An Alphabet of Predators

“Everything in Florida is trying to kill me,” said my husband-to-be as we paddled through a calm inlet between the island and the mainland. “Especially those dolphins,” he muttered darkly at a graceful pod arcing out of the water behind our double kayak. I shook my head, but he argued, “Why else would they have been following us for this long if not to murder us?”

He might have been wrong about the dolphins, but after a week visiting my family home on a small barrier island off the coast of Florida, I could see why he suspected the wildlife of having a vendetta. I forgot that growing up in certain parts of the South means a childhood that might have been wilder and weirder than ones in other parts of the USA. Perhaps not everyone’s formative years involved snakes, gators, bobcats, poisonous ants, sharks, and other assorted killers of the animal kingdom, like mine did. I should have warned him that in Florida, it’s best to let go of whatever happy-hippie-nurturing image you have of Mother Nature. Down here, like many of the locals, she’s a madwoman.

Luckily, I had some amazing guides for my childhood safari, like my uncle and grandfather. Both were named Ed, and they ran fishing-boat charters, set crab traps, smoked, drank, and played cards with equal gusto and grace. Some of my earliest memories were with the Eds on a boat called The Captain Moon, gliding down a salty superhighway known as the Intercoastal.

Back then, these waterways were dotted with “pit stops” for travelers, where you could buy fresh fruit off the docks of places like the Smith Homestead near Vero Beach, or freshly smoked fish and beer from Jimbo on Virginia Key. I absorbed lessons and a love of the sea that settled blood-deep and stuck.

So I’ve been trying to recite some basics for my sweet California boy, the stuff that most kids here know. It’s odd, for sure, but it’s almost like singing an alphabet of predators.

A is for ants, fire ants to be exact. I once accidentally sat in a pile of them while wearing very thin shorts. I still get the shivers thinking of the rush of poison that seeped into my backside within seconds. It’s a special kind of pain that’s hard to forget, and I always remembered to check my seat first after that.

C is for Crabs — the giant ones that used to run wildly across our streets, waving their claws in the air like drunken sports fans. I suppose most folks wouldn’t consider putting crabs on the danger list unless you’ve had one nearly snap off your second toe with its claw, like I did.

G, of course, is for ’gator, and the star of my childhood bêtes noires. When awake, I was ever vigilant near any standing freshwater or swamps, watching the shoreline for any sneak attacks. It was the Southern version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: no boogeyman carrying you away in a sack, but an alligator dragging you to a watery grave.

When asleep, I had a recurring dream of being perched on a tiny sliver of wood in a slow-moving river chock full of them swimming below. Yet despite this, I ate fried gator on the regular like some kind of twisted charm to ward them off. And as I got older and more foolish, I’d take silly risks, like canoeing with my friend Hoppy right up to where the gators sat sunning themselves on the banks. We’d see how close we could get before they belly-flopped into the water and came after us. I put an end to that little game after one followed us the entire way back to the dock.

L is for Lizards, which my cats viewed as dangerous to us bumbling humans. Any lizard that entered the house was quickly and methodically beheaded, with the cats leaving the body and hiding the poisonous head in case we were tempted to eat it. It is a special horror to wake from your nightmares and walk to the kitchen for a glass of milk only to feel the squish of a reptilian corpse between your toes. These felines were content to be housebound assassins, though. 

Maybe they’d heard that B is for Bobcats, which snacked on the little dogs of the neighborhood after dusk.

S is for snake. But which kind? R is for the lithe black racers that would zip across our crabgrass meant no harm. But C was for cottonmouth:  approach with caution. Our neighbor had a mean old one that roosted right in the entryway to his house and wouldn’t leave, despite his best efforts with a rake. So he got out his gun, and I can’t recall how many shots he fired for it to be fatal — but it was over two.

C was also for coral snakes, which were the most venomous. And any time I stumbled across a tricolor'd serpent, came the voice in my head “Red and yellow, kill and fellow/ red and black, friend of Jack.” On one hot morning of my adolescence, I found a fat brown snake coiled around my toilet tank, soaking in the cool of the stone. I did not stick around to identify that one.

 Finally, there’s the weather. Thunderstorms, capital T. I’m talking about the biblical kind that rain hail and occasionally throw crabs or frogs from their hell-black clouds. Happily, I’d made it into adulthood without experiencing ball lightning, which a classmate of mine did. I’m glad I never knew as a kid that lightning wasn’t limited to the outdoors and could ricochet into the indoors through open windows. Floods, hurricanes, and tropical storms were enough for my developing mind to contend with. 

And let’s not forget T is also for Tornadoes! As a child, I was watchful for skies that had a greenish cast with the rain — it meant tornado weather. I was troubled by the idea of them eating whole towns and pets within minutes and leaving only the bones of houses in their wake. This habit of constant vigilance during storms was hard to break, and it took me years after I moved away to the West Coast to finally relax and quit it.

There’s more on this list of course, but I worry if I spell them all out for my beloved, he’ll never visit Florida again. 

So I take him to eat “critter platters” of frog legs, gator, and hush puppies at Marsh Landing in Fellsmere. I woo him with cortaditos and medianoche sandwiches in Miami. I offer him oysters in the Panhandle, and somewhat guiltily lead him into dusty old Cracker Barrels off of I-95. And it seems to do the trick.

But when he’s tucked back into the relative safety of an air-conditioned living room, I head out alone to haunt some places from my past. Both of the Eds are gone now, so it’s easier to remember them in spots they loved. I often find myself at Fisherman’s Landing in Grant-Valkaria, where I last saw my uncle before he passed. It’s a sun-bleached picnic area with a long dock that has a serene view of a string of tiny islands. It makes me happy to watch the fishermen standing there with their rods and buckets, just like my family did.

 The last time I went, there was a dolphin that kept coming up from underneath the pelicans that were floating in the water and tossing them in the air like it was a game. The fisherman and I were all laughing at this spectacle, until one of the pelicans didn’t resurface from its trip under the waves. So maybe my boy was right about the dolphins, after all.

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