Sitting in Starbucks sipping French pressed Kenyan coffee, a poem I wrote, about lions and lovers and kittens and sun-baked afternoons under an Acacia on the Serengeti, springs to mind.  Sipping Kenya.  I think of Out of Africa when the Baroness is thought to be a stupid woman for trying to grow coffee in Kenya.  Visions of documentaries on crocodiles waiting for wildebeests to drink from the muddy bank.  The same visions filled my consciousness on the drive to confront rumors of alligators in our lake in Athens last weekend.  Would the little calves be eaten?  Would Jenny get swallowed whole while Terry & I had our backs turned catching fish?  Is my gun powerful enough to penetrate that cobbler’s hide from distance?  Such are the vague and varied powers and fancies of the inexperienced imagination.



My little reverie was broken abruptly on 190 East just west of Ft Hood.  It seems that the entire base was leaving early for Father’s Day weekend.  Ugh!  If you’ve never experienced the joys of traversing from Kileen to Temple on a Friday afternoon between 3:00 & 5:00, don’t.  It’s I-35 in Austin during rush hour with two wrecks and a restaurant ablaze surrounded by fire trucks after getting hit by lightning.  I ran down my cell phone battery talking to everyone who would answer by the time I reached Temple.  Whew.



Needless to say I didn’t make it to Athens on time and didn’t have as much daylight as I had hoped to hunt the alligator with before Terry & Jenny showed up later that night.  I put on my snake boots, put the full choke on my 12 gauge, and loaded the shotgun with 3 ½” shells.  As I was walking across the dam I noticed that the baby calves had  ducked under the electric fence and had gathered around the new apple trees by the house.  They looked like they were having a board meeting and flashes of various “Far Side” strips played in my mind.  Were they planning their big getaway?  Not expecting this I hadn’t closed the front gate.   As I made my way through the meadow and the setting sun to the gate, it became rather obvious that I would not be discovering any antediluvians before dark.  Ugh.  



Alligator or not; darkness or not; beer or not; Terry was going fishing.  As he faded to black on the other side of the lake, walking through a darkness my 1,000,000 candle flashlight could not pierce, I sat down on the two-person rocking chair on the lakeside porch and waited for the screams.  Later, around midnight or so, after hearing nothing but silence from Terry, Jenny & I went fishing from the elevation of the dam, which was more an exercise in howling at the moon than it was any type of angling.  I heard him before I saw him, or rather the frogs & cicadas that constituted the rhythm of that night fell silent, then I heard the footsteps, then the grin.  Terry hadn’t seen any alligators or caught any fish, but he had a good time.  He took Jenny’s place on the dam while she went to bed and we talked until sunrise.  By 8am Jenny was back up fishing, and by 9 I decided to go to bed.



Life, like Truth, is often impossible to fathom, which is why I should not have been surprised, as I opened the door of the house to slumber, that I should hear Jenny’s high-pitched yell from the other side of the lake, “Alligator! Alligator!”  I loaded my gun and walked back across the dam, where on the far side I could an alligator floating in the lake about 25 yards away.  He didn’t look like anything out of those documentaries I had seen.  He was only 5 feet long.  Calmly, in the hunting zone that puts away all the interference of daily life, I took aim and squeezed the trigger.  After the boom, along with the splash, the alligator rolled onto its back with one foreleg sticking up out of the water.  He remained in that position for about ten minutes, the first five of which I spent wrestling with the realization that I had no way to retrieve him.  After that, he sank.  I went to bed.  It was so anti-climactic to what had appeared in my dreams that I didn’t know whether to be sad or exhausted or take pride in accomplishing what I had set out to do.  Thankfully, Terry caught a 14lb catfish and Jenny caught a 7lb bass the next morning, to make it an extremely positive group experience.  They also saw another alligator while I was sleeping.  Next time…



On my way back to Spring Branch I stopped to see an old friend.  I found Bear “recreationally” burning brush in his fire pit.  He looked like an English Big Game Hunter with his lamb chop sideburns or an Amish Mexican sans straw hat.  We talked about tomato salmonella, “Kung Fu Panda,” and his new computer.  We talked about Big Game Hunting and how he needed a new Big Game Hunter Hat over sweetbread and coffee.  Sipping Kenya.