Sometimes my daughter wants to know when she is tucked in, "Daddy, is there such a thing as ghosts and vampires?" My stock answer is, "No, but there is such a thing as smoking cigarettes." I put gators in the book with ghosts and vampires. A life insurance application does not ask, "Do you kayak in waters where live gators habitate?" It does ask, "Do you smoke?" "Do you sky dive?" The bean counters selling insurance know what the real risks in this world are. As we all know, Superman was thrown from a horse's back and he ended up paralyzed, and he later died from complications. But little boys and girls still take lessons at the stable and still get thrown to the ground by horses. My daughter is taking lessons now. No way would I deny her the joy of that experience because it killed Superman. It's a risk but the bean counters dismiss it as negligible, so there is no question, "Is there a chance you will be thrown from a horse's back within the next 12 months?"
My wife Topie and I canoed the river often before we had children. Occasionally we would round a bend and startle an Alligator sunning on a sandbank. “Startle,” meaning, everyone gets scared to the death, including the gator. Naturally, the gator sees the big canoe coming 'round the bend from nowhere before the humans see the gator. The gator comes barreling off the sandbank and crashes into the water right beneath your canoe. It happens in a split second. We thought it was pretty thrilling. But then Topie became pregnant with our first child. We kept running the river. We got some hoots one day when some guys in a small boat motored by and the men saw an 8-month pregnant woman paddling a canoe down the river with some lazy, worthless heap male laid out in the front with his feet propped up, reading a book (Er, me). Anyway, with a child on the way, I was less enthused with gator encounters, so I e-mailed a University of Florida professor. This was 11 years ago, in 1997, when the internet had already become a huge open source of information. University professors were quick ones to publish on it. I found a professor who specialized in the study of gators and he sent back some interesting comments. First of all, the gators in the wild, who never see humans, are not the ones that attack humans. It’s the urban gators or gators living behind seafood restaurants that train gators to associate humans with food. People feed them, and those gators become dangerous to humans because they lose their fear of humans. In the wild the gators are terrified. The Florida professor wrote that gators are afraid of vertical things, and he said to raise the canoe paddle if one ever surfaced near a canoe. Sure enough, the next time we went canoeing, a gator crashed into the water from a sandbank and popped his eyes up to watch us go by. I raised the paddle, and he zipped back under water. The warning the Florida professor had was simple: don’t get out of the canoe and go wading up into the small tributary streams in the spring—which is exactly what we liked to do. These small tributary streams are ice cold, crystal clear, and a real beauty to walk up into. But that’s where the mother gators build their nests in the spring, and if you walk up on one and she feels cornered with her young, she will attack. An Alligator can run 25 miles per hour for short bursts. The human loses that race.
This weekend, we had a father-son weekend at the river and it was a blast—two 7 year olds and an 8 year old. I was a little concerned that there might be a “two’s a party, three’s a crowd” problem because one of the visiting boys was a good friend and baseball teammate of my son and the other visiting boy was a newcomer. I’ve told my son that everyone experiences the downside of “three’s a crowd” at some point, and it’s no fun. If there’s a “three’s a party problem,” he needs to be a leader who makes everyone feel included and welcome. Well, “it weren’t no problem,” as some of my better kin folk and friends say. These three boys hit the countryside like Huck Finns without a care. We spent a lot of time at the mill south of the iron bridge. We did see a gator, and it was afraid of us. That night we watched the sun go down in a grove of Pecan trees right beside the camphouse. We slept with the windows open and the wind blew hard all night. I woke many times to gusts that sounded like hurricane winds in the Pecan trees outside the window. The sheer window dressings danced about the room and my 7 year old son slept beside me curled up in a little ball. I’m looking forward to another weekend without air conditioning as soon as possible. An electric fan humming through the night with storm winds blowing through the screens is a fine way to sleep.
