I realize it’s not even close to Valentine’s Day , but I feel it’s time for me to be upfront and admit that I’m in love with Skidaway Island State Park. That being said I have to add the caveat that the course of this love, like most affairs of the heart, hasn’t exactly run true. Some of the bumps are pretty big, too, like the attempt to kill my dog, Rico, but then love is never rational.
It was a hot September evening when I first stood on a wooden walkway overlooking slow-moving muddy stream that wound through a jumbled landscape of palms, live oaks and slash pines. The scene reminded me of nothing less than the Okavango Delta in Botswana, where I was lucky enough to spend a few weeks in the nineteen nineties.
A botanist could point out that that the greenery in the Okavango would be entirely different, but to my untrained, artist eyes it looked a lot like Africa. Of course even I could see that the bird life was different, but I could half close my eyes and the egret would become a sacred ibis, the grey heron would become a marabou stork, the American black vulture wheeling above me would become a bateleur eagle, and I could almost be back in Botswana. In fact Skidaway Park looks so much like Botswana that I could recommend sitting on a bench and reading Alexander Chancellor’s “The Number One Ladies Detective Agency,” which is set in that country
Don’t sit too still for too long though. That log-like item floating just below the surface of the muddy swamp water—and somehow not quite drifting with the current like a bona-fide log—may not be a swift and deadly Nile crocodile, but it is still a creature worthy of respect. The non-swift and timid Mississippi alligator may be horribly afraid of humans, but its fear might not prevent it from doing some violence with the intent of putting its tiny but unsettled mind at rest.
The adjective “swift” is something of a relative term. One evening the water of a pretty, tree-lined pond exploded, and a five foot long alligator charged at Rico the dog with its jaws wide open. Luckily the alligator had no chance of catching the dog, a lean-limbed shepherd-mix, who can leap a ten-foot ditch when chasing some morsel or plaything such as a cat, and possibly an even wider span when escaping an alligator
Once at a safe distance Rico turned and barked at the reptile. The alligator itself, perhaps feeling a little silly, lowered its upper jaw as slowly as a drawbridge after the ship has passed, and slunk back into the primaeval ooze. It was only when the excitement had drained away that it dawned on me that the alligator could easily have charged out of the opposite bank of its dew pond, where I was standing. I cannot leap a ten foot ditch, whether in pursuit of a cat or anything else, and the end of this story could well have been very different.
Now we walk the paths of Skidaway Park, an older and wiser dog and his older and wiser human. The alligator incident now a little spice of apprehension on a country walk that I hope we will take together for many years to come.
Or perhaps not. Nothing makes you feel more alive than a brush with death, and an alligator attack is a thrilling reminder of mortality, but the appearance of bulldozers near the entrance to Skidaway Park is a different kind of reminder that nothing lasts forever. The bulldozers are there to remove several hundred ancient oak trees along Route 204. Initially I thought they were there to widen the road, but I’ve asked around and as yet I’m not sure what the work is about, nevertheless the loss of the trees on the edge of the park will continue the process of shrinking the buffer zone around the park, and my artistic imagination will have to work harder, not just to turn black headed vultures into bateleur eagles, but also to make the newly-visible rows of trophy homes vanish.
So visit Skidaway Park and maybe you’ll fall in love with it too, and maybe, just maybe, if the park gets a lot of visitors, then someone high up might think it’s important enough to preserve.
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