Ridges and Hammocks

Rising out of an oak forest, we reach the desert-like ridge, dry and open. Reforestation is under way. A splash of bright red among the dusty green draws our eyes to a coral bean’s blooms. Mosquitoes start dive-bombing, even at this early hour. We follow the blue trail nearly to the road, the site of an old coquina quarry shot through with several solution holes. Like sliced butter, the quarry walls show the smooth scooping of machines that once cut the rock for building stone. On the white trail, we duck under a large net, part of an insect trap. The collection cup teems with bugs. We pause at a flowering paw-paw, which our resident botanist, Elian, identifies as a relative of the soursop, a fruit seen often on Caribbean menus.

We turn onto the Orange Trail, following it into dense mesic hammock to walk the Magnolia Loop, a mile walk through large old magnolias and a forest canopy of grand live oaks decorated with resurrection fern. The diameter of these oaks is such that it would take three or four people holding hands to encircle them. Prop planes occasionally buzz the canopy, thanks to the nearby Titusville airport. Huge ferns carpet the hammock: Boston ferns, bracken ferns, royal ferns. A thousand shades of green delight the eye.

Back on the Orange Trail, we head north through a dried-up hydric hammock, balancing on bog bridges, running into our first water source—a side canal branching off the Addison Canal. Built in the 1930s, the Addison Canal was meant to drain an enormous hunk of wetlands between the St. Johns River and the Indian River for development. The canal ended abruptly here, at the Enchanted Forest, when the diggers hit the impenetrable coquina ridge. The project was abandoned years before coquina mining began.

We reach the canal itself, a deep cut guarded by high sand bluffs. A corrugated metal bridge crosses at a point where kids once installed a cable swing, now dangling, Tarzan-like, impossibly high over our heads. The water runs brown but clear; greenery edges both sides of the canal.