What the Good Travel Magazines Still Cannot See
I drove down from Naples on a Tuesday in late October, which is the right time to do it if you want to understand something about the transition. Naples is a specific kind of American city, manicured and expensive and organised around a version of the good life that requires a great deal of maintenance to sustain, and the Tamiami Trail carries you out of it past the point where the landscaping stops and the landscape begins, past the last of the big box retail and the gated communities with their stone entrance pillars, and then you are in something else entirely, the road narrowing slightly, the tree cover thickening, and somewhere around the Collier-Seminole State Park the air changes in a way that is difficult to describe but is immediately noticeable if you have made the drive enough times. By the time you reach the turnoff for Everglades City the road has been going southeast for miles through a flatness that does not ask anything of you, and then it bends south, and the town is at the end of it, and there is no signal on your phone, and whatever you brought with you from Naples has become irrelevant.
I had been reading the AFAR piece before I left. A guide to Southwest Florida that promised to go nowhere near a resort, a shopping mall, or a cruise terminal, which is a reasonable promise and harder to keep than it sounds, because Southwest Florida is substantially composed of resorts, shopping malls, and cruise terminals, and the places that are not composed of these things require a willingness to drive past the point where the road feels like it is taking you somewhere curated and expected.
The piece was better than most. It mentioned Everglades City. It mentioned stone crab season and the Ten Thousand Islands and the fact that the town has a working waterfront rather than a decorative one. It had a photograph of a roseate spoonbill, which they always do, because the roseate spoonbill is exactly pink enough to perform well on a screen. I do not say this to be unfair to the photograph or to the bird, which is genuinely remarkable in person, but because the photograph is doing the same work that all the photographs in all the guides do, which is to promise a specific kind of visual experience that will confirm the reader’s decision to go, and the promise sits in a particular relationship to the actual place that the piece, like most pieces, does not examine.
What the AFAR guide cannot tell you, because no guide can tell you this and remain a guide, is that the experience of Everglades City is substantially composed of absence. There is no spa. There is no curated cocktail menu. There is no concierge who has thought about your needs in advance. What there is, in September before the stone crab season opens and the tourists are not yet here and the town is at its most itself, is a quality of stillness that most people find disorienting before they find it valuable, if they find it valuable at all. The town does not perform for you. It does not adjust. It is doing what it does, which is working and existing and minding the water, and you are either capable of finding that sufficient or you are going to be back on the Tamiami Trail by three in the afternoon.
The moment that revised something for me, that made me understand the gap between even the well-intentioned travel piece and the actual texture of this place, was a conversation I had with a woman who runs a small operation out of a building with no sign that I had walked past three times before someone pointed it out to me. She had been doing this for a long time, long enough to have watched several cycles of outside interest in the town, the periods when the media discovered it and the resulting influx of visitors who had read about it and arrived expecting the version of it they had read about, and the subsequent period when the visitors found something more complicated than the version and either adjusted or left.
She said the pieces that described the town accurately, meaning the ones that acknowledged the difficulty alongside the beauty, the isolation alongside the wildness, the fact that things here do not always work the way they work in places designed for visitors, those pieces tended not to produce as many visitors as the pieces that simplified. The simplifying pieces produced more bookings and more people who arrived underprepared and more strain on the small number of people in the town who interact with visitors as part of their livelihood. She said this without apparent bitterness. She had simply been paying attention long enough to see the pattern.
The light over the water at four in the afternoon in October, when the humidity has not yet broken and the sky goes from white to pale gold to something deeper over the mangrove line to the west, is genuinely as good as the photographs suggest. The stone crab at Triad when the season is running and the claws are fresh out of the water is as good as the reputation. The silence of the town at nine on a weekday evening, the canal sounds and the generator hum and nothing else, is real and it is valuable and it is worth the drive from Naples.
But it is worth the drive because it is the thing itself and not a version of the thing, and the distinction is one that even the best travel writing struggles to make, because the best travel writing is still in the business of producing desire for an experience rather than honesty about one.
Southwest Florida without the resorts and the malls is still being sold to you. The difference is what it is being sold as.
Donald Reeves writes about Everglades City the way the place deserves to be written about: without the brochure language, without the manufactured wonder, and without pretending that a town of 400 people sitting at the edge of a swamp is something it is not.
He has spent considerable time in Collier County’s oldest settlement, arriving during stone crab season when the waterfront smells of brine and work, and returning in the off-season when the tourists are gone and the town goes quiet in the particular way that only genuinely remote places can. He has paddled the mangrove tunnels of the Ten Thousand Islands, eaten at places with no hours posted on the door, and spoken at length with fishing guides who navigate these waters by memory rather than chart.
His writing on Everglades City FL covers everything from tidal fishing conditions and kayak trails to lodging, local history, and the complex past that most Florida travel content carefully avoids.
He writes to give readers the honest version.