Alligator Eyes
If you shine a spotlight out across the St. Johns at night, those red dots you’ll see will be the eyes of an alligator. Even though gators have yellowish eyes, for some reason they glow red at night. And what looks like a calm, peaceful river when only lit by moonlight or nearby car headlights becomes a lair when your high-powered spotlight shines directly on the river’s surface.
I was in high school in the early ‘80’s and our church youth group would sometimes go out to a friend’s 4,000 acre cattle ranch on the St. Johns River in central Florida. The family who owned it had lived in Florida for several generations and they’d take us suburban kids out for the weekend. There were several wood cabins, a campfire pit with big logs to sit on, and a long rectangular building with wood tables and a simple kitchen. The kitchen was walled in on three sides, but the eating area was open to the outdoors. The extended family often had Thanksgiving out at the ranch – probably still do. At night we’d pile into open Jeeps and ride around the ranch looking for wildlife with hand-held spotlights and the brothers always knew what a creature was by the color of his eyes and what he might do. A racoon, for instance, will “tree” once it’s been spotted, and thereafter is almost impossible to find again because he will turn his head up toward the sky so his eyes can’t be seen. Once we saw a possum, and the oldest brother said she was a mother carrying babies. He caught her, and gently turned her over with his foot. There, in the center of her belly, was a round opening where several little possums peeked out and squirmed around. We watched the babies for a while, and neither mother or babies seemed afraid of us. As a child of a NASA engineer who had come from a very different part of the country, I remember being amazed, and a little jealous, at the elemental knowledge these native Floridians had.
There was nothing on TV back then and the internet didn’t exist, so I guess it was an easy sell to get us city kids out running around a ranch. After driving around spotting animals and bellowing bad country songs to a probably-stunned wildlife population (“You picked a fine time to leave me Lu-cille! Four HUNDRED children and a crop in the field…”), we’d head back to camp for a bonfire, and then fall asleep under piles of old quilts in cabins that smelled like wood smoke and syrup. Located twenty minutes outside of town, nights at the ranch were darker, the stars were brighter, the air was colder, and once we had quit carrying-on at the tops of our lungs, the silence and sleep were deeper, as deep as the core of all humanity.
After a long time away, I moved back to Florida a few years ago. I took a weekend trip to Jacksonville and stayed at an historic bed-and-breakfast on the river. I slept in the St. Johns room and when I opened my eyes in the morning my first sight was the river with the sun just beginning to rise, but I didn’t have the momentary confusion one often experiences when waking in a new place. I knew exactly where I was: home.
- by Lisa Vick Grubba
