Welcome to Gator Country

Garage sale season has started. It's the weather. Once the heat breaks, the little white cardboard signs come out, and all you have to do is drive up the street to find a little something that you didn't know you needed until you saw it in someone's yard under a sign marked, "Everything on this blanket - half off!"

Last Saturday we found a neighborhood sale down a cul de sac on a small lake. One couple was selling the man's extensive collection of hand tools ("Can't see good enough to use 'em") and if you bought something his wife would throw in absolutely free your choice of allen wrenches from a box of about a hundred. My husband bought a grinder from the man for twenty dollars. He showed it to our neighbor who promptly told him he could have gotten a brand new one for half the price. It might have come to blows soon after but then our neighbor wisely decided it was a better model than what he'd first thought so they're still speaking to each other.

While we were out bargain hunting we met a woman who had pictures of her sons and husband standing next to an eight foot alligator (strung up under a tree and presumably dead) and also of her 18 month old grandson perched on the alligator's back (cut down from the tree and definitely dead). The one of her grandson reminded me of a picture of my brother as a child, posed on a pony, except that in his case the pony merely looked bored and not dead at all.

The woman was very proud of the pictures and was carrying them from house to house showing them to everyone she met. This is clearly something that people do down here, pose next to alligators. My neighbor has shown me a picture of him and his cousins and his uncle, standing next to not just one, but two dead alligators. I noticed that everyone that the woman showed the pictures to seemed admiring and matter of fact about it.

To me, alligators are an alien life form that's best viewed from a distance, say behind a 2 inch plate glass window at a zoo or aquarium. It makes me go all squirmy inside to think about putting a toddler on an alligator's back and taking a picture of the occasion, I don't care how dead it is. Or maybe it's because it's dead that it's so disturbing, except that if it had been alive I'm pretty sure that would have been worse.

I didn't ask the woman with the pictures where her husband and sons had shot the alligator. I didn't ask her whether her family would be eating any part of it or whether they would have it stuffed and mounted or whether they would take the skin and make shoes and purses from it. I realize now I missed an opportunity to learn something more about the culture where I live.

But at the time, I was speechless with shock. For one, in Michigan, when people show you pictures of their grandkids they're usually posed in front of fake autumn scenes with colorful silk leaves artfully scattered around the foreground and a backdrop of split rail fencing with maybe a cute woodland creature, like a squirrel or chipmunk, perched on top. There are no dead reptiles anywhere in the picture.

I've never been one for staged family photos myself. It could be this is just a new trend and I'm out of the loop. Maybe the next new thing in family photography is dead bears or wolves or badgers with all the kids dressed in their Sunday best and parked on the carcass. It's nothing I'd want framed and hanging in the living room, but you never know. Different people have different ideas about what's attractive in a family portrait.

For two, I'm just not used to thinking of alligators as something you hunt and then pose beside. Deer? Sure. Bear? Absolutely. Rabbits? Got a couple pictures of those.

I'll know next time how to react. I figure it's bound to happen again. According to the Florida Fish & Wildlife website there are a million alligators in Florida. Every week in the paper there's a story about some poor sod losing an arm or a leg to an alligator. Granted, the sod in question is usually high as a kite and swimming in gator infested swamp at four in the morning, so it seems as though if you take the minimum precautions, i.e., stay sober and don't go swimming in alligator bogs at night, chances are good you won't be eaten by an alligator or probably even nibbled on very much.

The signs warning you not to feed them are at boat landings at every state park we've visited so far. It definitely makes you cautious about letting your dog off the leash to get a drink. (Quick! How do you call an alligator? Here, Fido!) I took a picture last month of my husband holding our dog on a leash while she quenched her thirst at the Bulow River State Park. He's scanning the river and so are my two boys standing on the dock by the landing. The dog is the only one in the shot not worried about becoming alligator snack food. It's probably the closest I'll get to having a family portrait with an alligator in it, even if it's only the idea of an alligator that's in the picture and not the real, live dead one, like other people have. I think I'll have it framed.