by Dave Warm
photos by Colby Katz

Every decade or so, some consequential event alters the course of Clyde Butcher’s complicated life, a reality that inspires the celebrated Everglades photographer and born-again conservationist to wonder what might come of the panicked phone call he received last month.

Early in the morning of March 3, Butcher’s son-in-law, Neal Obendorf, and two family friends left for a Saturday dive trip in the Gulf of Mexico, a half-day warmup for a longer excursion to Captiva Island the following weekend. They anchored Obendorf’s 30-foot Wellcraft Scarab speedboat 14 miles offshore, somewhere between Sarasota and Venice.

About 2 p.m., the men decided to head back home, but not before Obendorf, at 38 a boater his entire life, attempted one last time to spear dinner. For reasons that haven’t been determined yet, as he disappeared below, the boat began to take on water, and as one rogue wave broke over the stern, another capsized the boat. A few minutes later, Obendorf followed the anchor to the surface and found himself in a quizzical position, staring up at the top of his boat.

Butcher’s daughter, Jackie, arrived home from Busch Gardens in Tampa about 10 o’clock that evening and couldn’t understand why her husband and his two guests — a father and son from North Fort Myers and Niagara Falls, Ontario, respectively — hadn’t returned. They should have been home hours earlier. Concerned, she called the Coast Guard and 911, then drove to the boat ramp in Casey Key from which they had departed and found his empty trailer. For the first time, she acknowledged the gravity of the situation.

When the phone rang at midnight, Butcher was slow to answer it, fumbling around in the dark. He and Niki, his wife of almost four decades, aren’t accustomed to late-night calls, so the unexpected ringing shook them from a heavy sleep in their Port of the Isles home, about 20 miles east of Naples.

Alone except for her thoughts, Jackie waited in silence for her father to pick up the phone. The ringing seemed eternal. When Clyde finally answered and she heard his voice, Jackie crumbled. "I lost it," she says. "I was very emotional with my dad."

On the other end, emotions ran equally high. The conversation threw Niki back to the dark, dark spot 15 years ago, to the evening a police officer knocked on the front door of their home, sat Clyde down and informed him their 17-year-old son, Ted, had been killed by a drunk driver. Neal is like a carbon copy of Ted, Clyde now says. He’s tall and thin, "the same kind of personality."

"He is like their son again," says Oscar Thompson, a family friend. "I knew if Neal didn’t make it back, it was going to be something. I was one of the people on my knees praying."

Clyde talked to Jackie again about 3 a.m. and she told them not to come over until morning. Instead, the Butchers drove more than two hours north and west to their tiny Venice home in a campground near the Myakka River. After a sleepless night in Venice, the search would begin.

A natural place to live

On a Monday morning in late March, the Butchers retreated to their property inside Big Cypress National Preserve, where they spend most of the summer because stormy conditions are ideal for nature photography.

The Butchers own 13 acres in Big Cypress, an uncommon parcel of old Florida on the Tamiami Trail, 46 miles east of Publix in Naples and 46 miles west of Publix in Miami, past Seminole tribal land and chickee huts and airboat rides. The Butchers’ quiet piece of terra firma is marked by a sign for the Big Cypress Gallery, which is the only building on the isolated property visible from the road and exhibits Clyde’s enormous black-and-white landscape photos.

"I was lucky to be able to get a piece of swampland," he says.

A few other structures are hidden inside a dense forest of cypress trees and potash swamps and muck, visible only to those who venture beyond a steel gate and into the Loosescrew Sanctuary, given its name when a man building the gallery quipped, "You’d have to have a loose screw to do this all the way out here." Clyde replied: "Then this will be a good place for all those people with loose screws."

This includes previous tenants. Twice before the Butchers lived here, Clyde unloaded his camera gear and set up outside the front pond before the former owner — who grew orchids inside the forest — chased him off with a rifle, mostly because he didn’t like beards and Clyde, who is 59 years old and covered in a river of white shag, has been growing his since 1975.

This turned out to be an effective means of keeping Clyde off the property, but one afternoon on her way across the state, Niki, two years his junior, stopped in to tour the orchid nursery, which the public could do for a nominal fee.

On the way out, she noticed a "For Sale" sign, and excitedly considered the possibilities of her own remote paradise before mentioning anything to Clyde, because, "He is the type of person who says, ‘If you’re going to dream a dream, do it, don’t dream it.’ So you have to be real cautious before you say, ‘Let’s try to do something.’ Because he’ll say, ‘OK.’ "

Despite a certain 80-year-old gun-wielding, beard-hating hermit, Clyde agreed to look at the property and purchased it the next day for $85,000. They have since been offered $750,000.

"But there’s a spiritual value," Niki says. "This is where we renew ourselves. You can’t put a value on that kind of sustenance."

Life on the Loosescrew Sanctuary is nothing if not simple. There are two modified trailers, an old pontoon boat that now serves as a guest cabin and a two-story house he’s given to a husband and wife who run the gallery.

The Butchers live in a 350-square-foot trailer with a custom roof, two-bedrooms, one-bathroom, a large-screen television and a Florida room with panoramic views of the property. "How much more do you need?" Clyde says.

During the rainy season, water sometimes comes up to the base of their home and otters will walk past the front door. Early one morning, Clyde was startled from his sleep by the sound of struggle and watched from the Florida room as a panther wrapped its jaws around the throat of a deer.

"You could hear the lungs going," he says. "You have to realize this is the middle of the Everglades. Just because there’s a house and a gallery here doesn’t mean it’s civilized."

Nothing but a hunch

On Sunday morning of March 4, an extensive search got under way for Neal and his two friends, Bill Lipsit, 37, and Lew Lipsit, 66. The three men hadn’t been heard from in about 24 hours.

When Clyde arrived in town in the wee hours of the morning, he drove to the inlet in darkness to check out the currents and the wind. As the sun came up, he and three others set out in a 42-foot cruiser with a vague idea of where the divers had anchored the previous day.

They guessed wrong and spent an empty morning fighting high waves at a terminal 5 knots as a storm moved in. "I was so tired and the waves were so rough," Clyde says. "I couldn’t think straight."

At the same time, the Coast Guard sent a plane south, searching in the bays and following a lead they had received regarding three men fueling up at a marina in Boca Grande. The lead turned up nothing. Clyde had sensed it wouldn’t, figuring Neal would have filled up at a gas station the previous morning. A sheriff’s office helicopter also failed to spot the men.

With the search churning in place — most of the private planes in the area already had been booked for the day so resources were limited — Niki turned to a less orthodox source, a college roommate of Clyde’s with a vast knowledge of the sea and the spiritual clout of a shaman.

The latter goes a long way with the Butchers, who have never quite expunged the 1960s from their hearts. "We’re kind of hippies," Clyde says. At the Butchers’ request, their friend meditated, saw a vision of Neal adrift in the Gulf and came back to them with what he believed to be his coordinates.

Later that afternoon, a plane circled the area, saw nothing but vast miles of water (in all fairness, the men could have drifted by the time the plane arrived) and retreated before nightfall. "Sunday afternoon was a really hard, hard, hard time," Niki says.

The night may have been worse. One person erupted in tears and the sight triggered a fountain of emotions throughout a house packed with wives and mothers and children.

Niki broke through the premature wake and demanded, "You don’t cry over someone you think is dead. Cry when you know they’re dead. You’re taking away strength from them, sending out negative vibrations. If you love them, you need to straighten up and start thinking positively."

She woke up at 2 a.m. and prayed hard to a moonless sky, while the others brainstormed strategies for the following day.

"I was thinking about the three families it was going to destroy," Clyde says. "I said to myself, ‘If we don’t get him Monday, we’re not going to get him.’ "

The road to reinvention

On a rainy June night in 1986, Ted Butcher and two friends were waiting at a stoplight in Fort Myers when a drunk driver busted full-throttle around the corner and crushed them, no warning.

All these years later, when Niki talks about the death of her son, she begins to sob and in a voice that would make any emotionally intact human want to join her, says, "I will never not want Ted back, but I do the best I can."

Ask Clyde how his wife has dealt with the loss and he grows sad and hushed and says, "She still has a problem with it." Ask Oscar Thompson, who spends a few days a week with his own wife (who works in the gallery) in one of the modified trailers at Big Cypress, and he says, "Niki was in bad shape for a long time. She was totally incommunicado for six months probably."

Clyde dealt with the pain in his own way (his father died three weeks after Ted, and Niki’s father a few months after that). "I didn’t know what to do," he says. "Maybe men are different ... but I had to do something. It could either be negative or positive."

For the first three-quarters of his life, Clyde had oscillated quite effectively between nomadic bohemian and material nonconformist. He graduated from the California Polytechnic Institute in San Louis Obisbo with a degree in architecture, compensating for his inability to draw by photographing models with a pinhole camera of his own making.

In college, he met Niki, who looks back on herself as "one of those kids who was different and took all the art classes. I was in a rebellious state as a teenager against the structured lifestyle of my parents."

So, when Clyde asked her to marry him, she danced around it. "I didn’t want to get in that same 9-to-5 rut," she says. "I said I wasn’t ready to settle down, and he said, ‘You don’t have to worry about that.’ "

She was 18 when they married. He was a senior in college and pursuing nature photography with as much interest as architecture, shooting in Yosemite National Park, where Ansel Adams was holding court, selling now-famous black-and-white photos for between $25 and $75.

About five years into his career as an architect, Clyde took some of his own color photographs — "cutesy stuff, quite a few flowers involved" — down to a supermarket and earned more money than he had at his day job.

Within a few years, he found himself in charge of a thriving company mass-producing prints for department stores, riding an erratic wave from wealth to bankruptcy. Somewhere between the two extremes, he and his wife lived in a commune next to Timothy Leary ("You have to realize," Clyde says, "I’ve never had a drink of alcohol in my life, much less drugs. I take an antihistamine or an aspirin and it affects me") and moved the family onto a sailboat.

The Butchers spent eight years jumping from marina to marina in California, leaving when it was discovered they were living aboard with two young children. They finally bought a mooring and stayed in one spot, albeit one devoid of running water and electricity. Each morning, the Butchers rowed their kids ashore for school. By the time Jackie enrolled in a Florida high school, she had checked in and out of more than 23 schools.

"We never were able to grow with people," she says. "We never had a sense of community."

When Clyde hit Florida, he would continue wandering, markedly unimpressed with the state’s flat geography. Months would pass before he walked into a Fort Myers photography store and struck up a conversation with Thompson, a fifth-generation Floridian (and respected photographer in his own right) who would take Clyde into the swamp and help shape his future.

"He wouldn’t get his feet wet," Thompson recalls of Butcher’s first foray into the soft and stinky mud of the Ochopee Prairie. "He wouldn’t get off the road. I said, ‘You’ve got to follow me.’ He said, ‘What, out there?’ "

It’s hard to believe Thompson’s referring to the same man who now revels in stories about being stuck up to his waist in mud with alligators 10 feet from a hearty meal. The same man who photographed a rare ghost orchid immediately after a water moccasin tasted the meat above his heel.

The same man who disappeared into the swamp in the painful days following Ted’s death and reinvented himself. "I wanted to do something positive," he says. "That’s when I started doing black-and-white."

Sunk

When Obendorf comes up from the bottom of the Gulf on Saturday afternoon of March 3, he looks around and spots his two companions clinging to the underside of his boat.

The only one wearing a wet suit and flippers, he dives underneath and gathers what he thinks the men might need to survive, which includes a floating oxygen tank, a compass, a flare gun and life jackets. They also find a seat cushion that doubles as a life preserver and remove floating bumpers from the boat.

The Gulf is a choppy 3-to-4 feet and 74 degrees. The air is warm. For about two hours, they hold onto the capsized boat, which still is anchored. "Then the guys flip out," Clyde says. They release the anchor and begin to drift.

A couple of hours later, as the sun goes down and the waves pick up, the boat begins to sink. Hardly any of the boat is above water when the three men decide to let go rather then risk being pulled below.

They take the life jackets and bumpers and anything else that will float and fashion a raft. The men have no water or food, but ate lunch just before the boat capsized.

Sometime in the night, a yacht passes a mile or two in the distance and Obendorf shoots two flares but no one sees them. About 3 a.m., the moon drops below the horizon and they float in utter darkness.

Eyes on a world unseen

Before he retreated into the forest, Clyde purged himself of past successes, drove two trucks full of his popular color photographs — about $400,000 worth, he says — to a dump and unloaded them.

"I was kind of wondering if he lost it or not," Thompson says.

"In art, sometimes you have to burn bridges," Clyde explains. "If you want to go in a different direction, if you don’t burn the bridge, you might take the easy road and go back."

Some nights, Butcher came out of the swamp; others, he didn’t. Sometimes, he took boats or canoes; sometimes, he slopped through mud and water with his sturdy tripod and a large-format mahogany view camera straight out of the Civil War. "Summertime, it gets really exciting out here," he says.

Despite his efforts to explain why black-and-white photography was the key to his salvation, it’s still difficult to understand. At one point, he says, "It is the art form of photography. You see the textures. You see the form. You see the nature."

At another, he asks, "What is more important: the sky, the air or the water?" The question is rhetorical so he answers, "When you see a picture, your eye goes to the sky or water or grass or trees, whichever you like best. But in black-and-white, it all becomes one. And I think that’s what nature is. One thing can’t exist without everything else."

His journey into the wild was as much about his new environmental awareness as it was his art. For any number of reasons all related to Ted’s death, he began to see the Everglades as something more than a vehicle to sell photos at art festivals throughout the state. It gave him a purpose beyond money. (He now donates thousands of dollars worth of work to various causes.)

"If you can do what you’re doing and make a difference in the world for other people and make them perceive life from a different angle ... that is very important," says Niki, who colors her own black-and-white photographs with oil paints. "Nobody gets into the swamps. This is a way for them to see what the inside of Florida looks like without actually going into it. In order for people to see it, somebody has to put the images out there."

After a chance meeting, Clyde forged a bond with the South Florida Water Management District, donated photographs to decorate their office walls, created posters and calendars, and attempted to do for them what Ansel Adams had done for the Sierra Club so many years earlier. The connection also gave him an opportunity to soak up information about Florida’s mishandled ecosystem. He is inclined to share it.

"In 1947," he says, "they put up a fence and said, ‘This is Everglades National Park.’ It didn’t protect it, because guess what? Shit goes downhill. It took them 50 years to see they screwed up. You have to see the whole."

Sit down with Clyde now and the conversation switches from redwood forests ("The only place on Earth dinosaurs lived") to hypocrites at the Audubon Society ("Ask them what they do for the environment in their personal lives") to George W. Bush’s environmental policies ("He’s an evil person") to those of Bush’s brother ("We’re getting Bush-whacked on both ends").

"I’d like to call myself an educator," he says. "I don’t know what an environmentalist is."

Success has not hurt his ability to teach. A few years after Clyde partnered with the South Florida Water Management District, Tallahassee filmmaker Elam Stoltzfus chose Clyde as the subject of a 30-minute documentary that went on to win the Louis Wolfson II Media History Center Film and Video Award in 1993.

"Some pictures can almost be haunting in the depth," Stoltzfus says from Blountstown, near Tallahassee. "Others capture the beauty, the majestic side. One thing you have to understand is Florida is subtle and slow. Those pictures capture the subtlety, the changes, the growth."

In 1995, two writers from The Miami Herald collaborated on Clyde’s life story, a gushing biography called Seeing the Light. Two years after that, he was inducted into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame, joining a truly impressive list of characters, among them Ernest Hemingway, Robert Rauschenberg and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Clyde was nominated by then-Gov. Lawton Chiles.

The Sierra Club recently honored him with the Ansel Adams Award for Conservation Photography. In June, he sends about 40 photos to the National Gallery of Art in Prague of the Czech Republic. The exhibit will tour Europe. On March 31, an exhibit called Clyde Butcher: Visions of the Next Millennium, opened at the Coral Springs Museum of Art. It runs through June 10.

"His images are designed to step inside," says Larry Richardson, a biologist at the Florida Panther National Wildlife Refuge and past-president of the North American Nature Photography Association. "Explore the tree on the right. The ripples in the middle. The flowers on the left. He’s putting such a huge picture in front of you, you’re there. He’s a great photographer."

Survival

Six different times on Sunday, March 4, the men watch helplessly as planes fly past. By late morning, both Lew and Bill Lipsit begin to hallucinate. At first, they are able to shake it off or blink until the images disappear.

As the day wears on and a storm moves in, the hallucinations grow more realistic. Obendorf begins to see Mount Rushmore in the clouds, but is able to bring himself back. One of the men wanders off the raft to go use a nonexistent bathroom and Obendorf, wearing the wet suit and flippers, retrieves him. Then, the other swims off after a water fountain.

As this goes on, the seas rise. The same storm that sends Clyde and the 42-foot cruiser back to shore is taking a toll on their bodies and minds. At some point, Obendorf loses his compass. The flares don’t work. They drift close enough to shore to see condominium windows, then the current snatches them back.

By evening, the waves are between 10 and 12 feet and the wind is 50 knots, close to 60 mph. They are pelted by rain continuously. The Lipsits conserve body heat by sharing the hood from Obendorf’s wet suit.

He doesn’t know how long before hypothermia sets in. As the men crest and fall with the waves, one of the Lipsits swims off toward an imaginary goal and disappears. Both men think he is gone, then five or 10 minutes later he snaps out of his hallucination and begins to scream. Weak and exhausted, Obendorf retrieves him. Later, it happens again. The moon disappears about 3 a.m., while Niki is in Venice praying hard to the sky.

The next morning, 44 hours after the ordeal begins, a rescue plane spots the three men, circles and phones the Coast Guard. An hour later, they are hoisted into a helicopter and brought ashore. Alive.

Faith and fate

Clyde is on a rocking chair in the Florida room at Big Cypress. It’s been more than three weeks since his son-in-law and the Lipsits were pulled from the Gulf, and Clyde still dreams about what he could have done differently to retrieve them quicker.

Later, he says, "I never think about the concept of regrets."

On the morning of the rescue, Clyde organized a fleet of private planes and sent them north instead of south, where the Coast Guard opted to search. One of the planes spotted the men floating about seven miles out. "I know a little about the wind and currents," Clyde says.

Back before he moved the family to Florida, Clyde was sailing from California to Mexico when he came face to face with a hurricane. He and his two-man crew literally harnessed themselves to the deck and surfed the boat across 25- to- 40-foot waves, coming ashore in 12 hours instead of the 36 it should have taken. "You could hear the keel going, ‘Bzzzzzzzzzzz.’ "

When the Coast Guard picked up Obendorf and the Lipsits, they told the men they’d never heard of anyone lasting in water that temperature more than 31 hours, let alone 44. The three men were taken to the hospital in Venice, treated for hypothermia and dehydration and kept overnight.

"Faith and fate," Clyde says. "I don’t think the other two men would have lasted another two hours." Jackie calls it a miracle.

A week later, Obendorf checked himself back into the hospital because a wet-suit strap under his chest had caused his pancreas to swell to the point of failure, leading to hepatitis. He spent the next 12 days eating and drinking through tubes, dropping to a bony 6 feet, 5 inches, 175 pounds. Clyde rocks forward and with a big grin, says, "This weekend, he was able to eat Chinese food."

Clyde could be somewhere other than Big Cypress today, but he is an accommodating man, even in the face of stress. A reporter wants to see him work and he first suggests meeting at the darkroom in Venice, where they also have a gallery, but instead finds time for a walk in the wild.

Understand, this is not a simple process, even on foot. Some of Clyde’s prints are as large as 5-feet high and 9-feet long. To get the phenomenal detail he’s known for on such a grand scale, it requires the use of large-format view cameras, giant relics from the past — bellows and all — that use one sheet of film at a time.

"You shoot less film because you take more time and more care with each one," says Steve Simmons, publisher of New Mexico-based View Camera and Camera Arts magazines. "There’s more emphasis on the craft. It requires a lot of skill and a lot of patience."

More than an hour after sitting down to talk about some of the things that interest Clyde these days — he’s having a solar panel installed in the gallery and recently bought a white diesel Volkswagen Beetle that gets 45 miles to the gallon — thunder rumbles in the distance. Storms excite Clyde. He grabs his hat, his tripod and what appears to be a hiking backpack but actually is an 8-by-10 Deardorf camera built in 1943.

Minutes later, he disappears into his private cypress swamp. "I just go," he says and stomps through the muck in white Etonics, a barrel-shaped figure with thick limbs and no socks, panting and brushing away branches and climbing over trees until he finds a spot with potential. As he moves his head from side to side in critical repose, plump raindrops begin to penetrate the canopy of trees. First slow, then fast until he’s standing in a storm.

Ten minutes later and thoroughly drenched, he’s sitting on the covered porch of Thompson’s trailer, wondering if this rare deluge in a winter-long drought will cause a particularly exciting fern to bloom. When the storm subsides, Clyde heads back into the woods. The soft earth has turned to mud, so he’s barefoot now and heading toward a familiar spot adjacent to a tiny pond where the 12-foot Loosescrew alligator lives.

Clyde sets up his camera and talks through each complicated step, breathing heavily and explaining why this particular composition merits his attention ... the bromeliad over there, the puddle trailing off into the woods, the depth ...

The entire process does not take more than half an hour from start to finish, which is exceedingly atypical for a man who’s more apt to spend three hours sinking in mud outside Silver Springs or waist-deep in Lake Istokpoka, waiting for the elements to align so he can capture the moment.

"Sometimes, you wait all day," says Niki, a frequent companion on these photo safaris. "Sometimes, a couple hours. One of the most glorious things about this is you get to meditate a little bit. It’s kind of neat to have time to sit and wait."

She’s standing in the Florida room now, arms folded across her chest, offering a frozen lunch. Clyde is visibly tired. A month on the periphery of disaster can take its toll, change lives even. Obendorf, who works for Clyde in the Venice Gallery, has appeared on the morning programs and in the newspapers, and the other day spent two hours with a reporter from Reader’s Digest. He’s wondering about a book agent now.

In the wake of this latest crossroads, Clyde takes a thoughtful moment to consider the transitive course of his own life. It’s as though he senses the end of this interview and wants to wrap it up on his own terms. In his own words. He rocks forward in the chair, sets his observant eyes. "I’m not sure what direction we’re going," he says. "A path opens up, and we take it."