Photo by David MacEnulty

Last summer my daughter and I were kayaking in a spring-fed river in North Florida. We had paddled into one of the small inlets in search of a spring when my daughter stopped and pointed to something. I thought she was pointing to the origin of the spring and I turned my kayak around — only to realize I was just a few feet away from a dark, seven-foot alligator! I started paddling so hard I looked like I was in a cartoon. I was terrified! My whole body pulsed with terror!

“Why didn’t you tell me there was an alligator!” I asked (okay, maybe I yelled).

“I tried to,” she said, paddling close behind me.

We got back into the main river as quickly as we could, and I kept a close eye on anything that looked like a floating snout after that. It took a good while for me to calm down. Talk about getting your cardio!

Alligators have cropped up in my historical fiction more than once. In The Burning Bride, Book 3 of the Delafield & Malloy Investigations, Louisa gets left in a Florida swamp where she’s pretty much surrounded by gators. You might wonder how she survived because alligators can run upwards of 11 miles an hour. When they want to kill something, they snap their powerful jaws on their prey and take it below the surface where it drowns or dies of shock. The saving grace is that they don’t eat that often, and their favorite food is apple snails.

The other time an alligator has appeared in my historical fiction is in my novel The Woman with the Wicked Face, inspired by the life of silent film star, Theda Bara. When she was in St. Augustine filming the silent movie Heart and Soul in 1916, her director decided to make use of the local fauna. He and some of his crew went to the Alligator Farm (established in 1893) and they managed to get a 500-year-old alligator (or so the proprietor claimed) onto the set. Never mind that the story was supposed to take place in Hawaii where they don’t have alligators, he knew his audiences would thrill to the sight of terrifying gator.

So as Theda Bara was riding a horse down the road, she was supposed to come across the gator. Unfortunately, the horse (which was not stupid) freaked out when he saw the gator and reared up, spilling Theda onto the ground just a few feet away from the saurian beast. She leapt up and skedaddled out of there. All in a day’s work for Theda Bara.

If you ever get a chance to visit St. Augustine, I recommend a trip to the Alligator Farm. Not only can you watch the alligators getting fed by one of the park employees, you can walk down the boardwalk to the rookery where thousands of storks, cranes, herons, and roseate spoonbills come to nest in the springtime. It’s an amazing sight.

Book Recommendation: Like many Floridians I have long been a fan of Marjory Stoneman Douglas. I was fortunate enough to review a collection of her short stories in the 1990s and to write a feature article celebrating the centennial of this indefatigable fighter for the environment and author of the classic book on the Florida Everglades, River of Grass.

Not only was she an ardent environmentalist, she participated in the suffrage movement and the Civil Rights struggles. Today, however, people may only associate her name with the high school where a tragic shooting occurred. So in addition to Stoneman Douglas’ fantastic book, I highly recommend this historical novel based on her life:  AMONG THE BEAUTIFUL BEASTS by Lori McMullen.

By casting the story as a novel rather than a biography, Lori McMullen is able to immerse us in the writer’s imagination as she experiences a troubled childhood with a mentally ill mother, a disastrous marriage to a criminal, and a heartbreaking love affair with a man driven mad by World War I. When she winds up in Florida where she will make her mark as a journalist, the reader observes how these events shape the powerful advocate she will become.

As always, I welcome comments and questions from my readers!