No. Not to hear my mother the herpetologist tell it. She says, “The alligators will not be active and feeding until temperatures reach above twenty-seven degrees Celsius and maintain that temperature over a period of days.”
For those of us who are not biologists, she meant to say, “The alligators will be out looking for something to eat when it gets into the eighties.”
Okay, this means I should not have to worry about alligators during the first week of April. Still, when I saw the sign that read,
Do not feed the alligators
your leg
I sort of missed my little sister. She’s smaller than me and not as fast.
7
We set up our base camp at the Open Pond campsite, and then I took off to get the lay of the land while there were still a couple of hours of daylight left. Open Pond is the largest of a series of lakes in the area. There are a couple of smaller lakes, or “ponds” as they call them down there, named Ditch Pond and Buck Pond. Then there are even smaller ponds that may or may not have names. Each pond is separated from the next by sandy soils and longleaf pines. Thick, aquatic grasses run out about ten feet from the banks and around the entire borders of the ponds. At Buck Pond, a wooden fishing pier extends from the bank to the outer edges of the aquatic grasses and then makes a “T” so you can stand and fish. The pier is about six inches above the water, and I would guess a heavy rain could send water right over the top of it.
I was standing on the bank, looking at the pier and thinking how impossible it would be to spot an alligator in the thick weeds and how an alligator can lunge up to five feet with no warning and how alligators in south Florida have been seen climbing fences, when a girl yelled, “Take a picture; it’ll last longer!”
The girl thought I was staring at her.
I tried to explain that I was just trying to spot an alligator in the aquatic grasses.
“Aquatic grasses?” she said. “Weeds is what they are, water weeds. You ain’t got to be scared o’ gators? Too cool for gators.”
“I’m not scared of gators,” I told her. “I’m just wondering, that’s all.”
“Come back in May,” the girl said. “Gators get their spring fever in May. You wonderin’ ’bout gators, come back in May, if you ain’t scared.” She turned her back to me and started tossing bread into the water.
She turned her back on me.
I strolled out on to the pier and said, “Of course I’m not scared of alligators. Besides, everybody knows alligators don’t become active and start feeding until the temperature gets above twenty-seven degrees Celsius for a few days.”
“Twenty-seven degrees Celsius? What-n-the-hell are you talkin’ about?” she exclaimed.
Hell? She said “hell.” If I said “hell” I would get an hour long lecture from each parent explaining how cursing is the way of the “uneducated mind.” A mind “lacking the vocabulary for more appropriate descriptive terms.” That would be an hour from each parent. Two hours. It would be easier on all of us if they would just wash my mouth out with soap.
“Hell,” I said, “twenty-seven degrees Celsius is eighty-something degrees Fahrenheit. Everybody knows that.”
“Everybody?” she said. Long, thick, shaggy, black hair seemed to swirl in slow-motion as she spun around to confront me. She said again, “Everybody?”
It was not a question I wanted to answer at that point. What I wanted to do was jump into the water weeds and disappear.
The girl was about my height, maybe an inch or two taller. She was wearing cut-off jeans that came down almost to her knees and a red and white Christmassy-looking sweater that seemed out of place in the spring green of the Conecuh. She wore black Converse Chuck Taylor All Stars and blue socks. She looked me right in the eye and said, “My name’s Leah. I’m fifteen years old. And you are?”
I told her my name and didn’t mention my age. Well, if I couldn’t impress her with my age, I would impress her with my vast knowledge. I spent the next ten minutes or so telling this girl everything she needed to know about alligators.
She was polite enough as she listened. When I was through she said, “You ain’t never seen a gator out in the wild, have you?”
“My mom’s a herpetologist,” I said.
“You ain’t never seen a gator out in the wild,” she said again. “Come back in May. That’s when gators get their spring fever. If you ain’t scared.”
“Me? Scared?” I said. Then I made that joke about coming back with my little sister as gator bait.
Leah said, “I can’t believe you’d say something like that. That’s mean.”
“You don’t know my little sister,” I said. “She’d make excellent gator bait.”
“I bet I can out run you,” Leah said. “Maybe I just leave you here for gator bait.”
And she proved it. She took off, and I’ve never seen anyone run that fast. I ran after her for about twenty yards before I realized I was embarrassing myself. I called after her, “I was kidding.” I don’t think she heard me. I think she outran the sound.
8
There are sounds in the Conecuh National Forest night that will make the hair on the back of your neck stand up. I didn’t hear any of those sounds that first night. All I heard were air conditioners. Yep. Out in the middle of Nowhere, Alabama about as far from civilization as you can get in the southeastern United States and I’m not hearing bobcats. I’m not hearing frogs. I’m not hearing night owls. I’m hearing air conditioners. About three-fourths of the Open Pond camp sites have water and electrical hook-ups for RVs, and about three-fourths of those were full. That means about twenty-five motor homes, urban sprawl on wheels, filled the air with the hum of air conditioners. Mom promised we would be spending the following nights at different frog ponds away from the main campground. That first night we would have to try and get to sleep with the whirr of climate controlled camping.
To make matters worse, there was that girl. Leah. She turned her back on me. She said things like “ain’t” and “hell.” Did she know Celsius from Fahrenheit? I don’t think so. How could she run so fast? Maybe because there was no brain in that head to slow her down. “Come back in May if you ain’t scared,” she said. Hell, I ain’t scared. And why did she have to be a year older than me? She couldn’t be thirteen; she had to be fifteen. One lousy year. Never seen eyes like hers. Dark, dark, dark eyes. Some kind of Alabama voodoo eyes. I didn’t know they had voodoo in Alabama. Leah? What kind of name is that?
I must have dozed off around midnight. It was not a restful sleep. I had too much to dream. In outer space. Alone. Quiet it was except for the drone of the spacecraft’s life support systems. Weightless, I drifted up to a porthole and looked down upon this strange new world. It was not the blue planet. Not mother earth. Green. Everything was green. The green planet. In my dream I wanted to go there. To the green world. There was something for me in the green world; I just didn’t know how to get there. Then I heard the voices.
“Shut up,” said the first voice.
“You shut up,” said the second voice.
“Both of you shut up,” said the third voice. The third voice sounded like it was in charge.
The voices were coming toward me. “How you know this is it?” asked one of the