The Gully and The Alligator

I grew up on a dead end street. Thanks to the magic of Google Earth, I can show you my street:

Yes, that is my actual street. Well, my childhood street, not the one I live on now.

My house is the third one from the right, on the South side of the street, which is at the bottom of this picture:

Across the street from my childhood home is an empty field, and beyond that is a shallow, muddy waterway that went only by the name of The Gully.


During periods of heavy rain, The Gully would fill and the field would flood. During periods of really heavy rain, the dead end of the street would flood as well. If it had rained really, really hard, the street could stay flooded for several days. This was always great fun for us kids, until the parents began to be concerned about snakes.

"Stay out of the water. There might be snakes," they would say. It didn't work on me. You tell me there might be snakes and that's the first place I'm heading. I wanted to see the snakes. But I digress....

I often regress to my childhood days in my dreams, and so it was Monday night. I was back in my childhood era, in my childhood home, but I was not a child. I was grown and Katie and Rylea were there with me. The field across the street had flooded, and I was wading barefoot through the ankle deep water, when I saw something moving just beneath the surface. Curious, I went closer and saw that it was a young alligator, about four feet long.

"Hey, look! It's an alligator," I called!

Attracted by my call and the splashing, both dogs came to investigate. They began barking and snapping at the alligator. I yelled at the dogs to get back, and Katie--being the well trained dog she is--immediately obeyed me. Rylea, however, being at that doggy teenager stage of I-know-everything -and -don't- need -Mom -to-tell -me-what-to -do kept worrying the little alligator.

"Rylea," I yelled! "That alligator is going to eat you!" Now Rylea is a good size dog, but not so big an alligator couldn't take her. I know we joke about chihuahuas and poodles, but I've heard/read accounts of alligators taking dogs as big as German Shepherds. One of my best childhood friends lost her 7 year old Golden Retriever to an alligator. Rylea isn't that big, so naturally I had cause to be concerned.

She and the gator continued snapping and worrying at each other. The fight had worked its way over into my driveway, and no sooner had I yelled, "That alligator is going to eat you!" than the alligator chomped down on Rylea's head. I ran into the fray and grabbed the gator, which let go of Rylea and turned on me. I jumped back, and the alligator, seeing it had an escape route, high tailed it back towards the water as fast as it could.

Rylea lay motionless on the driveway. Her neck was twisted in such a way that I knew it was broken, and her head was caved in on one side. Strange that there was no blood.

"Oh, Rylea," I mourned as I looked down at my little dog, but right away, she jumped up, shook herself and her neck snapped back into place, her head re-inflated itself, and she trotted off, right as rain.

At that time, there was an Italian family visiting my next door neighbor, whose name is Shirley. The Italian man and his two sons heard the commotion and came outside to see what was going on. They had never seen anything like the little alligator, and so decided that they were going to take it home with them as a souvenir. I tried to dissuade them.

"It's an endangered species."
"How are you going to get onto the airplane?"
"It'll never survive the trip."

But they were adamant. They threw a piece of canvas over the alligator and wrapped him up. Desperate, I tried one last tactic. I knelt down and put my hands on the alligator and looked the man straight in the eye, and said,

"It is illegal in this state to possess an alligator for any reason, no matter how short a time, so right now you are in violation of Texas state law." But since Italians tend to have no respect for either the law or a woman's opinion, the man just looked at me. He and his older son picked up the canvas wrapped gator and, with the younger son trailing along behind, carried it to my neighbor's house. I followed, along with a crowd of curious people who had gathered to watch the spectacle. The three disappeared through Shirley's front door. Silence, then a blood curdling shriek--which turned out to be my alarm going off and someone trying to sing.

Whatever has happened to country music these days?

Last night, I dreamed I was in a school, eating up all the poor orphaned chocolate so that the social workers wouldn't have to worry about finding chocolate foster homes to place it into.

Is it any wonder I never seem to get any rest?