National Working Woman Day. Six a.m. My parents are treating us to a wildlife tour a hour’s drive south.
Despite the fog, we arrive an hour early. It’s a hereditary problem which skips a generation. I saw two turkeys on the way. Nobody you know.
BABCOCK WILDERNESS ADVENTURES take place on the ninety-thousand-acre Crescent B Ranch. “Imagine walking out to the mailbox,” my father ponders. Tours last about ninety minutes. Cost is eighteen dollars per person. Reservations are required.
A Canadian couple tells us the experience was favorably reviewed in the Toronto Sun.
Mom: “We need to get several brochures to take back.”
Dad: “Several? We don’t know that many people.”
Thirty-three tourists in a towering swamp buggy, tiered like balcony seats. My dad and I grab the only two seats with any legroom, right behind the driver. Everybody’s already here, so we head out twenty minutes early.
Thirteen adventure tours a day. The ranch is running a herd of tourists; over four hundred head daily. My folks weren’t the only retirees with discount coupons. Figure seven or eight grand a day.
Not counting souvenirs. Like “choice, farm-reared” alligator meat for ten dollars a pound.
First, we have to sign an ADVENTURE PASS, sub-titled Waiver Of Rights. Whereby you basically agree nobody in the history of your family will ask for a dollar from anybody in any way ever connected to any of the Babcocks. Who are richer than Croseus.
You can’t even sue if the equipment is defective. Even if they are negligent. Which seems bogus to me. It’ll never stand up in court.
So, I voluntarily agreed to release, discharge and indemnify the Babcocks if I am injured by “wild or domesticated animals whether acting contrary to their nature or not or whether acting as a result of provocation or not, and including but not limited to alligators, snakes, insects, birds, cattle, wild hogs or dogs….”
Dogs?
Nobody said anything about bison. First thing we have to do is push a couple dozen buffaloes off the road. Oozing sores on their humpbacks. “Worse looking specimens I’ve ever seen,” says my dad, like he once worked as a wilderness scout.
The guide wears a cowboy hat. A sign on his chest says, DICK. Just Dick.
Like me, you are probably wondering, could this be an actual Babcock? Dick Babcock. Of the Pittsburgh Babcocks. So, if Dick Babcock was driving a defective piece of equipment and I lost my typing fingers, would the waiver make me unable to sue this Dick?
What price, three digits? That’s what I was thinking.
Dick has just one rule.
“Keep your writing hands and arms inside the vehicle,” Dick advises. “I’m not turning around to pick up detached digits.”
The Babcocks were lumber barons who came to Florida in 1914, picking out 156,000 acres of timber. Cattle eventually became more profitable than trees. After WWII, the Babcocks gave 65,000 acres to the state of Florida.
The place is still god-sized. 153 square miles. Six times the size of Manhattan. Less than a hundred people live on the property.
Dick stomps the brakes and the buggy rhinoes to a stop. We tourists follow momentarily. Probably explains the seat belts. Dick climbs out and onto a tower with a glass front we can see through.
“There are thirty types of snakes on the ranch, only four we worry about much,” explains Dick. “There’s the coral snake, which is mostly black with a bright yellow stripe. They’re shy.
“Water Moccasins. The smart cowman stays out of the soup.
“There’s the pigmy rattler. Aggressive. Mean little critter with small rattlers, so you don’t hear’em until you’re right on top of them. The good news is they don’t want to bite you. They don’t want to waste their venom on anything too big to swallow.
“Then there’s the diamondback.” Dick grabs a snake stick, reaches the hook end into a box on the floor and pulls a five-foot rattlesnake into full view. I can hear the damn thing rattling from where I’m sitting.
He’s not a morning serpent.
“There are more lightning strikes in Florida than in any other state,” Dick says. I contemplate the non sequitur.
He lets the serpent slide loose onto the floor.
“Yet more people are killed by lightning here in Florida than by snakes.” I must be missing something.
“I am wearing knee-high boots,” Dick confides, never taking his eyes of the snake. Dick and the snake dance in slow-motion.
Wherever the snake moves, Dick puts maximum distance between them. “My boots are made of the same material as bullet-proof vests.”
I get it now. Boys and girls, pay attention to MR. NATURE RANGER. Always remember to wear your armor-plated rubbers when playing in a thunderstorm.
“The problem with Eastern Diamondbacks, is they grow to eight feet or so,” Dick continues to maneuver deftly around the glass box. “Too hard to handle. Find one that big, we just have to let him loose.”
I beg your pardon.
Let him loose? I can’t believe my ears. A snake that size carries enough venom to kill a big man. Maybe an entire Brownie troop. I’m sorry, call me a psycho journalist, but that’s where I draw the line. Environmentally speaking. Right at eight-foot-long vipers.
Then, as if remembering his companion’s presence, Dick says to us: “Let me put him away.”
Dick returns to the driver’s seat. You can see his heart’s racing. He takes off the big hat and wipes the sweat from his brow.
I can see the quiet self-pride in the man.
That’s tough duty at 9 a.m. on a Monday. Good job, Dick.
“He’s a new snake,” Dick says confidentially to my Dad.
Then he chuckles. “Found him up by the parking lot last week, getting a little sun.”
January and February are the big calving months on the ranch. Dick has been sworn to secrecy about the actual number of bovine inhabitants. He will say that forty to fifty calves are born daily for those first sixty days of the year. The Babcocks ship maybe one thousand calves to feed lots across the Midwest, where they are fattened up on cheap grains and god knows what kind of chemicals.
Before being rushed to your table.
These little calves are so cute, still a couple of months away from climbing into that eighteen-wheeler. Meanwhile, it’s springtime in paradise.
“Our head of security is a deputy sheriff in four counties,” Dick tells us.
“That’s because the ranch is in four counties. And because we still have trouble. Rustling. They’ll cut some wire – we’ve got three hundred miles of fence – and they’ll just back the truck up and load a few head.”
The swamp buggy clomps to a bounce and a stop. This baby has some damn brakes.
LOOK OUT! ALLIGATORS!!!
But, no, I am calm. Although I did unbuckle my seatbelt.
Just in case.
Call me crazy, but I can’t be blase about gators.
I grew up in Putnam county in New York state. We had robins and deer and squirrel and crows and possum. Skunks. And your domestics, your horses, cows, goats, et al. Dogs. Cats.
Nothing like an alligator.
Not in the trailer park pond. Not in the mucky culvert on the next block. Not behind the Publix grocery store.
And nothing like these HUGE SPECIMENS!!! LOOSE!!! WILD!!!
We came around a corner and down a turn and suddenly the significance of the heretofore amusing but sinister ADVENTURE PASS became clear to me.
HOLY KACHUNGA!!! I am calm.
“We don’t allow swimming in here,” Dick explains. “No water-skiing, either.”
At first, amazed, I hadn’t noticed we’d come to a complete stop in the middle of a good-sized river. Both banks of the waterway are lined – like coeds at the beach bagging rays – with alligators.
I look, with the eyes of a boy. This is not Kansas.
Later down the road, Dick tells us, you can hunt pigs every day of the year. Wild hogs dig holes in the dirt and that’s not good for pastures and roads.
Surprise. Here’s a heavily tusked 250-pound boar in a “trap” by the roadside.
When does a trap become a cage?
Answer: too soon.
“A male this age is good for sausage,” Dick explains, “that’s about it.” Sounds like a feminist slogan.
It’s early springtime on the ranch. Hasn’t rained here in three months.
The swamp is dry.
We stop and all thirty-four of us hike over some very nice decking across shallow muck. To the only panther blind in the southern USA. A half-dozen of the big tan cats slink in front of us.
Cougars, pumas, mountain lions, whatever; none of them are the native Florida panther.
Native panthers are too scarce even for the rich.
And yet my mother was out one pre-dawn picking up the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, when a panther – much smaller than these here – walked right down North Montego Street.
“Like he was on his way to work,” is the way Norma Jean describes it.
Down the road, Dick stops. He points at a big pile of debris which looks remarkably like a two-year-old compost heap. That’s an alligator nest, Dick says. Obviously uninhabited. Dick jumps out and leaves us without explanation.
In a moment he’s back with a baby gator.
Somewhere on the property we don’t get to see, the Babcocks have one of the state’s forty gator ranches. Dick had this pup in a bucket in the back.
The soft cool skin felt just like a belt.
In the wild, one gator in ten makes it to maturity. In the wild, an alligator might grow a foot a year.
On this ranch, you don’t get old, but you’re six feet long by the time you reach your second birthday. On The Street, GATOR HIDE FUTURES are selling for forty or fifty dollars a foot.
The Gator Round-Up & Branding Jamboree, I’m told, can get pretty ugly for the careless reptile puncher.
Around the bend, Dick points out the elaborate raccoon display now under construction. “Don’t quote me, y’all,” Dick mumbles, “Around here, a garbage can and a couple of old fish oughta do it.”
About then I saw two coons run across the road. Dick saw them, too. Nobody else did.
We are on a dirt road that used to be the only way through forty-five square miles of subtropical wilderness. “You can’t imagine what all’s back there,” Dick says ominously, pointing east.
There’s a truly GARGANTUAN alligator BLOCKING the road.
Like he thinks he’s some damn bison.
We push him back into the water after some hissing.
Most of it mine.
Dick stops on a bridge across yet another branch of the Caloosahatchee River. So many big gators crisscrossing, like coffee time at a Burns Brothers Truck Stop. Some swim at us. Probably taught them this trick by dangling poodles from the buggy.
My mind starts racing, full of questions like…
If that fifteen-footer over there was to get a swimming start and shoot right out of the water and soar through the air and grab me by my boyhood and drag me under water on the other side of the bridge…would that be acting “contrary to his nature or not?”
Is parking in the middle of his river “provocation or not?”
Does this gator know about the waiver? Does he have any reason to want Dick – or any Babcock – to look bad?
Dick drove us back to the parking lot. When he said we were through, people applauded.
“I’m glad I came. We won’t be back,” is Mom’s immediate appraisal.
See it once, you won’t need to see it again.
AT BABCOCK WILDERNESS ADVENTURES WE WERE BASICALLY TAKEN FOR A RIDE, FROM ONE CONTROLLED OUTDOOR EXHIBIT TO ANOTHER.
I had a great time.
Which reminds me:
As adults, we should go on more class trips.
