3-17-19

Dear reader,
Hey! I hope you are doing well. I was sharing my experiences in wilderness camp with you.

Second trip. This one was down to Florida to canoe the Swanee River. I'm not sure how many miles we canoed but we started from Swanee State Park and took the river all the way to the awesome Manatee Springs. That's where the water becomes brackish (salt ocean water mixes with the fresh river water).

Now, up until this trip, my knowledge of alligators began and ended with the movie Alligator, in which Michael Douglas's character was hunting a killer gator in the New York sewer system. Yes... I'm saying that at the age of 14, I still believed gators lived in the sewer system. :/ This trip was a crash course on how wrong I was.

We canoed by day and made camp by night. We even had time to swim in most of the springs we passed. Swimming through the dark, tight coral tunnels was a fear I didn't know I had and was not excited to conquer. But I did. And then I couldn't get enough of them. The longer they were, the more exciting it was. I'd watch the other kids dive down and disappear in the crystal clear water like some magic trick. And then a ways over, I'd see a squiggly line of the color of their skin and swimming shorts make its way to the surface.

In this trip, I ended up seeing maybe about 200 gators. Though most of them came form a trip down a side river/creek that, as we paddled down, the gators would swim out and onto the bank. Of course, I, being the "smart" one, decided to get us back to the larger body of water before they started to see us as lunch... or toothpicks. A couple of us were really skinny! But in retrospect, if they wanted to eat us, being in the larger body of water would have been bad. The water is their territory. Land is ours...

We are traveling down the river and the other two guys in my canoe pointed out a huge turtle sitting on the end of a fallen tree that's floating in the water. Since I'm in stern (the rear seat and the one who steers the canoe), I angled us toward the large fallen tree. It had no branches on it so it was easy to get close. I eased us up to it. Focused intently on not bumping the tree and scaring the turtle into the water. The other two are acting funny. Like the turtle can hurt them. But they were excited. Really excited and AFRAID.

That's when they realized I'm still focused on the turtle. They pointed for me to look to the other side of the tree. That's when I saw it! It was faster than the tree! Hell, it was faster than our four man, 16 foot canoe. It was huge! Almost as long as it ow. A gator at least 12 feet long. Its head as big as my torso. you seen the movie Lake Placid, right? You've seen how gigantic that crocodile was? Okay, okay. It wasn't that big. I mean, that croc was the T-rex of crocs and gators. But at the time, I felt like that gator was a T-rex.

My eyes got big and I started to side paddle us away from the tree. I was doing it alone so the front of the canoe knocked the tree. At that moment, this turtle hit the water and the 737 turboing jet engining of a tail on that gator swooshed side to side, submerging the prehistoric relative under the dark green murky water. I jumped up! Rocked side to side. Looked at the water, waiting for it to come flying up out of the water, jaws open wide, prepared to sink its sharp giant teeth into my flesh and pull me under and into a death roll. Before stuffing me under a rock or log at the bottom of the river to leave me there to tenderize...

Then I looked at the tree, the bank, how far I could dive towards the bank. Could I beat it there? No! He'd tenderize me for sure.

Then, slowly, finding its way into my conscious reality were the words: your, jump, down? You're, to jump, sit down?

"You're going to jump the canoe! Sit down."

Oh! The chief was yelling to me. I sat. It was a good, no, great idea. After all, the canoes came together (four canoes). We, in my canoe, settled down our exhilaration. Weirdly, all three of us just wanted one thing: to see it again! Ha! Teenagers! It was an awesome trip!

I have one more blog post on this trip because I'm done sharing this moment of my past. It's more on the funny side. At least two of us in my canoe thought so.

Until next time.

Yours truly,
Doug