Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
A job for the young and immortal
Back when I was in grad school, my program sent me to a one-week workshop on all aspects of cancer. Not surprisingly, we all called it Cancer Camp. It was a hoot. We flew to a convention center in Keystone, Colorado, where it’s cool even in summer, and we got to do all kinds of fun stuff while we were there — a whitewater rafting trip, a hike, some serious hot-tubbing, even a dance.
They housed us six to a condo. One of my roommates was a big Floridian who seemed ancient to our crowd of twenty-somethings. Guy must have been 40. First night we were all hanging out in our living room swapping stories, and he told us how he and his buddies used to make some spare cash back in high school: hunting alligator eggs.
I don’t recall how much they were paid per egg, but this 2007 story in the Times Picayune says that nowadays, the city makes $12 to $13 per egg. Perhaps back in the 50s, kids were making a buck or two per egg. Good money*.
One guy, the high school track team’s captain, had the job of drawing off the mother gator. He was fast and nimble enough that he had to limit himself, in fact — if he lost her too quickly, she would only return to the nest in time to nail his friends as they raided her nest. The kid found this to be great sport. How far could he lure the female? Or, phrased differently: how slow could he run and not get caught?
One day, his friends (of which my storyteller was one) heard a high-pitched shriek, and they feared the worst. When they got back to the car, they found him in a state of near-catatonia, unwounded, but missing most of the denim from the left calf of his Levis.
Sometimes I wonder if the runner ever went out again. I’ll bet he did. I’m thinking of all the times I body-surfed as a kid (a kid who swam about as well as he played basketball), got pummeled by a wave, yet always had faith that I would be carried into shallow water, not deep. This, despite some nasty instances of undertow and riptide. Even one near-drowning didn’t slow me down; I went right back in.
I’m not sure when I lost my own sense of immortality . . . but I think fatherhood had a lot to do with it.
D.
*Alligator populations go up and down. I’m guessing that at the time, the People of the State of Florida felt there were too many gators for their own good.
