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Gator Hunting

Someone said he’d heard I’d gone gator watching during my recent trip to Beaumont, but I only saw one from a boardwalk in a nature reserve. We meant to go out in an air boat, but unfortunately, the 15-inch rain commenced the next day. However, almost as good a sight was the huge barge dry docked alongside the highway out of Cameron, Louisiana. It was just beached beside the road, having floated there on the 15-20 foot tidal wave that swept the area after Rita struck. I guess no one’s had time to come and get it.

Last year was better for gators—I saw the biggest one I’ve ever seen lounging on the far side of a bar ditch down around Johnson’s Bayou, Louisiana. Like dopes, we got out of the car and took wonderful pictures, and it never moved a muscle except to hiss once in a while. I later read that when they gape their mouths open, they are really ingesting some kind of solar energy, instead of warning intruders to keep their distance.

After the big rain, I went with Dianna, my sister-in-law, to a craft guild in Hamshire to work on my “peeking cats” quilt (I won’t live long enough to finish the hand quilting, but she thinks I’ll have it finished in time to enter a quilt show next fall!) We drove through Fanette, which was flooded; Taylor’s Bayou was out of its banks and all over the place. It flooded an alligator theme park, and the gators, bred in captivity, just swam out. “Big Al” even got out, and I think he’s about 13-½ ft. long and weighs over 1,000 lbs., but they got him back. We saw a man in shorts, wading in water above his knees, dipping out baby gator escapees.  I thought Di (my sister-in-law) was going to get run over by trucks, as she crept along the side of the road looking for gators; “There’s one,” she’d squeal, but it was only a branch floating in the water.

I don’t know why gators fascinate me except they’re prehistoric creatures who’ve had a long run, in spite of our pollution and destruction of their wetlands. I read that Jefferson and Chambers Counties have an estimated 286,000 gators, and the authorities have said “don’t call them” about gator sightings unless there are small children in the vicinity. The going joke in Beaumont is that you don’t see many poodles or #### szus around there! I read about two couples who operate the lock in a remote area of Taylor’s Bayou. One of the men said he no longer enjoyed visiting “the city” for long at the time. He enjoyed living on the bayou, except that sometimes “the critters” were annoying. He’d been walking on the bank with his faithful little dog trotting along behind him and heard a single splash. He looked around, and the little dog was gone!

Dianna used to live on a bayou, and a big gator lived in it. The neighborhood children played in the area, and the gator had never bothered them. They didn’t pay much attention to each other. Then one day he snatched a child’s pet lab and swam off with it in full view of the children. After that, everyone exercised greater caution.

I remember an incident in Lucille Stifleman’s biology lab in old Paris High School back when gators weren’t protected. We had a pet baby gator that we kept in a dry aquarium. Students would tease it by poking a pencil at it, which irritated Mrs. Stifleman, and one day, after it had grown several inches, it just snapped a pencil in half. Mrs. Stifleman got rid of it the next day before it snapped a student’s finger in half.

Last spring we went to Anahuac, which is a wonderful wildlife refuge with boardwalks built over the marsh. The place is alive with exotic birds and wild flowers. We didn’t see any gators from the walks, but we could hear them rumbling and bellowing; it was mating season. Driving out, we overtook a huge gator floating serenely down the canal by the side of the road. We stopped. All the cars behind us stopped, thinking we’d “seen something.” The gator stopped. Then he slowly began to sink until just his eyes and the end of his snout protruded above the water. I didn’t blame him.

But that’s the fun side of gators. The other side is gators picking off cattle stranded in high water, one by one, and of course, the recent tragedy when one picked off a careless jogger along a canal, of all things. Treat them with respect. They’ve been here a lot longer than we have.

More about Cameron to come.

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