| |
DANCES
WITH ALLIGATORS
by
George Lester |  |
My
Uncle had a fishing camp on Monterrey Lake near Vivian, Louisiana. Although it
is now a lake, about three miles long and two hundred yards across at the widest
point, it was once a bayou. My grandfather kept me spellbound with stories about
how steamboats once docked at the very spot where we were fishing. Then the water
was navigable all the way to Caddo Lake to the south and beyond. Due to the coming
of the railroad and trucking, the boats carrying freight no longer plied that
route.. Eventually the narrow spots in the bayou filled with fallen trees and
other debris, forming beaver-like dams. It reamains that way today.
The
stream that fed the body of water initiated miles to the west, somewhere in Texas.
The shallow flow entering the lake was a wonderful place to explore, and Sam and
I had navigated the winding passage many times in one of Uncle Tom’s rental boats,
powered by a three and a half horsepower outboard motor. The fact that our top
speed was less than five miles per hour didn’t matter. It gave us more time to
enjoy the pristine beauty surrounding us. Because of the many branches - some
leading to dead ends - going in all directions, there was no clear path to follow,
but getting lost was half the fun. The journey took us through miles of amber
water covered with lily pads under an arbor of moss-draped trees. It looked a
lot like the pictures I have seen of the Okefenokee Swamp.
Sam and I
would spend days at the lake joined by cousins Junior and Clyde. One of our favorite
pastimes was marathon swimming. Sometimes we would stay in the water for hours
without coming to shore. Sam was the biggest daredevil in the bunch. He would
swim all the way to the bottom, over twenty feet, and hold on to sunken logs while
he felt around for the huge catfish that lurked there. We were taking quite a
chance because alligators had been sighted in Monterrey Lake. We had never seen
one, so we reasoned, “out of sight, out of mind.”
That logic proved to
be misguided when my father spotted a twelve-foot alligator in the vicinity of
our watery playground. In the next few days, several others saw the huge reptile
swim to the surface. Even so, Dad’s warning to us to stay out of the lake fell
on deaf ears. Only a short time later, we were back. As we approached the lake,
we encountered an old black man and his wife sitting on the bank fishing. They
asked us if we had heard about the alligator recently seen there. We casually
told them that we had, then we dove in and dog paddled toward the middle of the
lake. Just before we were out of earshot, we heard the man say something under
his breath to his wife. He was questioning the sanity of “those white boys”. In
retrospect I can see that he had a good point. | | |
