University of Florida 03

Bill McGuire, an improper Bostonian if ever I met one, was one of the most interesting grad students in the Geography Department. A leftist like me, he had a ribald sense of humor and was always involved on our outrageous practical jokes, like the one with the slides. Although we were the same age, he was prematurely gray and as a result was always being mistaken for a professor. Naturally, having quite an eye for the fairer sex, he took great advantage of that mistaken identity with attractive coeds. He also was the most disorganized student I have ever met. Not one of his research papers was turned in on time. Luckily, he was seldom penalized for that tardiness since his reputation for being a brilliant analyst was known by the department’s professors.

Late one summer, three or four weeks before the end of the summer session, several of us were having a couple beers at Bill’s apartment when I asked why he looked so glum, a big change since he always had an easy smile on his face and a laugh in his voice. He admitted that he wouldn’t be graduating with a Master’s at semester’s end and therefore wouldn’t be able tostart working on the doctorate in the fall.

We were stunned. When someone asked why he showed us a bill from the University Library for books he had checked out as long as two years ago and never returned. Even if he returned them immediately the fines added to slightly more than $275 because several of the fines had been converted into the book’s purchase price since the librarian had determined they had been lost. Which was way more money than our always impecunious friend had in the bank. If he didn’t pay the total amount within the next two weeks he couldn’t graduate. He had told the Head Librarian that he had returned the books but the guy gave him the fish eye and didn’t buy a word of it.

I thought about it for a few minutes and came up with a suggestion. Each of us would take back four or five books every time we went into the Library and put them back on the shelves instead of returning them to the front desk until they were all back in the stacks, something we could do that Saturday and Sunday if we were well-organized. Then, on Monday morning we could start checking them out, two or three at a time. All the grad students would be involved so it wouldn’t look like it was only one or two of us.

Bill didn’t think it would work but we agreed to give it a try. We attacked the problem with gusto. All the overdue books were back in the stacks by Sunday evening. We started checking them out at 8:30 Monday morning. What happened was that when we would try checking them out at the front desk, the librarian on duty would discover the books were already checked out and would ask where we found them. On the shelves, we would reply innocently. The books would then be duly checked back in and then checked out in our names. It took us five full days to run them all through the system. Two weeks later Bill received a revised invoice from the Library totaling less than $7.00 He paid the fine and graduated on time, thanking all of us profusely. Sometimes scams are for the good. The library got its books back and Bill graduated on time.

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Preliminary exams for grad students in the Geography doctoral program were scheduled sometime in early spring 1970. Several weeks before taking the exam while on a short break from studying in one of the libraries I read a short article in the New York Times about a PhD mathematics student at Penn State University who had failed his initial prelim exam. The student was a foreign national from some unremembered country, perhaps Middle Eastern or Asian. The article was on the stress of either passing the exam or being booted unceremoniously out of academe.

It caught my attention for obvious reasons. The article detailed the efforts of the grad student to prepare for the second prelim exam (at Penn State and many other universities you had two chances to pass). When he failed the second exam the chairman of the math department told him right there he was dis-enrolled from the grad program and was no longer a grad student at the University. Apparently, it was too much for the student. He went back to his apartment, got a pistol he had purchased earlier, and returned to the University where he shot the department chairman and his advisor to death and then killed himself.

After thinking about that awful situation I began to see other possibilities and Xeroxed the article. About 1:30 that night, after my wife was asleep, I snuck from our married student housing unit and bicycled through a heavy fog that I couldn’t have planned for to Bryan Hall, where our department was located. Checking carefully to make sure no one was around, I tacked the cut-out article to the official departmental bulletin board outside the chairman’s office. And ghosted away through the fog. I saw no one coming or going.

Of course, the shit hit the fan the next morning. Several profs were extremely upset and informed the chairman the act of putting the article on the board was a direct threat to their safety. An official hunt for the guilty by campus police was hotly debated at an emergency faculty meeting. Luckily, cooler heads prevailed and the furor gradually died away. Several fellow grad students suspiciously asked me if I knew anything about the incident but I was convincingly innocent, telling them I had been up all night with our 20-month-old son, who had been sick for the last couple days, a fact I had previously told them about.

Nothing more was said. Until this day I have kept my mouth shut. My original assessment is still the one I have today: the actions of the math grad student were horrific; my posting the article on the bulletin board was on the edge but fairly harmless. Actually, I had briefly considered adding a note to the article, As a Warning to You All, but had rejected that idea as far too incendiary. Yes, I have a twisted sense of humor. Sue me.

Implications of the C&SF Project — EATING THE EVERGLADES

        After the last several ETE posts I almost don’t know where to start. But it has to be with the incestuous relationship Congress has with the Corps of Engineers. The way our political system actually works, when large and wealthy landowners, developers, mining firms, and agri-businesses want something done to benefit their properties, they lean on their elected representatives, who had previously been primed to respond favorably after having received many thousands of dollars in campaign contributions. Naturally, the pols are desperate to reward their moneyed supporters, so they turn to their pet agency, the Corps, which does whatever the politicians want. That is precisely how the system worked before in Florida and how it is working as you read the words on this page.

        The implications for the Everglades and all of south Florida should be obvious. If the goal of environmentally-oriented citizens is to create a new reality of effective stewardship and sustainability, those incestuous relationships between wealthy businessmen/landowners and bend-over politicians, and between the Congress and the Corps, have to be severed. That one sentence defines the extraordinary uphill struggle that lies ahead. A struggle the people of America are probably destined to lose, at least in my lifetime.

        We could learn a great deal about what is happening to Florida’s natural environments by looking through the lens crafted by the Girl Scouts-Boy Scouts: “Leave the camp as good as or better than you found it.” Which is really an offshoot of John Locke’s famous proviso, which he stated in many different ways but can be distilled to: Take what you need from nature and leave as much and as good for others. According to Locke, we have the right of acquisition only if we leave “enough and as good left in common” for others. From that point of view, we are failing miserably since our present actions are by every measure demonstrably worsening and declining natural resources for present and future generations. The evidence of that degradation is so overwhelming that not even many right-wingers would deny it. Well, there’s no telling what the tea party idiots believe so I should categorically exclude them as being incapable of offering rational inputs to a discussion about the environment.

        Human alteration of the previously natural landscape is what it all comes down to. Although a little dated, the Imaging the Region Report issued in 2001 by the Joint Center of Florida Atlantic University and Florida International University used a series of maps to document that alteration.[1] The maps show the amount of land that was in a natural state in 1953, 1973, and 1995. Almost 85 percent of south Florida (defined in the Imaging Report as Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach Counties) was in a natural state in 1953. Agricultural uses accounted for about 75 percent of what was left and the rest was urbanized, which was less than four percent of the total land area. Allow me to repeat that number. Four percent in total land area. Not much, right? By 1973, development pressure had reduced the natural land category to about one fourth of its previous areal extent. In just 20 years. Although the majority of that alteration was a result of growth in agriculture uses, urban uses more than doubled to slightly less than ten percent of the total land area. Again, in just 20 years.

        Over the next 22 years the natural land category lost even more acreage but, owing to Federal and State protection, the loss was not substantial. However, all of the land that the Report had somewhat facetiously classified as “natural” had already been severely altered through human occupance and water management activities. So, take that previous statement about minimal loss of natural land with a huge train-car load of salt. However, the biggest change was that the growth of urban areas approximately doubled again. In 22 years. Doubled. 

        So, given the surging population pressure in south Florida, by 2025 what should we expect to have happened in terms of urban growth? Or by 2050? Fewer people living in less dense concentrations? I doubt it and so do all the experts, even those with the Corps. And for those who think everything changed with the housing bubble popping in south Florida, don’t get your hopes up. According to the 2010 U.S. Census, south Florida hasn't taken much of a detour in terms of adding population. So, that growth train is nearly back on track.

        Do any of you perceptive Readers believe that the highly competent Corps of Engineers has an official opinion of what all of the above means? Certainly they do. Just read on. “The result is a currently non-sustainable system of urban, agricultural, and natural environments in south Florida that exceeds the capacity of, or is hampered by, the existing system of water management.”[2]

        Exactly what do you think an organization like the Corps of Engineers would propose as the only solution to this horrendous mess of their own making? Why, what else but to construct more canals, more levees, and more pumping stations. In other words, they want to apply even more water management technology. See the next ETE post for the ugly details.

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[1] Allan Wallis and FAU/FIU Joint Center for Environmental and Urban Problems, Imaging the Region Report – South Florida via Indicators and Public Opinion, pp. 104-106; 2001.

[2] USACE, Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan — Final Feasibility Report and Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement; pp. 3-1 and 3-2, April 1999.

Cool Early Earth Theory

               Although geoscientists have proposed numerous theories about the Earth’s early history, the problem is that no known rocks have survived from the first 500 million years. Consequently, large-scale inferences have been drawn from scant evidence. That situation may be changing. In 2002, several geoscientists led by John W. Valley[1] of the University of Wisconsin — Madison published their findings that a constant range of values of oxygen isotope ratios (¹⁸O/¹⁶O)[2] in single zircon crystals collected from the Jack Hills metamorphosed conglomerate in Western Australia suggested that certain continental crusts formed as early as 4.4 to 4.0 Ga (giga anni or billion years ago) and implied somewhat temperate conditions on Earth throughout most of the Archaean eon, meaning liquid water and relatively low temperatures characterized the environment. The surface temperatures inferred through the research were low enough for liquid water being cooled to, near, or below the boiling point, 212° F. The range of δ¹⁸O (oxygen isotope) values, as well as quartz and other trace inclusions within the zircon crystals analyzed by Valley and his colleagues, is constant throughout the Archaean eon (4.4-2.6 Ga), suggesting a long interval of uniform conditions and processes that were conducive to liquid water oceans, stable continental-granitic crust, and possibly life.

According to Valley, liquid water present in the early Earth would have formed oceans rather than a thick, steam-rich atmosphere expected in a Hadean-type early Earth. Meteorite impacts during that period may have been less frequent than previously thought. Consequently, the Cool Early Earth Hypothesis contrasts with earlier ideas that surface lava and subsurface magma covered the Earth, which led to the first 500 million years of Earth history being named Hadean or hell-like. Their research has called into question whether the well-accepted Giant-Impact model for the origin of the Earth-Moon system is compatible with that information and suggested that maybe a planetoid capture model should be considered instead. In addition, Valley’s studies of oxygen isotope ratios (which are commonly used as temperature proxies) in the Jack Hills zircons suggest that the Earth’s surface temperatures did not change appreciably between 4.4 and 2.6 billion years ago,[3] again implying a cool early Earth.

In the last decade, debate on the origins of life has been focused on a deceptively simple question: did life on Earth start in a hot or cold environment? Many earlier researchers — especially the world-famous chemist Stanley Miller, who by firing an electrical current through a chamber containing methane, ammonia, hydrogen, and water obtained amino acids, which are considered by many to be the building blocks of life — argued that the first cells arose in the near boiling waters of hot springs or geothermal vents. However, a small but increasingly prominent band of scientific dissenters insists on life arising from cool oceans. Of special interest is recent research conducted at University of Colorado-Boulder’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics by then doctoral student Feng Tian, who published the results (“A Hydrogen-Rich Early Earth Atmosphere”) in the April 7, 2005, issue of Science Express, the online edition of Science Magazine. Tian’s work indicated that from to 30 to 40 percent of the early atmosphere was hydrogen, implying the existence of a more favorable environment for the creation of pre-biotic organic compounds, specifically amino acids, and therefore the possibility of life. Many scientists believe that the early Earth was practically devoid of an atmosphere, or if it had one it was formed by volcanic outgassing of materials trapped in the Earth’s interior, which would have been rich in carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, methane, ammonia, and hydrogen sulfide.

However, one possible conclusion from Tian’s research is that the hydrogen-poor, carbon dioxide-rich Mars/Venus-like model of Earth’s early atmosphere that many chemists have relied on for the last four or more decades may lack critical elements, particularly hydrogen. In such atmospheres, organic molecules would not be produced by photochemical reactions or electrical discharges. The premise that early Earth had a hot, carbon dioxide-dominated atmosphere long after its formation caused many scientists to search for evidence of the origin of life in hydrothermal vents in the ocean, fresh-water hot springs, or those brought to Earth from space via meteorites or stellar dust. But Tian and the research team concluded that even if the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations were high, hydrogen concentrations would have been larger, with a hydrogen mixing ratio of more than 30 percent. Which would mean that production of pre-biotic organic compounds through the agency of electrical discharge or photochemical reactions may have been sufficient to generate life and more efficient than either exogenous delivery or synthesis in hydrothermal systems. Consequently, the organic soup in the oceans and ponds on early Earth may have created more favorable conditions for the origin of life than has been believed previously.

In an article published in Nature in 2008, Hopkins et al,[4] geoscientists from UCLA, examined over 400 Hadean zircons from Jack Hills. Their results imply a near-surface heat flow about three to five times lower than estimates of Hadean global heat flow, indicating that the magmas from which the Jack Hills Hadean zircons crystallized were formed largely in an underthrust environment that may have been similar to modern convergent margins. Meaning that plate movements may have already begun more than four billion years ago, a condition supporting the Cool Early Earth Theory.

In November 2009 two geoscientists from Stanford University published a study in Nature that analyzed hydrogen and oxygen isotope ratios in 3.4 billion-year-old ocean floor chert in South Africa. Their findings suggest that the early ocean was much more temperate and that life likely diversified and spread across the Earth sooner than has been generally theorized. The approach chosen by Michael Hren and Mike Tice, both Stanford University graduate students at the time, used isotope ratio data to calculate upper and lower bounds for the range of water temperature and composition that could have given rise to the observed ratios. They determined that the ocean temperature could not have been more than 104° F and may have been lower in some parts, indicating that the chemical composition of the ancient world ocean was significantly different from today’s world ocean, and not the 150° to 185° F as had been previously assumed by many researchers. The research implications are many but include that if the composition of the Archean ocean was significantly different from that of today, then the ancient atmosphere must have been different as well because gases move across the air-water boundary with considerable ease since the ocean and lower atmosphere are in a rough equilibrium. The hydrogen-oxygen rations found by Hren and Tice mean that over several billion years the ocean lost large amounts of hydrogen to the atmosphere to bring the hydrogen isotope ratio in seawater to where it is today. And since oxygen, not hydrogen, has built up in Earth’s atmosphere over that same period of time, the atmosphere must have discharged that hydrogen to space.

Author’s Note: Several atmospheric scientists reject Tian’s concept, arguing among other things that the assumptions behind the cold exosphere featured in the Tian model are too unrealistic for the exosphere temperature to be relevant and that that temperature needs more careful analysis as it affects the rate of hydrogen escape, especially considering that today’s escape of hydrogen is predominantly non-thermal. According to that criticism, Tian et al. incorrectly dismiss the importance of non-thermal hydrogen escape from early Earth by making comparisons with the low non-thermal escape characteristics on Venus. However, Venus possesses no magnetic field and thus features different escape physics. Interested readers should be sure to follow this critical and very exciting discussion in the professional journals since this discussion is far from over.

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[1] See: Valley, John W. 2005. “A Cool Early Earth?” Scientific American, vol. 293, no. 4, pp. 58-65.

[2] Geoscientists calculate the proportion of oxygen-18, which is a rare isotope having eight protons and ten neutrons representing about 0.2 percent of all oxygen on Earth, to oxygen-16, the most common oxygen isotope with eight protons and eight neutrons comprising about 99.8 percent of all oxygen. These isotopes do not undergo radioactive decay or spontaneously change with time and therefore are stable. But, the proportions of ¹⁸O and ¹⁶O incorporated into a crystal as it forms differ depending on the ambient temperature at the time of formation. The ¹⁸O/¹⁶O ratio is well known for magmas formed in the Earth’s mantle, which always have about the same oxygen isotope ratio. Those ratios are calculated relative to that of seawater and expressed in what is called delta (δ) notation.

[3] Valley, J. W.; Peck; W. H.; King, E. M. and Wilde, S. A., 2002. “A cool early Earth,” Geology, vol. 30; no. 4; pp. 351-354.

[4] Hopkins, M.; Harrison, T. M.; and & Manning, C. E., 2008. “Low heat flow inferred from >4 Gyr zircons suggests Hadean plate boundary interactions,” Nature, vol. 456, no. 7221, pp. 493-496.

Adverse Effects of the C&SF Project — EATING THE EVERGLADES

        To keep our eyes focused on the nature of the problem I've provided an abbreviated version of the many ills brought to the Everglades by the Corps of Engineers through the functioning of the C&SF Project.[1]

        Altered Water Flow Patterns: Today, without the existing water management controls in place, nearly all south Florida would be wetlands. The only exception would be a narrow strip of uplands/pine flatlands along the southeastern and southwestern coastal ridges. Water flow from Lake Okeechobee south through the Everglades to Florida Bay was, prior to modification, nearly continuous. The elaborate system of water management controls now scattered throughout the south Florida landscape has turned what was a natural flow pattern into highly regulated, sporadic, and artificially scheduled releases determined by water levels and user needs. Neither natural rainfall nor ecosystem needs drive the existing management system. As a direct result of human intervention, the entire south Florida region experiences drought in longer periods and higher frequencies.

        Altered Flows to Florida Bay: Decreased freshwater flows from Lake Okeechobee south to Florida Bay have resulted in increased saltwater infusions from surrounding ocean waters, raising coastal salinity to twice its normal level. That sharply increased salinity has damaged and even destroyed fish and wildlife habitat in the Bay. Those reduced freshwater flows are extremely detrimental to the environment and also to the economy as fishing in the Bay has been a major source of livelihood for many south Florida residents and of recreation for thousands of visitors. As a direct result, large areas of sea grass have simply disappeared; the population of pink shrimp, which use the sea grasses as a nursery, has dwindled; and commercial fishermen in the Dry Tortugas, islands west of the Florida Keys where the adult pink shrimp migrate, have seen their catches drop dramatically. The loss of sea grasses, which used to take up nutrients from Bay’s water and sediments, as well as increased amounts of nitrogen from agricultural run-off flowing through the Shark River and Taylor slough into Florida Bay and further south to the Keys, have also contributed to algal blooms. The blooms make the water murky and odoriferous (bad for tourism), robs the water of oxygen, kills coral, and forces fish species to move elsewhere or die (bad for the environment and the economy).

        Overdrainage: Today, 1.7 billion gallons of freshwater are discharged from the Everglades each day, largely from the EAA, so that sugar cane and other crops can be raised, but also from canals in other areas that have been incised into the highly permeable limestone of the shallow aquifer. That constant drainage has in effect diverted water from the Big Cypress Swamp and Everglades National Park through connecting canals, lowering the water table up to four feet, which, in turn, causes increased saltwater intrusion in the coastal aquifers. Which then can no longer be used to provide drinking water. Better start thinking domino effects.

        Soil Depletion: Most of the soils in south Florida were formed under wetland conditions of inundation for most of the year and contain significant amounts of organic material. However, after drainage those soils were exposed to the atmosphere and to an increased availability of oxygen. Decomposition of that organic material occurs at a much faster rate, and the soil surface elevation subsides or is blown away. A conservative estimate of soil loss, especially in the EAA, is one inch per year, or an average of slightly over six feet since 1900. At that rate, in 25 more years in some areas there will be no soil, only exposed bedrock. That enormous soil loss can never be replaced or restored. Never. At least in terms of human history. Nor can those areas be restored as wetlands since the surface elevation has dropped drastically; re-introduction of water at historical levels would produce an enormous lake. Therefore, if agriculture continues for more than 25 years, significant areas within the EAA could turn into a rocky moonscape.

        Nutrient Overloads/Pollution: Agricultural and pastureland runoff from the Kissimmee River passes through Lake Okeechobee and from there slowly meanders to Florida Bay. That runoff, containing high levels of pesticides, nitrogen, and phosphorous from fertilizers and from raw animal wastes, has damaged the entire south Florida ecosystem and has been especially injurious to Lake Okeechobee as the polluted materials accumulate in lake sediments and accelerate the natural eutrophication process. Lake water discharged into the Water Conservation Areas from EAA agricultural lands and pastures to the north and west contains between five and ten times the normal concentration of both phosphorus and nitrogen. When those nutrient overloads enter the Lake or other waterways, the natural system, which traditionally had been adapted to only small amounts of each, became disrupted. Vegetative patterns throughout the Everglades have been altered as exotic species that thrived in high nutrient concentrations drove out native species. Those deleterious effects have gradually but inevitably worked their way downstream into Everglades National Park. In addition, rapidly expanding urbanization from both coasts resulted in the discharge of improperly treated, nutrient- and bacteria-laden sewage into the canal system, causing the canals to be covered with algae, scum, and aquatic weeds, especially in periods of low flow and higher temperatures (summer), resulting in noxious conditions. Surface run-off from the above-mentioned urbanization has also resulted in increased pollution of water in the canals from dissolved-solids and toxic chemicals (hydrocarbons, PCBs, lead, mercury, zinc, etc.).

        Eco-System Disruptions: In combination, all of the above effects of human imposed water management controls have led to drastic alterations of natural, pre-drainage environmental conditions. Across the entire expanse of south Florida, wetland, upland, estuarine, and coastal wildlife habitats either have been severely reduced, altered, or have disappeared entirely owing to severe water flow and water quality modifications. Drainage effects, especially the interruption of the slow overland sheetflow, include the destruction of wetlands, wet and dry prairies, hardwood hammocks, bay heads, pine flatlands, riverine, estuarine, tidal flats and marshes, mangrove swamps, reef systems, and other coastal ecosystems. A widely quoted and representative statistic that serves as a surrogate for the total amount of eco-system destruction that has occurred in south Florida is that between 95 and 98 percent of the wading bird population has disappeared since 1900. Another measure of the level of ecosystem disruption is the sharply increased number (some biologists prefer the word explosion) of exotic plant and animal species that are now common in the Everglades and the Big Cypress. Those invasive species include melaleuca, Brazilian pepper, Old World climbing fern, water lettuce, water hyacinth, Australian pine, bromeliad weevil, feral pigs, black rats, walking catfish, oscar, Mayan cichlid, tilapia, Burmese python, iguana, Nile monitor, and green iguana among well more than 100 major other exotics.

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[1] Some of the text in this section was modified from a web site created by the University of Texas Department of Civil Engineering: “The South Florida Everglades Restoration Project” http://www.ce.utexas.edu/prof/maidment/grad/dugger/GLADES/glades.html#Intro 

Alligator Saga #4

Time for one last true gator story. This one’s my personal favorite. After I had been at the University of Florida for several years, each new crop of grad students came to regard me as a generally reliable source of information about the greater Gainesville area. One of the new teaching assistants, Mark Green, and I became friends and used to tour the countryside around Gainesville looking for fun things to see and do. While drinking our fair share of brewskis. One hot afternoon in mid-August, neither of us having pressing responsibilities since the summer session had ended and the next quarter was several days from beginning, he asked me to take him to the old botanical facilities on Lake Alice. He had tried to find them earlier and had been unsuccessful. I agreed and off we went.

Many years before then, in the early and mid-1940s, the University’s Botany Department maintained a lab-field station at a relatively isolated part of Lake Alice, where they grew all sorts of tropical and sub-tropical plants to aid in the War effort. By that time the station had been abandoned for well over two decades and had fallen into considerable disrepair. I found it without any trouble and after checking out what remained of the dilapidated wood buildings for a few minutes we headed for the Lake.

That particular summer had been ferociously dry and the Lake level was much lower than normal. We stood on what five months previously had been the bank just above water level and surveyed the exposed lakebed. To reach the water you had to cross at least seventy or eighty feet of bone-dry, cracked mud. To my surprise, Mark jumped down the two and a half foot bank to the flat lakebed and started off toward the water, camera in hand. He obviously was intent on getting a picture of something. Curious, I followed close behind. A little more than halfway across the dried bed I realized he was headed for trouble. I grabbed his arm and stopped him.

“Where are you going?” I asked as casually as I could.

“To get a picture of the lake. My Dad has never seen an alligator and he doesn’t believe they’re all over campus. If I’m lucky a couple of them will be right off shore.” He turned to continue toward the Lake and was surprised when I held on to his arm. “What?” he asked, frowning.

“Tell me exactly where you want to shoot the photos from.”

“Right there,” he said, pointing. “From that log.”

“From what log?” I insisted.

“That one,” he said, pointing, sounding a little irritated.

“Take a closer look, dog-breath,” I told him. “That’s not a log. It’s a gator.” Which it surely was. An enormous alligator, basking on the mud, lay not three feet from the water. At least twelve feet long and as fat as the biggest hog you’ve ever seen. That sucker was seriously huge. Mark did a double take and nearly shit his pants.

“Oh my God!” he exclaimed, his mouth dropping open in shock. “I would have walked right over and tried to stand on it. Oh my God, I might have been killed. Oh, man, oh, man. Thanks. Really.”

Although visibly upset, Mark had the presence of mind to snap a few shots of the monster for dear old Dad back home. While my friend was thus engaged with his camera I picked up an old Coke bottle some idiot had previously thrown into the lake and heaved it in the gator’s general direction. Accuracy wasn’t my objective; I just wanted to stir Mark up a little. And I succeeded perfectly.

The bottle hit the dried mud about five or six feet from the gator’s tail. Mark jumped as if I had shoved a cattle prod straight up his butt.

“What the hell you doing?” His voice rose an octave or more until it hit girlie level. “Are you crazy?”

He looked at me as if I were completely devoid of any sense at all. Little did he know. His head jerked around nervously as he kept glancing at the gator to make sure it hadn’t moved. It opened one yellow eye but that was it.

“I’m getting out of here. Before it attacks us,” he said, pushing past me and half trotting back to the bank.

Incidentally, for decency’s sake I have omitted the actual language Mark used to tell me how stupid I was for trying to agitate such a large and dangerous reptile. Yes, Mother, I know. The boy had a good point. However . . .

As he approached the bank, the devil that permanently resides inside me whispered a truly heinous suggestion in my innermost ear. Immediately, I recognized the idea for the truly evil genius it was and acquiesced without a second’s hesitation. Just as Mark placed his foot on the edge of the bank I shoved his back hard and let out a hair-raising scream.

 “Holy shit! Here it comes!” I yelled in a terror-filled tone. “Get your ass moving! Hurry! Aaaaaaaah! Run, Mark, RUN!”

Of course, the alligator hadn’t moved an inch but with his back to the lake my poor victim couldn’t possibly know that. In desperation born of outright raw fear, his foot hit the bank and promptly slipped on the muddy-grassy surface. He immediately tried to jump up on the shore edge but slipped again on the slippery vegetation. In a state rapidly approaching mindless panic he shifted his weight and tried with the other foot, and promptly slipped again and again.

Well, to be perfectly honest, it probably didn’t help that I was screaming like a banshee while alternatively shoving him forward and then pulling back on his pants belt so he was constantly off-balance. Hey, what are friends for?

To tell the truth, he looked like a damn Saturday morning cartoon, his feet churning in super-fast motion, slipping and sliding on the mud bank while desperately looking over his shoulder trying to locate the rapidly charging reptile from Hell. It was so damned funny I finally collapsed on the bank, helpless. Laughing so hard my sides ached and tears flowed down my cheeks. The scene was absolutely hysterical. At least for me. Hey, even after all these years I still laugh at that scene.

Why Mark was less than thrilled to learn we were not about to be savaged by a ferocious gator, I’m not really sure. For a few minutes he was extremely pissed off at me. To put it as mildly as possible. Though, to his credit, after he settled down he laughed as hard as I did.

“Just wait,” he threatened, trying vainly to suppress his chuckles and wipe the tears from the corners of his eyes, “Paybacks are hell.”

On the way back to Mark’s car we passed the botany field station and stopped for another look-see. As we came out of one of the less deteriorated structures, both of us spotted a small, brightly colored snake as it slithered into a bunch of boards piled against the base of a tree. It moved so fast that neither of us had seen it clearly. As a genuine snake lover from early teenage days, there was no way I wouldn’t try to catch it. Or at the very least to identify it. I approached the pile of wood cautiously because I was wearing sandals with exposed toes and ankles. I loved snakes but wasn’t the village idiot. Grabbing a four-foot long stick I poked the pile, trying to frighten it into escaping. No luck.

“Go around the other side of the tree,” I ordered Mark. “Try pin it to the ground if it comes out. And be careful. We don’t want to kill it.”

I continued to probe the pile, watching like a hawk for the slightest movement. Suddenly, I felt a very sharp sting on the side of my bare foot. Certain I had been struck by a venomous snake, I yelled and leaped straight up in the air. When I came down there was Mark, laughing hysterically, holding a pointed stick in his hand.

Yes, indeed, Aunt Sylvia, paybacks are hell.