What in the world is that awful odor I asked my uncle Martin as we were driving down Turner River Road looking for my lost father.
This hunting/camping trip was to be the first swamp buggy hunt after the building of my buggy was completed and just in time for the opening day of deer season here in South Florida. In our hunting party were my uncle Martin and his son Eugene and my Dad and myself. So with provisions for an overnight camping trip of two nights, we loaded up the swamp buggy on the trailer behind my truck and headed west out into the everglades with my uncle and my Dad following us in his brand new 1967 Chevrolet Impala. It was early Friday afternoon when we arrived at our Turner River Road drop-off point. We packed all of the provisions into the buggy and drove across the canal on a very narrow wooden bridge and headed east to the old RR tram that was part of the logging industry back in the early 30s and 40s. The narrow-gauge rails are long gone now. We followed the tram grade south for about a mile and turned back to the east and drove back in a couple of miles more and found a good location to set up our tent and supplies. After gathering up some firewood in the buggy my cousin and I headed back towards camp when all of a sudden the buggy jolted to a sudden stop. Getting off the buggy and looking around I quickly saw a large cypress stump up against the skid plate that protects the steering. That stump stopped my buggy in its tracks. By the time I got back to camp one of the two transmissions was making a loud noise and a grinding sound. Well, guess we won’t be using the buggy to hunt with….not a good start for its maiden voyage.
We all made our dinners for the night and got to bed early in order to get a good restful night's sleep and be ready at the crack of dawn to hunt opening morning. We got up at 5 am made coffee and plans to still hunt (walk) since the buggy was down and out. I didn’t want to risk driving further back into the glades only to have it totally break down. At least I know I can drive it back to my truck and trailer on Sunday. So I suggested that we all walk about 100 yards apart in a straight north to south line due east until 9:30, stopping every 20 steps for a 60-second count. This should keep us in a reasonable straight line. It was agreed that no one shoots at any angle greater than 45 degrees from directly in front of them. This all sounds reasonable, yes?
Well, better-laid plans of mice and men I think would fit what happened next. We no sooner got out about 1/4 mile from camp when we heard gunfire coming from directly behind us. As it turns out, some hunters walking towards our camp had scared up a nice 8 point buck that ran right through the middle of our camp…go figure... I should have slept in.
So it seems that I walked up to a swampy area and decide to walk around it to my left…that sounded better than wading straight through it. Well, that took me off course…who needs a compass right? Dad was on my right and uncle Martin was on his right and cousin was on the outside far-right. Somehow when 9:30 rolled around and everyone was supposed to stop, turn around 180 degrees, and walked back towards camp, but something went wrong. If anyone missed the camp they would have run into the RR tram and then they could backtrack until they saw the buggy trail and then back into the camp. That worked out for Dad, uncle Martin, and cousin. It seems as though my little detour took me way out in left field. So I climbed up into a tree and just hunted that way for about an hour, after all, I knew where the camp was…or so I thought. It was probably around 11 by now when I got out of the tree and of course, everything looks the same…hell it's the Everglades.
I started out in the direction that I thought I should be heading but really wasn’t sure of that. So I remembered what a skilled old Indian once told me about and the first thing to do was to STOP!!… get 3 small sticks about 12 inches long and push one of them into the ground. Place the other stick on the ground along the shadow line of the first stick…wait one hour and then place the third stick along the second shadow line and now you have a sun compass indicating a westward direction. Now before you take off walking willy-nilly, look for a tree directly behind you as you are lined up with the west shadow line. Do the exact same for a tree way out in front of you along that same west shadow line. Walk towards the tree in front of you and when you get there, look for the back tree. Outstretch your arms in the direction of the back tree and the tree your standing next to. This should give you a second front tree to line up along your arm and then walk to that tree repeating the process until familiar surroundings are found. This is the absolute best method of getting you out of a sticky situation. Now I have never been lost and I didn’t really think I was this time…just a little disorientated since I didn’t have a compass on me. From that point on I carried a small pocket compass and a few other necessary items of need as this story unfolds further.
So it's now about 2 pm and I still had not crossed the RR tram grade as yet…but I could smell it ?? By this time Dad was getting worried that I was lost and said he was going to go and look for me… a bad idea. I found the RR tram grade around 2:30 and followed it backtracking all the way into camp. The first thing I heard as I walked into camp was did you see your Dad…well no. I got up on the top of my buggy to see if I could see him, but nothing. I fired off 3 quick shots into the ground as a signal hoping he knew that, which he did not. We tried to get the buggy to run real slow to go look for my Dad but the transmission noise got louder and we limped back into camp. It was now starting to get dark, so we gathered more firewood to make a big fire which would light up the canopy under the pine trees around us in hopes that he would be able to see it, and we continued to fire off 3 shots about every hour. Around midnight I said let's get some rest and we will drive the buggy out to the main road and get in the car to drive up and down the road in both directions. There were numerous camps along the Turner River Road and we thought that perhaps Dad had wandered into one of them.
The next morning we broke our camp and packed everything in the buggy and headed back out to my truck. I got the buggy loaded onto the trailer and the gear stowed away and we three got into uncle Martin’s new chevy. We drove north a few miles and then turned around and headed south, stopping to see if anyone had seen my Dad. We got down the road a couple of miles when we came upon this Seminole Indian hitch-hiking south, so we stopped and let him get into the back seat. We hadn't traveled very far when I smelled something very wrong. I looked over at my uncle and asked what is that awful odor? We all turned around to see this drunken Indian barely ably to sit upright and a wide shit-eating grin on his face and I literally mean “SHIT”. Then it dawned on us what that odor was and ole uncle Martin slammed on his brakes, open the back door and grabbed that Indian by the arm, and pulled him out of the car. Uncle Martin got back in and we didn’t go very far down the road when he looked into the back seat and slammed on the brakes again. He jumped out of the car and yanked the door open, lifted the bottom part of the seat and pulled it out of the car and walked it over the edge of the canal, and dunked the seat back and forth trying to get the diarrhea crap out of the seat from where that Indian shit himself...all the time he is muttering something in Georgia Craker language and unbeknownst to me as to what he was saying. Uncle Martin gets the seat back into the car and we turn around and head back to my truck and there was Dad standing there beside the buggy. We were all happy…except for Uncle Martin who got the seat out again for another washing in the canal, still muttering that same unrecognizable language. To be very truthful, I’m not really sure if he ever got that smell out of that seat…I think he just traded that car in for another one as I would not put that past, Ole Uncle Martin.
Well, for Dad’s story... yep he got lost alright and had not a clue where he was or where he was heading, so he stopped for the night at a dry hammock. If ever there was a good thing about Dad’s smoking, it was the fact that he had a lighter with him. He used it to keep a dead palmetto leaf fire going all night just to keep the mozzies at bay. He said he could hear the gunfire but really didn’t know what that meant, not that he could have navigated in the dark. We figured that Dad must have walked about 8 miles NE and came upon a hunting camp where Alligator Alley was being constructed. The guys in that camp feed him and gave him a ride to where my truck and buggy was parked.
As we got back on our way heading south on Turner River Road and back home, we came upon this buggy heading north with that same drunken Seminole Indian grinning from ear to ear riding right upfront. That buggy owner must have not had a very sensitive nose.
This was just a start to our hunting and camping adventures some of which had their own stories to tell.
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