If the Trail was never the passage to an economic Shangri-la that the developers hoped, it did attract its own brand of jackleg entrepreneurs, whose economic activity runs from the exotic to the downright illegal. (In 1983, Everglades City came perilously close to being the only town in the country ever arrested for dope when the DEA scooped up 200 people in a single bust.) An impressive collection of exotic types is on hand in Escape, from the legless circus midget and her 8-foot-4 husband who opened a restaurant in Gibsonton to David Shealy, owner and chief investigator of the Skunk-Ape Research Headquarters in Ochopee, who has been accosted by the giant, smelly and amorous creature on three occasions. ''I guess I've just really been blessed in this life,'' allows Shealy modestly.

If the skunk ape seems a tad on the undocumented side, he's got plenty of company. Anthropology has always been a flexible science on the Trail, particularly in the phony Seminole ''villages'' that began popping up shortly after it was completed. Their residents cannily constructed an entire mythos to corral tourist dollars, even inventing the supposedly ancient sport of alligator wrestling to appeal to repressed Middle-American bloodlust. In fact, the Seminoles had only been in the Everglades -- their last redoubt after a long series of military defeats by U.S. troops -- about 50 years when the trail was completed. ''Florida is a place where even the Native Americans aren't native,'' ruefully notes a historian in Escape.

Not that Escape doesn't embrace the magisterial sweep of South Florida history. ''Exactly where we are sitting right now,'' notes novelist Randy Wayne White in an interview conducted on his porch on Pine Island, ''this precise location, people have been living here telling stories, living, dying, copulating in the bushes, peeing on the trees, essentially what I try to do right now, for more than 2,000 years.'' Certainly my old buddy Ratso Rizzo would have understood. 'Here I am, goin' to Florida,'' he rasped in his final moments in the back of that bus. 'My leg hurts, my butt hurts, my chest hurts, my face hurts, and like that ain't enough, I gotta pee all over myself. . . . I'm fallin' apart here!''

We know the feeling, buddy.

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