Traveling to the tropics

Barbara and I decided we wanted to retire and move to a warmer climate. So we spent a full month getting our house ready to sell, packing for our trip, and making last minute arrangement to ship our car to Florida. By the time of our flight on Jan. 31, we were drained.



We arrived in Tampa and boarded a shuttle (an 11-passenger van) to Sarasota. There was one other passenger, a man named Bob who looked to be about 70 years old. The driver of the van was a congenial guy named Nick who was dressed in shorts and a tee shirt.



Nick didn’t say much, which was good because I had a hard time hearing him from our seat toward the back of the van. Bob was spread out across the seat in front of us, looking for all the world as if he owned the van. Bob didn’t say much until Barbara mentioned how much she admired the Tampa Bay Bridge. At the mention, Bob launched into a long lecture on how bridges were built, mentioning along the way that his uncle had been a famous bridge-builder in the Midwest. I closed my eyes while he lectured Barbara and used the occasion to catch some sleep.



Later, after I awoke I overheard Bob say he was retired and so I asked him if his wife was retired. “Hardly,” he said with a laugh. “She’s only 37 years old.”



Bob went on to say that, while they lived in Connecticut, his wife commuted to her job in Los Angeles. “She flies out every Sunday night and flies back on Friday,” he said, with no small amount of bragging, as if to say that this young, vibrant woman just couldn’t keep her hands of his aging body.



Bob lived in a section of Florida called Parrish, a planned development that included many homes worth close to a million dollars. His own home was on a lagoon, he said, and I asked him about the alligators.



“They don’t bother you much,” he said, “if you leave them alone.” Then, after a moment of thought, he added, “Of course, there was that incident with Frank down the street a few months back. ‘Gator crashed right through the screen on his lanai and grabbed his dog. They don’t usually do that unless they’re quite hungry.”h



The only sound in the van was that of the tires rolling along Interstate 75. Outside, the weather was quite a contrast with that of New England. We had just left a pile of snow 4 feet high on our driveway. Now we were watching the palm trees zoom by.



“A few weeks back,” said Bob, “we had an incident with an alligator. They usually don’t bother you if you don’t bother them, but every once in a while one of them gets a little wild and becomes a menace. Florida State law protects alligators but not if they become a public menace. So I called the state environmental agency and reported an alligator out of control.



“One of their officers came to the house and he and I worked on capturing this belligerent male. This gator was huge, I think about 9 feet long, and very aggressive. The method they use to capture alligators is through a lure, just like fishing. This state guy had a chicken, or something that looked like a dead chicken (hey, maybe it was road kill, for all I know) and he put a giant hook through it and had a long rope attached to the hook. Then he threw it out into the lagoon and we sat and waited.



“A few hours later we heard some splashing and the state guy said we had hooked the alligator. It took the two of us to pull him in. You have to be careful that you don’t pull the rope too hard, ‘cause the hook will rip the stomach open. Once we got him up close to the bank, the officer pulled out a grappling hook and hooked him in back of the head. That’s the way we pulled him in.



“As soon as he had him on the shore, we wrapped tape around his snoot. You know, alligator jaws are pretty powerful, but only when they are chomping down. Theyi don’t have as many muscles controlling how they open their jaws.



“Once we got him into the truck he was taken away and my problem was solved.”Bob stared straight ahead while Barbara and I saw in the seats behind him and tried to digest it all. We hoped we didn’t run into any alligators in Florida.