Reclaimed Swamp
By Avra Aron
Hurricane seasons are like children, so you micromanage your first with a dizzying array of safeguarding steps. As you nail plywood to your windows, fill every container you have with drinking water, and search for a whistle to complete your emergency kit, you are terrified that even one mistake could result in catastrophic consequences. But by the time your third or fourth hurricane rolls around, you figure that no matter what you do, it’ll probably turn out all right.
After two decades in South Florida, my parents’ hurricane prep has dwindled down to knocking coconuts off the palm trees in their backyard. When I call during hurricane season to ask what other measures they’re taking to prepare, they say they live twenty whole miles away from the ocean. “Only twenty miles?” I squeak.
Their attitude upset me last year, when a storm was forecast to hit my childhood home: “We’ll be fine, we have hurricane shutters!” my mother exclaimed. This was true, but at the time, my parents also had an unfinished roof. It wasn’t scheduled to be completed until after the hurricane, so my parents were planning to ride out the Category Four storm with piles of shingles strapped to their roof’s underlayment. The shingles looked like slabs of concrete, and it didn’t take much imagination to picture the damage they could do if hurricane winds blew them into my parents’ house. “It’s safe,” my mother said. “They’re tied down!” I would then remind my mother that Category Four hurricanes can uproot entire trees, so it wouldn’t exactly be a big deal for the 150 mile per hour winds to blow apart a stack of roof shingles—no matter how many Boy Scouts had been involved in the tying-down process. “You’re probably right,” my mother said. “But we’ll be fine.”
This is what my parents repeated in response to whatever statistic I threw at them. We’ll be fine, they said, which—somewhat annoyingly—they were, when the hurricane turned at the last moment. “That’s what always happens!” they said the next day, sounding as if they had barely broken a sweat. From my adopted home in London, I had stayed up all night to watch the news, sob, and vomit. “It always turns at the last moment,” my mother said, going on to say this narrow escape of utter catastrophe was why they never concerned themselves with getting non-perishable food or evacuating or having an intact roof.
“Nothing ever happens here,” my father said, his flat voice betraying the boredom Florida trapped him in. “Ever.” And I knew he wasn’t only talking about the hurricane. For isn’t paradise ultimately one big bore? “Nothing ever happens in Florida.”
But my father was wasting his breath. “You’re wrong,” I told him. “Anything can happen in Florida.” In my mind, Florida is a wild place. The only reason it’s promoted as a family-friendly paradise is because some crazy person came to this overheated swamp filled with alligators and said, “Hey! Let’s build a theme park!”
Regardless of the image the Disney Corporation bestows, Florida is not tame. A sad example of its undomesticated underside came in 2016, when a two-year-old boy was fatally attacked by an alligator on Disney property. The boy was playing along the shoreline of Disney’s Grand Floridian Resort, ankle deep in the Seven Seas Lagoon. He attempted to fill a bucket for his sandcastle when an alligator bit his head and dragged him underwater. A year later and thirty-some miles away, a ten year old girl was attacked by an alligator. It bit her leg, but she stuck her fingers in its nose and the gator let her go. Sticking fingers up an alligator’s nose cuts off their air source, so they have to open their mouth to breathe, at which point they release whatever part of your body they have been trying to eat.
After the attack, Disney was blasted by reporters when it came out that gators were regularly removed from their resort. Everyone seemed shocked that Disney had known alligators were on their property, which is roughly the size of San Francisco, and built in… a swamp. In the week following the attack, Disney captured six alligators, all of which were euthanized. So many existed around the resort, The Washington Post reported, that Disney could create its own gator farm.
But Gatorland is already just down the road from Disney World and contains a gator park, petting zoo, zip line, and off-road adventure ride. You can watch people wrestle alligators, and then you can get a picture holding a baby alligator with its mouth taped shut. In fact, the ten-year-old girl who lived through her gator attack learned her survival technique at Gatorland. Attacks against adult humans are rare, staff say. Alligators want an easy meal, something they can swallow in one gulp. At least this is what Gatorland employees told me, when I myself visited as a child. (I have the picture holding a baby alligator to prove it). As I have not lived in Florida for almost two decades, sometimes I wish the space in my brain required to remember this experience could be devoted to something more useful. It would be nice if I was able to remember my PIN passcode, for instance, or maybe my social security number, but instead my Floridian DNA has to permanently imprint the knowledge that I probably won’t be killed by an alligator. Although impractical for life in London, it sure does make me feel tough when I visit the Everglades and all the tourists hightail it back to the parking lot after seeing a couple alligators scamper after a swamp apple.
If the alligators aren’t enough excitement, we also have Florida Man. This is the internet’s term for offbeat residents of the Sunshine State who have clearly been driven crazy by the humidity, and often have their mishaps detailed in news reports: Florida Man tries to take a shark on public transport. When police ask Florida Man for identification, he presents them a taco. Florida Man is arrested—for stealing a dozen zoo animals, eating pancakes in the middle of a crosswalk, or throwing an alligator through a Wendy’s drive-thru window. Then Florida Man tries to practice karate on swans and terrifies his neighbors when he wears a mop on his head and demands eggs. There’s a reason our local columnist Dave Barry’s signature line was “I swear I’m not making this up.”
But in my opinion, the unrivaled Florida Man situation is one my father almost found himself in several years ago. He went on one particular bike ride on a balmy January day through the unspoiled part of the Everglades which runs near our house. His shirt was wet with sweat and littered with dead gnats, because when you need to pedal faster than the mosquitos chasing you, your body is going to operate like a flyswatter. He was looking out at the wetlands, wondering how many decades people have left to bike the Everglades before South Florida becomes submerged underwater, when he found a twenty-foot Burmese python in his path.
Florida Man Eaten Alive By Killer Snake is what the headline might have read, except for the fact the python was dead. But the python’s presence piqued my father’s curiosity, as Burmese pythons are native to Southeast Asia and not Weston, Florida. It would be like skiing in Finland and spotting a kangaroo. So he did some research and found that a private reptile breeding facility near the Everglades was destroyed during Hurricane Andrew in the 1990s, leaving many Burmese pythons to escape into the sawgrass. In addition, many had ended up in the Everglades as ex-pets released by their former owners, who didn’t realize little Wiggles was going to grow so big.
South Floridians currently hear a lot about Burmese pythons and how they’re destroying the Everglades ecosystem by eating everything in sight—including the alligators. So my fair state has tried many things to make a dent in the python population, which is now estimated to be up to one hundred thousand. First, there was The Python Challenge, which was our state-sponsored serpent killing contest. Then, the state hired two snake hunters from the Irula tribe in India. The South Florida Water Management District is currently hiring members of the general public. There is no experience necessary to hunt pythons through the swamp in heart-stopping heat while alligators enclose upon you, at a job that pays minimum wage. The Florida Wildlife Commission had a similar program but also incentivized python kills by offering additional prizes to hunters, such as t-shirts. All you had to do was email them your size, along with a picture of the python you killed.
This mayhem is why I disagree with my father. How can you claim nothing ever happens in a place where up to one hundred thousand Burmese pythons are on the loose? Florida is paradise perched on the edge of disaster.
***
Last year, a neighbor found her cat decapitated near the lake behind my parents’ house. I was visiting at the time, and although I did not see the cat myself, I heard about it in great detail. I had always assumed a decapitation would be messy, but apparently most of the cat’s white fur had been free from blood stains. She had been left lying on her back, her legs sprawled out as they had been in life whenever she wanted someone to rub her stomach. Most of the blood had been drained from her body, and everyone said it must have been the work of a raccoon. Or an owl. But definitely not an alligator, because an alligator would have eaten the whole thing.
My parents lived out in the former Everglades—the part that had been dug up, outfitted with an endless supply of Starbucks, and built into thousands of identical gated communities with names like Windmill Lake. “Plastic,” my English boss had sniffed when I told her where I had grown up, and she had a point. But she didn’t know that every time my father went kayaking on the backyard lake, he stowed a baseball bat under his legs. Alligators do not care if you live in a gated community.
“Have you seen any raccoons or owls lately?” I asked my father the day after the cat had been found, and my father shook his head no. We were sitting on our screened-in patio, overlooking the scene of the crime while holding mojitos. It was hot in the oppressive sense—the humidity so thick it seemed as if I could sip it through a straw, and the clouds looked like they were squirted out of a can of whipped cream. My father stretched out on the chaise lounge, an over-read issue of The Economist on his lap. Every couple minutes we would hear a bark, my father would get up to open the door to our house, and a dog would come in or out. In the background, our fountain gurgled, drowning out the faint buzz of the highway on the other side of the lake. I sat by the edge of our pool dangling my legs into the water, the underside of my tanned thighs speckled from the rough salt finish of concrete decking. I was trying to decide whether to get in the water entirely when a duck landed on the top of our patio screen.
Craning my neck, I squinted at the duck through the sunlight. “Hello there,” I said, my visitor status making me just foreign enough that I could find everything some form of charming. I smiled at the duck, and in return the duck waddled back and forth, shook its tail a couple times, and defecated into our pool below.
I shrieked and took my legs out of the water. “What are you doing?” I yelled at the duck, and the duck shook her head like she was embarrassed by my stupidity. Come on, she seemed to be saying. Isn’t it obvious? And then, as if she took pity on my lack of intelligence and tried to answer my question, she released another brown stream of shit. “Stop it!” I yelled, as it dripped into the pool.
I glared at the duck. It was a Muscovy duck, which every South Floridian can recognize by the red folds of skin which surround their eyes like a Zorro mask. Instead of quacking, they hiss. During hatching season, predators often find Muscovies by following the scent of ducklings’ feces, and so to combat this, mother ducks carry the droppings of their offspring before releasing them in a place far from their nest. I’d just never expected that place would be my parents’ pool. As for the adult duck who was emptying her own bowels into the pool, she probably thought what the hell, as long as she was there, she might as well have a go too.
“How can you say nothing ever happens in Florida?” I asked my father as we watched duck excrement drip into our pool. He shot me a quizzical glance. Is this the kind of thing that passes for excitement nowadays? his expression read, but before I could respond, the wind picked up. The air started to feel electric, like a neighborhood does right before Halloween night to a kid, when you know something huge is about to happen. The duck stared at me as little droplets of water began to fall, faster and faster in frequency, almost as if the sky was panicking. It took off just as rain started to pour.
It had been a while since I had seen Florida rain. In London, rain is a stranger with a runny nose, sniffling as they sit next to you on the bus. In Florida, rain is a three year old with a temper tantrum, throwing themselves onto the floor and sobbing their heart out. My father and I ran into our house and watched the storm from our kitchen table. Lightning came closer and closer, turning night into day for a couple seconds at a time. Florida lightning is the only type of lightning I have seen that has made me think, Yep, I totally understand how this can kill people.
“We have to do something about these ducks,” I said to my father.
My father leaned back in his chair. “They’re only trying to protect their young.”
“I know that,” I said. “But where are we supposed to swim?”
At that moment, thunder exploded, giving a more sinister tone to my question than I had intended. At its loudest, Florida thunder sounds like a sonic boom, and when nobody is around, I still cover my ears if I know the storm is close and see lightning strike. Even after all these years, I am not used to the power of Florida thunder, and for that I’m grateful. It’s good to have a home that is still able to shock you into paying attention.
***
Technically, we were allowed to kill the ducks. Like Burmese pythons, Muscovy ducks are classed as an invasive species, and as invasive species can destroy plants and wildlife, it was legal for us to take matters into our own hands. But anyone who knows my family’s track record knows that destroying the ducks would have destroyed us.
Non-Floridians have a hard time understanding this reluctance. “You grew up in the Everglades,” they say, imagining a hardened individual who marched past gators on their way to school, armed with a shotgun they received for their sixth birthday. “This here’s my favorite hunting knife,” they imagine such a person saying. They look at me with respect, which is swiftly withdrawn the moment they realize, when it comes to nature, I am actually the biggest wimp alive.
How is it possible that I am trained to battle an alligator, yet I am scared of ants? During my childhood I used to scour my room for anoles, tiny lizards that average four inches in length—half of which is their tail. Anoles are even more common than ducks in South Florida. Their claim to fame is being able to detach their tail from their body when you come close in a manner they deem threatening. It’s a distraction for predators and works well, particularly because their tail keeps moving after it snaps off, jumping all around. Once, while visiting my parents, I begged my mother to get rid of an anole I found in my room, just like any healthy twenty-six-year-old would do. The anole crawled up my wall like he owned it as my mother entered my room with a cup, her lips drawn into a grim line while she tied her long blonde hair into a ponytail, preparing for battle. I stood on my bed, feeling much safer from that position. My mother walked over to the anole and lunged with her cup, trying to trap it. Instead, she ended up decapitating it.
The howl that radiated out of her body was the most frightening sound I have ever heard. Frozen in terror, she was still pressing the cup against the anole’s neck as she screamed for a good thirty seconds, sounding like someone being attacked in a horror movie. “The poor thing!” she yelled when she was finally able to form words. By that point, a small amount of blood had gathered on the wall. My father was watching a basketball game and shooed away our cries for help, but eventually a neighbor came to our aid. Drawn to our house because of all the screaming, he walked past my father, bathed in the light of the television, to assist in removing the body.
So we clearly needed a humane plan for total duck eradication. But first, we needed to get rid of the chunkier feces the ducks had dropped, which were too thick to drip through our strainer-like screen, and had since dried and hardened. A hose was deemed the most effective tool of removal, so I ended up in the gardening section of Home Depot with my parents at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, listening to a forty-five minute argument about the best hose to blast away duck excrement. My mother wanted to get the hose she saw on TV because it was easy to put away, but it was ten dollars more expensive than the cheap one my father wanted, which my mother said she definitely wasn’t getting. This made my father ask my mother if she was going to be the one blasting the shit away, because if she promised she would be the one to do it, fine, she could pick any hose she wanted, but if she was going to make him do it, he wanted to get the cheap one. And then my mother replied there was something in her hose that she read could cause cancer, so she conceded they could buy my father’s hose, until she realized there was also the same cancer-causing agent in his hose. Periodically, they enlisted the help of a man named Chuck who would answer their questions in a polite and efficient manner (“Yup, it’s a hose”) and then escape to water flowers.
The next day, we took the agreed-upon hose to our backyard, and our neighbor saw us. “Ducks?” he asked, and we nodded. “That’s nothing. Have you heard about the raccoons?”
We had not heard about the raccoons, but our neighbor was happy to inform us. At seven o’clock that morning, three raccoons had charged a woman who lived down the block and had been out walking her dog. This is definitely not a boring place, was my first thought. “The raccoons were rabid, and I think they came from Miami,” our neighbor offered, and I imagined raccoons wearing sunglasses and smearing on tanning oil. “I’ve been reading about Miami raccoons.” Anything can happen here. After a trip to the hospital both woman and dog were found unharmed, so my mother didn’t feel guilty about the way she greeted our neighbors for the remainder of the summer. “You hear about the raccoons?” she asked every person she came across.
“Yeah, of course,” they would say. It turned out we had been the last to know, so my mother never got the thrill of informing anyone. But that didn’t stop her from talking about it. “Isn’t it scary?” she asked our neighbor who lived across the street.
“Shocking,” our neighbor agreed.
“Until someone comes up with a plan, I’m going to use this.” My mother held out a spray bottle of Clorox. “Kills flu virus!” was written on it. “I’ll just carry it with me everywhere.”
Our neighbor wrinkled her nose. “Why?”
“Well, it’s poison. So I can fend off the raccoons if they attack.”
“Are you sure that will work?”
My mother looked at her Clorox, and something about the way she was holding it reminded me of the time I had gone hiking in Wyoming and tried to purchase bear spray. “Do you have a smaller version I could buy?” I had asked the cashier at a wilderness store. “Like something I could take on an airplane?” The cashier had replied that if you had to use bear spray, you pretty much had to deploy the entire full-sized can.
“Be careful with that,” our neighbor said. “Because you don’t want to do something that will only make them angry.” I imagined raccoons screeching with rage after being sprayed with bathroom cleaner. “Maybe carrying a stick would be better.”
Almost all our neighbors were scandalized by the news. “I mean, you think you’re safe,” they said, before asking when animal control would come and take matters into their own hands. Only one of our neighbors sided with the raccoons: “That’s what happens when you live on reclaimed swamp!” he said.
***
By late August, my parents’ patio had become Duck Central. They gathered every day, rain or shine, their constant presence so reliable it might have been comforting, had I not hated them so. Nothing made them leave – not yelling or banging tubs of chlorine together or even displaying an embarrassingly expensive holographic balloon called “The Evil Eye,” which we bought after a review claimed it “scared the fuck out of ducks.” Eventually we started spraying the ducks with a water gun, but this was a short-term solution. The ducks always came back. Every morning when I had my coffee on the patio, a duck was perched on the top of our screen. The duck always seemed completely unalarmed by my presence, and looking back, this is what bothered me most. It upset me more than the ducks’ perpetual presence or continuous hissing or even the fact that they were dropping feces into our pool. What really unnerved me was the ducks’ total disregard for us. It would be easier if it was hatred, if they were doing it out of spite, if they were trying to take back part of the fifty percent of the Everglades that we’ve dug up and drained for our air-conditioned, sanitized, plastic paradise, but that isn’t it. How can you hate something that isn’t even worthy of acknowledgement?
There’s only so much a human being can take. Because we don’t want the real Florida. We want to tape its mouth shut and get a picture holding it. Yet after a while, it’s hard to shut out the untamed—the pythons who don’t care they’re being hunted, the mystery animals all too willing to decapitate cats, the raccoons so apathetic they attack people in broad daylight, even the wind that wants to blow you away… all the fragments of Florida that refuse to be controlled. A fully-loaded water gun on a chaise lounge only gives the illusion of power. The animals treat us as what we are: just another invasive species. And we are so insignificant they do not even pretend to play by our rules as they wait for us to be gone. Is this why we Floridians laugh at the tourists running away from a harmless thing like an alligator, why we don’t bat an eye when our government fiscally rewards us for killing snakes, why we hand the police tacos when they ask for identification? Is it not the humidity that drives us towards insanity, but the fact that in the eyes of nature, we are inconsequential and impermanent?
About the author
Avra Aron is the winner of the 2022 Felice Buckvar Prize for Nonfiction. Her work has been published in The Bellevue Literary Review and The Briar Cliff Review. She is currently working on a collection of essays.
