How have I lived so long? Even when I managed to avoid the jaws of hungry alligators, how did I survive my teenage years?
How do any of us?
I don't know about you, but as a teen I had more lives than a Florida bobcat. I fished from a railroad trestle, ignoring the horn of an approaching train until the last possible instant, while reeling in a feisty crevalle jack. It wasn't very smart of me; a kid from my school had been killed by a train on the very same trestle, doing the very same thing, a few years before.
I rode my bicycle at night, never with a light, never with a helmet, usually on the wrong side of the road, against the rush of traffic. I surfed when lightning was striking nearby on Miami Beach and dove off the South Beach Pier without looking to see if the tide was safely high or neck-breakingly low. I knocked on car windows at traffic lights so I could hitch rides with strangers.
I had a wild friend named Alan whose father owned a used car lot on Miami Avenue. Alan drove one of his dad's souped-up Oldsmobiles, the one capable of supersonic speeds. A couple of times, with me as his passenger, Alan hit 120 mph on rural roads west of Miami.
Somehow I survived youthful stupidity. It never occurred to me - I don't think it occurred to any of us - that we might get killed, even though we had evidence to the contrary.
When I was a teen, I should have known about Darwin, if only intuitively, because I fished, watched birds and spent a lot of time in the Everglades. But the full implications of the survival-of-the-fittest theory never dawned on me.
I could see that nature weeds out the weak and foolish. The careless squirrel is taken by the alert red-tailed hawk; the mangrove snapper, exhausted by the current, becomes easy prey for the attack of the gape-jawed barracuda. I didn't realize that the same natural law might apply to me.
My three children are adults, but when they were kids, Darwin was always on my mind. Where were they? What were they up to? Who's picking them up? Who is the chaperone? I didn't want them to grow up paranoid, so I tried to keep from them all the terrible things that can happen to the foolish and careless. I was paranoid for them.
I was pretty sure that they were growing up in a different world from the one I had known. Their world, with AIDS, drugs and drive-by shootings, had to be more dangerous than the one I had known.
I don't think that now, though I was right to be vigilant for them. A parent has to be. But the day is 24 hours long, and our kids grow up. They leave our control. And Darwin waits.
And you know what? The good news is that Darwin somehow lets most of us go. Darwin lets 99.9 percent of us survive our weak and careless moments. We are luckier than squirrels and fish.
Of course, overconfidence is a trait of the immature. I keep thinking about Bryan Jeffrey Griffin. He's the 12-year-old boy who spent a day last week swimming with friends in north Central Florida's Dead River. Every once in a while, when an alligator surfaced, the boys fled the water. Bryan must have been quite a joker. A few times that day, his friends later told police, Bryan pretended he was drowning just to freak everybody out.
They were in the water at dusk, the worst time to be cavorting in the lair of predatory animals, when the alligators showed up again. All the kids scrambled out of the water except Bryan. His friends shrieked at him. Get out of the water! He apparently ignored them.
Something pulled him down. He screamed, and his friends thought he was teasing. His body was recovered 25 minutes later.
Creatures from the deep
When I was a teenager, I often swam in rock pits at night. A rock pit is created when builders excavate dirt and rock for road fill. A rock pit is usually very deep except for a small section along the rim.
We would stand on the rim in water up to our waists and horse around. Sometimes a small fish nipped us. It really didn't hurt, but it was scary. You'd jump, and then everybody would laugh at you, and you'd give whoever was laughing the finger. Every once in while, to show off, or to regain your dignity, you'd swim out into the middle and back and maybe call your friends chicken because they didn't want to make that long swim in the dark where God knew what - alligators, snapping turtles, moccasins - might be lurking.
Yet I'm still here all these years later - my hair gray, my forehead lined, my knees achy, but with all my memories intact.
Yes, I survived my youth. I shouldn't have, but I did. Most of us do, it turns out.
But as the headlines remind us from time to time, to our horror, Darwin's laws still apply to the unlucky few.
