A Rainy Day in the Park

I've recently started walking in the park after work on a fairly regular basis. I know it's "good for me" and I suppose I should be doing it for that, but I actually like the park and the huge array of things I see in there, so that's the real reason I do it. Don't tell anybody. My walks now are regularly a mile and a half to two and a half, depending on what's worth looking at on that particular day. Of course when I do see something worth looking at, I'm not walking much. So that would constitute the "cooling down" period. Some days I "cool down" quite a lot.

Today I was "cooling down" two ponds into the park, about three quarters of a mile from home. The alligator family has moved from the culvert area of the run-off to the pond it feeds/drains, about 30 yards away. The little guys are getting noticeably bigger. They're probably twenty inches long now. They're snapping at insects and at other things they're only imagining, just to feel like the big guys. They used to be grouped around mom all the time, but now they're like teenagers. They'd rather not be embarrassed by hanging around a parent. She's usually about fifteen or twenty feet away, pretending not to watch. They don't even hang around each other all that much. A couple of weeks ago, even last week, it was common to see all five of them on mama's back and head. Treating her just like a log. Now it seems they'd rather hang around the shoreline pretty much on their own, venturing only about five feet or so out into the wild and wooly pond. The camouflage they have is incredible. When you see a picture of alligator young, it always seemed to me that the yellow stripes would make them stand out in a stark brown pond. Not so. There is just enough miscellaneous floating vegetation for them to just about disappear from sight. I know there are at least five of the critters, but frequently I can only find three or four. Sometimes only two. And I know they're there somewhere.

Today I was busy being like Marty Feldman, watching out for the mama gator with one eye, and looking for little guys with the other (I had only found three), when all of a sudden, it started to rain. Well O.K., I guess that's one more thing I need to keep track of. Well the sad truth is that of all the dozens of times I've walked in the park, I'd never been caught in the rain. Never even close. Well now. I could probably make it to home in about ten minutes or so. It wasn't raining all that hard yet, but unfortunately the sky was getting pretty dark. Why hadn't I noticed that? The best bet seemed to be get going at a somewhat increased pace. As I hurried down the crushed shell path next to the bottle-brush plants, the rain increased in intensity. Just as it started to come down big time, I darted into a nearby picnic shelter. These are things like buildings without sides. There are quite a few of these in the park, and I was happy that this one was where it was today. I waited in there for about fifteen or twenty minutes, and finally the rain lightened up to merely a steady downpour. Something I could deal with. Off I went. Rain here in Florida this time of year isn't the gentle warm rain one would wish for. It was pretty chilly even though the air temperature was about seventy-five or so. I was pretty wet by the time I got home. I guess I'll watch for rain just a little closer from now on. This was the fastest I'd walked all day, and on top of that, it turned out to be a real "cool down" period at the same time.

---

just a thought. bill brower, 29-Apr-2004

Back to Index   Back to Home Page