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Friday, October 29, 2007
In a While, Crocodile
This fall, my eldest son’s elementary school playground was fenced off for three months while they replaced the surface, apparently because a child in Virginia had fallen onto such a surface from a great height and broken his neck. I never wore a seat belt until I was about twelve. My father could drive by the time he was ten.
The civilized world gets progressively more liability-conscious, if not outright wussier, by the decade. In the time it takes to say, “it ain’t like the old days,” the world becomes 3% less fun.
Outside of the little town of Mosca, Colorado, a place you have never heard of with no amenities that is hard to get to, is the Colorado Gator Farm. As everyplace else becomes safer, the Gator Farm, insulated from the civilized world by the San Juan Mountains on one side and the Sangre de Cristos on the other, is proudly what it is.
Everything about the Colorado Gator Farm is casual, almost lackadaisical. It is not expensive, it is not overly organized, and there is no company line. It’s a little difficult to identify entrances and exits. There are hand-painted signs everywhere, some of which are useful and some of which are amusing variations of behaviors that will get a person fed to the alligators.
The farm’s backstory is that they raise tilapia. That used to be all they did. They got alligators because some wizard around the farm decided that it would be an efficient way to dispose of all their dead fish. Initially they intended to keep the alligators until they were big enough to harvest, which coincides nicely with them becoming large enough to be dangerous, and then sell them and buy more little ones. They never did this and they have no particular explanation why not.
They had gators, so people started bringing them gators. Pets, mostly, unwanted exotica from half-witted suburbanites. So they had more gators. Then people started showing up, wanting to see the gators. So they started charging people to see the gators. Then people started bringing them other stuff. Now they have tilapia, gators, pythons, boas, rattlesnakes, skinks, crocodiles, caimans, ostriches, emus, turtles, tortoises and a wallaby. And Frank, the world’s largest domestic cat.
Their website makes some noise about environmental responsibility, which, while probably a bit sincere, appears to be an excuse to construct facilities out of stuff they have around rather than, say, what a zoo would make it from.
Jay Young is the heir apparent of the farm, the owners’ son. He is who he is. Jay is improbably affable, and clearly the force behind the casual nature of the enterprise. He seems supremely self-aware, and answers your questions in a practiced way, answering exactly what you ask and not concerning himself with what you might be insinuating.
A sample:
Me: So, are you guys licensed as a zoo?
Jay: Nope. Because we don’t have very many mammals.
Me: Erm…
Sometime during our conversation, during which time my two children were happily crawling around a treehouse somewhere above the portable swamp, a soccer mom with a couple of kids came up frantic that there was an alligator loose.
Jay: Yeah. Oh, yeah. That happens.
Soccer Mom: It’s really big.
Jay: The little ones don’t get out much. Kinda hard to find when they do.
Soccer Mom continued frantically wheedling at Jay about the loose alligator until he could no longer ignore the insinuation. He cheerfully agreed to go survey the loose gator and invited the boys and I along. If Jay Young invites you to do anything, you should accept. Lovely Wife caught up with us just in time to bask in the full Gator Farm glory.
Sure enough, there is a ten foot American alligator innocently chilling in a little slough not contained within a fence. Soccer Mom continues to pressure Jay in a way he refuses to acknowledge until he finally tells her that he would put the gator back, but he does not want to get his pants wet. Soccer Mom pales, Lovely Wife dies laughing.
Soccer Mom: So you can put an alligator back in its pen without any help?
Jay: Probably not that one. Too big.
Soccer Mom: So will somebody come help you put the gator back?
Jay: Oh, that’s usually not a real big deal. If I need help, there’s usually someone around. Like this guy here (pointing to me). I’ll just get whoever’s around to help me carry the gator. Big ones get heavy.
Lovely Wife: You would do it.
Me: Absolutely.
Jay: See? A lot of guys won’t, but usually their wives or girlfriends will.
For a piddling $2, you can buy a bucket of Gator Chow. It’s a wonderfully symbiotic business arrangement – they were going to feed the gators the Gator Chow, anyway, so you pay to do their work for them, but it may be the best dollar to family entertainment value on Earth. The boys and I spent $4 and an hour throwing Gator Chow at sleeping alligators. When you hit them in the nose, it makes this great hollow wooden sound, like a very satisfying percussion instrument. Maybe a bongo. Some of them wake up and start eating, some of them wake up and then go back to sleep, some of them do not react at all and some of them eat the chow without apparently waking up. It’s great fun. The boys and I laughed the whole hour. Lovely Wife did, too, but I am pretty sure she was laughing at us. Or me.
The Colorado Gator Farm is not a crusade. They rescue no animals on purpose. It is also not an educational endeavor. Nobody there seems to know the scientific explanation for anything. But there is something weirdly sincere about the whole thing. The cats and tortoises roam free, and they are all warm and friendly, clearly well-loved, and the staff has taken the time to figure out what each member of their weird menagerie likes.
You should go. You can include it with a trip to the Great Sand Dunes National Park, and there is a UFO Observation Deck a few miles north of the Gator Farm that looks far stranger. Jim Bob gives it a thumb’s up.
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