Gator Country, page 16
Yet, on the other side of every winter, spring arrives to bring the thaw, to awaken life within the swamp, to instill it with the vigorous and undeniable impulse toward creation. With spring would come mating season. The rumbling bellow of bull gators would hum through the cypresses and reeds. When one bull met another, they would fight, open-jawed, tooth and claw, the dragons of Bartram’s journals.
“Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder,” Bartram wrote. Although the naturalist’s writings are a bit much sometimes, and they’re often not factual in the literal sense, like the yarns from the backwoods of Florida, these hyperbolic descriptions capture alligators in their essence, as the majestic, ancient swamp rulers they really are. Such alligator duels and the couplings that come after bring forth a new generation to rule the swamp with no less majesty than their progenitors, even as the cold facts of modernity have diminished their magnificence under many an unimaginative gaze.
And so, in place of winter’s quietude, summer would follow spring, and with the rising temperatures, the inevitability of new life. The drama and danger of nesting season would seize the swamp once again. With nesting season, Jeff knew, just as inevitable as all that new life, crime would arise again and slink through the shadows of the swamp’s hot night.
10
THE BALLAD OF PEG BROWN
If the numbers from the Peg Brown tales were true, then Peg killed upward of ten thousand gators over the span of his career as a poacher. Only counting the time after he returned from World War II up until the Endangered Species Act of 1973, when he allegedly stopped hunting alligators entirely, that’s twenty-eight years, or about one gator a day. To put those numbers into perspective, now that alligators are numerous, homeowners can call an FWC hotline to report them—think the “nuisance” gators who take up residence in Nana’s Boca Raton pool.
Between 1997 and 2021, Florida trappers caught more than 320,000 nuisance alligators, some of which they released, while others were sold. More than half of those alligators, however, were “harvested,” the agency’s deceptively bland euphemism for “euthanized.” In just those twenty-four years, the state of Florida killed about eighteen times more alligators than Peg ever did by his own estimations, yet those losses have shown little impact on alligator populations overall. In other words, even the most notorious and prolific poacher ever to wreak havoc on the glades would have had very little impact on his own. Peg and his kind, however, made for very convenient scapegoats for the sudden and dramatic decline of the American alligator in the 1950s and 1960s when South Florida’s newcomers demanded action, hounding the park service for one escalation after another. The rangers obliged. They bought more planes and stayed out all night to watch for poachers. By the thousands of pages I’ve read of their barely legible logs, these efforts were successful. They caught dozens of poachers. But Peg, it seemed, always remained just out of their reach. Then they beat him, too. Tired of facing down so much firepower every night, Peg gave up their cat-and-mouse games for good. Or did he?
I went over these numbers in my head as I waited for Jonnie, remembering what Rothchild wrote in Tropic: “There is probably no such thing as a truly retired poacher.”
* * *
When Jonnie Brown pulled up—in a white Ford F-150, just like Jeff’s—to where I stood in the breezeway of the Outdoor Resorts of Chokoloskee, I recognized him immediately. I’d never seen a picture of him; it was just that his person very much matched the deep drawl I’d heard on the phone. He was an imposing man with ruddy cheeks from work in the sun and short graying hair. I considered for a moment that, had I been someone else, his stature and blue-collar roughness might have put me on the defensive. Instead, it was those same qualities that made me warm to him even more than I had on the phone. He would have fit right in at a Renner family reunion. I knew that he would take great care on the adventure that he had promised.
We shook hands, and I smiled. “You must be Jonnie Brown.”
“That’s right,” he said. “And you must be Rebecca.”
“That’s me. It’s nice to finally meet you, Jonnie.”
I found myself slipping into my river country drawl, a leisurely, broad accent that shies away from hard consonants, an accent not unlike the one spoken in the Everglades. For most of my life, my parents tried to correct that speech away. They would make me repeat after them, But-ton. Cot-ton. By high school, I could speak with the chipper blandness of a newscaster. By the end of college, I wished I could get it back. I wished I could sound like my great-grandmother, who had lived her entire life on the edge of the swamp. Yet that flavor only crawled back into my words when I least expected. It snuck up on me when I stopped trying.
Often when I’d slip back into it while talking with gladesmen, I could see their shoulders relax, their tension uncoiling, as if I had transformed from predaceous outsider to someone who might understand if they spoke their hearts to me.
I didn’t see Jonnie having lots of heartache to spill, but I try not to assume. Of course, being a pragmatic man, he launched into planning the day almost immediately. He asked me what I wanted to do, and I said, “You’re the boss. It’s up to you. Tell me and show me whatever you think I need to see. I have questions, of course, but I don’t know what I don’t know, you know?”
He laughed. “Right.”
What I really wanted were primary sources, documents and the like. My holy grail would be a diary or a journal, and I told him as much.
As we got into his truck, he said, “Don’t have anything like that. Don’t have much, in all honesty. We lost a lot of pictures. Somebody threw them out.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Even his war memorabilia,” Jonnie said as he pulled in a circle out of the shell-gravel parking lot. “My dad was a war hero. Did you know that? Had a gold star for valor.” Jonnie indicated a photograph print on the console between us. It was Peg in his military regalia, spangled with his gold stars. “He was a rifleman in the First Infantry,” Jonnie continued. “That much I know. He hardly ever talked about it. In fact, I only heard him mention it once.”
They were drinking together at the Oyster Bar, the now-defunct dive bar that the outlaws frequented, and Peg had gotten drunk enough to start reliving long-buried memories: It was December 16, 1944. The pines reached so high in the forest of the Ardennes in Belgium that the whole landscape would have fallen under a false twilight if the thick crust of snow hadn’t blanched it. Peg had never seen snow before the war. He was made in the swamp and built for that climate. The cold might have defeated a weaker Floridian, but Peg was tough. He never complained.
The snow deepened as the days went on. The troops were tired. Earlier that month, they had made a drive through the Hürtgen Forest and had withdrawn to rest before pushing forward against an unexpected German offensive.
As the infantrymen fought, Peg and the other riflemen guarded the line. He had learned to shoot in the Everglades, in cypress domes where the junglelike tangle obstructed the view of even the sharpest-eyed hunters. Despite the bitter cold of that foreign blizzard, the air itself seemed clear. Peg let off shot after shot, one hit after another. It was the same as back home, except here there was a man at the other end of your bullet. That wasn’t the same as hitting a gator or even a panther. It was best not to think about it. He had to keep firing.
He fired so much that even in that record cold his gun overheated. When the gun got too hot to keep firing, too hot to touch, his assistant rifleman would fill his helmet with snow and dump it on the gunstock. The snow would melt almost instantly, then freeze, forming a layer of frost so thick and stubborn that Peg couldn’t fire the gun again until they’d beaten away the ice. They repeated that unending farce, hardly taking breaks to eat and sleep for weeks on end. They pushed the Nazi offensive back, forcing the enemy troops from the wider roads onto barely passable trails. American tanks trundled over waves of rocks and snow.
This long counteroffensive beneath the Ardennes’s venerable spruces, a fight that would become immortalized as the Battle of the Bulge, was not a victory of strength over weakness. It was a battle of grit. Plagued by the forbidding elements in a battle that seemed to never end, only soldiers too stubborn to consider quitting held out. On the American line, no matter how weary they became, stubbornness was never in short supply, especially in the boys from Florida, who knew something about hard times. They knew that storms are temporary and that their hardship was nothing compared with whom they were fighting for.
By January 1945, the 1st Infantry had won out. They returned to Germany and crossed the Rhine. The snows of winter were only a memory by the time they reached Flossenbürg concentration camp, where they broke through its fortifications and released thousands of prisoners, many of whom were too starved to walk.
Peg never talked to Jonnie, or anyone as far as Jonnie knew, about the concentration camps or what he saw there. He had hardly talked about the war at all. The sheer amount of liquor it had taken to pry this one story from the recesses of his mind and the tenor of his voice as he recounted it, how he pantomimed the futile gesture of beating the ice from his rifle over and over again, told of a persistent memory more indelible than a photograph. He would never admit that it haunted him, but it was hard to imagine it hadn’t. Perhaps it returned to him during his nights in the swamp, the mosquito-thick air suddenly falling chill as the cypresses morphed into spruces and the water and the weeds and the mangroves became snow in the Ardennes, and a hail of gunfire he tried to forget sang out over his head. Or was that the beat of a helicopter blade? The rangers’ spotlights through the trees ratcheted Peg’s pulse. It’s easy to forget where you are, when you are, when the past is so alive within you.
As Jonnie drove toward Everglades City, eager to find us a place for lunch, the tableau of the icy gun repeated in my head. It was such a striking image, visceral just like the stories of Peg’s poaching, and yet it showed a completely different person from the one I had assumed Peg to be. In the Ardennes, Peg had not been a valiant folk hero, a John Henry–like figure of impossible feats in the swamp. He was just a mortal man faced with the futility of war. With guts and grit, he kept on going, because that’s what you did, but not without a significant loss. Something inside of him had broken. He carried that quietly all his life. And it’s in the quiet night of the swamp that he was alone with the darkest thoughts he left unspoken.
That complicated inner world of Peg’s changed the stories for me. His cat-and-mouse games with the rangers had subtext. After all of that fighting, Peg had come home to find his world changed. Loggers had stripped the land. The Army Corps of Engineers had diverted the water, causing what foliage remained to shift year by year, almost imperceptibly, until people like Peg no longer recognized the Everglades anymore. Alligators, the species that had been his livelihood, took a downturn. Adding insult to injury, rich developers and newcomers blamed Peg and other hunters for that loss even though their impact was small compared to all that new construction. Tricking the rangers made Peg feel less powerless. Perhaps that’s when he became the folk hero in his own eyes. Because no matter what else they took, developers couldn’t take away the poachers’ stories. The wily trickster and his humorous resistance remind the downtrodden the world over that when you’re smart you still have power. Some things never change.
* * *
Jonnie took us to a little fish house where we ate lunch and then remained in the oversized, shiny booth for our interview. Jonnie was a fisherman, a legal one. In those days, he mainly caught Florida stone crabs. They’re so ungodly expensive—with consumer prices for claws ranging from $35 to $95 per pound in 2023—it’s almost a crime anyway.
Jonnie reiterated a lot of the stories I’d already heard, adding that Peg had crafted many of them himself, their origin being at the Oyster Bar where many a poacher had spun his yarn.
“The Rod & Gun was for tourists,” Jonnie said.
He told me about Peg killing a gator outside the rangers’ station, the same one I’d read about in the ranger’s report. This particular gator passed his days floating in the estuary in the shade of the mangroves by the station. After seeing the gator every day, the rangers came to think of him as a pet. They even named him and erected a sign by his wallow with that name and a warning not to mess with him. One night, Peg came by, killed the gator, and changed the sign to say the gator was gone, because that dastardly Peg Brown had sent him to heaven. I found that story both grimly funny and sad. I’ve become attached to many a gator that has shared a habitat with me. I’d be pretty sore if somebody went and killed one of “my” gators. Jonnie told me about Peg getting lost one time and then ending up drinking coffee with the rangers at their station. When his brother showed up to fetch him, the rangers were asking Peg if he knew any poachers, “like that Peg Brown fellow,” whom they just couldn’t manage to catch.
“Never heard of him,” the Browns said before quickly slipping away.
The rangers had initially met Clarence—Peg under his Christian name—because they’d recruited locals to teach them how to navigate the glades. The rangers had come to work at Everglades National Park from all over the country, from the Rocky Mountains to the Ozarks, places they thought made them rugged. They assumed they could surmount any environment—and then they faced the Everglades. Poachers quipped that the rangers were easy to outsmart because they were afraid of the mosquitoes. On hot nights, they’d hunker in their station, unwilling to venture forth into that inhospitable swamp that was both their charge and their foe. The poachers, however, bore the swamp no such ill will. It was their home, their friend, the primary accomplice to their trickery. The locals certainly taught the rangers the ropes, but they left out important details, fudged here and there to stop rangers from stumbling on the hideouts where they poached. It was in their best interest to make the swamp seem unnavigable. This is not the place for the faint of heart. One of Peg’s neighbors nailed a sign to a tree that said it all: WHOA YANKEE TURN AROUND.
I had stumbled upon that picture in an archive, and it made me laugh. I asked Jonnie about it, and he said he knew where it was.
“We can go find it later,” he said.
I was happy to hear some confirmation of all these tales from Jonnie, but at the same time, I worried that some of them were just folklore. I wanted more than confirmation. I wanted evidence. I wanted firsthand accounts. It was starting to seem like I was out of luck, though, because Peg had gone out so much on his own, and his brother Totch’s versions of the tales that made Totch himself the star were the ones recorded in print. If Totch was the famous one, did that make him right by default? I didn’t like that. It seemed antithetical to the stories themselves, erasing their element of tenacity. As captivating a storyteller as he was, Totch was no underdog.
So I asked Jonnie, “Do you happen to know anybody who went hunting with Peg who’s still alive?”
Jonnie gave me a slow smile. “Well, there’s me,” he said.
“Really?” I said, alert, my pen poised and ready. “Can you tell me about any of that?”
“Of course,” he said. “What do you want to hear?”
* * *
In the year 1960, Jonnie turned eleven. By then, great change had already befallen Chokoloskee. In the very early years of Jonnie’s life, neither road nor electricity connected the island to the mainland. Jonnie attended a one-room schoolhouse on the island. Some other kids rode in on a boat that acted as their school bus.
The Browns lived on a “house-lighter,” their word for what outsiders might call a houseboat. Rather than floating on the water, it stood on stilts overlooking the tide. It was white with blue trim. Jonnie’s father had built it himself when he came back from the war.
They had no electricity. Neither did any of their neighbors. Jonnie did his homework by the light of kerosene lamps. Not that he always did it. Jonnie was what he would later call a “real mean” kid. He would shoot cans from their garbage pile with his BB gun and teach innocent neighbor kids how to cuss. He had plenty to be ornery about, but he didn’t fully realize it at the time.
In 1956, the state built a bridge that connected Everglades City on the mainland with Chokoloskee. With the bridge came all sorts of outsiders. According to the adults in Jonnie’s life, the two worst types of outsiders were the tourists and the environmentalists. Even a journalist had started poking around. Peter Matthiessen was working on a book about endangered species, he said. Yet he kept asking all kinds of questions to anybody who gave him the time of day. He was in love with the mystique of the Everglades, like most of the outsiders were, but he also seemed transfixed by a murder that had happened at the trading post about half a century before. The Brown clan and the Daniels clan, by then united by marriage, had both been involved. Unlike with their other alleged undertakings, they were more than happy to tell the story of how in 1910 they killed Edgar Watson, a violent sugarcane planter who treated his workers like slaves.
“The bastard deserved it,” Jonnie said. “Nobody knows who shot him, because near every man in town was there with his gun, and they all shot at once.”
Chokoloskee was proud of the Wild West–style justice they had meted out. Uncle Totch had taken it upon himself to become the island’s unofficial historian and storyteller (Kent’s spiritual predecessor), and so he befriended Matthiessen and showed him around, hoping to catch a little bit of fame along the way.
