Just off the trail, I entered the park at the Shark Valley Visitors Center. From there, on a tram tour alongside a canal that was alive with alligators, our guide told us that the only case anybody could remember of a visitor's being attacked by a gator here had occurred when a young Brazilian boy, out for a bicycle ride with his vacationing family, accidentally rode into the canal.

"My God, what happened?" asked someone who shared the general horror and disbelief.

An alligator, the guide told us, had already clamped onto the boy with its jaws when the boy's mother jumped into the canal and began pounding violently on the gator's snout, causing it to release the boy, whose injuries were relatively minor.

Had the park done anything, somebody wanted to know, to prevent similar incidents from happening again?

"Yes," the guide assured us. "They put out signs all along the canal, underwater, warning the gators about Brazilian mothers."

The part of the scare story to focus on, though, is not the gator, or the boy, or the mother, but the canal. It was one of many I saw on my journey to the park, all of them man-made and all of them at the heart of what ails the Everglades.

No one disagrees on the park's basic problem: Man, for reasons that seemed noble enough at the time, has tried to do a plumbing job on the Everglades. Beginning in 1948, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers compartmentalized a once free-flowing system by creating a network of some 1,200 miles of canals and levees, more than 150 control gates, and sixteen major pumping stations (using some of the largest pumps in the world), all aimed at storing water, primarily in lake Okeechobee, for when it is needed, and shunting it into the Atlantic Ocean or the Gulf of Mexico when it is not.

But the plumbing hasn't worked, at least as far as the environment is concerned. "As this project resolved most of the major water supply and flood control problems in South Florida, a second set of equally critical environmental problems emerged," wrote the park's director of research, hydrologist Robert Johnson, in 1996. "Today there is wide acceptance that the ecological integrity of the Everglades is nearing collapse."

As a visitor with more than three decades of perspective, I could see evidence of that collapse in the decimated populations of birds like the great blue heron, which were so thick overhead that we called their evening return to their rookeries rush hour. I could see it, too, in the invasion of nonnative plant species such as the red-berried Brazilian pepper tree. That aggressive home wrecker was growing in such profusion that it blocked the classic Everglades vista—an openness of saw grass prairie and seemingly boundless sky. And I could see it, at least in my mind's eye, in the mercury contamination that has resulted in the death of at least one extremely rare Florida panther, has been discovered in high levels in alligators, and has ensured that this time—thanks to posted health warnings—I wouldn't be fishing the way I did in 1969, when I feasted on freshwater bass, bluegills, and any number of saltwater species.