TALLAHASSEE DEMOCRAT (Florida) 13 August 06 Tiny gator terrorizes Tar Heels (Mark Hinson)
Somewhere in Transylvania County, N.C.: I am floating in a purple inner tube down a mountain river in North Carolina named the French Broad. Please don't confuse it with the Dutch Wench or the Flemish Floozy.
Even though these are the dog days of August, the clear water is as chilly and crisp as a Tanqueray and tonic topped with shaved ice. I occasionally lift my benumbed tuchis out of the river to avoid frostbite - as well as, of all things, alligator bite.
Three days before my voyage, a live, 3-foot-long alligator was lassoed and pulled out of the river. According to the laws of nature and complicated tax codes, alligators are not supposed to live in the French Broad. It's too far north. The climate is wrong. And, compared to Florida, there aren't as many Yankee tourists for them to eat.
The rogue gator, who was named Wiley by its captors, made big news around the region where North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee all bump heads.
The alligator is all people can talk about. It's the gator this, the gator that. You'd think the Loch Ness Monster had shown up wearing a feather boa made out of ivory-billed woodpeckers and started beating hippie kayakers with the petrified corpse of a Bigfoot.
"People kept coming back and telling us they'd seen an alligator on the French Broad," Headwaters Outfitters river guide Sid Cullipher said before setting me adrift in my "Purple Rain" raft.
"We kept saying, 'Sure you did.' We have a thing up here called the Hell-Bender Salamander. It's a pretty big salamander, so we thought that's what they were seeing."
When some canoeists brought back a digital photo of Wiley's beady eyes and unmistakable snout, the river guides knew moonshine was not involved. Cullipher rounded up a posse and went on a gator hunt.
"Obviously, he'd been someone's pet and had gotten too big, so they turned him loose," Cullipher theorizes. "Judging by how fat he was, he'd been living pretty good at the top of the food chain. Frogs up here have never seen gator."
I wanted to mess with Cullipher's mind by saying: "But what if Wimpy Wiley is not just a pet that outgrew the fish tank? Maybe Wiley is one of many born to a big mama lizard who was flushed into the river years ago? Haven't you heard about giant alligators living in the sewers of New York? Didn't you see that movie 'Alligator'? Transylvania County will soon run red with blood."
I didn't say any of that, of course. Speaking as a native Floridian, it's too easy to mess with the minds of Tar Heels and hill folk when it comes to alligators. To make the news in Florida, an alligator really has to eat someone or get arrested driving like a babbling Mel Gibson around Shell Point in a golf cart.
When I was a kid in Marianna, my brothers and I used to swim in a small spring where a Wiley-sized gator lived. We named the little guy Billy. It was wrong, I know, but we fed him marshmallows. Billy soon packed on the pounds thanks to his frog-and-Stay-Puft diet.
After Billy tried to eat our dachshund, we moved our party up the road to a reptile-free chlorinated pool. In Florida, you learn to respect the water lizard.
That's why every few minutes, whether I need to or not, I lift my backside out of the French Broad to "stretch" and have a good look around. Wiley is in custody and on the way to a gator-friendly sanctuary, but why take chances? Why taunt fate when it has teeth?
So here's some advice from a floating flatlander in a Barney-colored doughnut: Don't build your house in an alligator swamp, swim with marshmallows in your pockets or sunbathe on a river bank with dachshunds.
Tiny gator terrorizes Tar Heels