Three Smiling Snouts

Today we made a carb-clearing drive to Lake Okeechobee, under a hot sun and small fluffy clouds, to Canal Point Recreation Area near Port Mayaca (Florida). Other points of interest included roadside cemeteries where only the tops of old funerary monuments are now visible, which soon might be entirely buried in environmental drift -- they seem to be natural rock-tops embedded in the soil.

Immediately upon entrance to the roadside picnic zone at the Lake, three significantly-large alligators (also known as "crocs") surfaced and swam past the ersatz boat launch near the parking spaces, as if performing in a carnival show. The head of an average-sized bullhead (fish) was drying out at the edge of the shoreline, while fileted bones were found further along the grassy embankment near the picnic tables. The 'gators swam slowly and carefully past the cement boat launch, with substantial spacing between each.

Further along (yet-another) sandy roadway, a pile of blue clothes lay beside the shoreline, and were a focus of cerebral concern among passers-by and onlookers. Broken glass from bottles is strewn among a row of jumbled rocks placed to stabilize the embankment, as a sort of barrier sharply augmented. The Canal Point Recreation Area is most specifically a picnic area, and there is more sand in the roadway trail than along the shoreline, which is a 'beach' littered with mollusk shells and shell-rock congomerates.

A half orange was lying abandoned beside a picnic table; memories of abandoned orange segments at Bear Point on Hutchinson Island were accompanied with the usual "what will happen" question about tossing them into the water -- at Bear Point segments were tossed into the water near the Indian River Lagoon and some water-creature's nest surfaced as if predictable and marked by a bobbing buoy.

The 'gators were definitely adult, and as we drove away from the Recreation Area, a fire truck and two police cars with flashing lights passed by moving toward Canal Point from the opposite direction. The smiling snouts? -- the roadside catch and Savannas Preserve release of a smaller 'gator a few days earlier.