- April 25, 2024
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I walk out my front door in Matanzas Woods on a steamy Monday morning to leave for work when I see an evil eye glaring at me from the water in my swale.
An alligator.
At this point, I know I’m a goner, but maybe I can fight it off long enough for my family to escape. I pull out my phone to take a picture in case it’s needed to help with my autopsy. As I point the camera at the water, though, the gator disappears. It’s now hiding in the flooded culvert pipe under the driveway.
The way I see it, I have two options. I could dangle my hand into the water and entice the prehistoric beast out for a duel. Or I could poke around with a shovel in the opposite end of the culvert to push him onto a level playing field.
Not knowing where my shovel is, I’m rolling up my sleeve to plunge it into the rust-colored water, when I have another idea: I can call Animal Control.
Well, it turns out Animal Control doesn’t do gators. I call a number for Fish and Wildlife, and it turns out to be a St. Johns County number, instead. I explain my situation to a man on the phone and ask if he knows the Fish and Wildlife number. You know, the one for emergencies. When people’s lives are at stake.
“I don’t have the number,” he says. “You could Google it.”
Inside, my wife and children are peacefully eating breakfast, unaware that they will soon be rich after collecting on my life insurance.
When I finally get Fish and Wildlife on the phone, a woman tells me the rains must have displaced the gator, and to call back if it’s not gone soon.
“Soon, as in, five minutes?” I ask.
“Like, a day,” she says.
In a day, this is going to be a ghost town! The mayhem! The blood! The guts!
Wearing a mask of calm, I enter my fortress for my final farewell. Maybe I can rustle up a Hostess Cup Cake for my final meal. I’m on a diet, but at times like these, I figure I can cheat.
I gather the courage to tell my wife.
“Displaced?!” she says, her face as white as the underbelly of the dead, bloated gator in my waking nightmares. “Why do we live in Florida again?”
My 9-year-old son, Jackson, hears our conversation and says, “Stay out of the swale. Unless you want a broken leg, no leg at all — or death.”
I’ve seen something like this in Hitchcock’s “The Birds,” so I’m looking for some wood and a hammer to try to barricade my loved ones in the home, but their curiosity overwhelms them, and they swarm past me into the driveway.
Jackson tells his younger brother, Grant, “It says in a poem that alligators eat second-graders. And you’re a second-grader.”
My 3-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, says, “Daddy, I don’t want the alligator to climb up your pants and eat you.”
Finally, someone who understands the gravity of the situation.
The gator doesn’t want to come out of the culvert, and I’m now late for work. I debate whether I quit my job and just camp out here with a shotgun, but I decide that I wouldn’t want to do that to the community. Palm Coast wouldn’t be Palm Coast without The Observer.
As I leave, Elizabeth stands at the door in her pink nightgown, her brown curls in a kind of halo around her adorable face. “Bye, Dad,” she says, ominously.
At lunchtime, I race home and once again see the sultan of my swale, the tyrant of the trough. This time, I snap a photo. Finally, evidence!
I show it to my family, and I am crestfallen at their lack of concern. Elizabeth says she’s not scared. “That alligator is teeny,” she says, turning back to her princess finger puppets.
As I zoom in on the photo, and then zoom in a little bit more, I can barely make out the snout of an alligator. It’s possible its head is more like five or six inches long, rather than eight or nine as I had originally estimated.
“I like it,” Grant says. “It looks cool.”
Suddenly it has a name: Crunch Devil.
The good news is, I have survived this struggle with nature. And unlike Capt. Ahab, I have not literally lost a leg, only a figurative leg of pride.
The next day passes uneventfully until the rains come again and, apparently, the gator has been displaced yet again. Days later, when I return home from work, I still take a peek in the swale and wonder where he or she has gone. May he or she be displaced into your swale for a day or two, so that you, too, can remember the fleeting nature of life and love and, most of all, terror.
