Looking away no eye contact — I learned that trick early on when approaching my skittish dog , I held my iPhone at the edge of the car, and snapped, hoping for a shot. I missed, so I looked again. And slowly, bewilderedly, the gator blinked. It seemed less like a menacing predator, more like an abandoned pet cowering under a car, forlornly hoping for tips on how to play its role.
In fact, it reminded me of me, at every publishing party I'd attended during my first years in New York. Here was a fresh-off-the-boat New Yorker, like the baby arctic seal seen floating on an ice floe on the Hudson near the Chelsea piers, or the handsome, bewildered coyote who managed to wander over a train bridge in Inwood that swings open and closed, and into Central Park.
Maybe the gator would settle in among us, like the peregrine falcons who nest on the wide ledges of celebrities' fancy Fifth Avenue co-op buildings, or the flock of tropical parrots released or escaped pets that flourish year-round near the warmth of a Brooklyn electrical substation. I found myself imagining a happy life for the gator, in the streams that still flow below the basements of some of Manhattan's oldest buildings, fed by some gentle janitors.
The lady cop cautioned me to be careful, but the poor thing seemed one of us, a stage-one New Yorker, blinded by its lights.
I stared at it, thinking: "Little, lost alligator washes up out of the New York sewer and is menaced by tough New York rats, bureaucrats, and push-cart owners that almost run over its tail, until finally it returns to its safe, cozy sewer. Surely, there's a children's book in here somewhere. One thinks of novelists as inspired by muses, and living by their wits. But reality, especially the New York variety, is sharper and stranger than fiction.
A few years ago, the spark came for the novel I am currently writing, a love story between a male abolitionist and a female suffragist. I had intended to read the papers of Frederick Douglass, the heroic, ex-slave abolitionist, and Susan B Anthony, America's legendary suffragist, just for background. But I could not put down their letters. Here was the staid, buttoned-up Anthony after a speaking tour engagement, chopping her way through a foot-thick wall of winter ice that had formed around the home of her hosts for the night.
And who could have imagined that, beneath our concrete jungle, are streams that may once have hidden fugitive slaves from their hunters? As the cop in Queens remarked to me on Sunday afternoon: you can't make this stuff up. Banished into the sewer system, abandoned gators had no other choice but to find food and survive underneath the city, lurking in the shadows of the sewer system.
In , the New York Times ran a piece on a gator sighting in the Bronx and another a few years later in East Harlem. Astonishingly, there is some evidence to suggest that the myth may have a strong basis in reality.
Snapping turtle sightings have been verified and are well documented. Here, it is alleged, the breed multiplied exceedingly, and have become almost as ferocious as they are numerous. This story, apocryphal as it seems, has nevertheless its believers, and it is ingeniously argued, that the reason why none of the subterranean animals have been able to make their way to the light of day is, that they could only do so by reaching the mouth of the sewer at the river-side, while, in order to arrive at that point, they must necessarily encounter the Fleet ditch, which runs towards the river with great rapidity, and as it is the obstinate nature of a pig to swim against the stream, the wild hogs of the sewers invariably work their way back to their original quarters, and are thus never to be seen.
What seems strange in the matter is, that the inhabitants of Hampstead never have been known to see any of these animals pass beneath the gratings, nor to have been disturbed by their gruntings. The reader of course can believe as much of the story as he pleases, and it is right to inform him that the sewerhunters themselves have never yet encountered any of the fabulous monsters of the Hampstead sewers.
As a suitable finale, I present excerpts from a New York Times about police plans to stalk alligators they believed were living in a Bronx River lair:. The start of the explorers. The proper method of catching an alligator alive was the subject of a conference this afternoon between the police chief and his men.
A hurried visitor to Police Headquarters told the police chief that a piece of liver would make an alligator literally walk across the water to shore and that it could be captured alive easily with the type of net generally used by butterfly chasers. The police chief put in a requisition for enough liver to feed a good-sized alligator, and one of his men promised to lend the explorers a fishing net for the expedition.
Gator sightings are a pretty normal occurrence around South Louisiana. Recently, an alligator on UL's campus was spotted hunting down a turtle. When the waters rise in Louisiana, gators tend to get out of their normal habitats like when this big guy was spotted in New Orleans. In South Carolina, there was a beat of a gator that was spotted around a Myrtle Beach neighborhood. That is exactly what happened in New York City, as someone spotted a gator lurking below a sewer grate.
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