Kat's Rambling Mind

I was sitting and having coffee with Miss Janice (my mother) one morning, and we were talking about a news story involving a young girl at Lake Lanier that was attacked by a rabid beaver. The girl survived; the beaver didn’t, because the girl’s father quite rightly beat it to death with an oar.

All the talk about beavers led Miss Janice to casually comment, “They had beavers at the Sportsman’s Club, until they put a couple of alligators in the lake.”

Excuse me…. WHAT?

The Sportsman’s Club was a tri-county, three lake attraction based out of Troup County, Georgia, in a place called Hogansville, which is where my parents grew up. I remember it from my childhood as simply, “The Mudhole”. It was where my grandparents went to fish, and that’s what they called it.

Anyway, as I was struggling to absorb the fact that a group of so-called reasonable people apparently thought the answer to a problem with nuisance animals was to install two apex predators in the vicinity, Miss Janice regaled me with tales of the alligators. There was the time one of the alligators cost my great- grandma a fishing pole. It seems Mama Smith got a little too close to the edge, and the alligator ambled up towards her feet. Mama Smith promptly beat it back with her fishing pole, thus ending that day’s outing.

Then there was the time my grandmother, Lila Mae, climbed up on top of a gazebo to get away from the alligators. My Papaw Jesse also had to make a choice one day when a water moccasin fell into the boat with him; abandon ship and risk the alligators or stay in the boat with the snake. (He jumped ship.)

However, for all my disbelief that a group of people in rural West Georgia decided to put alligators in a place that was supposed to be a family attraction, Mama said, “Well…it worked. They didn’t have any more problems with beavers!”

Well, Hell’s bells, I guess not!