Respect (Dec 5, 2008)

One time, when I was fairly young (I was going to say small, but let's face it, I've been 6 feet tall since I was like, 8), my family and I took a trip to Florida for summer vacation. One of the many places we visited was the Florida Everglades. Most of the trip through there was spent on an airboat, as the good majority of the 'Glades is a fucking swampland. There was a part of it that was stable land, though, and through this we did walk. There were alligators everywhere. No, they were not crocodiles. Unlike many people, I do know the difference. I point this out only out of my personal contempt for peoples' general stupidity. Anyway, alligators everywhere. The only thing seperating the bug-eyed tourists like myself from these sharp-toothed predators was a flimsy chicken wire fence no higher than my kneecaps. This seemd to suit the gators just fine, and the fear of being eaten seemed to keep the idiotic tourists from stepping over the fence. Most of the gators we saw that day were enormous. I've learned a lot about large reptiles in my few but informative years on this rock and one of the things I now know is that  the larger a reptile is, the more lethargic it is, save at dinner time. Point being, a well fed large snake or gator or what have you is more likely to just lay there idly basking in the sun than to try to push itself through a fence to eat a person. A lot of these lazy beasts were laying right up ON the fence, too. One particular specimen was a huge monstrosity of a gator that  I ended up with a particular fondness for. It was probably a good 9 or 10 feet long. Huge thing. It's head was almost as long as my leg. It didn't even blink as the tourists walked by, inches from it, snapping pictures and being noisy obnoxious tourist food things. When I got to this particular alligator, I felt such a deep sorrow that it almost brought me to tears. Someone had walked by it and cushed their cigarette butt out on top of its head. Right in the middle. I know that it didn't hurt the big bastard, its skin and scales being pretty much impervious to anything short of gun shots, but all the same. I saw that as about the most disrespectful thing I had ever seen. It still may be. I remember reaching out my little kid hand and brushing the cigarette butt off its head and rubbing at the burn mark until it was almost entirely gone, as much as I could get it. The gator didn't even move. I don't know if it even looked at me. I talked to it for a minute or so while whichever parent I was with was snapping some pictures of a nearby group of them. I don't remember what I said. Then it was time to move on to stay with the tour group. I patted the colosis' head lovingly a final time and walked away.