Lesley Grant Law: Crikey!

      When John asked me to write he simply gave me the instructions to give a “Perspective on Ocala.”  Those are fairly broad parameters but I figured there are a lot of reports on the events and other horse related activities that I would try to write about something different.  As everyone knows the weather is fab, the activities are fun, it is the happiest place on earth for an Eventer in the winter, yatta yatta… but I am going to tell you about the one dark side of Ocala… the creatures.

      I grew up in Toronto with wondrously upper-middleclass parents who were the “golf-club / piano lessons” types.  Not really the outdoorsy types.  I had to beg and beg until I was about 12 to get a pet that required more food than flakes and even then they gave my Grandmother a kitten under the defense that at least then I had something furry I could visit.  Needless to say, I grew up in a fairly sterile environment in which I hardly encountered a housefly let alone more exotic bugs or reptiles.  In Florida however, we get it all. 

      I pride myself in keeping a fairly clean house.  Considering we have two dogs and a two year old, I think I do fairly well.  Luckily we have wood floors so I sweep them out just about every day and once a month I have a lady come in and help me properly scour the whole joint.  I am fanatical about dishes, garbage, leaving food out, and I also have a pest control company check the place out every six months.  Nonetheless about once a week I will be sitting ever so quietly minding my own business when out will prance a cockroach as big as your eyeball.  They have a pretty name for them in Florida, they call them “Palmetto Bugs,” but really they are nasty cockroaches.  They will waltz along the floor just as casual as you like all big and shiny and offensive looking until you grab something to try and kill them with.  Then they turn into the Ben Johnsons of the bug world and are quite speedy and athletic.  Leslie has just about popped his knee out trying to capture these creatures.  To add insult to injury, once smushed they leave a train wreck of a mess similar to jumping full force onto a package of take away mayonnaise.  Although there are more dangerous creatures in Florida, these are my personal nemesis.  The other day Leslie left a half drunk glass of coke outside and Liam found it the next day and said “Yum Coke!” and took a big slug and brought me the glass.  In the bottom were two massive Palmettos all sugared up on Coke.  I didn’t know whether to scream at Liam, scream at Leslie, or just go quietly barf behind the garage.  That’s about the point I think of my mom and what she would do.. which is probably call child services on me.

      Moving up the scale of Florida Creepies are the spiders.  We seem to have two categories of spiders in Ocala: really, really big ones and small creepy alien looking, hard shelled ones.  They don’t tend to bother us too much aside from the fact that they will take your breath away when all you are used to is Toronto, run-of-the-mill , Daddy Long Legs and you will think, “That will definitely bite me and lay eggs under my skin like in all those horrible Discovery Channel stories.” The trick to the spiders is that when you are hacking through the woods, be sure to let someone else be the trailblazer.  I don’t care how much your horse is hopping up and down rearing and squealing to get in the lead, nothing is worse than ambling along and getting the old “web in the face.”  Then you spend the next hour of your hack wondering if every time you get an itch whether that was the beast burying its spawn in your neck.

      Next we have the snakes.  For the most part we tend to get the big, fat, black rat snakes.  I’ve been told they are harmless but I don’t believe everything I’m told.  I am about as girlie as it gets when it comes to snakes; and so too is Leslie.  That said, I have become quite confident about our snakes as of late for two reasons.  One, because our gal Kerri’s lab cross has gotten seriously professional about ripping them in half, and two, because we have a lovely new girl Dana in the barn who has a Chihuahua and I figure he will be the first to go.  To be fair I cannot really knock Ocala for the snakes though as our worst snake encounter came one summer in Virginia when we rented this sweet stone cottage and I had a lovely long bath one night (this was before I had a child obviously) and then ten minutes later went back into the bathroom to use the toilet and while sat on said toilet was stricken with fear as there, coiled behind the shower curtain, was a leviathan of a black snake.  He was clearly napping after having watched me in the tub all that time; dirty thing he was.  It was ten at night and I screamed and got Leslie who was as grief stricken as me.  What were we to do? I determined I was going to have to go and get our Landlords who lived on the property and in the meantime Leslie was charged with the task of making sure it did not leave the confines of the bathroom.  When I drove back with Landlord and their head barn staff in tow armed with pitchfork and machete we found Leslie guarding the door with pajama bottoms, wellington boots and a broom.  He was sweating quite a bit but had been successful in containing the threat.

      Last of all are the alligators.  We have just in the past few years bought our own farm which does not have a pond so as of late we have not had any alligator encounters.  However, when we rented the farm across the street it had a very large pond that was often home to a gator or two.  When Leslie first moved here he was quite taken by the idea of having alligators in your back yard so we’d often hack down by the pond and go wink at them (they wink a lot).  The gators were very shy guys and would run into the water from their sun tanning spots when we got too close.  The man Romero who was the property manager there had a three year old daughter at the time and one day he called me on the phone to see if I’d like to come to his house to see what he had.  I guess one of the Gators had journeyed away from the pond and made the bad move of crossing over Romero’s back yard so he had jumped on the golf cart and lassoed the trespasser!  Can you imagine? Romero as you might imagine is no “Crocodile Hunter” type, rather he is about three apples tall and cooks a mean taco rather than shrimps on the Barbie if you know what I mean.  But there he was on the owner’s pretentious blue ‘bmw’ golf cart with a gator at the end of his lasso.  The Gator was none too pleased and proceeded to take a hunk of the cart’s fender and started doing the death roll just like on Discovery Channel.  Romero proceeded to drag it up to the barn and we all gathered around like the gawkers that we were and even grabbed a broom and watched the Gator snap it.  I remember thinking “Wow, I’ve achieved proper Red Neck status now.”

      That just about sums up our local wildlife.  The only two I left off the list of note perhaps are the wild boars whom we rarely see other than once when our Lurcher came home a day prior to our wedding party with a hole in his side as apparently a momma sow didn’t understand that it wasn’t so much her child he was interested in but her afterbirth, and the red ants that have educated Liam as to the fact that not every cool pile of sand is a castle.  Perhaps my writing will be of solace to those stuck up north for the winter that at least their bugs are all dead right now!