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was. A hat floater is a dinner plate size puddle in the middle of the swamp. When you step in it—you disappear—leaving nothing behind but your floating hat. Sounds impossible but its true! Rob stepped into one and if it were not for the tripod on his shoulder he would have gone completely under. It looked like a little puddle on the forest floor.
    Hat floaters are formed when a large sweet gum has blown over due to a storm or just from old age. This will leave a large deep hole. Soon the roots from the other sweet gums and the ferns grow over the hole making it look like solid ground. But it is not solid ground. Step on the roots and the ferns and you’re alright. Step in the bottomless dinner plate and you disappear. Ryan was lucky for he knew not that he was already well into “hat floater” country. His luck was about to change.
    After tying a ribbon around a sweet gum tree , Ryan noticed that in the direction he was traveling the swamp was getting shallower. He quickly moved out onto dry ground but he was still in the sweet gum swamp. He looked back with pride at the ribbons behind him. He looked with apprehension at what lies ahead.
    The late afternoon sun is casting its long shadows giving a different look to the swamp. The sun shining on the bark of the sweet gum really shows it texture and colors. A certain tree catches Ryan’s eye. He notices a spider on the trunk of the tree. At first he did not see the spider because it took on the same texture and color as the bark. He breaks off a twig and holds it up to the spider. The spider rose up its front two legs to quickly bite the twig with its fangs. Ryan pulls back the twig and sees drops of venom. Ryan shudders throwing the twig down. He promptly slices the spider in two with the machete, leaving a green sticky blob behind. He pulls the machete out of the tree.
    “I will remember to keep my hands off of these bay trees,” he said.
    Ryan has been on dry spongy ground for one hundred feet. It feels good not to be sloshing through the water. He is on a small oak hammock. It’s small because it consists of only one oak tree thirty feet to the left of Ryan’s path. It is a huge oak tree with long and low sweeping limbs. Ryan steps into a small circular clearing. On the other side of the clearing is a fallen bay tree. All of the roots are exposed making for a curious sight. The root ball is at least ten feet tall. Ryan walks out across the opening not even knowing that he is walking across a root covered chasm that has been created by the fallen gum tree. He is walking across a “hat floater” but it is a dry one. It is dry due to the raised elevation of the oak hammock.
    Ryan is halfway across when there is a sudden snapping noise. He looks down at his feet to see the ground give way beneath him.
    WHOOSH!
    Ryan has disappeared down into the belly of the swamp. One second he was there, the next he simply vanished.
     
    Back at the wreckage at that same moment, Rob’s seemingly lifeless body twitched jumping as though he awoke from a dream.
     
    Down in the chasm Ryan gathers his thoughts. He has fallen through several rotted roots and stopped with his head being a few feet from the top. He is entangled and is dangling precariously in a massive root system some twenty-feet above the bottom of the abyss. The place is infested with insects of every imagination. Ryan feels them crawling about but it is much too dark to see them. Looking up through the crossing-maze of broken and unbroken roots he is not sure what to grab or even what hand to move first. He was thinking it over when it came—descending down from the light above—an arm , the arm of a man !
    It is dark bronze in color with black finger nails. It stops short of reaching for Ryan and instead pointes at and then pats a certain root next to Ryan’s left hand. Ryan reaches out to grab onto the hand but the hand recoils. The hand comes back down and repeats the process on the same root. It was telling