The alligator was there to witness the biological advent of birds—in fact, since ancient birds were really just dinosaurs with incidental feathers, the alligator was sort of their first cousin. He ate them anyway. Millions of years later, he watched as another species became ambitious: plodding, hairy gorillas stood up and began to walk on two legs, crossing land bridges and exploring swamps. O miraculous Nature! 

He ate them. 

He watched, eyes peeking just above the water, as humans learned to domesticate animals. He ate their conveniently gathered livestock, their tame dogs. But soon the hominids, with their large heads, began wielding weapons too strong to dodge. For the first time in history, the alligator was eaten. Someone else was king of the swamp. 

This is where I come in. I am eating a fried alligator salad at Mulate’s, a Cajun restaurant in Baton Rouge. It is my first month in Louisiana. The meat is tough, a little bland. Even gastronomically, this is an offensive beast. The salad is my attempt at revenge. A distant and cowardly strike, I know, but after a solid month of nightmares, I have come to hate these creatures. 

Like most powerful fears, my gatorphobia has roots in early childhood. My parents used to make me read a book of Christian propaganda thinly disguised as children’s stories. Some of the ideological fables condemned drugs, truancy, and smoking; others advocated kindness to animals and obedience to parents. The most affecting lesson for me, however, told of a boy named Swami, who swam (I see the nominal pun now) in waters clearly marked NO SWIMMING. Guarding the lake, of course, was a huge alligator. The resulting conflict was captured—and permanently etched into my youthful mind—in a pictorial spread of little Swami thrashing in front of the wide-open jaws of that reptilian soldier of Satan. It was by far the most stunning picture in the book: the creature's cold, slotted eyes, the muscular, fleshy pink tongue, water foaming in the wake of the deep-green, banded tail. The artist had really thrown himself into the task of visually punishing this little boy, which makes me think he had a dread either of alligators (which I can understand) or of little boys (which I have experienced fleetingly). Whatever the motivation, it was a centerfold of horror, and the book has had a lasting effect. I carry its priggishness even today, eschewing drugs, truancy, smoking. Helping sick birds. Calling my parents frequently. But most of all: fearing alligators. 

This gatorphobia is as centrally entrenched as all my basic knowledge: Fire is hot, water is cool; alligators are rapacious beasts sent from Hell to gorge themselves on the innards of innocent boys. It’s primal. So regardless of how rational and ecologically sympathetic I am toward other creatures, the formative prejudice remains. I believe that alligators—craggy, prehistoric, armored windsocks—have no business in the modern world. That’s what the alligator salad is about. 

And that’s why it’s so painfully unfair that chance—in the form of graduate school—has taken me from the peaceful forests of Oregon to South Louisiana, one of the few pockets of civilization where gators still thrive. My local friends’ stories are all very matter-of-fact: They have fished with them, lost dogs to them. Nearly everybody has a first-person account of an alligator run-in. One friend tells me about the time her father wrapped a baby gator in a pair of jeans, smuggled it home, and kept it in the backyard pond until finally it grew too large and waddled off. Another friend claims to have hunted alligators (evidently Louisiana’s campaign to save them is occasionally too successful, and so hunting licenses are issued in an effort to thin the population). 

While browsing a discarded Baton Rouge Advocate one afternoon not long after my move to the South, I noticed the headline alligator eats spaniel. I recoiled in horror. Some have accused me of loving my miniature dachshund with excessive zeal (let’s just say he has his own car seat), and, because of alligator risks, he is forbidden to swim in or even approach any of Louisiana’s muddy ponds and streams. The article reported that a family in Mississippi had been camping at a state park when a ten-foot alligator surfaced next to the two sisters, who were swimming with the family spaniels. When one of the dogs barked, the alligator responded in its customary mammal-gobbling way. State wildlife officials later tracked him down and killed him. I steered my dachshund away from water with extra vigilance after reading that. 

_While most Louisiana locals have come to terms with alligators patrolling their waterways, outsiders are less comfortable. This sets up two fundamental and contradictory views. The Outsider view (to which I subscribe wholeheartedly) motivates Californians to produce horror movies starring giant reptiles; it inspires authors of Christian storybooks to cast gators as demonic assassins. This view has a long and venerable history and is nicely exemplified by William Bartram, the eighteenth-century botanist and explorer, whose powerful descriptions of the American wilderness impressed, among others, Coleridge and Wordsworth. Bartram was one of the first outsiders to record his horror towards the American South, which makes him the pioneer of a science since joined by Northerners everywhere. In Bartram’s Travels we find the author canoeing through uncharted bayous and swamps, vulnerable constantly to what he calls “the subtle attacks of the alligators”:

Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake.The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder. 

Though this type of dramatic exaggeration is a common feature of the outsider view, no alligator, however ravenous and powerful its jaws, has ever produced smoke from its nose. And yet Bartram claims to have been surrounded by alligators with nasal smokestacks who, just as a bonus, belched floods of water and clapped their jaws strategically near his ears to stun him. Several times they tried to overturn his boat, then followed him ashore to steal his fish. In short, they act just as churlish and unwelcoming as we (the sane ones, the outsiders) would expect them to. 

The Insider view, favored by Cajuns and naturalists, attempts to establish a kind of brotherhood with the alligator. Two centuries after Bartram’s horrified account, E.A. McIlhenny, the eminent Louisiana sportsman and Tabasco baron, gave us a typical insider’s paean to all things long and toothy in his book The Alligator's Life History. McIlhenny is often referred to as a “backyard naturalist,” though it helps to remember that his backyard, Avery Island, was the size of most state parks. With this land to play on, McIlhenny helped to save Louisiana’s egret population and to curse the state with nutria, large rodents that tend to breed out of control and clog waterways—and which, legend has it, were introduced when a few of them escaped from one of McIlhenny’s cages. He even raised and trained a pet bear. But it was alligators he preferred. Early in life he developed what I see as a pathological fondness for them; some of his boyhood stunts take the cake for native Louisianian alligator moxie: 

We would attract them by imitating the barks and cries of dogs and by making loud popping noises with our lips, as these sounds seemed to arouse the ‘gators’ curiosity, and they would come swimming to us from all directions. We had no fear of them and would swim around the big fellows, dive under them and sometimes treat them with great disrespect by bringing handfuls of mud from the bottom and “chunking” it in their eyes. 

McIlhenny goes on to defend alligators as “maligned and much misunderstood” and eventually gets so drunk with hyperbole that he calls them “harmless and picturesque.”

_Like the others, this dream begins as an eerily tweaked cliché. My wife and I are walking hand in hand in a kind of pseudo-medieval park, at the center of which is a lake visibly rife with alligators. (Only landscape architects of medieval dreamscapes, by the way, would think to stock a public lake with alligators.) A line of small, unmanned gondolas bobs nonsensically near the shore. But the clinching evidence that this is a dream—besides the thick stone walls, the gondolas, the psychedelically purple sky—is that we’re walking near this liquid nest of Evil without spasmodic fear. In fact, we’re about to have a picnic. The path leads us right up to the lake. As we sidle along the tepid water, the path narrows. The cobblestones become uneven. And suddenly, in the inevitable, horrible clumsiness of dreams, my wife—this human I love, this human whom I do not want to be devoured by a large lizard as if she were an egret or a hunting dog—falls into the lake. 

One of the gators promptly darts over, thrashes his snout above the surface, and, seizing her in his impressive jaws, plunges under. I know the reptilian modus operandi: He’s supposed to roll her in water grass, tuck her under a log, save her for later. 

But I am a dream-hero: this will not happen. I leap into the water, hammering my feet at the alligator’s leathery back, which should be made into a purse, or, more ecologically, chewed on by lions. I will vanquish the monster, save the maiden. I make a big splash. Gators swarm. In fantastic synchronicity, seven of them clamp down on my torso at once—burning, bleeding death. This is how the nightmare always ends. 

I sit up in bed. This time the dream is obviously real: My stomach is still on fire, excruciatingly cramped. Except I can'’t see the blood. In fact, I can’t find a wound at all. But the pain! And then I realize that this is severe indigestion. And I remember the alligator salad. As I leap out of bed, suddenly it all makes sense. The universe has passed judgment. By eating that salad, I overturned the hierarchy of Good and Evil. Innocent, tragic prey became predator. Alligators everywhere now have an ethical carte blanche to enjoy me as thoroughly as ever alligators enjoyed a human meal. I am legal chum. I deserve a thousand snapping jaws. I was the carnivore first.

_When I initially heard about Alligator Bayou, I didn’t really believe it. It is the worst idea ever: a commercial venture offering tours of alligator-infested waters and, as if that weren’t criminal enough, canoe rentals, by means of which you can paddle out, alone, into areas clearly marked no swimming: alligators. I could not stop thinking about it. It was the locale of all my bad dreams, the very heart of danger. This was Evil’s headquarters.

It turned out that Hell was dangerously close to my house, in a picturesque swamp just ten minutes outside of Baton Rouge. When I arrived, it shocked me by being quietly beautiful: in place of the carnage I had expected, there were only oaks wearing shaggy beards of gray moss, and placid water freshly painted with a layer of neon-green algae; in place of the horrified screams of the recently mauled, a soothing silence. 

The guided tour seemed best for someone as boat-clumsy as myself, so I passed up the canoes (which to me looked like a row of floating coffins) and joined a crowd waiting near the water. Evil, as usual, was terribly popular: Elderly couples mutely surveyed the water, hands clasped, and parents chased shrieking children, for whose soon-to-be shortened lives I nearly shed a tear. We crowded the dock. Though I didn’t get a head count, I guessed we were a week’s worth of gator food. Most of my future tour-mates were busy either spraying or being sprayed with mosquito repellent. Ironic, I thought, to worry about such a tiny bite. 

I scanned the faces in search of our guide, and settled immediately on a Cajun, a swarthy little salamander of a man who had surely, I thought, navigated every branch of every mud-choked stream in the vicinity, spent nights floating facedown in swampy shallows, supped on mosquitoes, and taught his children to catch fish with their mouths and eat them raw. This had to be him: our Ahab of the bayou. 

Just when I had resigned myself to a backwater death at the hands of Admiral Lizard, however, a hearty, sociable, non-saurian man—a man with his shirt tucked in—bounded out of the ticket office. He spoke in complete sentences, tossing off words like respite and epitomize. His only questionable feature was a dramatic mustache, white at the tips, but I figured I could live with that. He introduced himself as Jim Ragland and led us onto The Alligator Queen, a canopied, rectangular swamp cruiser bobbing just offshore. I estimated it would take a team of seven alligators, simultaneously lunging with vertical snouts, to flip it over. 

We pushed off from the bank amid a flurry of Ragland’s puns (“You’re from Utah? Me-tah!”) and throwaway jokes (“You can usually tell when I’m lying because my lips are moving”) and cruised along the green water at about ten miles per hour. Ragland pointed out a heron, a nutria family, a tree full of vultures. He recited the definition of a swamp, listed historical dates, and told us that this place had originally been called Crocodile Bayou. Then he produced a mini-petting zoo of swamp creatures he kept stashed on the back of the boat in plastic containers: first a nutria, who wouldn’t stop defecating, then a turtle, who bit the brim of someone’s hat with surprising conviction. As Ragland talked, I scanned the shoreline for frothing water and steaming nostrils. I didn’t trust the tour’s illusion of safety. 

Finally, the boat’s captain interrupted one of Ragland’s jokes. “Hey, Jim!” he shouted from his control panel. “What'd Bartram call this place? ‘Crocodile Bayou’?” 

Bartram’s name magnified all my nightmare images of teeth and smoke and danger. 

Ragland said that yes indeed, he had called it that, why would the boat captain happen to be asking, please? 

“ 'Cause there’s something heading right at the boat!” 

At once everyone forgot manners and rushed, as a unit, to the front of the vessel. Friends elbowed friends, old women wrestled children. 

Ragland, on the other hand, hurried to the back of the boat and disappeared into a closet. I remained in my seat, stunned. My fear transcended the skit’s blatant campiness. I watched Ragland pop back out of the closet carrying an extremely smelly piece of chicken. He hurried through the crowd, which parted at the stench. As he moved to the front of the boat, he started chanting a refrain of nasal squeaks and bleats: “Eow, eow, eow.” This, evidently, was a professional-quality imitation of a baby alligator’s one-word vocabulary, a sonic alert to the mother that the young one is ready to hatch or is hungry or lost or scared. It translates roughly as “bring your teeth over here.”