Call it what you will — primordial, mystifying, daunting, backwater or, above all, magnificent in that swamp sort of way — the Okefenokee Swamp is one of Georgia’s most beloved treasures. Covering some 700 square miles in southeastern Georgia and the very northern reaches of Florida, the Okefenokee, whose name means “Land of the Trembling Earth” in the Creek language, is now part national wildlife refuge and part privately owned park that is widely known for harboring an incredible cache of biological and ecological wonders.
The swamp’s dark, coffee-colored water is the base for a living jumble of pine, cypress, swamp, palmetto, peat bog, marsh, island and sand ridge. A hodgepodge of animal and bird life — among the hundreds of species are black bear, alligators galore, snakes aplenty, deer, anhinga, osprey, and sandhill crane — call the swamp home.
On a brilliantly blue, cloudless day in spring, a young man named Scott, a local guide and seventh-generation swamper, fires up the motor on a Carolina Skiff as my husband, Roy, and I prepare to take a half-day’s journey into the Okefenokee. The noise startles a great blue heron from the water’s edge into a graceful, slow flight, its lustrous more-gray-than-blue plumage mirroring splendidly against the dark swamp. The gorgeous bird hopscotches across the surface before vanishing into a tangle of trees.
