Animal Magnetism

Learning to Adapt

Living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the mid-1950s, I was surrounded by an exotic natural world that was completely different from the Piedmont I loved so much. Florida was a surreal place where it might be pouring rain on one side of the street with brilliant sunshine on the other. The subtropics challenge those of us raised in the higher latitudes. I had much to learn from this exotic new environment.

In South Florida, night-blooming jasmine infused the air, brushed my skin, promised magic. The smells and sounds are sui generis, unique to this patch of subtropics. Much of what you see delights.

Other things can kill you. Dig down, hit a pocket of mango gas, that’s the last breath you’ll take. Fool around on the jetties jutting out into the ocean without paying attention to where the schools of little fish are, and a shark might consider you lunch, or a barracuda might be tempted to see how sweet human meat is. Smaller creatures come armed. Mosquitoes bite like the devil, as do sand flies, and then there are palmetto bugs and cockroaches large enough to pay rent.

On the bright side, I can remember a flock of flamingos escaping the infield of Gulfstream Park racetrack, filling the sky with a brilliant pink cloud. They returned shortly after this soaring moment because life was good at Gulfstream once upon a time.

Across the Florida East Coast railroad tracks reposed a relatively large swamp. Fort Lauderdale was still small then. As I mentioned earlier, a city of thirty thousand people was a kind of paradise. It wasn’t my paradise but it was seductive. I often miss it, especially when the poinciana trees bloom in March. All over Fort Lauderdale the eye is caught by huge orange canopies filled with birds singing away.

The swamp lacked such attractions, but it did have alligators. Now the whole thing has been drained. The alligators have all been shot (a sin) and houses sit on landfill. They’ll eventually tilt and crack, if they haven’t already.

Alligators scared me but I had to watch them. They’d lie on the banks sunning themselves, lazy creatures. Something would attract them and they’d slither into the swamp. When they opened their mouths it was impressive. Many a dog has made the mistake of getting too close to those open mouths only to discover how quickly an alligator can move. I never tested it.

Garfish, at a quick glance, can resemble sleek, small alligators. They’re actually a kind of needlefish with sharp, nasty teeth, and they can be aggressive. They’ll swim in close to the shore. I kept my distance from those as well.

Starting in the seventh grade, I endured two years of schooling at the Naval Air Station. The famous Lost Squadron took off from Naval Air long before I attended school there. By ninth grade, Sunrise Junior High was completed. I could walk to school, whereas Naval Air was over ten miles away. There was no air-conditioning. I didn’t have air-conditioning until I was in my forties. But you don’t miss what you don’t know, so it felt completely natural to sit in those two-tiered wooden barracks sweating as our teachers droned on. A few were good, but most of them had tired of teaching young people long ago. And none of them ever displayed the slightest interest in our natural environment.

Surrounded by the natural odor of sulphur gas from some of the waters, sweet-smelling flowers, heavy salt scent from the sea, I had no one to teach me. I can’t say I loved the environment as I loved and continue to love the Mid-Atlantic, but I was fascinated.

My salvation was the local library, a small building downtown on Middle River that I believe had once been a house. It felt like a house, anyway. Mom or Dad would drop me off, or sometimes I’d walk. It was four miles away. Other times I’d take the bus. Once I was there, I read and read.

I also went out and observed the natural world firsthand, and I can still vividly recall what I found.

Swamp foxes darted about, along with many forms of wild felines, including what we called the Florida panther, a sleek, fast-moving creature that could startle you. Sand sharks swam around the canals using their tails in a manner that fascinated me. Most big fish have powerful tails, but the sand shark’s seemed extra flexible. Like their bigger brethren in the ocean, they look fearsome. Among these ocean sharks, the hammerheads stood out, never failing to startle with those strange eyes. The sand sharks left us alone, though. I never tested the ocean sharks by being in the water with them.

The creature that fascinated me most was the manatee. “Manatee” first came into the English language in 1554 according to my Oxford English Dictionary. An aquatic marine animal, this wonderful creature is sometimes called a sea cow.

I observed my first manatee on a little bridge that stretched from Fort Lauderdale into Wilton Manor on Northeast Fifteenth Street. A little curve in the water there allowed all manner of aquatic creatures to fiddle and faddle.

Manatees are large, brown, and oddly shaped, kind of like a flattened beanbag. They eat plants—no flesh—and they like shallow waters. They can dive, though, and they can move with fair speed, given their shape and size. They weigh around a thousand pounds and they have a few natural predators including sharks and alligators. But frankly, people are their main problem. Manatees can get cut up by outboard propellers. Someone not a Floridian or a person interested in nature would see one and scream bloody murder. Fortunately few of these folks owned guns or harpoons. Occasionally the police would receive a call about manatees. I often wonder what they said to the panicked soul on the other end of the line. Eighty percent of police calls are nuisance calls, I would imagine, and twenty percent must be horrible things.

Anyway, my fascination grew. I’d ride up Fifteenth Street on my trusty blue Schwinn with the balloon tires, go down the embankment, and sit by the canal, wondering if I’d see one of my beanbags. Often I did. Once one came close to enough give me the once-over. I guess I didn’t pass muster, because he turned around and left me flat.

The manatee’s maneuverability impressed me. One of my classmates reminded me of this aquatic mammal. He didn’t look like a brown beanbag but he resembled a block. No shape. However, he was fast and played left tackle. Left tackles are smart. He played through high school and college, and when he came back home he started a turf business. Underline “successful” three times.

As long as we protect manatees they’ll be successful, too.

Sea turtles astonished me. Once a year the females would clamber up from the Atlantic, dig, and lay their eggs. They’d twirl around on their bellies once they’d pulled sand back over their future offspring. Then they’d slowly amble back to the ocean. They were huge. And I marveled at the fact that I was looking at animals who were probably seventy or eighty years old. I don’t know if they can breed at those ages, but you’d see the turtles who didn’t come onto shore waiting in the shallows for their companions.

Age impresses me in any creature. Part of it is luck, but it also means that animal is wise. We place so much emphasis on book smarts that we miss emotional wisdom, wisdom about the self, the ability to read the environment. Long-lived creatures have figured these things out. Many scientists will tell you an animal has no sense of self, of its own individuality. Bunk. And prudence isn’t fear. There are prudent animals.

The A-plus students, the Oxford scholars, often lead lives that are emotional disasters, but the kid who somehow has the sense not to drink and drive, marries the right person, finds work that keeps the heart full, that prudent kid keeps going and going. He or she may never be lauded for excellence in their field but will be well-rounded and successful in life.

Of course, some academics and left-brain folks get it. Survival, I mean. But this sinks in later in life. The convention is that stupid people cause trouble. Some do. They usually wind up dead or in jail. I think more trouble is caused by people who may be experts in one field but are dolts about life in general.

Animals don’t suffer these problems. The dumb ones are killed off early. They don’t get to pass on those dumb genes. The unlucky ones perish early, too.

Due to air travel, diseases that affect animals can be carried to our country literally on people’s pants legs. That, too, kills people and animals. Witness the West Nile virus.

Our future well-being and that of other creatures now depends on the human ability to correctly assess a threat and react swiftly. Remember the dreadful slaughter of cattle in England as a result of hoof-and-mouth disease? Someone dawdled. That’s all it took. The cost in lives, livelihoods, and grief can never truly be calculated.

The human animal must now “be sober, be vigilant,” as Muriel Spark once put it. When you factor in cultural differences it seems inevitable that in the future, thousands if not millions of certain animals (chickens, for instance) will die, and millions of us may die with them.

Florida couldn’t prepare me for this. Nothing could. But Florida and its creatures taught me adaptability to new weather conditions. They also taught me that beauty is only skin deep. Thank you, Miss Manatee.