Gators and the Disciplines of Prose

From an innocuous distance – say, 10 yards across a brown, slow-moving tributary of the Brazos River – they don’t look so much harmless as inert, like logs stuck in the mud. You can’t see their eyes – “eel-gray with vertical pupils,” Edward Hoagland assures us -- until you move closer, but by then you are less likely to be noting anatomical niceties with precision. Park signs, red letters on white background, are posted everywhere: “DO NOT APPROACH ALLIGATORS.”

Yesterday, for the first time, I saw alligators in the wild, in Brazos Bend State Park, one hour southwest of Houston. By my count, we saw 24 of them, ranging from carry-on-luggage size to one monster as long as my Bonneville. To my Northern eyes, they look too exotic, too computer-generated to be "live, livin' and breathin," as I remember a sideshow barker say of his Giant Rats of Sumatra. We heard one crashing through the tall brown reeds on the far side of the river until it stopped, stolid and ancient, at the water’s edge. Alligators are like firefighters -- their lives are long stretches of inactivity and tedium broken only by moments of frenzy. A park ranger, who had let us pet a baby alligator back at the visitor’s center, said they are smarter than their reptilian cousins, turtles and snakes, and they seem to have a memory and a primitive ability to learn. But their brains are peanuts, she said, and they act strictly out of instinct, like most killers.

I approached within six feet of a small one, four feet long and lying perpendicular to the river, head cocked to the left so he could watch me with one unblinking eye. Like a fool, I wanted to take his picture. When I stopped, I could see long, crooked teeth jutting from his upper jaw over his lower lip – an orthodontist’s nightmare. Only later did I read one of the more detailed park signs, which urged humans and dogs not to approach within 30 feet of a gator.

Hoagland, a nature writer with little taste for the mystical rubbish that compromises so much contemporary nature writing, clearly likes alligators. In the 1960s he wrote a short story which is not very good as a story (you can see why he switched to writing essays), but which is very good on the subject of alligators. “The Final Fate of the Alligators” concerns a guy who raises one in his New York City apartment. Here’s a sample:

“The alligator, like an overgrown brown invalid confined to bed, lived in the big bathtub. If an outsider had been invited in to look at it, he would have gaped, because this was no ten-inch plaything but an animal of barrel-like girth, with a rakish, pitiless mouth as long as a man’s forearm and a tail as long as his legs. The cut of the mouth, however, was no clue to the alligator’s mood since, like the crocodile mask that a child wears in a school play, it was vivid but never changed. The eyes, eel-gray with vertical pupils, were not as static. They seemed to have a light source within them, and the great body, scummed slightly with algae, was a battlefield shade, the shade of mud.”

This is over-written and under-realized, clotted with gratuitous metaphors. But clearly, Hoagland has looked at an alligator. He’s not writing about a symbol of primeval life force or some such nonsense. “Rakish, pitiless mouth” is very nice. I saw one of those yesterday.

In a much later essay, “In Okefenokee,” the writing is pared-back and efficient:

“Their heads were flat-looking and grimacey because of the long mask of their mouths – a grin that is two hundred million years old. Swimming alligators have horsey heads, however, the eyes and high nostrils are emphasized, instead of their fixed somber smiles. They look more like a sea horse than a sea horse does (though the inches between their nostrils and eyes denote their total length as measured in feet).”

Separated by more than 20 years – an eternity in the life of a writer’s style – the excerpts tell the tale of a maturing artist. There is continuity – in both he mentions masks – but there is growth and discipline also, less willingness to indulge in eloquence for its own sake.