Apr 04 2009
Here comes the sun!
It’s been sunny for two days, but the ditches are all still full of water. No, I don’t live in North Dakota. I live in Northwest Florida, and it rained here for about a week and a half straight. I certainly needed the break from the weather, and not only because the car I drive often hydroplanes (plus the windows have this awful tendency to get stuck in the DOWN position).
No, heavy rains on the Gulf Coast can cause dangers of the strangest kind. Floods are nothing new to Milton; it is submerged in water even more frequently than it is on fire, but I digress. I am more interested in the alligator farm a few counties west of here which lots many of its residents during the storm. Apparently the water rose so high the alligators simply floated above the five-foot tall fence and are loose someplace in Alabama. One of the alligators is eighteen feet long. The news reporter told all viewers that if they encounter any of these loose gators to leave them alone and call the gator farm.
I think this is amazing - not that there are 18-foot alligators loose - I come from an area where, assuming the people encountering the gator are not armed and/or hungry (What? They’re tasty!), folks would actually call the gator farm to rescue them from rogue alligators. I have no doubt in my mind that people took down the number and started calling in gator sightings almost immediately.
As a Floridian, I know quite a bit of gator-evading maneuvers (TIP: they’re too fast to outrun, but they don’t change direction very well). Fortunately for me, my neighbors, and my pets, the worst threat in my neighborhood was a crayfish rising up from the pavement when I took my goat for her evening walk (catching crayfish is easy - simply place a Styrofoam cup behind it and scare it until it backs up). No gators in sight.
We survived this storm. And we made enough progress building our ark that we should have it completed by the start of Hurricane Season (I consider worthy of capitalization, even if it isn’t proper).
