Everglades National Park - Fireproofed by Nature

In the dry season, the slightest spark, such as one caused by a bolt of lightning, can turn the river of grass into a river of fire -- fire that lasts for days or even weeks. Bright, crackling flames send billowing clouds of cream-colored smoke into the sky, and burn everything for miles around. Miraculously, the hammocks are saved. Each is protected by a watery moat, created by the hammock itself: acids from decomposing leaf litter leak out from the hammock, dissolving nearby limestone into a natural water-filled firebreak.

Fire is not only a scourge in the Everglades: it is a blessing too. So essential is it to the balance of life that park rangers sometimes start a fire intentionally, under well-controlled conditions and with a great deal of care. For fire consumes mats of dead leaves that prevent new sprouts from taking hold, and clears the way for saw grass to renew itself. Even the ashes help generate new life, by adding valuable minerals to the mud.

Were it not for fire, hardwood trees would crowd the highest ridges of the park, eliminating the last surviving groves of slash pine to flourish in south Florida. When a fiery storm reaches the ridges, the hardwoods, along with the smaller understory plants and the pine needles carpeting the forest floor, are natural tinder. Most of the vegetation is turned to ash -- but the spindly-looking pines live on. Like the hammocks, the pines are endowed by nature with a fireproof shield: only the outer sheath of their multilayered bark is lost to the flames.

Although the ground is laid bare by burning, with uneven lags of exposed limestone turning the landscape into a tortuous terrain, life stirs anew beneath the surface. Saved by massive root systems, the plants in the pinelands resprout. Soon, the saw palmetto adds its long and graceful fan-shaped leaves to the forest, joined by the coontie, a foot-high fernlike plant that belongs to one of the oldest plant families on earth. Before too long, the ground is once again covered with greenery, and splashes of brilliantly colored flowers return the vibrancy of life to the land. Over all tower the pines, their bark splattered with rust and gray, their sparsely needled branches withholding only a small amount of light from the plants that spring eternal from the earth.