Gator Country, page 12
Each of the men took a turn telling me a related story until they all seemed to coalesce into a single yarn spun with Craig Daniels, Kent’s younger relative, at the lead. Craig is the type of character you can’t get away with in fiction. He is just too much to be true, and yet there he was, sitting right there before me: a local pastor who was missing a finger, who had been shot and gone to prison, who preached with the same panache he used in telling poaching stories. He said a gator took his finger. He was Peg Brown’s grandson. It was Sunday morning, and he was about to leave to lead his congregation, but first he had to regale me with a little violent family history.
When the national park came in, it pushed everyone there off their land, the Brown and Daniels families included. Even if they hadn’t lived within that tract, they had all fished or hunted there, and with the nearest dose of civilization apart from the hamlet of Everglades City about forty miles away in Naples, most made their livelihood off the land. The Browns made most of their money fishing and hunting, so they kept on doing just that with the additional obstacle of running from the law while they were at it. They were a hardy and raucous bunch, stubborn the same way that was in my blood. (My own apocryphal family story says that my great-great-uncle disappeared into the swamp in those same days and went south, perhaps to Everglades City. Wherever he went, no one in the family heard from him again, so there’s no telling where he turned up, if he turned up at all.)
“Tell her the one with the hammer,” Kent said, gesturing at Craig.
“Oh, that one,” Craig said. “Are you sure she can handle it?”
I see what you’re doing, I thought. They were baiting the story, tag-team style. I knew how this went. I was supposed to say, “I can handle anything.” And so I did.
“Are you sure?” Craig said. “This one’s not for the faint of heart.”
“Good thing there’s nobody like that here,” I said.
Craig grinned. He seemed tickled that I was in on the show. “All right. Once, maybe thirty years ago, my uncle—his name was Floyd Brown—was out hunting. Killing gators. Where he was, there were so many that they’d been watching him as he did it. Hundreds of eyes watching him from the water. Every time he’d kill one, another would jump out. Bang! He’d have to shoot it. They were nearly on top of him. There were so many he was running out of ammunition.”
“How many were there?” I asked, knowing that was my next line, too.
“Oh, hundreds,” Craig said.
“At least,” Kent said. “Over a thousand.”
“He had to keep going, or he was going to get ripped to pieces,” Craig said. “Jump, bang, jump, bang!—and then he ran out of bullets.”
Had I been anyone else, I would have thought they were lying to me just to yank my chain. But I knew better. In the storytelling tradition that I come from, yarn spinners employ hyperbole to create evocative and memorable images, and to get the visceral feeling of the story across.
“And then he used a hammer?” I asked.
“Yep, it was the only thing he had,” Craig said. “If he didn’t think of something, they were gonna eat him alive. So he looks around his pitpan and sees the ball-peen hammer, and knows that’s what’s gonna save his life.”
“How’s that work?” I asked. “How do you kill a gator with a ball-peen hammer?”
Craig swung his hand, wielding an invisible hammer at Kent’s head. “Whack! You put its lights out.”
“But that made ’em madder, didn’t it?” Kent asked.
“Absolutely,” Craig said. “They were mad as hell. They started coming faster. But Floyd was a machine. He just kept going. Jump, whack, jump, whack! Thousands of them.”
How many gators did Floyd really kill? The number didn’t matter, but Floyd’s resourcefulness did, and the hyperbole amplified that. He was overwhelmed. But he made do with what he had. There was a stubbornness in this family. And that wasn’t the end of it.
In those days, the men said, taking turns filling in the story, just seeing a man committing a crime wasn’t enough to arrest him. Rangers had to physically catch poachers to bring them in. When the rangers spotted him, Floyd had to leave the thousands of alligators he’d just killed with only a ball-peen hammer behind. That happened with many a story, the law always on the tail of the heroes, who made it just in the nick of time. The heroes were nefarious, but they were still good folks, deep down. They had their reasons. They also had their standards. In this family, poaching was fine, but you didn’t steal from your neighbor.
All these stories orbited around kernels of truth. The most ridiculous parts of them were liable to be true. Obvious hyperbole aside, spinning yarns takes sanding down the edges of a story to make it easier to swallow, not adding outlandish things that don’t belong. Though sometimes you meet someone who abides by a different tradition of backwoods storytelling: When at all possible do as Peg did with his high jinks, and bamboozle the outsider. I knew how to spot it when it came along, of course. I’d done it before, myself.
After their stories petered out, Kent assumed his role as my tour guide. He insisted that we take my Honda Civic and that I drive, something I warned would not make for a comfortable ride, not to mention that I wouldn’t be able to take notes, but my complaints went unanswered. He should have known better when we reached my car, and he saw that an empty cylinder remained where the driver’s-side lock had once been. But there was no changing his mind. Too stubborn, I guessed. I reassured myself that it would be okay. I would figure it out. I always did. So we boarded my jalopy and set off in search of his tales of the Everglades and other yarn spinners who would pick up the story along the way.
Kent gave me verbal directions and nagged me to follow the speed limit. We cruised back through the mangroves to the mainland, where we pulled into the Rod & Gun Club, a hotel with a bar and restaurant that looked like the kind of place Hemingway would have frequented. A twelve-foot gator skin stretched across the wall over the billiard table. In the gleaming cherrywood of a small back barroom, Kent gestured to the bar and said this was where the storytelling magic happened. All the poachers would come here, drink, and exchange tales of pulling one over on the law. Though Kent was a yarn spinner and perhaps a long-retired smuggler, he had never been a poacher himself. He didn’t seem like the type who would have liked killing things, even out of necessity. Later one of the men who had been a poacher back in the day refuted Kent’s claim that they frequented the Rod & Gun. That place was for Yankees and tourists, he said. Celebrities went there. The poachers went for something with rougher edges and lower prices. They frequented a pub called the Oyster Bar, which had long since gone belly-up but lived on in the stories of the stories that were spun there.
As Kent shot the breeze with a woman in the kitchen, I listened, just taking everything in. They talked about local businesses on hard times. The woman, Patty, mistook me for the daughter of a local, and I thought about that long-lost great-uncle of mine, and I wondered if when he’d allegedly disappeared into the swamp he’d wound up down in Everglades City. In these parts, it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility.
With his social call over, Kent led me back to my car and directed me to drive farther inland. I obeyed, interviewing him along the way with my digital recorder rolling in the cupholder so I could keep my hands on the wheel.
Some interviews, you have to ask a lot of questions. But Kent seemed to need no prompting. He directed me to drive toward the swamp, noting landmarks along the way so I could come back later. As we ventured deeper into Big Cypress Swamp, passing the ranger station into the national preserve, flat marshes of sawgrass, wire grass, bulrushes, and canebrake extended past the road in seemingly endless plains. Far off, a line of slash pines bristled from the saw palm scrub. We passed the “official” skunk ape research headquarters, an exhibit dedicated to Florida’s odoriferous answer to Bigfoot. Islands of cabbage palm or larger cypress domes sprang up in the middle of these wetlands where the water belowground gathered in deeper pools in the limestone. Gradually, this more majestic growth overtook us, and we entered the swamp proper. Big Cypress National Preserve is larger than the state of Rhode Island. The entirety of New York City could fit inside it three times over, and there would still be room.
Hardwood hammocks like rain forests cast the rich understory into a tranquil gloom. An exuberance of bromeliads issued from the boughs of trees like fireworks. I would later venture deeper there on my own and sit beside a pool that had collected in the shadows where a dozen or so alligators swam, undulating away out of sight, or drifted, sleeping. Some watched me as if expecting food. Overcome by the peace of the place, I sat and listened as the purple cast of gloaming shifted into the evening dark, and the hot buzz of katydids gave way to the thousand voices of frogs and toads in chorus. It met the shimmer of the crickets’ song and the mysterious plink of drops into water. I wanted to be like Jeff, to be able to recognize every voice in the night music. To know each name was to know the swamp itself. I wasn’t there yet. But I recorded the enchanting songs so I could figure it out when I once again returned to the electric world of Wi-Fi. There was something extraordinary in the wonder I felt in hearing those enigmatic calls. I wanted to know everything, but I couldn’t let answers wash away my sense of wonder.
That trek would all happen much later. Right then, me and my Honda Civic were about to be in trouble.
“Turn here,” Kent said, pointing to a dirt road, one that had no sign that I could see.
“Are you sure?” I asked.
“Would I lead you wrong?” Kent said.
I don’t know, would you? I thought. “Where are we going?” I asked as I turned.
“Through the swamp,” he said. “I want to show you something.”
Something about tomatoes. He was talking so fast I could barely register one idea before he jumped to the next. The canal along that trail existed because of the tomato farmers, he said. I was willing to believe him, but I saw no tomato farms there, just pine and palms in scrubland as far as the eye could see—except for the road, if you could call it that. A trail of calcified shells ground into bone-white sand stretched on into the distance until it dissolved at the horizon in a billowing white sandstorm. There was no way to tell where we were going or how far away from there we would reach the end. If there was an end.
The turbulent ground under my tires jarred the car so violently that it threatened to knock something loose. I can drive in just about any conditions, but at a certain point I, too, succumb to the limits of logic and physics. By then, we were several miles outside of cell contact from anyone who might come to the rescue. At every clank, I imagined something important falling from the undercarriage, like a rear axle or my entire engine block, and I knew that if we broke down there, I would be walking back to the ranger station by myself in that vengeful summer heat, regretting every decision I’d ever made that led me up to that moment. Tropical heat has that effect on people.
Unperturbed, Kent kept talking. I never had to ask a question. He never left any dead air. He talked about the effects of farming and the parks on the people. There was oil drilling, too. Every manner of industry was allowed in the glades, as long as you had enough money to do it. Anything was legal if you knew which palms to grease.
But the changes to Florida really started with the Spanish conquest, he said.
I nodded, interested. That was just the kind of thing I wanted to hear about, conquest from the Seminole perspective. I didn’t dare look at him, afraid he’d stop talking to scold me about keeping my eyes on the road.
The Spanish even changed the environment, he said. I knew they’d logged to build ships, as did other settlers all along the coasts for centuries. Magnificent bald cypress groves had fallen to become masts and planks, dock pilings, shingles, caskets.
“Here’s something you might not know,” Kent said. “Manatees are an invasive species! The Spanish brought them along for food, used them like livestock. Tastes like pork.”
Huh?
I had to interrupt him there. “I’m sorry, what? Manatees?” The Spanish had released a variety of invasive species upon their so-called New World, among them the mustang horses of the West and the wild boars whose populations have boomed across the southeastern United States and California, plus regions of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil. (Tenacious and destructive boogers. Well traveled, too.) But manatees? That’s not right, I thought.
“Yeah, manatee steak,” Kent said. “Great on the grill.” Not that he would shoot one, he said, because the animals were protected, but Kent thought they shouldn’t be, and it was a conspiracy that they were.
“But—but manatees are from here,” I said. When I’m interviewing, I try not to interrupt. I’d rather be a fly on the wall and listen, getting the unadulterated tale from my subject, whatever that tale may be. That meant learning to let people be wrong. But I have my limits.
“Manatees are from the West Indies,” Kent said pointedly. “Their full name is the West Indian manatee. They’re from India.”
The West Indies is the Caribbean, I thought. I shot him a confused and beseeching look before quickly returning my gaze to the dust-clouded road. Kent was such a knowledgeable fellow. He’d seemed so smart up until then. He can’t actually believe this, I thought. Is he trying to screw with me?
I had read a few other magazine articles reported from Chokoloskee before I’d ventured down there, and in every last one, there had been major gaffes in fact, real howlers clearly gleaned from local sources that any journalist familiar with South Florida would know to be untrue. Although they may not have hoodwinked visitors anymore, as tourism had become Chokoloskee’s lifeline and main industry, it seemed that bamboozling writers had remained a time-honored tradition here. The only story I read that passed was from Peter Matthiessen, the author of the award-winning novel Shadow Country. Ironically, I would end up working in Matthiessen’s shadow, as several of the old-timers whom I interviewed said that I was the second journalist they’d ever talked to, the first being Matthiessen himself nearly half a century ago.
Kent went on, deriding manatees, saying people should be able to hunt them. Hunters would come in droves if they had any idea how much mermaid ivory was worth. According to Kent, mermaid ivory was the name for the ivory derived from manatee bones, which he said was worth hundreds of dollars per piece. A single manatee could bring in thousands.
Mermaid ivory? I thought, incredulous and a bit offended. Do I look like I just fell off the turnip truck?
“Yes, there’s so much people from outside don’t know,” Kent said. “Such as, mangroves are invasive, too.”
What? I went into this interview knowing Kent had a propensity for embellishment, but at that point I knew I’d have to sit down and comb through his assertions one by one to disentangle the facts from the shenanigans. Man, you are giving me more work than you realize.
“The whole Everglades has changed,” he said. “People who aren’t from here don’t realize. The whole place is unrecognizable. Nothing looks like it did fifty years ago. If you showed me a picture of all this back then, I wouldn’t know the place.” The big trees had disappeared. The mangroves had migrated. I’d never heard anything about that, but just because I hadn’t heard of it before didn’t mean it wasn’t true. I reminded myself to withhold judgment.
A thick cloud of sand descended upon us, completely whiting out my windshield. Wary of continuing forward, I slowed to a crawl and put my wipers on. Their rubber strips proceeded to unravel from the blades, and they screeched back and forth across the glass, smearing the sand, tatters flapping in the wind.
Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought.
I sighed and looked at Kent. “It’ll be okay,” I said, my tone falsely sunny.
“You need new windshield wipers,” he said.
No, really? I thought. I rolled down my window and stuck my head out so I could see, and we set off again. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him staring at me, judgmental and vaguely horrified.
I had gone down there to get to know the people by seeing past the Florida Man clichés. Now here I was acting like a Florida Woman.
“Turn those things off,” Kent said. “You’re gonna damage your glass.”
He was right. I turned off the wipers, parked the car, and got out to clean the windshield with a rag as best I could. When I got back in, he told me to drive to Naples to get new wipers and to do so before it rained or I was in real trouble. He said he wouldn’t take me anywhere else until I did that, which, okay, I admit was reasonable.
Several hours later, we made it out of the glades more or less intact, I treated Kent to dinner, and then, after dark, retired to my dockside motel room, exhausted, where I copied down notes from the day and started fact-checking. Manatees, of course, are endemic to Florida and the Caribbean. As are mangroves, but I had more questions there: Could mangroves have migrated into that portion of the glades? It didn’t seem impossible. Kudzu had spread across the Southeast within a generation. But if mangroves were endemic, what could cause such a mass migration? To my surprise, the most outlandish of Kent’s claims was true. Mermaid ivory is real.
Although it bears a mythical name, mermaid ivory comes from the bones of real animals in the order Sirenia, a name derived from the Greek Σειρῆνες, the Sirens who transfix sailors with their beguiling songs and lure them to their deaths in the deep. By the time they appeared in medieval bestiaries, these Sirens had become mermaids much as we know them today. According to legend, sailors mistook manatees for mermaids. Anyone who has seen these Rubenesque mammals up close knows those delightful tales are questionable at best. Nonetheless, it follows that their bones would take on a florid name like mermaid ivory. Most of the mermaid ivory on the market comes from fossils of the Steller’s sea cow, another member of the Sirenia order that went extinct in 1768. Because the animal is extinct, trade of this mermaid ivory is legal. However, trade of manatee bones is not, as they’re protected internationally under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and in the US under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, the Endangered Species Act, and others. Some of the first-ever conservation laws were ratified to protect manatees.
