Orange Lake to Cross Creek

This is how you get to Cross Creek from Orange Lake at the MKR house: head down the canal, left at the dead end, past the dead cypress, hard right at the dead monarch butterfly, hard right toward the waves of minnows.  You'll know you're near them when you see the white egrets sucking them out of the water and down their crooked gullets.

Cross Creek has become my go-to paddle, the place where reminders why I get up at 6AM to do this are abundant, and I needed that after yesterday. I have no idea what the Creek looks like during the heat of the day, but in the early morning, it is downright hallucinatory: the water an oily black, solid rolls of fog, giant cypress and Spanish Moss catching the sun an hour before it touches the ground, and every imaginable heron, egret, coot, moorhen, or duck.  Even the smell of the rotting hydrilla is not an unpleasant one, and bringing up a fright wig of the stuff with each paddle is a small price to pay for such beauty.

Watching all the creatures do their morning rituals reminds me of nothing so much as the time I biked through the French Quarter early one morning many years ago.  The streets themselves were empty, but at the sides the workday had begun as folks unloaded trucks or washed last night's detritus down the sewer.  


If you're wondering why you don't see any of this amazing wildlife in my pictures, it's because by the time I've retrieved my cell phone, nearly dropped it in the water, and capsized myself, the birds have long since fled. Watching a large man flail around in a kayak of a color not to be found in nature is not something they are apparently into. The grey herons especially let me know this, always yelling at me at they fly away.  Stay tuned, though, someday I will capture a non-dead creature on camera.


Near the Cross Creek bridge I stopped for a bit and watched an enormous wad of hydrilla rise out of the water and then ease back down.  And so it is that I am becoming able to sit directly above a creature who could so easily tear me apart, but who for some reason does not, without completely losing it.


Side note: I am in the process of bribing a Wetlands Scientist buddy of mine to come with me one morning so that he can identify all the plants and wildlife I see every day and, of course, so I can write with a modicum on knowledge about it here.


Tomorrow: Day off...I think.