotta go get groceries, head back to the swamp and continue work on the next painting.

Rain sent us into town this morning, so I’m back at Starbucks and their most welcome internet connection. I’ve encountered a painting challenge:  the best time for plein air painting, early mornings and late afternoons, is when the mosquitoes come out in hordes. I thought they’d be a minor nuisance this time of year, but it’s still hot down here and frequent showers keep them breeding out in the marshes and mangroves. I’ve got the mosquito hat and shirt, six different kinds of repellent, but those only seem to trigger their bloodlust.  As long as I keep moving along boardwalk trails, I’m pretty comfortable, but to sit and paint for an hour or two means fending off swarms of the little buggers. Hard to paint when one hand is swatting! Hence a trip to Office Depot today to pick up a little Selphy printer which will make 4 x 6 prints of the photos I’ve been taking and enable me to work on the screen porch.

Speaking of which, here’s my first little watercolor, with a view from my mosquito-free porch studio:

I’ll be trying out the Selphy this afternoon and let you know how it works in the next blog.

I have just arrived in Everglades National Park, where I am embarking on an artist’s residency. As guest of the National Park Service I’ll be exploring every nook and cranny of the park, learning as much as I can about this tropical environment from rangers and researchers, painting my impressions of this magical place, and presenting a program for visitors about what I’m doing.  So, what am I doing? So far I’ve been seeing what’s here, walking the boardwalk trails and figuring out where the best places are for setting up my easel to do some plein air painting. So I don’t have any artwork to show you yet, but here are a few images to give you an idea of this place:

The essence of this park is water. What looks like a dry grassland here is really a moving sheet of water  that flows from central Florida south to Florida Bay, creating a unique environment found nowhere else in the world. 

Now let’s get this out of the way….Yes, I’ve seen alligators.  They’re everywhere, lying docilely in the sun or weaving slowly through the small ponds scattered throughout the park.

Finally, here’s where I’m staying.  My one-room studio/apartment is the second screen porch from the right. It’s government housing left over from the 1950′s (or earlier, maybe), so it’s pretty spartan, but there’s air conditioning and the usual appliances, so I’m confortable and ready to get down to work.

I hope to be able to post a couple times a week, but there’s no internet access in the park, so I have to come into town — Homestead, Florida, 20 minutes away — to Starbucks.  At least there’s a Starbucks!  So I’ll be back in touch in a couple of days….with new artwork to show!