Acknowledgments

Extract

The fieldwork for this book began more than a decade ago. Between 1996 and 1997, I conducted an oral history project with Glen Simmons that documented his experiences as an alligator hunter in the southern Everglades during the early part of the twentieth century. The University Press of Florida published the results of this fieldwork in 1998 in the book Gladesmen: Alligator Hunters, Moonshiners, and Skiffers. Simmons began the process of writing a book early in his lifetime: beginning in the 1940s, he jotted down observations (“hundreds of curlew on Joe River Camp”), funny sayings, and hunting records in small pocket-sized ledgers. He then transferred these notes into stacks of larger, spiral-bound notebooks that he gave to me. I used the notebooks as starting points for an almost daily, yearlong interview. We took many trips together into the backcountry, searching out the sites of former hunting camps, me sitting in the bow of a gladeskiff while he poled us through the dense saw grass marshes. When Simmons tired, I would wade through the waist-high waters, scanning for alligators, as I pulled the boat along. Other days we spent scrambling over and under the tangled prop roots of the mangrove swamps, a difficult feat for a nearly blind man, seeking the sites where moonshiners’ stills had once been hidden. On these trips, Simmons taught me more than the human history of the area. From him I learned how to interpret nature’s subtle signs—the meaning of alligator scat and deer tracks, and the beauty of fresh growth after a fire. Certainly, this book would not have been written without the support of Simmons and his wife, Maxie.

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