The adventures of a Florida boy (part 9)

In the 1960s, kids ran as far and wild as their imaginations would take them

ONE OF AN OCCASIONAL SERIES: My boyhood was spent in Florida in the 1960s on an island called Coquina Key. My parents’ waterfront home overlooked a large expanse of Tampa Bay. Back then, parts of the island were undeveloped, which left plenty of room for climbing trees, digging forts in the sand, and swimming in shark-infested waters (though we didn’t give the latter much thought).

This is part 9 of a random and mostly light-hearted series that I might eventually combine into a memoir. I’m telling these stories to the best of my recollection and changing names and physical descriptions just because it seems like the right thing to do.

Photo by Jack Kelly on Unsplash

Alligators, eagles, and cockroaches

My friends and I used to play football in a large grassy field at Lake Maggiore Park in St. Petersburg. Back then, the lake wasn’t what I would consider a thing of beauty. It was broad but not very deep, and several feet of disgusting muck smothered its once-sandy bottom. That was one reason not to swim in it. But there was another.

Alligators. The lake was full of them.

It wasn’t uncommon for a 10-foot alligator to sun itself on the bank of the lake less than 50 feet from where we were unleashing violent tackles and scoring dramatic touchdowns.

Just about every body of freshwater had alligators. Quite often, the behemoths even found their way into our swimming pools.

I can’t claim to have had any dramatic encounters with alligators. I spent most of my time in saltwater where sharks were the number one concern. But we would occasionally walk over to an alligator just to see how close we could get before it scrambled into the water. It barely entered our minds that it might scramble toward us.

Anyone who has spent time in Florida has seen alligators. And if you lived there long enough, you pretty much saw some every day at one place or another.

Are there people in the world who have never seen an alligator in person? To a Florida boy like me, that did not seem possible.

There are other commonplace things in Florida that might not be common to people who have never visited the state. Here are a few examples:

Lizards: A variety of lizards thrives in Florida, but the ones I grew up with were mostly green and brown anoles. During daylight hours, anoles were as common as flies. I could stroll around the outside of my house and easily count 30 or more, and those were just the ones I saw. More likely, my back yard alone was home to hundreds.

I was a boy. And boys like to do boy things. We would catch a couple of big lizards, dangle them by their tails over a bucket, bang their heads together, and then drop them into the bucket. The feisty lizards would then fight like angry dinosaurs. Was this cruel? Of course! And I would never do this now. But back then, it was just another way to pass the time.

Seagulls: Everyone has seen a seagull, right? There are more than 50 different species found around the world. In Florida, the most numerous species is probably herring gulls—and they are everywhere! In oceans, seas, lakes, ponds, McDonald’s parking lots (they love French fries and just about anything that is even remotely edible). If you’re at the beach eating potato chips, watch out! They will swoop down and take one right out of your fingers, onion dip and all.

In my late teens, I worked at a seafood restaurant located inside a boat marina that held a yearly fishing contest called the Suncoast Tarpon Roundup. Back then, there was no such thing as catch-and-release. Contestants would bring in dead tarpon to be weighed and measured. And since tarpon aren’t edible, the organizers of the roundup would simply fling hundreds of them into several large dumpsters that sat across the street from the restaurant. It usually took a couple of days before the dumpsters were emptied. Meanwhile, the rotting, smelly tarpon would attract rats the size of beer cans. The rats then attracted seagulls, which swallowed the vermin whole. What a way to go, huh?

(Seagulls have even been known to swallow fully grown squirrels.)

Blue herons: I now live in the mountains of Upstate South Carolina and occasionally will see a blue heron. But in Florida, I saw them all the time. They are large, beautiful, fascinating, hypnotic birds. They were not as numerous as seagulls, of course, but I hardly went a day without seeing a blue heron.

Bald eagles: It also wasn’t unusual to see bald eagles. The majestic birds swooped down to the surface of the water just a hundred feet or so from the seawall in my back yard and plucked a wriggling mullet right out of the bay. This often occurred several times in a single day.

Mosquitoes: For every bald eagle, there were 20 blue herons. For every blue heron, there were 100 alligators. For every alligator, there were 1,000 seagulls. And for every seagull, there were a 1,000,000,000,000,000 mosquitoes. And these suckers were bad sombeeches. In the warm months (in Florida, you’re talking February through November), I could barely go outside in the evening, especially around dusk. Florida mosquitoes were large, voracious, and angry at the world.

Cockroaches: These hideous insects weren’t as numerous as mosquitoes, but a day hardly passed when I didn’t have to smash at least a couple of them inside our house. This is the main reason that women who live in Florida prefer to have sons, so that they can order them to smash cockroaches.

Like the mosquitoes, Florida cockroaches—especially the ones we called Palmetto bugs—were huge and fearless. There are a lot of terrifying things in life, and having a 3-inch-long Palmetto bug run up your bare leg is certainly one of them.

When an elderly relative of mine died, it fell to me to go to her house and clean up a thick pile of carpet that had lain in her carport for years. The damp and moldy carpet was filled with cockroaches, and as I scooped up heavy piles with a shovel and heaved them into a dumpster, the cockroaches scattered everywhere. Within minutes, an army of lizards appeared and had the feast of a lifetime. I remember seeing one of the smaller lizards somehow devour a cockroach that looked even bigger than the lizard was. To this day, that memory still amazes me.

Photo by Kenrick Mills on Unsplash

Palm trees: Almost every yard in Florida has a palm tree or two or 10. Whenever I return to Florida for a visit, it always astounds me how many palm trees there are. But as a boy, I never gave it any consideration.

Sandspurs: In terms of sheer numbers, sandspurs might rank number two to mosquitoes. If I had a nickel for every time I stepped barefoot on a sandspur, I would be rich beyond measure. If they got into your yard, one plant could become a dozen in a week or less. They were the scourge of my boyhood, and I hate them with a passion to this day.

Afternoon thunderstorms: With climate change screwing up weather patterns, I don’t know if it’s still this way. But when I was a boy, it rained every day around 4 o’clock, especially in the summer, i.e. February-November.

In only a few minutes, the sky changed from a light blue to nearly black. Stupendous bolts of lightning crashed upon the land. Forty to 50 mph winds lashed the palm trees, scared the lizards, and scattered the mosquitoes. Even the seagulls went into hiding. I’m not sure about the alligators.

An inch of rain could fall in 15 minutes. And then as quickly as it began, the storm would pass through, the sky would become blue again, the heat would return, steam would rise from the streets, and life would go on.

Photo by Rajiv Bajaj on Unsplash

Heat/humidity: To say that Florida is hot and humid is a grand understatement. When I was a boy, it rarely got above 92 degrees, but the humidity was also 92, which made the feel-like temperature hover around 184. And that wasn’t even the worst part. It sometimes got into the 90s in February or November. There was many a Christmas Day when I ran around outdoors in shorts and a T-shirt.

Did it ever snow? Ha!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 🤣

Sunburns: I had probably 50 sunburns between the ages of 5 and 18, which is the reason I now have to go to a dermatologist twice a year and face the terror of the liquid nitrogen gun. But as much as this hurts, it’s not nearly as bad as stepping on a sandspur.

The adventures of a Florida boy — past episodes

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

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