Chasing gators in Oz and the Honey Island Swamp
Sharks and alligators are the oldest creatures on Planet Earth. You can look it up. They have been around since the dinosaurs and they will still be around when our good old globe turns into a can of toxic sludge. The only thing harder to kill are cockroaches and please don’t get me started on roaches. There is a reason why sharks and gators have been around so long. Like Republicans and related reactionaries, they have no social conscience whatsoever. While the rest of us are discussing organic and hormone-free products, a gator will have swallowed it. If you don’t believe me, look into their eyes. Get real close and have a good hard look. I will wait here for you.
Gators are called crocodiles in Australia. A lot of things are backwards Down Under. For instance, most people drive on the wrong side of the road. They call it the left side, to differentiate from the right side, but now we are getting off-track. Australia is also known as Oz, as in a type of Wonderland, and it’s a wonder anyone is left alive given the number of savage and poisonous creatures wandering around in Oz, many on the wrong side of the road. Salties, as saltwater crocodiles are usually called Down Under, are at the top of the nasty list. More human beings are eaten by salties in Oz as snacks between meals than Dick Cheney eats small children for breakfast.
The Daintree Rainforest is a vast tropical jungle found in Queensland in the far northeastern region of Oz. You thought all of Australia was desert, didn’t you, full of poisonous snakes and spiders, kangaroos and wallabies? The Daintree is the oldest jungle on the planet, which is to say it’s full of salties, waiting for tourists to arrive and the occasional local who has difficulty with reading and writing and doesn’t understand signage. There are signs found near any body of water in Queensland making reference to salties. On the way to Cape Tribulation on the Queensland coast, which is the end of the road and therefore a dead end worth checking out to see who got killed and why, the visitor must pass over the Daintree River. Given there is no bridge, the option is to swim or take the car ferry. This is where the story picks up with some action.
The Daintree Rainforest is rather remote. There you are in the jungle and come around the corner of the highway and suddenly you stop. There are not a lot of vehicles lined up at the ferry stop. The river is not that wide but since there are few people living in the jungle there is no bridge. A sign reveals the ferry goes back and forth continuously. You park your vehicle and wait a few minutes. You get out of your car and walk around. It’s a jungle; the view is lovely. Then you see another sign, which makes mention of the salties.
“Under no circumstances whatsoever should you get out of your car! Salties are known to eat anyone and anything, including tractor trailers and backhoes! A saltwater crocodile is the fastest creature in the world over a distance of 30 metres! If you are reading this sign, you are too close! Run, not walk, back to your vehicle and pray for your sins!”
I am sad to say I took a photo of this sign and put away my camera case, because after I did so a man and his two children got out of the car behind me and walked up the sign, stood and read it. After doing so, they walked down to the edge of the river and had a good look around for any salties. I don’t have a photo of that because I had retreated back to my own rental car, checking to see where I had left my lunch and wondering if even the signage in Oz is backwards.
The road to Cape Tribulation is a great drive, with nice views and signs warning of giant cassowaries in the jungle — a bird larger than an ostrich which is known to attack and kill people with one good swift kick where it counts — and poisonous jellyfish in the ocean, killer sharks just off the beaches, and poisonous snakes and spiders everywhere. If you are feeling suicidal you can get out for a walk around. The drive ends at a parking lot next to a sandy beach, which would be fun to explore and have a dip after many hours sitting in the car, except for the rather large warning sign about salties. “Keep well away and do not enter the water. Take extreme care when launching a boat. Camp well away. Do not open your car windows.”
On the return trip you may wish to explore the Daintree River a bit more. On my excursion a fine fellow named Bruce Belcher was recommended, a highly experienced guide who had cruised the river for years on his croc boat and who enjoyed a warm relationship with the local crocodiles. Unfortunately an enormous cyclone had just hit the region, devastating everything in its path, so croc viewing wasn’t up to par. We cruised up and down the river, looking to see who and what had survived. Crocs are cold-blooded in more ways than one. They need to crawl out of the water from time to time, like a congressman down on his luck, and bask in adulation or sunshine on the river banks. We managed to see one, a medium-sized lethal weapon about 12-feet in length, airing out its bicuspids while contemplating future Machiavellian maneuvers to reduce the surplus marine population.
Bruce explained there was a pecking order among salties, so to speak. That is, the bigger ones ate the smaller ones. Hey, you don’t survive for millions of years with too many rules infringing your liberties, right? The local alpha male on this section of river may have been killed in the cyclone, or perhaps he had not yet gotten around to killing this challenger in his rightful territory. Baby and juvenile crocs were cannon fodder, of course, fuel for discussion amongst their peers. Despite the cyclone, we saw some excellent snakes dozing in the foliage, and all was well with the world.
Over in Louisiana, the swamp people wouldn’t know a saltie if one bit them on the butt or other body parts, although cyclones — called hurricanes in America — are a frequent occurrence. Hurricane Katrina had just made an appearance when I dropped by, leaving her mark on all and sundry. Just north of New Orleans, if the visitor can draw attention away that city’s sultry allures of food and drink, the Honey Island swamp is the place to come to look for gators. I’d already enjoyed an adventure in the Atchafalaya Swamp in central Louisiana, the largest swamp in North America, but that particular excursion had been sideswiped by a flood so large it drove the gators up to higher ground to gather sunshine so few of the critters were available for an intellectual conversation and photo opp. Honey Island was second choice.
Swamps, as it turns out, are interesting landscapes for several reasons. While all landscapes have four directions (north, east, south and west) and three dimensions (up, down and over there) a swamp has no bottom. That is, there is no land on which to stand. That realization always come s into play when you have enjoyed a couple of beverages from the cooler that the swamp guides are kind enough to bring in the swamp boat. After all, who doesn’t want a cold beer at 9 a.m. while on vacation? Whoopee! Let’s go for it! Party time! Then around noon it comes to mind there is no place to pee. For esteemed gentlemen with good balance in a crowded boat, perhaps no problem. For the ladies? Not so much.
On the Honey Island swamp tour the swamp boat was full of paying customers and me, the freeloading travel writer. First we headed east, which was where we first spotted the swampers, local folks in need of better annual compensation in order to pay for adequate housing. Nobody lives in the swamp on purpose. Even in past history native people didn’t live in the swamps because there was little land on which to build and less food to eat. Some of the locals down on their luck had built shacks in the swamp, floating homes you might say, some in livable condition and others less so. The pilot directed our attention to the trees instead. Look up, he said. Way up. Do you see a black mark on the trees? About 25 feet in the air? That marks the storm surge from Hurricane Katrina. Gives you thought about Mother Nature, right?
The swamp boat headed west, past the original launch point and beyond. There was a reason for this. Our guide was kind enough to explain. “Now, I know ya’ll want to see a gator. That ain’t easy in a huge swamp. But I think we can find ya’ll a gator if ya’ll hang in there with us. We have some special rules that we are gonna explain.”
The first rule, he explained, was that under no circumstances whatsoever was anyone, at any time, for any reason, allowed to stick an arm or leg over the side of the boat. You were not allowed to lean out of the boat, point, reach out, touch or otherwise do anything at all that might allow you to fall out of the damned boat. The reason for this was simple. The waters just to the west of the boat launch were the haunt of a croc named El Whoppo. The nickname had something to do with his size. El Whoppo was estimated to be 17 feet long from snout to tail. He became that size because he had eaten all his competitors and everything else he came across during his daily swims. To date he had not yet eaten any paying customers and the boat company thought it best he did not. The publicity might be good for business but there were lawsuits to consider. While there were folks foolish enough to think of El Whoppo as a pet or an old acquaintance, it was the considered opinion of the staff that El Whoppo was lacking in social conscience and did not care if you were a paying customer or had simply won a free ticket for your birthday or were a freeloader. El Whoppo was happy to eat any of your body parts if you offered them, which explained the rules.
So we drifted along, all hands on deck, everyone looking ahead to we were going, eyes peeled for a floating log about 17 feet long with beady yellow eyes. The swamp boat guide sat at the back of the boat, one hand on the tiller and the other hand holding a bag into which he dipped from time to time. I noticed with some curiosity that he pulled out some small white balls like cotton batten, which upon closer examination turned out to be marshmallows. Instead of eating them, he casually flicked them over the rail of the boat, one at a time, every 30 seconds or so, leaving behind the boat a trail of small white dots. Upon consideration, I decided this behavior required some clarification and went back to ruminate with him.
“What’s the deal with the trail of candy?” I asked nonchalantly. “Just in case we get lost?”
“Ha ha,” he said, smiling from ear to ear. “That’s a good one. I know this swamp like the back of my hand. No, I’m sending a message to El Whoppo. This is how I do it.”
“What, it’s like Morse Code or something?” I asked again. “Dot dot, dash? Hello, where are you?”
“Sorta,” he replied. “Nice camera you got there. Zoom in and see what you see.”
I trained my camera at the nearest dot on the water, then moved back further one dot at a time. There were about six tiny dots in the distance. I looked back and forth and counted again. There were five dots. I counted again. There were four dots, each about 25 yards apart.
“The marshmallows are sinking,” I said, squinting. “Must be waterlogged.”
“I don’t think so,” he replied without moving to see. “Look again.”
There were now three dots. As I watched carefully, one of them disappeared. Zooming in closer, I could see a log floating in the water, but no white dot. The nearest dot was about 100 yards behind the boat. As I watched, it disappeared with a tiny ripple.
“That’s not what I think it is, is it?” I stared in disbelief. “You catch gators with marshmallows?”
“Yep, works every time,” he said, standing up and turning around and killing the motor. “Dunno how it works, or why. If he’s within a mile, he’ll know and come for it. Like dessert. Mebbe he just ate somethin.’ Mebbe a kid fell off the dock. You want a good picture, you stand over here. It’s gonna get right busy in a moment.”
I positioned myself behind him on the starboard side of the boat. Or maybe it was port. Word had gotten around and folks were coming to look. The last marshmallow disappeared. There was no sight of El Whoppo. I looked over the side of the boat, and there — about two feet away — was El Whoppo staring me right in the face with a look of serene contentment, like he had just eaten a small child. I could have reached down and petted him. I could have stroked him under his chinny-chin chin. Instead, I took a photo. He was almost as big as the boat.
“You ready for a real picture?” asked the guide. El Whoppo was circling the boat, waiting, perhaps for someone to stick out an arm, or fall overboard. “I’m gonna feed him. Ya gotta be real quick.”
“Ready any time you are,” I replied, watching which way the light shone on the water and worried about back lighting. “Let her roll.”
“Everybody clear some room for this here fella,” said the guide. “He’s a reporter for the newspaper.”
Every person on the boat had their camera out, whether cheap little Kodaks or cellphones. They were not necessarily listening or paying attention to the instructions. Personally I was very, very focused on not being pushed overboard, because I didn’t think El Whoppo was listening either. The guide reached down and picked up a stick, a little wooden branch from a tree as thin as your finger, on the end of which he stuck another marshmallow. He held it up for all to see.
“Everybody ready? OK, here we go.”
He turned around and held the stick off the side of the boat. The stick was no more than three feet long and about four feet off the surface of the water. He held the stick there for about three seconds and suddenly a monster from the deep appeared, coming out of the swamp like a leatherette locomotive, jaws wide open, hundreds of razor sharp teeth glistening in the sun. With a motion as sweet as a baby’s breath and a sweet kiss on the cheek he snatched the marshmallow off the end of the stick in a nano-second and was gone even quicker, like a 17-foot figment of your imagination, in the deeps, never to be seen again.
“Aw shucks,” said the lady next to me, clutching a camera that must have come as a prize in the bottom of a box of cracker jacks, “I missed it. Did anyone get a shot?”
Apparently the consensus was that no one had managed a photo, except for one lady from Alabama with a blur on her LCD screen that looked like a thumbprint. Those in the back of the crowd began to grumble, and soon the conjecture turned to whether there had actually been any gator or not. I put my camera away in my shoulder bag and sat down to look around, wondering of El Whoppo would show up again. No such luck, show over. It was a quick ride back to the parking lot and the bus back to the hotel.
On the way back, given that it was hot enough to barbeque Canadian tourists, we made a quick pit stop for nutrients and essentials, like cold beer and licence plates. If there is one authentic cultural experience I can recommend to visitors to the Louisiana swamps who want the real deal, it would be to make a pit stop at a country store. The Boudin Shop and Country Store was well off the beaten track or the tourist trail and mostly sold to the poor white trash living in the immediate vicinity, but as such it offered several excellent selections for an afternoon snack and some rare souvenirs of the kind that you will seldom see anywhere else.
Take, for instance, the take-out menu listed on the wall, all selections available out in your choice of Styrofoam plate, Styrofoam box or Styrofoam container. You had your choice of fried crawfish, fried shrimp, fried oysters, fried catfish, fried alligator, frog’s legs or gator wings. I was quite intrigued by the gator wings, not quite sure which part of the body to which the menu was referring. Gators have wings? Unfortunately the Country Store was all out of gator wings. Crawfish, as we all know, are often referred to as crawdads, or mudbugs. They look and taste just like prawns, but are found and harvested from the bottom of swamps instead of the sea. I would have opted for a Styrofoam box of mudbugs, but I had just eaten about a thousand of them the night before so I opted to pass.
My memory says I went for the alligator, in honour of El Whoppo, but all I remember was that it tasted “just like chicken.” Doesn’t everything? I have eaten bits and pieces of several small mammals in Asia that most definitely were not chicken, but they tasted like it. I ate frog legs in Cambodia and I am still picking small bones out of my throat years later. I have enjoyed catfish before and no doubt will do so again, but my culinary preference is that not everything I eat needs to be deep fried. Sadly in Louisiana it is illegal to serve food that is not fried or doesn’t go down well with beer.
Which brings us up to the excellent souvenir licence plate selection available for purchase at the Boudin Country Store. Normally I don’t spend much time looking at licence plates. I am positive there is one on the back of my car should I need to look at one. Wait, no! The same plate is also attached to the front of my car, just in case I am lucky enough to run through a radar trap. I’m not exactly sure what slogan is imprinted on my licence plate these days. It used to be “Supernatural BC” (I live in British Columbia) but to the innocent and unsuspecting that motto brought up images of witches and covens, so I think they changed it. For a while it was “The best place on Earth,” which managed to irritate both the locals and the tourists, because the locals didn’t want anyone to know (especially the tourists) and the tourists may have felt it was insulting to them and their famous potatoes. I would have to run out to my garage to find out what the current slogan is today, but since we are Canadians it probably says something on the theme of “I’m sorry.” Nowhere in Canada can you buy a souvenir licence plate that makes a political statement like you can in Louisiana. No sirree.
My first choice was a plate saying “I’m spending my children’s inheritance.” I am a great believer in honesty in public life, and for the average American redneck I doubt it would be possible to be more honest than that. Then there was “When they outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns,” which is logic carried to the nth degree, since every time there is a mass murder in America (every second week, soon to be every week) everyone rushes out to buy another gun. I finally settled on “American by birth, Southern by the grace of God.” Back in Canada, nobody would have a clue about what I was talking about, and the plates cost $7.95 each which was well beyond my budget as a Canadian travel writer (I prefer to travel for free and can’t really afford souvenirs) so I gave the plate a pass. Next time. They had some great coffee cups though.
I picked up my Styrofoam box of gator bits at the cash register, to eat outside at a picnic table in the blistering outdoor sauna bath better known as summer in Louisiana. First, in order to win friends and influence people for a future visit, I inquired with the clerk about an item I couldn’t find on the shelves.
“Do you have any marshmallows for sale?”
“Say what?” said the gentleman at the cash register. “We got pepperoni sticks, we got gator wings, we got popcorn, we got fries, what you want with marshmallows for?”
“That’s what you use to catch gators,” I replied feebly, defending my turf. “They love marshmallows.”
“Sure they do, sure they do,” he replied, handing me my Styrofoam box of gator bits. “Ha, ha, that’s a good one. You have a good day, you hear?”