I Travel the Road Less Traveled
THE BULLCREEK WILDLIFE MANAGEMENT MASSACREE
My daughter graduated from high school. It was time for me to leave a marriage gone awry, to crawl out of the pressure cooker with the tight-fitting lid into whatever came next.
Women have asked me since how one leaves. I tell them, “I always wondered that myself. As it turns out, you twist the knob, open the door, and step out.” Without plans beyond leaving, I walked to the kitchen door of the house I had called home for just shy of twenty years, turned the knob, and stepped into the rest of my life.
For lack of a strategy, I accepted invitations of virtual friends I had met online and embarked on a journey that would carry me north to Boston, south to the tip of the Florida Keys, west to Denver. My real-life friends, the ones with bodies and clothes instead of avatars, anticipated they would receive my remains in a body bag at any moment.
It was pretty crazy, now that I reflect on it, but God protects fools and drunks, and since I was mostly sober, I leave you to draw your own conclusions about my intelligence.
The only really frightening experience I had in nearly ten months was a day I spent with my older brother, Cal, four years my senior, who lives in Orlando, Florida. If I had to pick one human being as the epitome of kindness and practical intelligence, it would be my big brother.
The first Sunday of my visit, Cal took me to see stuff.
We headed for the Orlando Wetlands, left Cal's Civic in a parking area, and started down a sandy track into the wild and eerie beauty of prehistoric Florida marshland.
The marsh waters are glossy and dark, trembling under the dancing feet of dragonflies, concentric ripples spreading where unseen fish rise to feed. Drifts of warblers, gnatcatchers and sparrows flap into the air, startled, and then settle again, chirping in agitation. Solitary kestrels and red-shouldered hawks soar on the thermal currents high above, hunting. Pallid snakes wriggle through the black water, heads lifted, seeking. They are not snakes, but birds. Anhingas.
Anhingas are large diving birds with long pale necks and black bodies whose feathers have no oils to provide water-proofing. Lighting by the dozen on the bleached bones of half-submerged trees, they spread their wings to dry in the sun. Raccoons scurry busily along the paths, ignoring hiking tourists. Plants with wonderful names choke the waters: giant bulrush, pickerelweed, duck potato. Stunted versions of water hickory, cypress, and potash trees crouch in the marshes like predators, and sinister ripples in the dark waters remind you alligators and snakes call the wetlands home.
I still had the northern bluish cast to my skin, fluorescent in the blazing sunlight. After we had hiked the sandy paths for two hours, Cal looked at my sweating, pinkening self and took pity.
He proposed we drive toward Kissimmee to see the orange groves and the Florida longhorns. We passed forests of fruit trees planted and pruned so that each row in the grove blended into one long tree, with wide aisles between. Cal explained this was to allow harvesters to drive along the aisles and jostle the orange trees, dropping the fruit into the waiting bins.
A dark object on the roadside proved to be a road-killed wild pig. I had developed an unhealthy fascination with road-killed animals in my travels, and my photo collection boasted a coyote, an armadillo, an elk, and now a wild pig. It was a big dead pig, and had nasty curving tusks at the corners of its whiskered mouth. Cal estimated its weight at two hundred pounds. A large white-tail deer weighs about 150 lbs. Once we’d examined the pig and I’d taken its picture, it did little else to entertain, and we moved on, past fenced pastureland with long-horned cattle, their broad horns spanning upwards of six feet from tip to tip.
Near Melbourne, we passed a sign with the legend, “Bull Creek Wildlife Management Area.” We grinned at each other, sibling shorthand for "That looks interesting." Cal spun the wheel and the tires hissed along the narrow entrance road to a kiosk instructing us to “Sign in.” I got out and chose among the dozen reasons for visiting: Hunting, Fishing, Hiking, Interpretive Drive. The last seemed closest to our intentions. I checked it. We learned the definition soon enough. It meant you had to interpret where to drive. We misinterpreted.
The sun was high in the flat aqua sky when we started into the preserve, our hearts light. Nowhere did we see a sign warning: “Don’t come in here unless you have a four-wheel drive, you damned stupid Yankees.”
The white sand shone in the sun, and broad live oaks shaded long stretches of broken sandy soil, some a hundred feet in length. Cal suggested the cause might be wild pigs, rooting in the ground for whatever delicacies might hide there. We grinned again. Maybe we’d get to see a live pig!
On either side of the narrow track stretched the land that time forgot, dead-flat Florida terrain. Sharp points of palmetto and saw grass, unfriendly and dangerous-looking, top-knotted palm trees; it was a land of knives and blades. Cal told me he had been talking to a man not far from Bull Creek, mentioning that in fifteen years in Florida, he had yet to see a snake. The man laughed heartily at that and said, “I guaran-damn-tee you there’s a half-dozen lookin’ at you right this minute.”
Once we’d left the kiosk, we saw exactly one directional sign, a square of white metal with an arrow and the legend “Interpretive Drive.”
It had rained heavily the night before. At first, the Civic splashed through puddles on the road without difficulty. The puddles grew larger. Cal said he might try to turn around, except the sand on the sides of the path was much looser, not tamped down by vehicles, and he feared getting stuck.
The next curve we rounded ended in a small lake, fifty feet long and wider than the road. Cal stopped the car, and we discussed our options. Again he said he was afraid that an attempt to turn around would result in a stuck, and we decided together to soldier on.
“Hold on,” Cal said, and gunned the little Civic. Halfway across, the car sank into the soft wet sand, the wheels spun, and Cal said something unprintable. “We’re f*****,” he said. I had to agree. We were. He backed and filled for a few minutes, and finally told me to slide into the driver’s seat. He splashed out into thigh-deep water, stained the shade of midnight by minerals in the sand, and put his shoulder to the back of the Civic. After a few tries, he stopped, dripping and cursing creatively.
He crawled back into the driver’s seat I had just vacated and put his head down on the steering wheel, sucked in a deep breath. As he blew it out he punched the accelerator and by sheer force of will backed it out of the black water puddle and onto dry sand.
I cheered. What a man! What a brother!
He interrupted my celebration by pointing out that we still were in the middle of nowhere, and he was still afraid to turn the Civic around, which meant we had to go forward, somehow. We looked around and saw tracks in the loose sand beside the road, through some low palmettos. Someone in a vehicle had taken that route around the huge puddle.
Cal backed a few more feet, shifted to forward, and jammed his foot to the floor.The little car bucked up the slight embankment, clawed for purchase, and hung up on the sand piled high between the tracks of the larger, brawnier vehicle that had gone before. We got out of the Civic and stared under it.
Hung up, beyond hope. We were unprintabled with a vengeance.
“We’re going to have to walk,” Cal said.
We rifled through the contents of the Civic. Bottles of water. Cal’s ball cap. He snatched a knife out of his fishing tackle box, a silly useless thing with a gut-hook on the tip. I grabbed my purse, as though I might do a little shopping along the way. Neither of us considered the two umbrellas in the car, which would have been shade-giving Godsends.
We gritted our teeth and started through snake heaven. The choices before us were either stepping through knee-high saw grass and palmetto, each frond of which hid a coral snake with twin gleaming pearls of venom dripping from its fangs, or splashing through thigh-deep black water, which hid God knew what.
Agreeing that we had driven so far through this gorgeous hell that we must surely be closer to the end than the beginning, we walked on in the same direction we had been driving. We did not know we had gotten stuck at the most remote point of the vicious Floridian joke of an interpretive drive.
We talked as we walked. We were resourceful, well-read. If anybody could figure a way out of this mess, surely we could.
I cannot describe the relentless terror I experienced every time I lifted a foot and put it down again, the vivid images that screamed through my head. Was that glistening in the weeds an alligator tail? A copperhead? Oh, dear heaven, what was that squishing under my sandal in the puddle? My heart flopped in my chest like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat.
The midday sun was merciless, beating down on the white sand and reflecting back. We were walking through a rotisserie oven. Or hell, with snakes.
Fifteen minutes after we’d left the Civic stranded in the sand, the track bent around a stand of live oaks and ended. In every direction, only palmetto and saw grass. No path. Wait – what was that up ahead? It looked like a canal. No, it was the road we had been struggling along, now sunk completely beneath black water, waist deep. The land declined gradually as we walked, and now was under water.
Cal looked at me, noted my trembling lip and panicky eyes. He said gently, “We’ll have to go back.”
Go back? Go back through the hordes of poisonous snakes and alligators and scorpions?
I closed my eyes for a long breadth of time, praying for strength and the courage I now knew I lacked. (You know how you always wonder how you’d do in a truly bad situation? Well, now I knew. I was a coward, and I didn’t care who knew it, as long as I didn’t have to go BACK through that nightmare.)
But we did have to go back. It was even worse than that, I was beginning to realize. Icy fingers were racing over my skin, followed by tongues of flame. My vision was blurring, clearing, blurring. My stomach roiled. Heat stroke, I thought, but didn’t say.
We passed the Civic, red metal hide blazing in the sun, radiating yet more heat as we struggled by, barely noticing it. I thought about how far we’d driven, and how far we had to walk, and my spirit quailed.
Fifty feet or so past the car, my head began to whirl madly and the terrain spun in crazy circles as I swooned to the hot white sand. When I opened my eyes, I saw my brother’s worried face. “Are you okay? Hey! Are you okay?” I’d fainted.
No, I wasn’t okay. He helped me sit up in the hot white sand. I said, “Cal, I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll go for help. You stay here and rest.” He spotted a grove of live oaks a hundred feet back the road. “C’mon, I’ll walk you back to the shade…”
“No.” Tears came to my eyes. “I’m not walking back through that again.”
“All right,” he said. “All right.” He pulled the knife he’d taken from the Civic out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Here. Not because you’ll need it, but because it’ll make you feel better.” He gave me a bottle of water, kept one. He turned to walk away, looked back at me again. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I watched my excellent big brother trudge away from me down a long white sandy track in the Bull Creek Wildlife Management Area. We were the only souls left on earth.
I was dizzy and afraid, surrounded by miles of wilderness and unknown creatures. I was sick, head swimming, stomach churning, pulse racing. It occurred to me that the previous night’s rain might have left the sand beneath the surface wet and cooler. I used the blade of the knife Cal had left me to dig down into the sand. Dark, wet sand. I plastered it over every exposed inch of skin, and though it dyed me as black as the puddles on the road, it lowered my body temperature to a tolerable level. Relief from the burning of my skin, a return to clearer thoughts. My stomach calmed. I used the pathetic knife blade to saw through the tough woody stems of the palmetto, cutting fronds and sticking them in my damp tangled hair for shade. Throughout the afternoon, I repeated the process of coating myself with damp sand.
The drop in body temperature helped, enough that I amused myself by building a sand castle, and using a few palmettos for decoration.
I worried about Cal, a bit older than I, although fitter and better prepared for the heat, as a result of his long bike rides in the Florida weather. Suppose he succumbed to the heat, too?
A rattling sound, moving up and down the hedgerow of palmettos on the opposite side of the sand road, caught my attention. I dampened a finger on my tongue and held it up, but could detect no breeze. I frowned. Then I heard the grunting noises, and saw a dark rump moving from open space to open space, then another. Pigs. Pigs like the one we’d seen road-killed near Kissimmee, with sharp hooves and wicked tusks. A dozen or more, rooting in the sand just beyond the road.
I remembered the tiny pocket knife I had in my purse for unexpected necessities, and dug it out. I stood on the sand road, legs spaced wide, Cal’s stupid gut-hook-tipped fishing knife in one hand, my miniature pocket knife in the other, to make myself a more formidable figure. I shouted things at the pigs as though they would understand: “I’ve got a knife, pigs!” They snorted and grunted and rooted, but remained mostly invisible, which somehow made them more frightening. After a time, most of the herd edged away, and I saw them disappear into the grove of live oaks some distance off. There was still one moving near me, though, and I remained vigilant. Finally, it stepped out onto the road twenty feet away, and stared at me. The bristles on its snout quivered as it sniffed and gazed at me, the white gleam of its tusks catching the sun. I was unsure whether a shout would be more likely to scare it or provoke it, so I stayed dumb. At last, it tossed its head, snorted at me, and trotted off after the rest of the herd and I watched it vanish into the stand of oaks.
I sat down and slathered more damp sand over my shoulders and arms, and prayed for Cal’s safety and swift return.
A rattlesnake four or five feet long slithered across the road the length of a small room from where I sat. I stared as it passed.
The sky darkened abruptly, as Florida skies do, and the wind picked up, a blessed coolness on my tortured skin. Clouds scudded across the bruised sky; the rains spat into the dry sand. I thought about the puddles that had led us to this disaster. What if it rained so hard they couldn’t get in to rescue me until morning?
I considered that for a moment, and decided I would not attempt to survive a night in this God-forsaken country. If it came to that, gut-hook or no gut-hook, I would saw away at my wrist with my brother’s foolish knife and end my own life. I could not face the prospect of pigs or snakes or alligators doing it for me.
The storm’s temper passed as quickly as it brewed, and I felt better, sitting in the damp sand in my wet clothing. And then, from far off, I heard a sound, faint and indefinable at first, slowly swelling as it neared. An engine. A dark green late-model pickup truck surged around the farthest bend in the road, and I saw Cal leaning out the passenger window, waving.
Cal and the best-looking man I’ve ever seen climbed out of the Ford Ranger and greeted me. My brother, who is a lamb of a man, but taciturn and undemonstrative, grabbed me into a huge bear hug and said brokenly, “I thought I’d find you dead.”
He introduced me to Al, the gallant four-wheeler who’d found him nearly at the entrance to Bull Creek. I shook his hand for all I was worth. Cal opened the passenger door for me, but I shook my head, looking at the beautiful Al.
“I’ll get your pretty truck all dirty,” I said.
“Dirty? Girl, it can’t get no dirtier than it is. Get your butt IN here.”
Al hooked a chain to the Civic to pull it out of the stuck and had to stop three more times to pull Cal out of the sand. Al said, “I don’t know how he got that little thing in here in the first place!”
At the entrance, we stopped to offer thanks and the couple of twenties Cal pressed on Al. When we reached the main, safe, civilized, blessed road again, the Civic’s muffler let go and we dragged it, wallah, wallah, wallah, all the way back to Orlando.
My daughter graduated from high school. It was time for me to leave a marriage gone awry, to crawl out of the pressure cooker with the tight-fitting lid into whatever came next.
Women have asked me since how one leaves. I tell them, “I always wondered that myself. As it turns out, you twist the knob, open the door, and step out.” Without plans beyond leaving, I walked to the kitchen door of the house I had called home for just shy of twenty years, turned the knob, and stepped into the rest of my life.
For lack of a strategy, I accepted invitations of virtual friends I had met online and embarked on a journey that would carry me north to Boston, south to the tip of the Florida Keys, west to Denver. My real-life friends, the ones with bodies and clothes instead of avatars, anticipated they would receive my remains in a body bag at any moment.
It was pretty crazy, now that I reflect on it, but God protects fools and drunks, and since I was mostly sober, I leave you to draw your own conclusions about my intelligence.
The only really frightening experience I had in nearly ten months was a day I spent with my older brother, Cal, four years my senior, who lives in Orlando, Florida. If I had to pick one human being as the epitome of kindness and practical intelligence, it would be my big brother.
The first Sunday of my visit, Cal took me to see stuff.
We headed for the Orlando Wetlands, left Cal's Civic in a parking area, and started down a sandy track into the wild and eerie beauty of prehistoric Florida marshland.
The marsh waters are glossy and dark, trembling under the dancing feet of dragonflies, concentric ripples spreading where unseen fish rise to feed. Drifts of warblers, gnatcatchers and sparrows flap into the air, startled, and then settle again, chirping in agitation. Solitary kestrels and red-shouldered hawks soar on the thermal currents high above, hunting. Pallid snakes wriggle through the black water, heads lifted, seeking. They are not snakes, but birds. Anhingas.
Anhingas are large diving birds with long pale necks and black bodies whose feathers have no oils to provide water-proofing. Lighting by the dozen on the bleached bones of half-submerged trees, they spread their wings to dry in the sun. Raccoons scurry busily along the paths, ignoring hiking tourists. Plants with wonderful names choke the waters: giant bulrush, pickerelweed, duck potato. Stunted versions of water hickory, cypress, and potash trees crouch in the marshes like predators, and sinister ripples in the dark waters remind you alligators and snakes call the wetlands home.
I still had the northern bluish cast to my skin, fluorescent in the blazing sunlight. After we had hiked the sandy paths for two hours, Cal looked at my sweating, pinkening self and took pity.
He proposed we drive toward Kissimmee to see the orange groves and the Florida longhorns. We passed forests of fruit trees planted and pruned so that each row in the grove blended into one long tree, with wide aisles between. Cal explained this was to allow harvesters to drive along the aisles and jostle the orange trees, dropping the fruit into the waiting bins.
A dark object on the roadside proved to be a road-killed wild pig. I had developed an unhealthy fascination with road-killed animals in my travels, and my photo collection boasted a coyote, an armadillo, an elk, and now a wild pig. It was a big dead pig, and had nasty curving tusks at the corners of its whiskered mouth. Cal estimated its weight at two hundred pounds. A large white-tail deer weighs about 150 lbs. Once we’d examined the pig and I’d taken its picture, it did little else to entertain, and we moved on, past fenced pastureland with long-horned cattle, their broad horns spanning upwards of six feet from tip to tip.
Near Melbourne, we passed a sign with the legend, “Bull Creek Wildlife Management Area.” We grinned at each other, sibling shorthand for "That looks interesting." Cal spun the wheel and the tires hissed along the narrow entrance road to a kiosk instructing us to “Sign in.” I got out and chose among the dozen reasons for visiting: Hunting, Fishing, Hiking, Interpretive Drive. The last seemed closest to our intentions. I checked it. We learned the definition soon enough. It meant you had to interpret where to drive. We misinterpreted.
The sun was high in the flat aqua sky when we started into the preserve, our hearts light. Nowhere did we see a sign warning: “Don’t come in here unless you have a four-wheel drive, you damned stupid Yankees.”
The white sand shone in the sun, and broad live oaks shaded long stretches of broken sandy soil, some a hundred feet in length. Cal suggested the cause might be wild pigs, rooting in the ground for whatever delicacies might hide there. We grinned again. Maybe we’d get to see a live pig!
On either side of the narrow track stretched the land that time forgot, dead-flat Florida terrain. Sharp points of palmetto and saw grass, unfriendly and dangerous-looking, top-knotted palm trees; it was a land of knives and blades. Cal told me he had been talking to a man not far from Bull Creek, mentioning that in fifteen years in Florida, he had yet to see a snake. The man laughed heartily at that and said, “I guaran-damn-tee you there’s a half-dozen lookin’ at you right this minute.”
Once we’d left the kiosk, we saw exactly one directional sign, a square of white metal with an arrow and the legend “Interpretive Drive.”
It had rained heavily the night before. At first, the Civic splashed through puddles on the road without difficulty. The puddles grew larger. Cal said he might try to turn around, except the sand on the sides of the path was much looser, not tamped down by vehicles, and he feared getting stuck.
The next curve we rounded ended in a small lake, fifty feet long and wider than the road. Cal stopped the car, and we discussed our options. Again he said he was afraid that an attempt to turn around would result in a stuck, and we decided together to soldier on.
“Hold on,” Cal said, and gunned the little Civic. Halfway across, the car sank into the soft wet sand, the wheels spun, and Cal said something unprintable. “We’re f*****,” he said. I had to agree. We were. He backed and filled for a few minutes, and finally told me to slide into the driver’s seat. He splashed out into thigh-deep water, stained the shade of midnight by minerals in the sand, and put his shoulder to the back of the Civic. After a few tries, he stopped, dripping and cursing creatively.
He crawled back into the driver’s seat I had just vacated and put his head down on the steering wheel, sucked in a deep breath. As he blew it out he punched the accelerator and by sheer force of will backed it out of the black water puddle and onto dry sand.
I cheered. What a man! What a brother!
He interrupted my celebration by pointing out that we still were in the middle of nowhere, and he was still afraid to turn the Civic around, which meant we had to go forward, somehow. We looked around and saw tracks in the loose sand beside the road, through some low palmettos. Someone in a vehicle had taken that route around the huge puddle.
Cal backed a few more feet, shifted to forward, and jammed his foot to the floor.The little car bucked up the slight embankment, clawed for purchase, and hung up on the sand piled high between the tracks of the larger, brawnier vehicle that had gone before. We got out of the Civic and stared under it.
Hung up, beyond hope. We were unprintabled with a vengeance.
“We’re going to have to walk,” Cal said.
We rifled through the contents of the Civic. Bottles of water. Cal’s ball cap. He snatched a knife out of his fishing tackle box, a silly useless thing with a gut-hook on the tip. I grabbed my purse, as though I might do a little shopping along the way. Neither of us considered the two umbrellas in the car, which would have been shade-giving Godsends.
We gritted our teeth and started through snake heaven. The choices before us were either stepping through knee-high saw grass and palmetto, each frond of which hid a coral snake with twin gleaming pearls of venom dripping from its fangs, or splashing through thigh-deep black water, which hid God knew what.
Agreeing that we had driven so far through this gorgeous hell that we must surely be closer to the end than the beginning, we walked on in the same direction we had been driving. We did not know we had gotten stuck at the most remote point of the vicious Floridian joke of an interpretive drive.
We talked as we walked. We were resourceful, well-read. If anybody could figure a way out of this mess, surely we could.
I cannot describe the relentless terror I experienced every time I lifted a foot and put it down again, the vivid images that screamed through my head. Was that glistening in the weeds an alligator tail? A copperhead? Oh, dear heaven, what was that squishing under my sandal in the puddle? My heart flopped in my chest like a fish in the bottom of a rowboat.
The midday sun was merciless, beating down on the white sand and reflecting back. We were walking through a rotisserie oven. Or hell, with snakes.
Fifteen minutes after we’d left the Civic stranded in the sand, the track bent around a stand of live oaks and ended. In every direction, only palmetto and saw grass. No path. Wait – what was that up ahead? It looked like a canal. No, it was the road we had been struggling along, now sunk completely beneath black water, waist deep. The land declined gradually as we walked, and now was under water.
Cal looked at me, noted my trembling lip and panicky eyes. He said gently, “We’ll have to go back.”
Go back? Go back through the hordes of poisonous snakes and alligators and scorpions?
I closed my eyes for a long breadth of time, praying for strength and the courage I now knew I lacked. (You know how you always wonder how you’d do in a truly bad situation? Well, now I knew. I was a coward, and I didn’t care who knew it, as long as I didn’t have to go BACK through that nightmare.)
But we did have to go back. It was even worse than that, I was beginning to realize. Icy fingers were racing over my skin, followed by tongues of flame. My vision was blurring, clearing, blurring. My stomach roiled. Heat stroke, I thought, but didn’t say.
We passed the Civic, red metal hide blazing in the sun, radiating yet more heat as we struggled by, barely noticing it. I thought about how far we’d driven, and how far we had to walk, and my spirit quailed.
Fifty feet or so past the car, my head began to whirl madly and the terrain spun in crazy circles as I swooned to the hot white sand. When I opened my eyes, I saw my brother’s worried face. “Are you okay? Hey! Are you okay?” I’d fainted.
No, I wasn’t okay. He helped me sit up in the hot white sand. I said, “Cal, I’m sorry. I can’t do this.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ll go for help. You stay here and rest.” He spotted a grove of live oaks a hundred feet back the road. “C’mon, I’ll walk you back to the shade…”
“No.” Tears came to my eyes. “I’m not walking back through that again.”
“All right,” he said. “All right.” He pulled the knife he’d taken from the Civic out of his pocket and handed it to me. “Here. Not because you’ll need it, but because it’ll make you feel better.” He gave me a bottle of water, kept one. He turned to walk away, looked back at me again. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
I watched my excellent big brother trudge away from me down a long white sandy track in the Bull Creek Wildlife Management Area. We were the only souls left on earth.
I was dizzy and afraid, surrounded by miles of wilderness and unknown creatures. I was sick, head swimming, stomach churning, pulse racing. It occurred to me that the previous night’s rain might have left the sand beneath the surface wet and cooler. I used the blade of the knife Cal had left me to dig down into the sand. Dark, wet sand. I plastered it over every exposed inch of skin, and though it dyed me as black as the puddles on the road, it lowered my body temperature to a tolerable level. Relief from the burning of my skin, a return to clearer thoughts. My stomach calmed. I used the pathetic knife blade to saw through the tough woody stems of the palmetto, cutting fronds and sticking them in my damp tangled hair for shade. Throughout the afternoon, I repeated the process of coating myself with damp sand.
The drop in body temperature helped, enough that I amused myself by building a sand castle, and using a few palmettos for decoration.
I worried about Cal, a bit older than I, although fitter and better prepared for the heat, as a result of his long bike rides in the Florida weather. Suppose he succumbed to the heat, too?
A rattling sound, moving up and down the hedgerow of palmettos on the opposite side of the sand road, caught my attention. I dampened a finger on my tongue and held it up, but could detect no breeze. I frowned. Then I heard the grunting noises, and saw a dark rump moving from open space to open space, then another. Pigs. Pigs like the one we’d seen road-killed near Kissimmee, with sharp hooves and wicked tusks. A dozen or more, rooting in the sand just beyond the road.
I remembered the tiny pocket knife I had in my purse for unexpected necessities, and dug it out. I stood on the sand road, legs spaced wide, Cal’s stupid gut-hook-tipped fishing knife in one hand, my miniature pocket knife in the other, to make myself a more formidable figure. I shouted things at the pigs as though they would understand: “I’ve got a knife, pigs!” They snorted and grunted and rooted, but remained mostly invisible, which somehow made them more frightening. After a time, most of the herd edged away, and I saw them disappear into the grove of live oaks some distance off. There was still one moving near me, though, and I remained vigilant. Finally, it stepped out onto the road twenty feet away, and stared at me. The bristles on its snout quivered as it sniffed and gazed at me, the white gleam of its tusks catching the sun. I was unsure whether a shout would be more likely to scare it or provoke it, so I stayed dumb. At last, it tossed its head, snorted at me, and trotted off after the rest of the herd and I watched it vanish into the stand of oaks.
I sat down and slathered more damp sand over my shoulders and arms, and prayed for Cal’s safety and swift return.
A rattlesnake four or five feet long slithered across the road the length of a small room from where I sat. I stared as it passed.
The sky darkened abruptly, as Florida skies do, and the wind picked up, a blessed coolness on my tortured skin. Clouds scudded across the bruised sky; the rains spat into the dry sand. I thought about the puddles that had led us to this disaster. What if it rained so hard they couldn’t get in to rescue me until morning?
I considered that for a moment, and decided I would not attempt to survive a night in this God-forsaken country. If it came to that, gut-hook or no gut-hook, I would saw away at my wrist with my brother’s foolish knife and end my own life. I could not face the prospect of pigs or snakes or alligators doing it for me.
The storm’s temper passed as quickly as it brewed, and I felt better, sitting in the damp sand in my wet clothing. And then, from far off, I heard a sound, faint and indefinable at first, slowly swelling as it neared. An engine. A dark green late-model pickup truck surged around the farthest bend in the road, and I saw Cal leaning out the passenger window, waving.
Cal and the best-looking man I’ve ever seen climbed out of the Ford Ranger and greeted me. My brother, who is a lamb of a man, but taciturn and undemonstrative, grabbed me into a huge bear hug and said brokenly, “I thought I’d find you dead.”
He introduced me to Al, the gallant four-wheeler who’d found him nearly at the entrance to Bull Creek. I shook his hand for all I was worth. Cal opened the passenger door for me, but I shook my head, looking at the beautiful Al.
“I’ll get your pretty truck all dirty,” I said.
“Dirty? Girl, it can’t get no dirtier than it is. Get your butt IN here.”
Al hooked a chain to the Civic to pull it out of the stuck and had to stop three more times to pull Cal out of the sand. Al said, “I don’t know how he got that little thing in here in the first place!”
At the entrance, we stopped to offer thanks and the couple of twenties Cal pressed on Al. When we reached the main, safe, civilized, blessed road again, the Civic’s muffler let go and we dragged it, wallah, wallah, wallah, all the way back to Orlando.
