Merry Christmas!

[Don Rosa]

It's still Christmas Day, so it's not too late to wish everyone here (except
Dan and Rodney) a MERRY CHRISTMAS! (To Dan and Rodney I say HAVE A NICE
DAY!) I just returned to my lodge room and my laptop in time to type this
today. For the past 5 days I have been canoeing in the Everglades -- for
anyone who doesn't know, that's the maze of mangrove islands at the SW tip
of Florida, where you could canoe for a lifetime and never go through every
channel and find every hidden lagoon or bay. We followed the marked maze of
channels to various "chickees" (wooden decks built above the water where you
can pitch a tent since there's actually no solid ground in the Everglades),
but I also used a detailed map and wandered among many remote channels and
lagoons which I could imagine have not been visited for years or centuries
or since Tuesday. Sadly, even though you might imagine that the Everglades
is like the place depicted in old movies and documentaries, it's nothing
like that anymore. There are no billions of flamingos filling remote bays,
or trees white with a thousand exotic birds which take flight en masse, or
pools of manatees or bays choked with alligators or crocodiles, or anything
like that. It's almost desolate. We never saw a fish in the water, no
manatees, hardly any birds, and just a few alligators. Miami has pretty much
wrecked the Everglades by siphoning off most of the water and polluting what
was left. And when they opened a channel to the sea for powerboaters, the
seawater killed the grasses that fed all those birds or the fish that fed
the birds. The only think left is the mangove trees and the incredible maze
they make. There could easily be a bay full of Barks' Gneezles back some
sleepy little channel that has not been explored. And since it's impossible
to travel overland (since the land is made of mangrove roots and trunks too
thick to get through and offering nowhere to stand), if a lost civilization
simply blocked the channel that lead to its bay of residence with some
transplanted mangoves, no one would ever know they were there unless a
low-flying helicopter chanced upon them for some odd reason. (But, they
wouldn't last long, since the fish are too infected with mercury from Miami
to be eaten safely.)
Anyway, that's where I was for the past 5 days, including Christmas Eve
(which I spent in a tent on a "chickee" in a place called "Hell's Bay" since
it's so big and difficult to paddle across in the wind). But I hope all of
you were warmer and more comfortable than I was last night in that cold gale
that was blowing across the 'glades! Tonight -- a warm lodge bed!!! Hoo-hah!