The Day the Gators Left the Bayou
Barry Bonifay
3/15/2000

My mother’s eye glow when she tells the story of how Dad took her on a boat ride up Bayou Texar and stopped in front of the pine grove that now makes up part of our property and said, “How would you like for me to build you a house on that hill?” That romantic moment was the way he proposed to her and it was also the seeds for the paradise that their children would be brought up in. A place of great natural beauty where the wild things still lived all around us.

The porpoise were still there in the summer of 1957 and they would come up to the end of our dock on summer mornings and cry for us to come play. They never got close enough to touch, but they seemed to love watching us play on the dock and in the water.

It wasn’t was a couple of years later that home building and development along the bayou drove the porpoise and gators out as the water became murky and the grasses that harbored fish died out for lack of sun light.

The phone rang and it was our neighbor, Andy Welles, telling me to look out the window at the gators swimming down the bayou. I went to the window of our house on the hill and sure enough, I could see three gators moving slowly toward the bridge and the mouth of the bayou, where it empties into Pensacola Bay. I was about thirteen and I hollered at Mom to come look also. There were people all along the shore watching the two big gators and one smaller one as they made their way down the bayou.

I begged Mom to take us down to the bridge because I knew we could get a better view from there. She agreed and we were soon on our way toward a surprising event. When we got to the bridge, we discovered that several hundred people who lived along the bayou had the same idea we did. The bridge was full of people and the police were there trying to keep the pedestrians off the car part of the bridge. The gators were making their way toward the bridge and the crowd pointed with ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ as they got close and then passed under the bridge. Mayhem broke out as the crowd moved across the other side of the bridge. The police had anticipated this and had stopped the traffic on Cervantes Street.

What they didn’t expect, was the fellow on the other side with a high powered rifle, who had launched a canoe from the Mirador Apartments. He was dressed in khaki shorts and shirt and one of those hats like Teddy Roosevelt wore on his African hunting expeditions. He paddled out about 60’ into the bayou and then stood up right in front of all of everyone on the bridge and point the rifle at the alligators. The crowd on the bridge roared loud, “Nooooo!”

The police officer with the bull horn spat out: “put the gun down, sir, this is the Pensacola Police Department; put the gun down.”

The man continued to point and raised the sight to his head. The policeman yelled again through the horn, “Put the gun down, you are under arrest, put the gun down and paddle to shore.” Three policemen along the rail had their guns out and had assumed firing position.

The moment was tense.
The crowd held its breath.
No one said a word.

Then, ever so slowly, he lowered the gun and the alligators slipped quietly into another life. The crowd cheered for the gators and everyone on the bridge felt that good feeling one feels when right and goodness win out in life. The big game hunter was repentant stating he was only trying to protect people from the alligators. During that period of my life, I was a paper boy and had to ride my bicycle across that bridge every morning. Few were the mornings that I didn’t think about those gators and what their leaving meant to our paradise on that bayou. As a grown man, I still think of them as our first real loss of innocence. As development and municipal mosquito spraying increased, we also lost the horn toads, the fireflies, and many species of butterflies that lived in our neighborhood. There were years when we couldn’t even swim in our bayou.

I wonder if the kids who live on the bayou now know that this was once a live bayou, teaming with every kind of marine life. During the Great Depression of the twenties, our family survived on fish from Bayou Texar. During the next seventy five years, our family saw a lot of things we love, leave the bayou. My Dad and uncle and their sons still fish there for trout in the wintertime. My nieces and nephew ski there during the summer.

Recently, the community along the bayou fought location of a cell phone tower adjacent to the bayou bridge that ruined a still beautiful vista as you come down the hill to the bridge. When I heard that the community had won their fight, I remembered this event from my childhood and how I felt on the day the gators left the bayou.