I pulled off the highway expecting a quick leg stretch and maybe a few birds. What I got instead was a grassy basin the size of a small county, with shaggy brown shapes moving across it that had no business being in Florida.
Bison. Actual bison, grazing under cabbage palms beside wild horses and a marsh full of alligators.
Florida keeps a landscape like this hiding in plain sight, and once you see it, the whole idea of what this state looks like shifts.
A Prairie Basin Where the Highway Ends
Drive south from Gainesville on US 441 and the land simply drops away. Trees thin out, the horizon widens, and suddenly you are crossing a grassy bowl that stretches farther than seems possible in a state built on beaches and subdivisions…