Gator Country, page 17
All this new attention brought newfound trouble. Peg had always made his living fishing and poaching alligators. In those days, the numbers of alligators had shrunk in some parts, while in others, like around Big Fox Lake, they remained plentiful. The outsiders seemed preoccupied with the alligators, even more so than the people whose livelihoods depended on them. They came in seeking to change everything rather than realizing it was the change they had brought that started the problems in the first place. If everyone had just left the Everglades the hell alone, the adults said, the alligators wouldn’t be having so much trouble.
Jonnie frequently went hunting with Peg. They would skin the alligators out in the mangroves then take all the hides down the road to the mainland, where they would meet a fellow named Graham, one of the buyers. He would throw the salted hides into the trunk of his car, really load it up until it barely closed, and then he would count out bills from a roll, $5 per foot for hides five feet and over. That was a lot of money back then and well worth the risk.
Everything got more expensive when increasing crowds of tourists came to the Ten Thousand Islands, so the Browns struggled more than ever to put food on the table. Jonnie had two sisters and six living brothers, and he was the second-oldest boy. He and the six younger kids lived with their parents on the house-lighter. The oldest two lived down the road with their grandparents. It was a good thing that fish were free and plentiful. They ate a lot of ibis, too, usually the brown ones. Even though hunting the white ibis was illegal, so many people on the island did it that even folks outside the Ten Thousand Islands started calling them Chokoloskee Chicken.
Come hurricane season of 1960, the gauges on all their barometers plunged, and even before the radios proclaimed the approach of Hurricane Donna, the residents of Chokoloskee knew a major storm was on its way. The adults in Jonnie’s life—his parents, his grandparents, and their neighbors—feared losing their belongings. They battened down the hatches as best they could, then evacuated across the island to the Blue Heron Hotel, where the owner allowed them to stay for free. The tourists fled in a panic. As the adults watched and waited, the kids squirmed with that particular excitement that precedes the coming of a hurricane. Regular storms were awesome and wonderful, but hurricanes were something else, mighty and dangerous. Just living through one was an adventure.
Their excitement reached a fever pitch as the wind howled outside. Periodically, they would peek out of the blinds. The big fig tree out front had bent nearly double. The wind gauge on a nearby roof climbed as high as 185 miles per hour. The glass of a car outside flexed with the record low pressure then exploded the way a bubble pops.
During the eye, everything went still. Jonnie couldn’t help himself. He ran outside. He had never seen the island so quiet. There were no cars, no people. Not even the birds sang. For a moment, he gazed around in wonder, awed by the stillness wrought by nature’s fury. Peg marched out and dragged his dumb ass back inside. Soon the winds picked up again. Torrents of rain pelted the hotel. All kinds of strange sounds enveloped them: the screech of metal, the crack of splintering wood, a long groan that sounded like the song of a whale.
When the skies had cleared, the Browns ventured out into the daylight. Water had risen up to cover the entire island. Peg waded away to get his pitpan. Jonnie followed him through that foreign landscape. On the shore where their house once stood, they only found debris. Their house-lighter was gone. Luckily, Peg spied his boat, or at least a boat that looked enough like his to pass for it. Who knew in all that mess. He and Jonnie went around picking up serviceable wood scraps and piling them in the pitpan. Thousands of fish littered what was left of the dry land, some too far away to have washed ashore on the tide. There were little minnows, puffer fish inflated from fright, even an immense grouper nearly the size of a cow. They ate the fish that night at the hotel, like a Sunday fish fry that they all had together.
Peg built a new house from reclaimed wood. This one was wired with electricity. That wasn’t the only change that settled over them after the hurricane. Peg poached less and less. He focused on his fishing guide business, even had a friend paint a sign on the side of their house. NATIVE GUIDE, it said and touted his wares, adventures for sale. He decided to capitalize on the tourists instead of fighting them. Even celebrities sought out Peg, like Christopher Plummer and Gypsy Rose Lee, who came to film Wind Across the Everglades, a 1958 film in which Totch Brown played a bit part. They came to Peg not just for guiding services but also for a taste of the exotic life of the glades. As he steered them through the mangroves, sometimes with Jonnie as his assistant, he spun yarns for them, tales that brought the glades to life. Rip Torn came fishing with them, and Peg didn’t know who he was. But Rip had heard of Peg. It was always like that.
* * *
On the way back to Chokoloskee, Jonnie drove us by the rangers’ old houses, two bungalows raised on stilts over their carports. Back in the day, Jonnie would drive by like this to see if the rangers’ cars were in their driveways. Then he’d drive past the station and glance over the docks where the rangers kept their boats. If all the boats and trucks were accounted for, the coast was clear to go out hunting. That day, the docks were full with everything from small motorboats to bigger trawlers.
“Looks like the coast is clear,” Jonnie joked.
Back on the far side of the island, Jonnie drove down increasingly narrow dirt roads. Near the pebble-strewn beach, a stand of Australian pines, an introduced species, cast cool shadows over the lot. The house was a regular house, not on stilts, not a lighter.
Jonnie mused aloud that he didn’t know who lived there anymore. He had moved up the coast decades ago in search of better opportunities as a fisherman, and so he had become disconnected from Chokoloskee. The distance seemed to sadden him, as if he was separated from his past and the person he used to be, and merely visiting did little to bridge that gulf.
He did know the fellow who lived next door, so he drove around and parked next to where a land-bound catamaran waited in the grass. He got out and walked around, and I followed. At the corner of the two fences, there was a clutch of trees. Jonnie gestured at it. “Sign’s gone,” he said. He meant the WHOA YANKEE TURN AROUND sign we’d gone looking for. It was a marker of a bygone day. Now Chokoloskee’s only industry was tourism. WHOA YANKEE COME BACK (AND SPEND YOUR MONEY) would have been more fitting.
Jonnie walked around the house, remembering stories as he studied the changes. He recounted the one time that the rangers ever came close to catching Peg. Peg had been burning prairie grass so he could get his pitpan through to the next waterhole in the slough. Before he knew it, he heard chopper blades overhead. He threw palm fronds over the boat and lay down underneath them. Thus thatched, he hid. The whirlwind from the helicopter drove downward, pressing in on him until he could have touched the landing gear with his oar. He waited, not moving, his heart hammering as the palm blades fluttered. After a while, the chopper seemed to give up, and Peg returned to the hunt.
Planes and helicopters had chased both of them down more times than Jonnie cared to count. Rangers in a plane once locked onto them with a spotlight. It was hair-raising for Jonnie, but not for Peg. Nothing ever ruffled him. At least, it didn’t seem to. Who knew what was really going on in that quiet man’s head.
Then why did Peg stop poaching? Perhaps it was no longer worth the risk. Perhaps the rangers had won. Perhaps he never stopped. He just stopped spinning yarns about it. Once a poacher, always a poacher, right?
Once when Jonnie had gone out poaching on his own one night, he inadvertently left behind his gun and the salt he used to cure the hides out in the open. Come daylight, a ranger stumbled upon them. Somehow, he knew who they belonged to, and he tracked Jonnie down.
“I was never as crafty as my dad,” Jonnie said with a chuckle. “Nobody was.”
When the ranger came to arrest Jonnie, Peg told his son to do as the ranger said. “Don’t worry,” Peg added. “I’ll take care of it.” These were just the facts of life when you were an alligator poacher. Unruffled, Peg went out to his boat. He never told Jonnie what he did, but when he arrived later to bail him out, he had money that he didn’t have before. There was one thing that Peg knew how to do that made good money.
Jonnie had barely finished this story when a car pulled into the driveway. Earlier, we had asked after a man named Mac at the Smallwood Store, which he owned with his wife, a descendant of the original Smallwood. Mac had tracked us down. He was a light-haired, sturdily built fellow with a disarming smile and a carefree attitude that reminded me of the Keys.
“Who’s this?” Mac called out from his truck. “She’s way too pretty for you.”
“Sorry, I’m a journalist,” I said in a deadpan, joking tone. “And I’m too pretty for you, too.” For a second, they were silent, and I was afraid my joke hadn’t landed. There’s always that danger when my mouth gets ahead of me. Then Mac and Jonnie roared with laughter, breaking what could have been a tense moment like the popping windshield in Jonnie’s hurricane story.
“You got me,” Mac said. “I walked right into that one.” If he had been closer, he might have slapped me on the back like I was one of the guys. I had proved I could take it as well as dish it out. Once he’d parked and come over, he gave me a firm handshake and a grin, and we exchanged more proper introductions.
My relief came from more than having avoided a tense moment. I’ve found that many Floridians employ a genre of sarcasm that seems to go over some people’s heads. When we’re together, we speak in this often-dark repartee, but when outsiders show up, especially when they’re extremely serious journalists, they take our remarks out of context, and we go from figuratively misunderstood to literally misunderstood, which would be funny in itself if it didn’t happen so often and in such otherwise reputable periodicals.
Mac had become an insider, but he hadn’t always been. He lived across the street and knew Jonnie well, but he wasn’t from Chokoloskee. He wasn’t even from Florida. He proudly called himself a Michigander, yet no one seemed to treat him with the same hostility toward northerners that had once inspired the sign WHOA YANKEE TURN AROUND. Though some of that sentiment still lingered in the Everglades and back where I came from, Mac seemed to exist in a different category. Without having to erase his roots, he had been accepted as one of them; not just allowed or tolerated, he was a pillar of the community. That made me wonder: Why had Mac been accepted while other outsiders remained, well, outside?
I thought back to the celebrities visiting Peg. They took his fishing tours and listened to his stories, but perhaps they didn’t really hear him, and by the end, they only saw him as a character, set dressing, part of their experience of the glades, as I had when I first came to Chokoloskee. Then without knowing it, they and other visitors and newcomers, having fallen in love with the Everglades, or only the caricature of it that they were willing to see, rallied for laws and regulations to protect the place from the people who lived there, the very people who had acted as stewards of that land for generations, or, in the cases of the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes, since before humanity transcribed history into words.
Peg and other guides like him had welcomed tourists, and then those same visitors turned around and begged violence against them from the park service. It’s easy to forget that the American alligator became endangered after Everglades National Park came in. So what happened, really? Habitat destruction had been the first to take its toll, but no one could drain or build in the park. So it wasn’t that. Poachers like Peg did continue hunting, yet the number of alligators they took was statistically insignificant and could not have resulted in their decline. Yet the tourists blamed the poachers, decried history, and didn’t bother to look deeper to see their stewardship of the glades. With fewer locals traipsing through that swamp, no one who knew what they were looking at was there to take the pulse of the species.
Given the stories I’d heard, I had a theory. In the 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers installed a series of floodgates that allowed the Everglades to flow—or so they said. In true 1950s fashion, the corps put out a promotional movie reel, touting their triumph over nature: The corps controlled the Everglades. They told it where to flow, and flow it did in places where it never had before, creating floods made all the worse by Mother Nature’s fury. Jonnie’s story about Hurricane Donna gave me an aha moment, and it linked, like many things in their stories did, back to Jeff’s investigation.
Just like how flooding from hurricanes had ruined a bayou nesting season and prompted Louisiana farmers to call on Floridian egg hunters to replenish their stocks, kicking off the need for Operation Alligator Thief in the first place, after the corps “triumphed” over nature, rainwater from hurricanes, which had once flowed through the Everglades, now pooled and mired and mucked up the place. Then the situation went from bad to worse. Hurricane Donna washed away over half the mangrove trees in the Everglades. This happened in September 1960, a time of year when nesting season becomes hatching season, and vulnerable hatchlings rely on vegetation like mangroves for shelter.
If flooding really did play such a major part in the alligator’s downturn, how did the species bounce back? The Army Corps didn’t fix their problem. They’ve been trying to mend that particular blunder to this day. For this answer, too, I can look back at evidence from Peg Brown stories. Although alligators tend to aim for the same nesting grounds that they have used year after year, they are not as unyielding as sea turtles: The alligators moved, many to the southernmost reaches of the glades where Peg continued to hunt and tend the land, such as by burning off excess brush left after storms to prevent blocked flows and pooling water, the very act that alerted the park service choppers to his whereabouts the one and only time the rangers almost caught him.
“You never take more than you need,” Jonnie had said to me when he described their family’s way of subsistence living. They cared for the world around them, because if they didn’t, there would be nothing to sustain them anymore. When outsiders pushed them out of the Everglades, more was at stake than a sense of ownership. The Everglades was everything to them: their home, their past, their future, their culture, their identity.
Championing environmental causes by ignoring the people who live there, or worse, by working against them—wherever that may be—does not work, because to ignore the people is to ignore the land itself. They are the ones who have been listening to the land, many for a long time.
When tourists come down to the glades, or to any culture that has become a destination, it’s all too common to partake of that culture like a commodity to be bought and sold. Tourists are so eager to experience what they think that culture should be that they ignore what it actually is. Journalists are guilty of this, too, when they jump in to take down a story without really paying attention, and it’s why making fools of those same journalists remains a beloved Chokoloskee tradition. As much as I want to lay the blame elsewhere, we’re all guilty of consuming culture like this in one way or another. It’s just more apparent, and more hurtful, when it happens in your own backyard.
Although Mac had come from outside, he had done the very opposite: He arrived, he listened, he absorbed. He made it his life’s cause not only to protect the place, but to continue its history and retell its stories. Maybe that was why the old-timers had ultimately accepted Peter Matthiessen, and why their descendants let me in, too: No matter what we didn’t have in common, storytelling bridged the gulf. Matthiessen knew that the most important part of telling a story is, first, to listen.
Jeff had lived like that, watching people, talking to them, trying to understand them. He wanted to see the best in everyone. He wanted to know their story. He knew that no one breaks the law without a reason. He tried to withhold judgment. Because he was a mere mortal, that didn’t always work. The same had happened for me on my journey into the Everglades.
I’ll admit I’d held a concept of what poachers are like in my mind, and it was not a kind or understanding one, not one prone to listen. What kind of person hurts a defenseless animal? I thought, a hypocritical idea to countenance as a meat-eater. I crafted a caricature of the poachers I would meet in my head: rifle-toting, opinionated, camo-clad roughnecks who would have no respect for me or for the environment, who delighted in the pain of the animals they caught. What’s worse is that I knew better. I already knew most poachers weren’t like that. Yet the stereotype persisted in my thoughts until I had encountered such a shameful amount of evidence to the contrary that any single-celled organism could have understood that I was wrong.
Peg was a soft-spoken man, a listener. It was the creation of the park borders that had defined him as a poacher. Before it came in, he was only a hunter, and there were no Peg Brown stories.
Jonnie had been a poacher, too. He was soft-spoken at times, commanding in others. His livelihood as a fisherman depended on the balance of nature. He and Mac knew that stretch of glades better than I ever would. And instead of keeping me out, they wanted me to know more, because they knew I was ready to take it all in as it was, not as I thought it should be.
Jonnie explained to Mac what I was doing there, and Mac offered to take us out on his boat through the Ten Thousand Islands.
“You game for that?” Mac asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Let me grab my notepad first.”
11
THE HOOK
A tip came to Jeff from his handlers at the agency. They told him to check out a man named Wayne, who it seemed owned an alligator farm and kept half a dozen backwoods side hustles going, including guiding tourists on harrowing alligator hunts at night. So Jeff cooked up a story that he wanted to go into the pet trade. He called Wayne up and asked him if he had any hatchlings to sell that might make good pets.
The fact is that really no alligator makes a good pet. While federal law governs their private ownership because they are considered exotic pets, individual states dictate which animals are legal to own within their borders. It’s legal to own a pet alligator in Alaska, but it’s a crime in Georgia. In Florida, you have to have a permit and get it renewed once a year. Still, it’s inadvisable. Former pet alligators under the care of specialists at rescues and rehabilitation facilities exhibit strange behaviors that range the gamut from excessive aggression to unnatural docility. Some display disrupted circadian rhythms. Others show up at rescues malnourished and missing limbs. Even private owners who believe they’re treating their alligator properly are likely depriving it of the basic needs it would be fulfilling in the wild. And just as with any exotic animal that becomes too much for an owner to handle, if the owner releases it into the wild, it’s unlikely to survive, as it has adapted to a bathtub and not to a swamp.
Jonnie frequently went hunting with Peg. They would skin the alligators out in the mangroves then take all the hides down the road to the mainland, where they would meet a fellow named Graham, one of the buyers. He would throw the salted hides into the trunk of his car, really load it up until it barely closed, and then he would count out bills from a roll, $5 per foot for hides five feet and over. That was a lot of money back then and well worth the risk.
Everything got more expensive when increasing crowds of tourists came to the Ten Thousand Islands, so the Browns struggled more than ever to put food on the table. Jonnie had two sisters and six living brothers, and he was the second-oldest boy. He and the six younger kids lived with their parents on the house-lighter. The oldest two lived down the road with their grandparents. It was a good thing that fish were free and plentiful. They ate a lot of ibis, too, usually the brown ones. Even though hunting the white ibis was illegal, so many people on the island did it that even folks outside the Ten Thousand Islands started calling them Chokoloskee Chicken.
Come hurricane season of 1960, the gauges on all their barometers plunged, and even before the radios proclaimed the approach of Hurricane Donna, the residents of Chokoloskee knew a major storm was on its way. The adults in Jonnie’s life—his parents, his grandparents, and their neighbors—feared losing their belongings. They battened down the hatches as best they could, then evacuated across the island to the Blue Heron Hotel, where the owner allowed them to stay for free. The tourists fled in a panic. As the adults watched and waited, the kids squirmed with that particular excitement that precedes the coming of a hurricane. Regular storms were awesome and wonderful, but hurricanes were something else, mighty and dangerous. Just living through one was an adventure.
Their excitement reached a fever pitch as the wind howled outside. Periodically, they would peek out of the blinds. The big fig tree out front had bent nearly double. The wind gauge on a nearby roof climbed as high as 185 miles per hour. The glass of a car outside flexed with the record low pressure then exploded the way a bubble pops.
During the eye, everything went still. Jonnie couldn’t help himself. He ran outside. He had never seen the island so quiet. There were no cars, no people. Not even the birds sang. For a moment, he gazed around in wonder, awed by the stillness wrought by nature’s fury. Peg marched out and dragged his dumb ass back inside. Soon the winds picked up again. Torrents of rain pelted the hotel. All kinds of strange sounds enveloped them: the screech of metal, the crack of splintering wood, a long groan that sounded like the song of a whale.
When the skies had cleared, the Browns ventured out into the daylight. Water had risen up to cover the entire island. Peg waded away to get his pitpan. Jonnie followed him through that foreign landscape. On the shore where their house once stood, they only found debris. Their house-lighter was gone. Luckily, Peg spied his boat, or at least a boat that looked enough like his to pass for it. Who knew in all that mess. He and Jonnie went around picking up serviceable wood scraps and piling them in the pitpan. Thousands of fish littered what was left of the dry land, some too far away to have washed ashore on the tide. There were little minnows, puffer fish inflated from fright, even an immense grouper nearly the size of a cow. They ate the fish that night at the hotel, like a Sunday fish fry that they all had together.
Peg built a new house from reclaimed wood. This one was wired with electricity. That wasn’t the only change that settled over them after the hurricane. Peg poached less and less. He focused on his fishing guide business, even had a friend paint a sign on the side of their house. NATIVE GUIDE, it said and touted his wares, adventures for sale. He decided to capitalize on the tourists instead of fighting them. Even celebrities sought out Peg, like Christopher Plummer and Gypsy Rose Lee, who came to film Wind Across the Everglades, a 1958 film in which Totch Brown played a bit part. They came to Peg not just for guiding services but also for a taste of the exotic life of the glades. As he steered them through the mangroves, sometimes with Jonnie as his assistant, he spun yarns for them, tales that brought the glades to life. Rip Torn came fishing with them, and Peg didn’t know who he was. But Rip had heard of Peg. It was always like that.
* * *
On the way back to Chokoloskee, Jonnie drove us by the rangers’ old houses, two bungalows raised on stilts over their carports. Back in the day, Jonnie would drive by like this to see if the rangers’ cars were in their driveways. Then he’d drive past the station and glance over the docks where the rangers kept their boats. If all the boats and trucks were accounted for, the coast was clear to go out hunting. That day, the docks were full with everything from small motorboats to bigger trawlers.
“Looks like the coast is clear,” Jonnie joked.
Back on the far side of the island, Jonnie drove down increasingly narrow dirt roads. Near the pebble-strewn beach, a stand of Australian pines, an introduced species, cast cool shadows over the lot. The house was a regular house, not on stilts, not a lighter.
Jonnie mused aloud that he didn’t know who lived there anymore. He had moved up the coast decades ago in search of better opportunities as a fisherman, and so he had become disconnected from Chokoloskee. The distance seemed to sadden him, as if he was separated from his past and the person he used to be, and merely visiting did little to bridge that gulf.
He did know the fellow who lived next door, so he drove around and parked next to where a land-bound catamaran waited in the grass. He got out and walked around, and I followed. At the corner of the two fences, there was a clutch of trees. Jonnie gestured at it. “Sign’s gone,” he said. He meant the WHOA YANKEE TURN AROUND sign we’d gone looking for. It was a marker of a bygone day. Now Chokoloskee’s only industry was tourism. WHOA YANKEE COME BACK (AND SPEND YOUR MONEY) would have been more fitting.
Jonnie walked around the house, remembering stories as he studied the changes. He recounted the one time that the rangers ever came close to catching Peg. Peg had been burning prairie grass so he could get his pitpan through to the next waterhole in the slough. Before he knew it, he heard chopper blades overhead. He threw palm fronds over the boat and lay down underneath them. Thus thatched, he hid. The whirlwind from the helicopter drove downward, pressing in on him until he could have touched the landing gear with his oar. He waited, not moving, his heart hammering as the palm blades fluttered. After a while, the chopper seemed to give up, and Peg returned to the hunt.
Planes and helicopters had chased both of them down more times than Jonnie cared to count. Rangers in a plane once locked onto them with a spotlight. It was hair-raising for Jonnie, but not for Peg. Nothing ever ruffled him. At least, it didn’t seem to. Who knew what was really going on in that quiet man’s head.
Then why did Peg stop poaching? Perhaps it was no longer worth the risk. Perhaps the rangers had won. Perhaps he never stopped. He just stopped spinning yarns about it. Once a poacher, always a poacher, right?
Once when Jonnie had gone out poaching on his own one night, he inadvertently left behind his gun and the salt he used to cure the hides out in the open. Come daylight, a ranger stumbled upon them. Somehow, he knew who they belonged to, and he tracked Jonnie down.
“I was never as crafty as my dad,” Jonnie said with a chuckle. “Nobody was.”
When the ranger came to arrest Jonnie, Peg told his son to do as the ranger said. “Don’t worry,” Peg added. “I’ll take care of it.” These were just the facts of life when you were an alligator poacher. Unruffled, Peg went out to his boat. He never told Jonnie what he did, but when he arrived later to bail him out, he had money that he didn’t have before. There was one thing that Peg knew how to do that made good money.
Jonnie had barely finished this story when a car pulled into the driveway. Earlier, we had asked after a man named Mac at the Smallwood Store, which he owned with his wife, a descendant of the original Smallwood. Mac had tracked us down. He was a light-haired, sturdily built fellow with a disarming smile and a carefree attitude that reminded me of the Keys.
“Who’s this?” Mac called out from his truck. “She’s way too pretty for you.”
“Sorry, I’m a journalist,” I said in a deadpan, joking tone. “And I’m too pretty for you, too.” For a second, they were silent, and I was afraid my joke hadn’t landed. There’s always that danger when my mouth gets ahead of me. Then Mac and Jonnie roared with laughter, breaking what could have been a tense moment like the popping windshield in Jonnie’s hurricane story.
“You got me,” Mac said. “I walked right into that one.” If he had been closer, he might have slapped me on the back like I was one of the guys. I had proved I could take it as well as dish it out. Once he’d parked and come over, he gave me a firm handshake and a grin, and we exchanged more proper introductions.
My relief came from more than having avoided a tense moment. I’ve found that many Floridians employ a genre of sarcasm that seems to go over some people’s heads. When we’re together, we speak in this often-dark repartee, but when outsiders show up, especially when they’re extremely serious journalists, they take our remarks out of context, and we go from figuratively misunderstood to literally misunderstood, which would be funny in itself if it didn’t happen so often and in such otherwise reputable periodicals.
Mac had become an insider, but he hadn’t always been. He lived across the street and knew Jonnie well, but he wasn’t from Chokoloskee. He wasn’t even from Florida. He proudly called himself a Michigander, yet no one seemed to treat him with the same hostility toward northerners that had once inspired the sign WHOA YANKEE TURN AROUND. Though some of that sentiment still lingered in the Everglades and back where I came from, Mac seemed to exist in a different category. Without having to erase his roots, he had been accepted as one of them; not just allowed or tolerated, he was a pillar of the community. That made me wonder: Why had Mac been accepted while other outsiders remained, well, outside?
I thought back to the celebrities visiting Peg. They took his fishing tours and listened to his stories, but perhaps they didn’t really hear him, and by the end, they only saw him as a character, set dressing, part of their experience of the glades, as I had when I first came to Chokoloskee. Then without knowing it, they and other visitors and newcomers, having fallen in love with the Everglades, or only the caricature of it that they were willing to see, rallied for laws and regulations to protect the place from the people who lived there, the very people who had acted as stewards of that land for generations, or, in the cases of the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes, since before humanity transcribed history into words.
Peg and other guides like him had welcomed tourists, and then those same visitors turned around and begged violence against them from the park service. It’s easy to forget that the American alligator became endangered after Everglades National Park came in. So what happened, really? Habitat destruction had been the first to take its toll, but no one could drain or build in the park. So it wasn’t that. Poachers like Peg did continue hunting, yet the number of alligators they took was statistically insignificant and could not have resulted in their decline. Yet the tourists blamed the poachers, decried history, and didn’t bother to look deeper to see their stewardship of the glades. With fewer locals traipsing through that swamp, no one who knew what they were looking at was there to take the pulse of the species.
Given the stories I’d heard, I had a theory. In the 1950s, the Army Corps of Engineers installed a series of floodgates that allowed the Everglades to flow—or so they said. In true 1950s fashion, the corps put out a promotional movie reel, touting their triumph over nature: The corps controlled the Everglades. They told it where to flow, and flow it did in places where it never had before, creating floods made all the worse by Mother Nature’s fury. Jonnie’s story about Hurricane Donna gave me an aha moment, and it linked, like many things in their stories did, back to Jeff’s investigation.
Just like how flooding from hurricanes had ruined a bayou nesting season and prompted Louisiana farmers to call on Floridian egg hunters to replenish their stocks, kicking off the need for Operation Alligator Thief in the first place, after the corps “triumphed” over nature, rainwater from hurricanes, which had once flowed through the Everglades, now pooled and mired and mucked up the place. Then the situation went from bad to worse. Hurricane Donna washed away over half the mangrove trees in the Everglades. This happened in September 1960, a time of year when nesting season becomes hatching season, and vulnerable hatchlings rely on vegetation like mangroves for shelter.
If flooding really did play such a major part in the alligator’s downturn, how did the species bounce back? The Army Corps didn’t fix their problem. They’ve been trying to mend that particular blunder to this day. For this answer, too, I can look back at evidence from Peg Brown stories. Although alligators tend to aim for the same nesting grounds that they have used year after year, they are not as unyielding as sea turtles: The alligators moved, many to the southernmost reaches of the glades where Peg continued to hunt and tend the land, such as by burning off excess brush left after storms to prevent blocked flows and pooling water, the very act that alerted the park service choppers to his whereabouts the one and only time the rangers almost caught him.
“You never take more than you need,” Jonnie had said to me when he described their family’s way of subsistence living. They cared for the world around them, because if they didn’t, there would be nothing to sustain them anymore. When outsiders pushed them out of the Everglades, more was at stake than a sense of ownership. The Everglades was everything to them: their home, their past, their future, their culture, their identity.
Championing environmental causes by ignoring the people who live there, or worse, by working against them—wherever that may be—does not work, because to ignore the people is to ignore the land itself. They are the ones who have been listening to the land, many for a long time.
When tourists come down to the glades, or to any culture that has become a destination, it’s all too common to partake of that culture like a commodity to be bought and sold. Tourists are so eager to experience what they think that culture should be that they ignore what it actually is. Journalists are guilty of this, too, when they jump in to take down a story without really paying attention, and it’s why making fools of those same journalists remains a beloved Chokoloskee tradition. As much as I want to lay the blame elsewhere, we’re all guilty of consuming culture like this in one way or another. It’s just more apparent, and more hurtful, when it happens in your own backyard.
Although Mac had come from outside, he had done the very opposite: He arrived, he listened, he absorbed. He made it his life’s cause not only to protect the place, but to continue its history and retell its stories. Maybe that was why the old-timers had ultimately accepted Peter Matthiessen, and why their descendants let me in, too: No matter what we didn’t have in common, storytelling bridged the gulf. Matthiessen knew that the most important part of telling a story is, first, to listen.
Jeff had lived like that, watching people, talking to them, trying to understand them. He wanted to see the best in everyone. He wanted to know their story. He knew that no one breaks the law without a reason. He tried to withhold judgment. Because he was a mere mortal, that didn’t always work. The same had happened for me on my journey into the Everglades.
I’ll admit I’d held a concept of what poachers are like in my mind, and it was not a kind or understanding one, not one prone to listen. What kind of person hurts a defenseless animal? I thought, a hypocritical idea to countenance as a meat-eater. I crafted a caricature of the poachers I would meet in my head: rifle-toting, opinionated, camo-clad roughnecks who would have no respect for me or for the environment, who delighted in the pain of the animals they caught. What’s worse is that I knew better. I already knew most poachers weren’t like that. Yet the stereotype persisted in my thoughts until I had encountered such a shameful amount of evidence to the contrary that any single-celled organism could have understood that I was wrong.
Peg was a soft-spoken man, a listener. It was the creation of the park borders that had defined him as a poacher. Before it came in, he was only a hunter, and there were no Peg Brown stories.
Jonnie had been a poacher, too. He was soft-spoken at times, commanding in others. His livelihood as a fisherman depended on the balance of nature. He and Mac knew that stretch of glades better than I ever would. And instead of keeping me out, they wanted me to know more, because they knew I was ready to take it all in as it was, not as I thought it should be.
Jonnie explained to Mac what I was doing there, and Mac offered to take us out on his boat through the Ten Thousand Islands.
“You game for that?” Mac asked.
“Absolutely,” I said. “Let me grab my notepad first.”
11
THE HOOK
A tip came to Jeff from his handlers at the agency. They told him to check out a man named Wayne, who it seemed owned an alligator farm and kept half a dozen backwoods side hustles going, including guiding tourists on harrowing alligator hunts at night. So Jeff cooked up a story that he wanted to go into the pet trade. He called Wayne up and asked him if he had any hatchlings to sell that might make good pets.
The fact is that really no alligator makes a good pet. While federal law governs their private ownership because they are considered exotic pets, individual states dictate which animals are legal to own within their borders. It’s legal to own a pet alligator in Alaska, but it’s a crime in Georgia. In Florida, you have to have a permit and get it renewed once a year. Still, it’s inadvisable. Former pet alligators under the care of specialists at rescues and rehabilitation facilities exhibit strange behaviors that range the gamut from excessive aggression to unnatural docility. Some display disrupted circadian rhythms. Others show up at rescues malnourished and missing limbs. Even private owners who believe they’re treating their alligator properly are likely depriving it of the basic needs it would be fulfilling in the wild. And just as with any exotic animal that becomes too much for an owner to handle, if the owner releases it into the wild, it’s unlikely to survive, as it has adapted to a bathtub and not to a swamp.
