Pursuits

I’m tottering on tiptoe, my lens wedged awkwardly between the concrete wall and tall iron bars, which separate my camera and me from the teeming alligator pit. I’m whining about how walls and railings are always getting in the way of a good picture. And furthermore, the most monstrous of the beasts—the ones with three-foot jawspans and blood-red battle scars—seem to have deliberately turned their backs on me.

David Piper, my host and tour guide at Bill and Lester Piper’s Everglades Wonder Gardens in Bonita Springs, calls my bluff. "You want a good picture? Take off your shoes," he says, bending down to remove his own. I’m not comprehending. Or maybe I’m in denial. Without waiting for a response, he’s lifting a Lilliputian-size grating from an opening at the bottom of the wall. The gators notice the activity and start slithering in our direction. I feel a hot flush starting in my chest and moving through my limbs, and suddenly I want to swallow, but can’t. David takes no notice and continues nonchalantly: "All the real photographers do it. The big guns. Had a TV crew in here just last month. Got some great stuff."

The "real photographer" thing got me. And he knows it. I can tell by the too-innocent grin on his boyish face. By the time he gets around to, "So, you wanna stay out here and shoot from the railing?" I’m already untying my sneakers. Or trying to. My fingers aren’t working so great. Also, I know that this is going to be a one-camera, one-lens job, and I’m trying to make a professional decision with terror-impaired brain cells.

Now my bare toes grip the cracked surface of slippery, green, algae-covered concrete as dozens of reptiles glide toward me. The pit is like a doughnut, and I’m in the hole. Stephen King couldn’t have done any better than this. David stands near me with a pathetically skinny stick. This he uses to point at any gator that gets so close I can feel its breath on my ankle.

As far as I can tell, I haven’t breathed in or out for about two minutes. I hear a kind of mantra that sounds like "click, click, dear Lord, click, click, my children need me, click, click, click." So I must be taking pictures.

I whisper, "What if they attack?"

David says, "They won’t—they just got fed."

I insist, "But what if they do?"

David says, "I’ve got this stick."

All the days of my life I will remember that skimpy little twig.

"I think I’ve got enough pictures now," I rush to say, my voice a bit squeaky. But David’s not finished breaking my spirit.

He: "Here, give me the camera, and I’ll take your picture."

Me: "Not a chance of me taking my eyes off Cujo here. Besides, my camera has melted and fused into my palm. Can we get out now?"

Chivalry is not dead. David does a sort of gentle stick dance, and the beasts back off just enough to open a path to the hole in the wall. But first, David wants to give me a present. He steps back among the beasts and reaches into an algae-covered crevice, emerging with something shiny, white and sharp. A genuine alligator tooth. A fitting souvenir of my moment as a "real photographer" in one of the last surviving pockets of the "Real Florida."

Postscript

avid piper is the owner of the Everglades Wonder Gardens, an original "Real Florida" roadside attraction started by his grandfather in the 1930s. The ’30s and ’40s were the heyday of roadside attractions. Their funky highway signs promised carloads of tourists not just postcard-perfect beaches but also a glimpse at the weird creatures inhabiting the deep, dark, mysterious swamplands.

These attractions offered a respite from the tedious drive down two-lane U.S. 41 and a chance to pick up some real Florida souvenirs, from the bizarre (an alligator claw on a keychain) to the tacky (ceramic pink flamingo salt and pepper shakers); each one proudly lettered "Souvenir of Florida."

The patriarch of almost every such attraction was an eccentric of some sort—part naturalist, part philosopher and part hermit, who carved a life for himself out of the subtropical wilderness. Hard work weathered his face; the rough landscape or the claws of wild beasts often scarred his body.

Interstate highways and Disney spelled the demise of most of these roadside attractions, but amidst the sophistication and glamour of the new Bonita Springs, at the Everglades Wonder Gardens, the hands of the clock still drag along; the air still hangs heavy with the musty secrets of a mysterious, vaguely recalled era.

Don’t try to find that little grate in the wall, which a decade ago bore actual DNA from the skin of my white knuckles. David Piper has since expanded and gentrified the gator pits a bit to turn them into more eco-friendly "habitats." Still, check out the cover of the Everglades Wonder Gardens brochure. That journalist-eating reptile on the cover once slithered within inches of my bare toes, and christened me the Real Photographer
I am today.