Wednesday, July 13, 2005
ghlorida ghotos
How do you spell “fish”? Ghoti: “gh” as in “tough,” “o” as in “women”, and “ti” as in “nation.” Did GB Shaw make this up, or was it me? A more thought-provoking question might be, why have you never seen Shaw and myself photographed together?
What (as our british friends may say) a load of (as our indo-slavic friends might say) bollocks ("fish"). But it does raise the stimulating subject of my vacation photographs, which are sadly fish-free but full of wildlife nonetheless. The ones I’m sharing today - the last ones I’ll force upon you, actually - are probably the least aesthetically interesting, and several of them are pretty small compared to the others I’ve posted because I was shooting small images and then zooming in tightly on the interesting bits of them. So, sorry for the lack of “Mutual of Omaha"-type graphic close-ups. However, these were fun photos to take, because they all represent instances in which I encountered, in real human life, some attribute of the enduring non-human habitation of the fascinating state of ghloroda.
An Ibis, strolling the grounds outside the visitor center at the mangrove preserve:
Also at the visitor center, this lizard was about five inches (4.2 hectares) long. As I focused on him, he flared his little red flange. Flange flare! Flange flare! And you saw it here first! (Those who have seen this before, just shut up about it. You want to make a big deal, flare your own goddamn flange.)
The following photos were taken during our tour of the everglades on an airboat. Our particular airboat was about 40 feet (9.7 angstrom) long, seated five across comfortably, had a windshield and roof, and was a double-hull built of aircraft-grade aluminum, powered by two caddy eldorado engines that got the propellors moving quite efficiently when we were in “go-fast” mode. The tourguide was a picturesque deep-bayou/trailerpark version of Wilford Brimley, who brought us to some beautiful areas and pointed out some very interesting wildlife. For example, these purple gallinules don’t swim, but live on the water by running around on the lily pads. They’re beautiful little birds and quite spry.
Another fascinating aspect of the ecosystem we were exploring on our tour was how very clean the water was. For a place that looks pretty swampy, you can see in this photo that plants that grow up out of the water, or droop down into it, are easily visible above and below the surface. It’s so clean, you can almost smell the gator. This guy was about ten feet long. For the record, the measurement is from the base of the ears to get me the hell away from this freaking dinosaur.
A little further down the “trail” we stopped to toss bread into the water (Wilford did, anyway, and we were captives on his boat), attracting more gallinules and a fellow he referred to as “Old Battleship” - a fifteen-foot gator whose back is scarred from many serious fights with, if you can believe it, much larger gators. We were told, as Wilford literally leaned over the side of the boat to give the gator a noogie, causing it to gape wide its fearsome jaws, that gators are blind directly in front of them - so he could safely expose himself in that small range of proximity and not get his arms chewed off. Keep that in mind next time you want to expose yourself to a gator. He also mentioned that OB was fully capable of climbing into our boat at any time. Then we hightailed it out of there, twin props roaring and lilypads nodding in our wide wake.
So that’s it for Florida Photos. No clue what’s left for tomorrow. Your guess is as good as mine. For now, I’d better make my own tracks to the office.... which, ironically, is blind until you’re right in front of it.
