Hairat
Our film club finished up our latest cycle last week. So before we begin again, we all make a pick for our short-film festival. I won’t offer any comments here about the other picks (which were all enjoyable to watch); just some thoughts on mine.
Last Friday, before our Zoom film club, I was coming back from a conference in Tampa, when we stopped at a rest stop on I-75 just past Paynes Prairie.
To me, a prairie means dry grasslands, without trees, but possibly plenty of gophers. Of course, that isn’t the case in Florida. There’s plenty of water, and it resembles a swamp from the interstate.
As we’re pulling into the rest stop, I see people gathered along a chain-link fence separating the rest stop from a storm-water retention pond. An alligator has everyone’s attention.
We get out of the car and walk over to a 7- to 8-foot gator about a yard away — on the other side of the fence. (Yes, gators can climb fences, but by my calculations, I could run faster than it could climb.)