How far up the food chain?

Busy-ness, appointments, and the heat conspired to keep us home from the lake this spring and summer.

The heat was the real villain. It?s tolerable while the boat is moving, since we’re inside. We get a little breeze while under way, and the tinted windows reflect heat and sunlight.

When evening comes and we’ve picked out a shady cove, the boat is motionless and beating the heat becomes almost an obsession.

The best way to beat the heat on Lake Eufaula is to get in Lake Eufaula. Even that is temporary, but I can’t even think about fixing dinner until I take a dip and spend the rest of the evening in a wet T-shirt.

Lake Eufaula surfaces in our family lore as the lake to which we took Mary when she was in college, and quelled her fears about swimming by pronouncing it alligator-free; only to awake in the morning and see the bulgy eyes of a gator watching us from about 50 yards away.

This past spring, if you pay attention to such news (and we do), we learned that three women were killed within just a few days by alligators whose ponds had been decreased by Florida’s drought.

One victim was reportedly walking on a path alongside a bayou when the gator came up out of the water and pulled her in.

“Doesn’t make you want to go swimming, does it?” I said to Dave as we sweltered in our cove.

“I’ve been boating on this lake for 30 years,” he replied, “and I have never seen alligators at this end of the lake. Besides, the ones in Florida were desperate for food because their ponds were so reduced.

The ones here have plenty to eat and never go after humans.”

I noticed even Captain Ahab kept a sharp lookout as he soaped up and ducked under, holding the swim ladder.

Next day, enjoying coffee on the deck while the morning was still cool, I was scanning the shore for birds when I saw it. A long silvery line on the water; then the bulge of eyes, then nothing.

Nothing. No gurgle. No splash. Nothing.

Thereafter we bathed like our grandson Isaac did when he was here two summers ago. He soaped up out of a bucket of water and held onto the ladder for a quick dip with Grandpa forming a human cage around him.

We teased Isaac mercilessly that summer. We don’t anymore.

Had two or three more gator sightings in Lake Eufaula this summer, usually while scanning the water’s edge, checking the little beaches they favor, not open water. We took our dips one at a time, the other watching the water intently from the deck.

Alligators weren’t the only critters that saw us as a meal. At night, we had to put in screens; the mosquitoes humming around our ears were actually more difficult to evade than the alligators. Sometime during the night we found a few hours cool enough to turn off that battery-draining fan and get some sleep.

It was a good trip from a birding point of view, with more water birds than usual. There were American egrets, snowy egrets, and lots of great blue herons. I missed him, but Dave spotted a bald eagle ghosting along a thermal above Hard Ridge on the Alabama side.

We’re always glad to see ospreys feeding their young, whistling like songbirds as they approach their nests. When we moved here in 1971, ospreys were still endangered, their numbers frighteningly low. Since DDT was banned, and their eggs are no longer fragile, you see the big “fish hawks” everywhere.

Shortly after we got home from this spring’s outing, both of us broke out in a rash so severe we eventually took it to our doctor.

“Allergy” he diagnosed, but we’ve never figured out “allergy” to what. We suspect something in the water, something other than alligators. It confirmed my belief that it isn’t always the big critters that do you in.

Dave did find a tiny tick on his hip. Got it off easily and completely,but three weeks later you can still see where it was, and he says it still itches. As to our rash, it finally cleared, and we never did find out what it was.

Can’t help thinking, something is going to eat you, like it or not.

Nature’s revenge, I guess. She certainly got me back the other day.

This year instead of a garden, I planted a variety of lettuces in two small window boxes on the back deck. Covered with an old window pane, they sprouted happily and we had several salads out of those fresh green leaves.

This week I noticed that about half the leaves were lacy, chewed “by something” almost to the stems. I clipped out and tossed the really bad ones after looking to see if there were any butterfly larvae dining on them. Then I picked the leaves still whole enough to eat, swished them heartily in cold water, spun them dry, and put a little plateful in front of each of us.

Halfway through the salad, I spied a tiny caterpillar on a leaf, exactly the color of his dinner. I picked up the leaf and flicked him into a tissue. Watching more carefully now, I discovered that every single remaining leaf hosted its own little worm, munching away on his last meal.

That could mean only one thing.

“Yuck!”