Road Apples
Jan. 22, 2007

Gator bait

By Tim Sanders

Post editor Scott Wright always has his finger on the pulse of Cherokee County. And while I would never claim to have my finger on the pulse of Cherokee County, I do occasionally have my finger poked into the soft palate of Cherokee County, evoking a strong gag reflex. That is why Scott passed the following e-mail message along to me. He said he’d been contacted by several people who’d received the e-mail, asking if he could elaborate on the story. He said that since I was nothing if not a pathological elaborator, he thought I was qualified to handle it. Here is the e-mail:
 

1. [photo of either a very large alligator , swimming with a regulation-sized deer in its mouth, or a regulation-sized alligator with a very small deer in its mouth]
"This picture was taken by a KTBS helicopter flying over Lake Weiss about 90 miles north of Birmingham!"
 

2. [same gator, same deer, closeup shot]
"That has to be a HUGE gator to have a whole deer in its mouth! Are you ready to go skiing on Lake Weiss?! If you ski at the west end of the lake – try not to fall."
 

3. [photo of a uniformed man who does not appear to be a midget striding manfully behind an exceptionally large gator which is hanging from a crane]
"This alligator was found between Centre and Leesburg, Alabama near a house! Game wardens were forced to shoot the alligator-guess he wouldn’t cooperate ..."

"Anita and Charlie Rogers could hear the bellowing in the night. Their neighbors had been telling them that they had seen a mammoth alligator in the waterway that runs behind their house, but they dismissed the stories as exaggerations."
" ‘I didn’t believe it,’ Charles Rogers said, but they realized the stories were, if anything, understated."

"Alabama Parks and Wildlife game wardens had to shoot the beast. Joe Goff, 6'5" tall, a game warden, walks past the 23-foot, 1-inch alligator he shot and killed in their back yard."


Something about that last photo–the one with the alligator hanging from a crane–looked familiar to me. I decided that a 23-foot, deer-eating alligator in Weiss Lake deserved a little research. Armed with the sophisticated computer technology known as Google, I would soon find out that the story was even more bizarre than I’d imagined.

The good people at www.snopes.com provided an e-mail dated 2004, accompanied by a photo of a large gator suspended from a crane. The gator looked exactly like the one in the Weiss Lake photo, except that this gator, according to the caption, was only 13 feet long. And this e–mail clearly stated that Anita and Charlie Rogers lived in the Bar X subdivision in West Columbia, Texas. Oddly enough, the very same game warden, Joe Goff, was shown striding manfully behind the gator.

Another e-mail, dated 2005, showed another photo, with another really similar gator–a 15-footer–hanging from an eerily familiar crane, only this time in the Titusville, Florida area. Again, not surprisingly, Joe Goff was seen striding manfully behind the gator, and again the couple whose fat he’d pulled from the fire were poor old beleaguered Anita and Charlie Rogers.

And in early 2006, under the false impression that the upscale Shreveport, Louisiana community they’d relocated to would be "gated," not "gatored," Anita and Charlie Rogers again found themselves in a mess. You guessed it, there was another e-mail photo showing another almost identical gator hanging from another crane, only this gator had grown, according to the caption, to 18 feet. Joe Goff had obviously relocated to Louisiana, because he was there, too. Still striding manfully. Lord, how Anita and Charlie must have been weary of all of this stalking and bellowing and striding by now.

Sometime later that same year, the whole kit and kaboodle–Anita, Charlie, Joe, etc.–moved to Mineral Springs, Arkansas. And again, due to what I think may have been a certain pheromone scent Anita was giving off, a bull alligator the size of a Volkswagen bus appeared at their back door, bellowing excitedly. He fared no better than the others, and wound up hanging from a crane, with roving game warden Joe Goff striding manfully behind him.

So with a series of lakes and gators in Texas, Florida, Louisiana, and Arkansas only dim memories in their tiny minds, Anita and Charlie are here in Cherokee County, Alabama, living on the banks of yet another lake. And now we have our very own dead 23-foot alligator, which, if this journalist has anything to do with it, will have grown to 48 feet by mid-summer.

And if there is any question as to whether our Cherokee County alligator is real, we have those two additional e-mail photos of a gator which might well be thirty feet in length, swimming across Weiss Lake near Hog Island with what any naturalist would immediately recognize as a northeastern Alabama whitetail deer in its mouth. (Given the size of that gator, I estimate the deer to weigh in at around 500 lbs.)

Should somebody try to tell you that those overhead photos actually show a much smaller gator, and were really taken by District Fire Management Officer Terri Jenkins on March 4, 2004, about 40 miles south of Savannah, Georgia, don’t believe a word of it. And don’t let what appears to be Georgia moss in those photos throw you off, either–those are Alabama turnip greens. That’s a 23-footer, and that’s Weiss Lake. If anybody knows gators, it’s Anita and Charlie Rogers, and their word is good enough for me.

And if Grandpa offers to take you water skiing in the vicinity of Leesburg this Spring, make sure he’s been working out and has a good, sturdy paddle for his johnboat. Remember, if those gators tire of venison, you’ll be next on the menu.

And you’ll be on your own, too. I hear that the magnificent Joe Goff, wandering warden, is sick and tired of stalking alligators all over the Southeast. He’s headed for Iowa, where a completely different Anita and Charlie Rogers have reported an enormous, 800-pound, man-eating bull weasel bellowing in the vicinity of their woodpile. He says he plans to hunt the beast down, and then stride manfully behind it once it’s hoisted and hanging from his own, personal weasel crane. He promises to e-mail us some photos.