"Yeah, sweetheart?"
"Can we stop someplace to go to the bathroom?"
He smiled, had known it was coming all along.
"Absolutely," he said. "I've got just the place. Can you hold on for another ten minutes, sweetie?"
"If I have to. Yes."
In five minutes he was at the junction of 29 and the Tamiami Trail and headed back east, past the airboat ride signs, the Miccosukee Indian village signs. He tried to divert Carly's mind by telling her about how men long ago had built the trail as the first road across the great Everglades by scooping up the dirt and muck and limestone with a huge dredge and dumping it alongside the canal they were creating as they moved forward.
"See the water over here on my side? That's where they dug, and this road is where they piled the stuff."
"Uh-huh."
Nick looked out beyond the canal at the occasional spread of saw-grass meadow spotted by islands of cabbage and silver thatch palms. Then the hammocks of dwarf cypresses, wild tamarind and rimrock pine would fill up the space with a thin greenness. And always there was the heat, bubbling the mixture to a deep simmer. He admired the men who had worked through this relentless nature and wondered if they had ever taken an appreciation of its bare beauty while they tried to tame it.
After another ten minutes, Nick pulled over at a sign reading: CLYDE BUTCHER'S BIG CYPRESS GALLERY. He parked next to the small pond that bellied out from a culvert running under the roadway. The water was dark and coppery and lay like an unrippled tarp around several gigantic water cypress trees, their branches strung with Spanish moss.
Carly got out on the other side while Nick gathered up his thermos, balanced a cup on the roof and poured.
"We can go inside and use the bathroom, baby," he said and when he got no answer he stepped forward and looked over the hood for his daughter. She had forgotten all about her need and was staring out into the near water, her arm outstretched and a slightly crooked finger pointing.
Nick followed the line of her finger and saw the rumpled black nose of a gator cutting slowly through the water, leaving a growing V behind it. The eyes were like two disfigured lumps on the trunk of a tree with their centers buffed smooth and glassy.
"That's a good-sized one," Nick said, injecting a lightness into his voice as he moved around the front of the car to Carly's side. His daughter took a step back, but her eyes did not leave those of the reptile. When the beast took a turn to the south from its dead-on path, Nick felt Carly move up into the side of his leg.
"Wow," was all she said.
Now that they knew what they were looking for, Nick pointed out two other motionless snouts and Carly found two others among the cypress knees poking up through the water.
"Won't they come up and, you know, bite the tires or something?"
"I think they're used to company by now," Nick said. "As long as some idiot doesn't start feeding them from the parking lot, they don't have much reason to come out of the water when people are around."
They stood and watched for a bit, Carly now giggling at each perceived movement. After several minutes she seemed to have her fill and started looking around. The simple wood deck of the studio took her interest.
"Pictures?"
"Yeah, your other love," Nick said. "Let's go in."
When they stepped inside Butcher's studio, Carly's reaction to the large black-and-white photograph of the Big Cypress Reserve had the same effect as her initial spotting of the gator-her eyes froze on the photo. But this time she stepped forward. The frame that greeted them was one of Clyde's shots of spreading clouds building in the limitless sky over the Glades. Their movement and tumble and growth from drawing up the water below had been frozen in his lens. Below was a sheet of still water, reflecting the image of the clouds as if on a hot mirror. Bordering the open pond were marsh grasses and hammock trees, and bisecting it was a small sliver of island. The textures, in pure black-and-white, made the viewer forget even the possibility of color.
Carly stepped even closer and reached out to touch the photograph with the tips of her fingers as she might a sleeping animal. "Daddy," she said. "How does Mr. Butcher do this?"
Nick was looking at the photograph with only slightly less wonder than his daughter. He had always been as mesmerized by the man's skills as she was now.
"He's just very, very good at what he does, honey. He's like an artist, only with a camera, you know, who can see things in a way that other people can't," Nick said, but he knew he too was flummoxed. "Let's look at his other stuff."
Carly uncharacteristically took his hand and they drifted into the gallery, every wall filled with portraits of the wild and majestic Glades, from a small frame of a rare and intricate ghost orchid to a broad, wall-sized print of the moon rising over land no man had stepped on for thousands of years.
Nick had been absorbed by the guy's photos ever since a newspaper colleague had profiled Butcher years before. But only recently had he been drawn out to the studio, to stand and look again. Nick knew Butcher's story. The photographer, already a recognized talent, had been stunned by tragedy when his seventeen-year-old son was killed in a terrible car crash. Butcher and his wife closed in on themselves. And then, in a way maybe he himself could not describe, Butcher slipped alone into the ancient and otherworldly land of the Everglades swamp. He spent days and weeks alone in the pristine wilds with his big eight-by-ten-inch box camera and let the energy of his grief spread out in a place where other people did not reach. Out there he would stand waist-deep in the water, then focus and wait, enduring heat and mosquitoes and loneliness until the perfect moment of light and shadow could be captured. And out here he let his talent, the thing that defined him, grow in spite of his anguish and it redefined him. Nick felt a sliver of that now, and it made more sense to him, and he was pulled to it.
"OK," he finally said to Carly after they'd wandered through the entire exhibit. "Which one do you like best?"
She looked up at him with that delicious look in her eye she used when she knew her father was about to do something she would adore, and then dropped his hand and he had to follow her around a wall to a far corner.
"This one, Dad."
She chose not a photo of the Everglades, but a shot from behind a white-sand dune on one of Florida's empty coasts. The sun was rising, the wind bending sea oats, the tiny ridges of swept sand so clear in relief you swore you could see the individual grains.
Nick studied it, giving the shot his appreciation, but he sneaked a look at the huge dark makeup of a silent river bend draped in a canopy of cypress. His daughter caught the look.
"I like this one because Mom would like it," she said. "It's like her."
Nick quickly shifted back to the seascape.
"Yeah, you're right, sweetheart."
"That one's lonely, Dad," she said, gesturing toward the river that she knew was drawing her father.
"Yeah," he said. "You're right."
Nick had the gallery keeper wrap up the seaside print.
In the car, he took a detour south to Chokoloskee Island and treated Carly to a visit of the one hundred-year-old Smallwood Store, where the original owner's descendants, with the help of the historical society, had maintained the stilted trading post, one of the first in southwest Florida. She touched the old hand-wringer washtubs and the tanned pelts of otters and raccoons still hanging on the walls. Nick read to her from the original ledger that Ted Smallwood had kept in the twenties when his clients paid him in gator skins. Carly especially liked the Seminole Indian dolls, even though she never would have admitted that she was still into that sort of thing. Afterward Nick treated both of them to a stone-crab dinner at a restaurant in Everglades City. The meat of the stone crab claws is the most delicious seafood ever discovered, and having it fresh off the Everglades City docks where the crabbers came in from the Gulf was one of the wonders of the world.