Mucking About

When I first met Elliot Gray in Maine and he told me he walked in the swamp in Florida, I never dreamed he was being literal.

"You don't really walk in the swamp," I had said, visualizing floating walkways above the murky waters of the Everglades.

"Absolutely, I do," he answered, and described old sneakers and long pants tucked into high socks, how he stepped around unseen cypress logs and skirted floating islands.

"There's two deputies I take out," he continued, "two female deputies. We were crossing this open area and one of them said to me, 'Elliot, stop!' I froze. Right between my legs was the biggest water moccasin I've ever seen. White mouth opened up at me. I picked up my foot and stepped back. Real slow."

"That was in the swamp?" I asked.

"Oh no. That was on the way to the swamp. You get in there, and you can't tell if there are moccasins in the water or not. Probably not. But we walk through the water. It's about thigh-high. It's like nothin' you ever did before. I take out all kinds of folks, even ones like you, good-looking, well-preserved women who write about nature." He smiled at me. "You're gonna love it."

He's a handsome man in his early seventies who looks at least ten years younger—my age—lean, bearded, his vanity betrayed by a collection of stylish, wide-brimmed hats, like the one he was wearing right then, soft suede with a rawhide strap. If I didn't go to Florida every winter to visit my ailing father in the Keys, I would never have even considered his offer. But there was something about Elliot, something about his passion for the experience that compelled me, encouraged me. I could talk about doing this, could tell people I was going to go "muck about," I could even imagine myself walking through a swamp, but somehow I never thought I would actually do it. A real-life suspension of disbelief.

Seven or eight years earlier, Elliot and his wife, Marion, decided to drive down south one winter and ended up in southern Florida, not far from the Fakahatchee. They lived in their camper and volunteered as rangers in the Big Cypress National Preserve, picked up trash and watched the alligators. Elliot was bitten by the swamp bug. He took a nature walk one day in thigh-high water and never looked back. He and Marion were befriended by Clyde Butcher, a fine arts black-and-white nature photographer who runs the Big Cypress Gallery in Ochopee on twelve acres that had been the site of an orchid nursery. In return for winter housing, the Butchers hired Elliot to capture all of the exotic plants that had been released there, and to bring the land back to as near indigenous as possible in a place where things sprout and bear fruit overnight in the fetid air. Butcher's oversized, compelling images captured with a nineteenth century large-format view camera, brooding clouds over vast empty sharp-toothed wetlands, provided the perfect romantic vision of the swamp where Elliot was now totally immersed.

I had only recently met Elliot and Marion, old friends from my new husband's former life in western Maine, but his leading and her following were apparent immediately. They went to high school together in the tiny mountain town where the Appalachian Trail cuts over from New Hampshire into Maine. Old-time Yankees. While Elliot pursued a career in Marine life, she raised five children all over the globe before coming home to Maine to retire. He is one of those guys who got better looking and more interesting as he grew older. Marion, untouched by their worldly travels, drifted into rural dowdiness. She's a plain woman with a rough manner and a smoker's rasp. Four times she beat cancer. She's just come through a siege with number five, and the fear shows in her eyes.

The day I visited them in Maine, and Elliot invited me to come on...