Of snakes, Florida and steamy summers past.

Our old air conditioner died this May; and while we waited for the new one, we kept our windows open, waking to a noisy chorus of insects and birds. Pushing off the sweaty covers and listening to thunder rumble over the Gulf, I was reminded of my first Southwest Florida summers, back in the late '50s.

Part of the boom that doubled the region's population in that decade, my family moved here from Chicago, when my father decided to sell his share of a family-owned seed company to farm the fertile fields of Iona, just south of Fort Myers. All I knew about Florida was that it was home to every poisonous snake featured in our book about North American reptiles, and for weeks I pored over their descriptions.

On a scouting trip, my father had rented a house a block from the river in the old part of Fort Myers. When we pulled into the driveway, I could see the shock on my mother's face. An old, Spanish-style house of crumbling brown stucco, it brooded over a big jungle of a lot dominated by a rambling banyan tree dripping with ghostly Spanish moss. An overgrown courtyard in the back was littered with palm fronds and rotting yellow fruit that even my father, an expert grower, could not identify. We later learned they were called mangos, and he sent some to Chicago as a botanical curiosity.

In those days, Florida was an exotic frontier to most Americans, raw and sparsely settled. At first my mother hated it-the heat, the poor schools, the provincial newspaper-but there was something in the overripe, earthy atmosphere that we children found, like the mangos, both strange and delicious. Free of winter coats and Northern strictures, we ran around our new neighborhood like near-naked savages, capturing lizards, cracking open coconuts and fishing off the seawall along the river, where one day our 12-year-old neighbor, Butch, reeled in a big, silver tarpon. We didn't have air conditioning-few people did-so we spent even the steamiest summer days outside, until swarms of mosquitoes would descend at dusk and we'd run inside, shrieking and slapping ourselves. Several nights a week, we'd hear the mosquito truck, and we'd rush outside to join the other children running behind it, shrouded in the billowing fog of insecticide.

I don't remember ever complaining about the heat, or even noticing it much, although we were always getting heat rashes, which sometimes developed into nasty boils called impetigo; and if you ran around barefoot you could get a weird kind of worm, too. It wriggled its way under your skin, leaving raised, bumpy paths like a creepy topographical map. And the snakes, true to my book, were everywhere. One day someone ran over a six-foot rattler right on our street. My brothers coiled the body up on the front stoop; and when Dad came home, carrying a grocery sack holding a bottle of beer, he yelled and dropped the bag, sending glass and foamy suds everywhere, while they doubled over with laughter behind the bougainvillea.

"Don't you know snakes still have venom in their fangs after they die?" I chided them; but my knowledge didn't keep me from stepping on a coral snake (it slithered away harmlessly) a few weeks later while I was hanging out laundry in the backyard.

Florida was full of dark surprises like that, as moody and mysterious and exciting as the storms that would suddenly boil up from a clear-blue sky and hurl bolts of lightning at us while we streaked for home through curtains of rain. While life up North had seemed clean and contained and predictable, here it was as primal as the prehistoric creature that rose from the depths next to the seawall one day, a shapeless mass that turned into a whiskered sea cow. Something was always hiding behind the pretty, pastel Florida surface, and that was both scary and exhilarating-like the time we were water-skiing down the Orange River and a teen-aged friend leaped clear out of the water while we were circling around to throw him the rope. "Quick!" he screamed. "I stepped on an alligator!"

The state's grown civilized since then; today's kids tend to stay inside in the air conditioning, and the only snake I've seen in years sped past me when they were building the mega-home next door. I hope he's found a refuge somewhere, a last, hidden holdout from the days life seethed below every Florida surface, and we ran free and wild in the midst of it.