Hillary’s Book Review: Swamplandia!

Growing up in Florida means waltzing between the concrete and the wild. Childhood weekends were spent dodging yellow flies by dipping under the cool protection of lake water and walking paved streets that hissed with heat to buy a box of Nerds at the nearby 7-11. We swam under docks one day and then waited for our mothers on hot benches outside of mini malls the next. There were white table cloth restaurants that served stone crab and bait shops with wet floors and rectangular pools of bait fish, where I could stick my hand in to touch the minnows as they swam endlessly in circles.   

When I read Swamplandia! By Karen Russell, I felt immediately connected to the sense of place. The book begins in the swamp at the family park of young protagonist, Ava Bigtree, where tourists come to watch in amazement as her mother dives into alligator pits. There is an ethereal quality of starlight and green shadows. The air is as damp as the earth, but beyond the park is a concrete world blurred constantly by the sun’s harsh glare. The mainland in Swamplandia! has a hell-themed waterpark called World of Darkness that is based seemingly on parts of every amusement park in the state.

I spent a considerable portion of my childhood on small creeks and rivers weaving through narrow waters the color of tea. The occasional cypress tree stood defiantly in the middle of the river’s path, flanked by small knees, while saw palmettos stretched to dip their thirsty fronds. These waterways run like veins across Florida, making their way out to the Gulf of Mexico or emptying into one of thousands of lakes.

I remember sitting on the green metal bench of a Jon boat barreling across Lake Walk n’ Water, each wave sending a jolt through my tiny hips. When it started to rain, I had to put a towel over my head because while on a motorboat, even a relatively slow one, the rain feels like being pelleted by nails. As I looked back, I could see a black Florida sky behind my father. He looked straight over my head, his hand on the throttle with the slight backward twist of poor people boating. 

We were on our way to a small cove that leads to a tiny creek. My dad was planning to snatch some baby gators. With his seven-year-old daughter in a Jon boat. This was the early 1980s when it was definitely already illegal to trap alligators, but laws about endangering children were much less restrictive. This was perfectly fine parenting. He left me in the boat alone while he went to grab the hatchlings, so I would be safe even if he was attacked and died in front of my eyes. I knew how to start the motor. I could just ride back across the lake and move on with my life.

He was taking the gators for the purpose of putting them in a cooler for a party later that night—a cooler right next to the cooler with cans of beer. My dad would sit back, light a cigarette and howl every time someone opened the wrong cooler and screamed in terror. I do not know who was coming to this particular party, but most likely it was people from up north or maybe some tiny children, people who would be appropriately mortified.

As my grandmother was standing at the stove stirring grits, and my grandfather was setting up tables and covering them with red checker cloths at her direction, their oldest son was leaning over the side of a boat across the lake dropping one last little gator into the giant cooler set up behind his daughter.

I am not sure what he did with the gators the next day, but they were always gone by the time I wandered back outside in the morning. I assume he released them into the creek where I spent my days swimming.

We sometimes ventured out in a larger boat—a center console—that was good for skiing. I was never a great skier, which worked out fine because water skiing has dropped from popularity like a slalom’s extra ski. I was decent on the knee board, but when I would wipe out, the amount of time between hitting the dark water full of orphaned alligators and their grieving mothers, and my dad noticing and turning around to get me felt like an eternity. While I was bobbing in the dark water, I would try to pull my legs up so that my feet were not low hanging fruit. When the boat finally pulled up beside me, I flung myself into it like a sturgeon.

At the beginning of Swamplandia!, Ava’s mother gets sick and dies and then everyone in Ava’s life also becomes a ghost, even her home in the swamp dilapidates irreversibly. The crowds diminish and the water and land surrounding her become simultaneously more haunted and less magical. There is something inexplicably Florida about change that cannot be undone.

I watched my dad disintegrate as Florida was paved with concrete and money. I did not understand it at the time, but looking back I think his heart was broken by development. I have spent my entire adult life trying to figure out how he got lost. Maybe he just smoked too much weed. And got married too many times. Maybe it was because he was struck by lightning. When he died, he was broke and alone in a shitty motel room, and I spend my time looking back—just like I did as a girl in the boat—for the lurking danger and wondering if it is going to get me next.

My father taught me to never be afraid of nature, and I grew up brave in the wild. Even as an adult, living in North Florida, I spend my days deep in the woods, often still looking over my shoulder as I am sprinting through the rain, seeing a bolt of lightning crack open the sky and shake the trees with a shudder. I just run faster. I have watched baby alligators pitter-patter out of broken pieces of shell into black water until there is just a nursery of bubbles.

The problem is that being brave and adventurous is not necessarily a marketable skill. It does not put food on the table or help me with my car payment. I have worked in offices surrounded by stacks of paper and felt overwhelming despair as I look over my shoulder at faux wood shelves stocked with manuals. Maybe that is why my dad died in that motel because everything wild turned to ghosts.

There is a moment in Swamplandia! when Ava, afraid and trying to survive, swims across a swampy pool to a wall of grass and mud. When she presses her hand against the wall, the mud and grass crumble and she plunges through the newly exposed opening into a gator den. She thought she was at a dead end, but then pushed through and ended up somewhere even scarier.

When I walk on the trails near my house, I leave behind all of the weight of my life. Out there I do not have to think about the papers I need to grade or about how my life spent as an underachiever makes it really difficult to pay my property taxes. I do not think about how my daughter’s art has recently evolved into her ceramic weed pipe period. I walk and hear the crunch of leaves and the swish of trees.

This last week, I made my way around the lake and then noticed something in the middle of trail, almost blending with the path of brown crushed leaves, except for the faint stripes of yellow. It was a young gator, no more than three feet from nose to the end of his still thin tail. He stretched across the path and as I approached, I grabbed a stick. I stopped before stepping around him. He was motionless. His eye on my side was fixed on me. I held his gaze and quickly sped around him, tail-side. He never moved, and I kept walking back to my house and out of the wilderness.