A volunteer park ranger finds peace in paddling after surviving tragedy
Volunteer park ranger Mariela Mason patrols the waters of Gilchrist Blue Springs. The transparent turquoise allows her to soar.
July 11, 2022 | Story by Madison Chestang | Photos by Anderson Bobo
This article is part of Atrium’s Winter 2022 issue. To view the print edition online, visit our Issuu here.
Editor’s note: This narrative contains scenes from a car accident that could be troubling for some readers.
On a late fall morning, volunteer park ranger Mariela Mason navigates the turquoise waters of Gilchrist Blue Springs State Park in an orange kayak. She paddles past canopies of trees and herds of swimmers in search of relief from the Florida heat.
The 55-year-old woman is the only ranger patrolling the water on this sweltering day. Beneath her wide-brimmed hat, she surveys visitors and ensures they refrain from damaging the flora and fauna. Her longtime friend and fellow kayaker Daniel Avery calls her “nature’s police.”
She’s not alone. Mason has a deputy: Kush, her service dog. The border collie mix, whom Mason adopted after finding in her recycling bin, is swaddled in a miniature orange life jacket, his fluffy black and white tail dangling in the water below.
Mason smiles and gives him a scratch before returning her attention to her paddle. She sweeps the blade to the right and allows the current to launch the boat into the springs. She offers no hint of her struggles.
Mason is a protector of the springs and its creatures. She educates parkgoers on conservation efforts at the springs — and about her disability.
Mason greets couples crammed into rented canoes and recites the springs’ geography, highlighting where it connects with the swift Santa Fe River.
The buzzing chatter of the crowd dies away as she passes the “No Swimming” sign, giving way to the gentle chirping of birds and the slow, rhythmic splashes of Mason’s paddles. Here, she encounters fewer visitors but more springs residents with feathered wings and protective shells.
Occasionally, passersby stop and stare at her, their eyes lingering a little too long at the end of her pant leg. She pays them no mind; after four years, she’s gotten used to the stares.
She glides in perfect harmony with the water. Her muscular arms propel the paddle in careful, cadenced strokes. Mason knows most people in her position wouldn’t dare enter a kayak, but she soars down the springs, swanlike.
Mason turns her attention to the aquatic dimension beneath her. She peers through the water to examine the plant growth along the floor. Dark green leaves sprout where there was once decay. Mason mutters a brief update of their condition to the other park staff into her walkie-talkie.
A woman in a pink visor kayaks in the quiet clearing nearby, fumbling with the paddle before noticing Mason in her ranger hat.
Finally, the woman thinks. Her son abandoned their boat after only 10 minutes on the water, and she hopes Mason can convince him he has no reason to fear the Florida outdoors.
“Are alligators common around here?” she asks as she stations herself next to Mason’s kayak.
“They’re very rare over here,” Mason replies with a reassuring smile. “We usually see more turtles.”
She points toward the Santa Fe, highlighting exactly where gators have been spotted. She’s only ever seen two in the river. Mason gushes about the springs’ 11 different species of turtles, emphatically gesturing to the rows of brown shells perched on nearby floating logs. Yellow-bellied sliders are the most common visitors on the shoreline, but sassier snapping turtles also call the springs home.
Mason’s service dog, Kush, waits patiently on the Jeep that will transport Mason’s kayak to the mouth of the springs. He mirrors his owner’s tranquility, his thoughtful brown eyes dancing across the shoreline.
The woman is not listening anymore. Her attention is on Mason’s dog.
“Is this a puppy?”
“No, he’s my service dog,” Mason says.
She knows what she’ll have to explain next — what she always has to explain next.
“I only have one leg. He helps me balance my kayak.”
The woman’s eyes fall downward to the kayak seat, where the empty pant of Mason’s khaki shorts lies empty and flat.
“Wow,” the woman says, eyes wide. “You’re amazing.”
Should have stayed home
Mason used to seek signs from the universe. She would find repeating patterns — like the number 222 chasing her on receipts and clocks — that she interpreted as messages of encouragement or warnings from the heavens above. On a fateful April day in 2018, she should have known not to ride her motorcycle to her biotechnology job at UF Health Shands Hospital. Not on Friday the 13th.
But she got on her bike anyway and sped down Southwest Williston Road. The afternoon sun beat down on her dark gear. She passed her friend Daniel Avery’s school bus, which was heading to the nearby elementary school to deliver students home for the weekend. She saw the green light ahead as she approached the intersection.
Then, out of nowhere, a Mazda SUV zoomed in from the opposite lane and barreled around the median in a reckless U-turn. It swerved onto the road right in front of Mason’s bike. Mason veered hard to the right. She even remembered to put her turn signal on.
But she wasn’t fast enough. The SUV slammed into her bike, smashing her left leg and sending her flying across the road.
She laid in a pool of her own blood. She could do nothing but stare at the mangled pieces of her leg on the ground.
“God, please,” she whispered at the blue sky above. “I love you.”
She thought of her daughter, who was only in her 20s, and the years of her life she had yet to see.
“I do not want to die.”
Mason closed her eyes. Her mother, who died 30 years before, stood over her, a vision amid the haze of blood loss and pain.
“Shhh, Maggie,” she said. “Everything’s going to be okay.”
Mason opened her eyes to see Avery, who had witnessed the accident from his bus and sprinted toward her.
Avery had worked as a paramedic for 12 years and was no stranger to grisly wounds, but the horrifying image of Mason’s severed and bloody calf would linger in his head for years to come. Bones jutted out of what remained of her thigh. It looked like she had stepped on a landmine. There was no saving her leg.
But he could still try to save her.
Avery snapped into action. He removed the belt from Mason’s waist and wrapped it tightly around her thigh, a tourniquet to staunch the bleeding.
“Don’t look at your leg,” he said. His voice wobbled.
“I know,” she said. “My leg is gone.”
Mason boards her kayak, ready to embark on her daily adventure. For a time, her kayak felt unsafe, but with patience and persistence, she regained her balance.
The water flows within
The afternoon sun is now high above Gilchrist Blue Springs. Mason continues her conversation with the woman in the pink visor.
“Before, when I had two [legs], I always loved kayaking,” she says wistfully. “I can go anywhere in the kayak.”
Mason was raised by nature. She grew up in Venezuela, and from the tender age of 4, she spent her time outdoors playing water sports, canoeing, sun fishing and sailing with her family. In college, she even volunteered for a rescue group in the Andes Mountains to recover people trapped on the rocky cliff sides. She came home covered in mosquito bites, emotionally and physically exhausted, but still raring to go back the next day.
By the time she settled in the United States in 1994, the outdoors were the one constant in her life. She got in her kayak two to three times every week; even more after she separated from her ex-husband in 2013.
Now, she can’t even go on a simple hike without her all-terrain wheelchair.
The woman glances down at the paddle she’d been clumsily gripping as an opportunity dawned on her.
“Am I holding this right?” she asks, gesturing to the double-bladed oar.
Mason grins.
“You can open up a little bit,” she says. “Try to hold this in the middle.”
The woman in the visor attempts to mirror the motion Mason demonstrates. Her strained knuckles turn white around the oar, and she tenses her back.
“Easy, don’t hurt your shoulder,” Mason cautions. “You want to hold it like a bicycle, over here with the pedal.” She mimes holding the handlebars of a bike with the oar handle and dips the left end of the paddle into the water in a circular motion.
Mason holds the oar in place, allowing the current to nudge the boat counterclockwise. She mirrors this on both sides. The surging water powers the kayak. She moves in unison with nature.
When everything went dark
After the accident, paramedics rushed Mason to UF Health Shands, the same place where she had been heading to work. The doctors did their best to save what they could of Mason’s leg. They amputated downward from the center of the knee joint, attempting to reconstruct what they could of her thigh. But her femur was still badly broken, propped together with rods. She would return for a second surgery — when the doctors amputated up to her upper thigh.
When she awoke in the hospital, the first thing she noticed was the smell of decay. What remained of her leg was a bloody wound, open where doctors had scraped out remnants of dead bone and tissue.
“I smell like a zombie,” she told her doctor.
Mason spent the next few weeks in a fog of medication. Her siblings and cousins from across the United States and South America swarmed her bedside to pray for her recovery. Her friends pitched in wherever they could. They mowed her grass, took Kush out on walks and paid her monthly bills. Her neighbors even built a wheelchair ramp for her house.
Mason told herself she was happy. She was alive, after all. It didn’t matter that her leg — a connection to the outside world — was gone. She wouldn’t give in to despair. She would do the only thing she could do. Even with her world flipped, she’d keep moving.
Mason and Kush examine a rock from the bottom of the springs, where slivers of green are finally growing. Mason often inspects the water below her to ensure it is free of trash and debris.
At Gilchrist Blue Springs, Mason spends much of her day picking up trash. She stretches over the side of her kayak and plucks a wrapper out of the water with a plastic grabber most people use to reach items on high shelves. Canoers toss plastic bottles and beer cans into the springs as though it were a garbage can.
Mason hates it. She tries to turn fishing for litter into an educational opportunity, explaining to those she catches in the act how terrible polluting the area is for the springs’ natural wildlife. But she’s often left sick to her stomach when she witnesses people treat the place she loves and nurtures with disrespect.
It’s not just Blue Springs. Earlier that October, when she and Avery kayaked in nearby Poe Springs, Mason stumbled upon an ecological nightmare: a group of drunk college kids tubing down the Santa Fe River, coating it in margarita cans and tequila bottles.
Mason was off-duty then, but that didn’t stop her. She asked the students to pick up their garbage. It was important to keep the river clean, she explained.
They ignored her.
Instead, they brought in a jet ski.
She tried her best to tell them off without losing her cool. But when they started partying on private property alongside the river, she knew she was at her limit.
“We’d really appreciate if you don’t throw away cans on the river, or any trash,” she shouted in strained desperation.
One of the partiers threw a tequila bottle in front of her. It bobbed menacingly in the water.
Mason glowered at dozens of ignorant faces that had no regard for the place she loved. She went home, defeated.
But for Mason, defeat has never been the end of the battle.
Mason removes her kayak from her car. Park rangers usually assist her in transporting her kayak to the edge of the springs.
A new normal
After two weeks in the hospital, Mason transferred to rehab for further treatment. Mason kept telling people how happy she was to still be alive. But after all the kindness and care she’d received at Shands, rehab was a harsh return to reality.
She learned how to prepare her house, installing a shower chair and replacing her carpet flooring with hardwood to make it easier to maneuver a wheelchair. She learned how to safely fall in a situation where she lost her balance by catching herself with her hands and rolling onto her side. She learned how to handle her insurance, especially now that she could no longer work. Kush began training to become her service dog.
And with the newfound, unbearable pain in her leg, suddenly sharp without the higher doses of pain medications she had been taking at the hospital, she had to exercise — both physically and mentally — to recover from the trauma to her body and mind.
Every glance at what remained of her thigh made her sick. It was no longer hers or her connection to the ground beneath her. It was covered in angry red scars, the skin crumpled and reconstructed. Worst of all, it was a constant reminder of the moment she struggled to stop reliving in her head.
All she wanted to do was keep moving and working. Mason felt like a fish missing a fin, swimming in small circles.
Throughout her attempts to navigate this new existence of static stasis, she required more doctor’s visits, with new medications piled on by the day. Even with the support of her loved ones, she was exhausted. But she was determined.
To her many visitors, elderly neighbors she stayed up late fixing appliances for and friends she met volunteering at Shands, she repeated just how happy she was to be alive.
That was until August, when a fever and doctor visit uncovered another hurdle: Mason’s thigh was infected, all the way to the bone. The attempts to find a new normal came to a screeching halt. She was admitted to the hospital and administered increasing rounds of antibiotics via the constant drip of an IV. Doctors warned her that her prognosis was not good. The antibiotics needed to stop the infection would likely cause a loss of hearing and kidney function.
“Keep going,” she told them. “I just want to live.”
Mason was rushed in for another rapid surgery. Surgeons amputated 2 more inches off her leg to counter the infection. They didn’t bother to let her know in advance. She felt violated and betrayed. After months spent vulnerable and weakened from the accident, she put her trust in their ability to care for her.
Yet they failed to tell her she would lose more of herself.
After a mix-up between Avery and her daughter, Mason spent that night alone in her hospital room. The pain in her leg was the worst it had ever been, aflame and screaming from infection and surgery. Here, at her lowest, no one was there to hold her hand and guide her through the darkness. On her own, with no one to don a mask of positivity for, she cried.
One paddle at a time
Mason slides down the springs as the twisting canopies of trees unfurl, giving way to the open clearing where the spring meets the Santa Fe River. Occasionally, she will traverse its murkier waters to become one with the swift current. Today, however, she is content to sit among the calmer springs. She perches her kayak near a gaggle of tree roots and gazes out at her watery home.
She is broken out of stillness by a distressed groan coming from the bank. From within the tangled branches of a nearby tree, three young men frantically thrust their paddles into the water, droplets splashing wildly as their canoe refuses to budge.
Mason immediately jumps into action. Rowing to their side, she begins speaking to the men in Spanish. She gestures to their oars and mimes a backward paddling motion. The canoers follow her movements and straighten their loose grips on their oars. They once again try to pry themselves from the branches’ grip to no avail. Mason grimaces and shakes her head. She mimics her practiced, gentle strokes in the water. The men continue to flop around, unseeing.
Mason swallows her frustration and smiles. If I can do it, you can do it, too.
She demonstrates how to pull their body weight backward and let the current propel the boat. Finally, the tree sets the canoe free.
Mason waves the men goodbye. Their rowing falls into rhythm. Mason is accustomed to playing the role of patient, altruistic stranger.
She doesn’t desire anything in return — just respect for the springs that push them forward.
Taking the plunge
Kayaking wasn’t always this easy for Mason.
After months of staying inside, administering rounds of antibiotics packed in coolers of ice, she wanted more than anything to no longer be stuck in place. She stretched her leg regularly to prepare for short walks with her crutches. She missed the outdoors, the places she spent the best moments of her youth. She missed the water.
Three months after her last surgery, Mason started small. She practiced rowing in her neighbor’s shallow pool. It was like learning everything from scratch. All her old kayaks were too heavy for her new weight, and she’d risk tipping over and being unable to swim. She had to buy new, lightweight models that Kush could also ride in to help balance the weight inside the boat. After her infection, she was terrified of letting anything, even the water, touch her leg. She couldn’t risk getting sick again.
Her first venture into nature after losing her leg was exhausting. Her family and friends came out to support her on the big day, but after she was assisted into her kayak and began to paddle out, all she could think about was the bit of her left leg poking out from her bathing suit. The scars were a wrinkled reminder of everything she had been through. Memories of the accident and her infection came flooding back to her. Mason’s heart raced, her breathing rapid and tight in her chest. She felt the stares of everyone around her, their eyes fixed on the foreign skin of her upper thigh she couldn’t bear to look at or touch.
She fled the kayak, desperate to be back on land.
As she calmed down from her panic, she knew she wasn’t mentally ready. Things would never go back to the way they were.
But she had to try. Never once had she stopped moving — not after her parents’ death, not after her separation from her ex-husband and certainly not now.
Next time, she’d wear swim trunks to cover her leg.
Mason relies on Kush to balance her kayak and alert others if she needs assistance.
For the next several months, Mason developed a routine. She asked Avery or one of her friends to go kayaking with her at one of the nearby springs, full of nerves and trepidation. Kush jumped onto the back of her kayak, wagging his tail while waiting for Mason to launch from the docking bay.
The first few attempts were rocky. Everything after her accident felt like it took longer, and relearning the whole process from scratch, despite her extensive experience, was no exception. But after she returned to the springs, she began to remember why she loved it so much: the soft, curved trees, the turtles and birds perched on nearby logs.
The water was always moving with gentle nods and currents. Here, she wasn’t stuck seated at home, nursing the ever-present pain in her leg. She was flying. The turquoise highway trickled life into her bones with every swish of the paddle, each stroke a tranquil meditation to quell the turmoil of her past. She trained on the water day after day. As her arms regained strength and precision, kayaking felt more like sprinting, flying over the Earth beneath her.
The accident, her infection — none of it mattered when she was on the water. With her kayak and paddle, she could go faster than she ever could on her legs.
Mason wears her name tag, walkie talkie and life jacket with pride, knowing she is restoring life to the springs as it renews the passion within her.
Mason kayaked for months across the High Springs area, spending time in Poe and Rainbow Springs. Often, she found herself drawn to the quiet Gilchrist Blue, lesser known than other local waters. There, underneath trees and surrounded by leagues of turtles, she would have time to row onward. She would even educate people paddling beside her, teaching them the importance of keeping the springs clean.
In November 2020, Sandi Kalilich-Richmond, a Blue Springs volunteer coordinator, approached Mason about applying to work at the park as a volunteer ranger. Mason was thrilled: a place to work where she could help people in her element, in her own way.
The park created the Springs Ambassador Program for Mason. As volunteer ambassador of the water, she would be the first volunteer park ranger to be in a kayak for the majority of her shift.
In moments when she is not monitoring water quality or picking up litter, she takes in the quiet, healing cool of the springs she loves.
In 2022, Mason received a certificate of recognition for logging more than 660 hours of volunteering in fewer than two years of work.
She’s the first face people see, a symbol of environmental protection and perseverance as the rangers fight to preserve the unique biodiversity of the Florida springs. Mason may not remember all the names of the hundreds of visitors she interacts with every week, but they always remember hers.
Before leaving for the day, Mason kayaks down Naked Springs, a roped-off tributary to the right of the main springs. The trees above form a thick blanket over the silent clearing.
Once flush with wildlife, the water here is empty and still. Before the springs had been officially deemed a state park, vacationers ravaged the area with litter and debauchery, trampling the springs’ plants until they were nearly eradicated from the area and left almost uninhabitable for wildlife. As part of the springs’ restoration project, the section is closed off from all guests. Only biologists and park rangers are allowed in the area.
Mason steers the kayak to the middle of the expanse and ruminates for a moment. The movement of her paddles sends gentle ripples down the crystalline pool, the sole noise emanating from the water lapping at the edge of her kayak. Here, in the safe, soothing hands of nature, she is free.
Performing the last of her routine inspections, she peers down into the springs. Bits of eel grass sprout along the floor. Content with the progress, Mason calls in an update to the park rangers on her walkie-talkie. Then, as she turns to leave, she spots a lone turtle, perched on the edge of a felled tree. She smiles, rejoicing in the knowledge that some wounds heal with time.