The Flight of the Iguana (35 page)

•   •   •

No more rain, no more deerflies, no more oppressive heat and humidity—just mild sunshine and the gradual awareness that this swamp journey of ours was somehow being smiled upon.

The scenery had gotten even more exotically gorgeous after Sapling Prairie, when we turned south toward the very heart of the Okefenokee on a channel that led in and out among cypress domes. The cypress themselves seemed to thrive in this area; they were lofty and stark, exaggeratedly fat where they came out of the black water but tapering quickly down into long roof-beam trunks, Spanish moss dangling all over the high branches. The smilax vines continued to reach out at us along narrow runs, but now Red and I were reaching back, letting navigational chores lapse while we snapped off those sweet little tips, popping them down like huckleberries. There was a noticeable current again, upon which we moved easily. The surroundings were halcyon, but best of all, for me, was having the Red Ace there in the front of the canoe, intermittently rummaging down into his bucket of cameras and zoom lenses and fancy filters, coming back up with some combination of that hardware in front of his face while he tracked the latest alligator on a leisurely swim along the channel before us, the latest heron on a laborious takeoff and then a slow graceful walk across the sky. I was glad to have Red here in the swamp because it had been too little and too long. I had barely seen him since 1972.

Certain people can make the most pleasant enterprise seem doleful; others can turn any grim misadventure into at least pretty good slapstick. The Red Ace is of the latter group. I had laughed through some of my life's dreariest moments in his company. I could describe the time he split my scalp open with one crack of an exploding all-day lollipop, an event that occurred
onstage during a high-school-production melodrama in 1965. I bled on my Buster Brown suit while we went ahead and sang “Never Hit Your Grandma with a Shovel.” I could tell you about the West Side of Chicago in 1968 and a neighborhood gang that was intent on frightening off a commune of do-gooder white boys. I could recount the one about The Man in the Towel, late at night in the labyrinthine corridors of the Penn Station YMCA, 1969, with the Red Ace and me literally barricaded up in a five-dollar room. And there were the few weeks he slept on the floor of my garret in England, during the winter of 1971, while he tried to decide whether to fly home and propose marriage to a certain lady and I groped for a plausible excuse to drop out of graduate school. But never mind all that. Just take my word. Space doesn't allow doing justice here to those episodes, and anyway this is a story about—at least mainly about—the Okefenokee Swamp.

During the past dozen years we had seen little of each other, Red and I. It was a matter of history and geography. Time and change. The movement of waters along an imperceptible gradient, dividing to follow different routes to different seas. Then again, though, it wasn't really so gentle as that implies. Something ended abruptly in 1972.

What was it that ended? Not the friendship. Not just our youth or his bachelorhood. Not just my romance with academia. It was the sixties themselves, according to my theory, that ended in 1972.

Now I know some pundits argue that the sixties ended at Altamont, in December of 1969, when a Mick Jagger song finally resulted in murder and the band played on. Others would claim that the true end came in April of 1975, at the moment the last U.S. helicopter lifted off the roof of a building that had been the American Embassy in a place now named Ho Chi Minh City. I assert otherwise. For me the definite and unmistakable end of the sixties—for whatever they had been worth, and God only knows
—came on that evening in November of 1972 when the network computers announced, just minutes after the polls had closed, that Richard Nixon had squashed an earnest, unfortunate man named George McGovern, on whose behalf I had gone AWOL from all aspects of my own life. And of course I was just one of many.

Me, I slept that night on a pile of leaflets in the back room of a McGovern storefront in suburban Chicago. I used my seersucker politico jacket for a pillow, next morning dropping that into a trash barrel. My reaction within ten days was to depart the civilized U.S., heading back to England and then to Africa and then eventually, still farther, to Montana.

Yes I was young, and yes my political metabolism was hysterical. I was angry and worried and saddened—everything but surprised. But I also count myself as having been lucky: The abrupt end of the sixties may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me, because Montana certainly was.

Neither Red nor I got back to southern Ohio for that fifth or tenth or (if there are such things) fifteenth high school reunion. I heard he was married and then later not and teaching tennis and then not. He was back East in a town that he himself had always celebrated for its grim ugliness. He was steady, but there were no giveaways of good fortune. He endured solitarily through a run of bad weather, of the personal variety, that went on just too damn long. It seemed to me like unfairness. I invited him, in a tone that verged on browbeating, to come out and fill his lungs with Montana air. But that never managed to happen. I suggested he move out permanently (although adding to the number of Montana residents, even by one, is a responsibility I don't take lightly). Moving wasn't on. Still he needed—and
deserved,
it seemed to me—to fill his lungs with a new sort of air. Any sort. Shuffle the deck, give a crank to the kaleidoscope, get some fresh alignments and juxtapositions. This was all unsolicited diagnosis by me, the Dutch uncle. A new sort of air.

Finally I said:
Meet me in south Georgia two months from today, and we'll go out and get lost in the Okefenokee Swamp.

The Red Ace said:
How could I possibly refuse?

•   •   •

Which brings me to another story that Crawfish told in the privacy of the swamp. He didn't push these stories forward, understand, as though he enjoyed talking about himself. On the contrary. No, it was simply a matter of memory doors opening and anecdotes emerging as a certain swamp-bound but genuine rapport grew up among the three of us. And Crawfish, I learned, was a man of multiple doors, with a luminous little memory behind each.

This one was about being electrocuted. It happened when he was fourteen. (A hard year for him, the same year he shot an arrow through his own wrist with a device called a Hawaiian sling. But that's a different story, and not one that illustrates the human body's capacity for self-healing.) The doctors in this case of electrocution honestly thought he had killed himself, at least temporarily. They suspected that his heart was not beating during the time he sailed through the air.

He was in the upper branches of a tree, doing merely the sort of foolhardy and routinely life-threatening things that fourteen-year-old boys used to do in trees. Leaning too far, he reached back for support and grabbed hold of a wire. The wire was carrying ten thousand volts. The tree was wet. Zap: legally dead, through that long dreamy moment while his body fell forty-five feet to the ground. “I had the sensation of floating,” said Crawfish. “I
saw
myself floating there, my body in the air. Dead.”

But he was a lucky young Crawfish, missing the picket fence by a full three feet and hitting the ground hard. That impact on landing—so the doctors hypothesized—must have started his heart beating again.

The moral, I suppose, is that if the tree had been smaller his death might have been more permanent. The moral is that you
never know what it might be, causing your lungs to fill with new air. It might be Richard Nixon. It might be the Okefenokee Swamp.

•   •   •

As late afternoon was turning to early evening, we came into an area called Big Water, which is a lake by the Okefenokee system of figuring, though in some ways seems more like a river, yet, in real justice, should not and cannot be reduced to either of those categories. Big Water is a thing of the swamp world, and you would find its equivalent nowhere else. It was the loveliest spot Red and I had seen or would see in the Okefenokee, and in its own style probably one of the most magical wild places on the continent. It was also high on Crawfish's private list of Okefenokee secrets, and though he presented it to us with quiet pride, noncommittally, later we knew that he had been gratified by our appreciation. Here in Big Water was where the alligators came out to greet us.

What the maps call Big Water Lake is really a liquid canyon through tall cypress, a long blade of open water running on for three miles but never more than about forty yards wide. On each side, beneath the cypress, are little coves of still water carpeted over with spatterdock. The current moves north to south, steady enough to carry a canoe but so smooth that the water never forfeits its texture of polished ebony. With the light angled low, we could see from thirty yards back the tiny wakes of whirligig beetles as they proceeded before us along the surface. In the course of a couple of miles, paddling quietly, we also saw the wakes of a dozen alligators, wakes that were larger but not much larger than those of the beetles: nothing but nostrils and eyes protruding to cut the water, tail working powerfully but invisibly. Most of these alligators slid away as we approached, moving off downstream and then, if we gained on them, diving; they could easily stay down, if they had to, for half an hour. But some were more curious.

In one of the spatterdock coves we stopped to explore the possibility of a fish dinner. Crawfish unwound the line from his cane pole and flopped out a hook baited with salami—the higher technology of angling has not yet come to the Okefenokee, nor is there any reason why it should. In a minute Crawfish's bobber was bobbing tentatively. I held our canoe below Crawfish's boat, in the tail of the eddy, giving him room, while the Red Ace's camera went clickety clickety. We found ourselves whispering. Last shards of sunlight breaking through the cypress, and we both felt the same tranquility and pagan reverence as if we had been sitting the afternoon away in the cathedral at Chartres. We watched Crawfish working his hook and line—and in that we weren't alone. A large alligator had come out of the spatterdock, sliding up quietly near Crawfish's canoe to see how the fisherman was faring.

Crawfish twitched the cane, then lifted a small sunfish up and into his boat. We whooped encouragingly, Crawfish said nothing, and the alligator came a couple of yards closer.

Only its eyeballs and snout were visible, but the spacing between those suggested an animal about seven feet long. It was holding position, patient and very attentive, less than ten feet off Crawfish's starboard bow. He could have tweaked it on the nose with his fishing pole. Instead he just ignored it. Caught another sunfish. The alligator moved still closer. I had thought at first, unavoidably, about Captain Hook and the croc-with-the-clock, but this alligator, it became clear, did not represent the slightest menace. It had more the demeanor of a shameless mutt at the back door of a butcher shop.

“He's waiting for a handout,” Crawfish said across the quiet water. “Been around too many fishermen at this spot.”

Crawfish offered the gator no handout. We understood why. That would have only reinforced its false and dangerous misapprehension of the nature of the human species. Still, it took a
person of will as well as principle to say no to such a beautiful animal.

•   •   •

Another story, this one of will and principle.

Back in 1968, about the same time Red and I were being terrorized by that gang in Chicago, Crawfish was enrolled at Armstrong College in Savannah; he was also working part-time as a herpetologist for the Savannah Science Museum. Herpetology being his real true love, he gradually began to spend more time at the museum than at Armstrong. When this fact became known to the members of a certain civic body, John Crawford received a draft notice.

The year 1968 was of course a very lousy time to be drafted. Furthermore, Crawfish was opposed on grounds of conscience to the war in Vietnam.

So he enlisted in the Navy, thinking this might be a partial solution. He was trained, then assigned as an electrician's mate to a submarine support ship based in Bremerton, Washington. Pulled duty down through Panama, at the Guantánamo base on Cuba, and at a submarine base in Key West. His ship was still there in Key West when word filtered through the ranks that a large antiwar demonstration would be held soon, just outside the gates of the sub base. If he had leave that day, Crawfish thought, he would like to participate. He was in no position, at that point in his life, to foresee which way the waters would flow.

The Navy brass at Key West were concerned that there might be trouble from those demonstrators. So they planned to assign a few men to stand guard with rifles, just in case things got out of hand. A finger was pointed while a voice said, “You, you, you, and Crawford.” It brought to Crawfish the clarification that until then had been muddled and delayed. He thought, “I can't do that. I might be asked to shoot my own friends.” And not just friends, but people with whom he was in political and moral agreement. So he filed for status as a conscientious objector.

It was the wrong time to do that. Convincing the U.S. armed forces that you are a conscientious objector after you have already
enlisted
in the Navy—and with a Catholic upbringing, which is supposed to make you well fit religiously for war—is only a little more difficult than driving an alligator through the eye of a needle. While his application was pending, Crawfish took abuse from the noncom officers. He was given the nickname “Rabbit.” He was razzed late at night by patriots stumbling in drunk. A large and solid fellow, Crawfish explained to them in his mild way that, though opposed to war, he had no objection whatever to fistfights. They backed off. And he argued his way successfully to the CO discharge.

Escaping the Navy at that juncture led him to a very different sort of life in the Florida Keys—a little commercial fishing, lots of diving, wildlife photography, lobster research, and eventually some free-lance biological consulting. That experience led back to Savannah, where in 1973 he and two friends started an enterprise called Wilderness Southeast, a nonprofit institution providing outfitted and guided wilderness trips with a strong emphasis on ecological education. Crawfish never suspected, early on, that he would ever earn a living from what he loved best: mucking around in places like the Okefenokee Swamp, one eye peeled for reptiles. But eleven years later the business was flourishing.