10%

JESSE & THE EVERGLADES

Gator Park, Florida

By Darren Martin

August 18^th, 2014

JESSE & GATOR PARK

About 40 minutes from South Beach Miami lies another world. Sure you’ve got the peacocks who prance and pose along Ocean Drive in South Beach with their Ferrari’s and sun-kissed, gym-buffed bodies, but in the Everglades you’ve got a bunch of different wildlife to deal with. Gators, pythons, birds, fish, panthers and more.

The Everglades National Park is a unique wetland ecosystem formed over thousands of years from the overflow of heavy rainfall into Lake Okeechobee, the Everglades extend southwest from Lake Okeechobee to the shores of the Florida Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Its 5,000 square miles of slow flowing water that’s often referred to as the “River of Grass,“ the swampy Everglades create endless prairies of sawgrass that is so dense that travel is possible only through natural water passages.

The Everglades.

Where the men are as tough as the leather bags that some gators become, and where tattoos are as distinctive as the terrain that defines the place.

Gator Park Jesse, a tough man, a good man. A man who knows this place like the back of his tattooed left hand. Tough men work in tough conditions, and the ink etched in Jesse’s skin doesn’t define him as much as the land he works on does.

Gator Park Jesse knows his job and the land, and that’s a good thing. If he was to ever see a peacock in the Everglades he’d tell him that he’s lost his way. That South Beach is 40 minutes and a world away from the one he inhabits. This is a world where airboats and gators prowl the prairies, a world where South Beach peacocks don’t belong.