A funny thing happened to me on the way home the other day.

Well, funny for some of us involved, anyways…

You know how when you’re just driving along, minding your own business, and then all of a sudden, you hit an alligator in the middle of the road?! Of course you don’t, because aside from Florida, that’s something that really doesn’t happen anywhere else in the entire world. When I used to live up in Michigan, it certainly wasn’t uncommon to see deer alongside the roads and occasionally one would get hit because when it comes down to it, deer are extraordinarily dumb creatures that wouldn’t know a suburban if they ran into one head-on, but alligators, on the other hand … well, let’s just say that “dumb” isn’t exactly the kind of adjective that I would recommend throwing around with regards to a prehistoric beast that could rather easily crush any random part of your body in its gaping jaws like a rag doll in a particularly hungry vise!

As you would only expect for such a tale, it was a dark and stormy night, and yours truly had just gotten off after pulling a double down at the old crab shack … well, I was driving home at night and it was raining, anyways.  I was driving well under the speed limit, as any good driver does when hazardous driving conditions are present, although I guess I didn’t know until a moment too late that said road hazards also included a six foot lizard with an overbite!  It all happened so quickly, I only saw his mighty incisors in the roadway for a split second before *bump*.  He looked mad, which I suppose is probably pretty normal when you’re just trying to cross the road and cars keep running over your tail…

It took me about a mile or so down the road before I finally put the pieces together and realized that I had, in fact, just ran over a giant log with teeth and an appetite!  At that point I immediately turned around and drove back, half expecting to find a wounded gator hobbling off into the ditch, but nothing – no tail slipping out of sight, no flattened alligator carcass obstructing traffic, not a single sign of my scaly, slithering speed bump anywhere.  Of course, that’s when the worrying began to kick in…

For the rest of the trip home, my mind raced as I pondered the situation and where exactly my gimpy gator might’ve disappeared to – maybe he was in a hurry when my front tire came along, so he was already running and thus long gone by the time I had circled back.  Or maybe he actually ran into me and as a result, felt kind of embarrassed about the whole situation and took off cowering in shame before his other alligator friends could give him a hard time about being such a klutz of a lizard.

Or maybe my absolute worst of fears had been realized and he was actually still stuck underneath my car, just waiting for me to stop and get out so that he could grab my feet and begin his violent, albeit arguably warranted revenge!  He’d wait until I was back home and the garage door had closed, thus eliminating both the risk of having witnesses and also the majority of my potential escape routes in the process.  Then, once I opened my car door, out would pop his flattened, little head to nip at my ankles before my feet even touched the ground, ready to inflict onto me a world of hurt normally reserved for water buffalo in Discovery Channel specials.  Before long he’d drag my lifeless, battered body back into the makeshift lair that he had created underneath my car to be feasted on at his leisure, biding his time until morning when my wife would return home and open the garage door, thus allowing him to slink off back into the wild as nature’s not-so-silent assassin once again…

Thankfully, though, all of that didn’t actually happen and my fate was spared with a minimal amount of jumpiness once I finally returned home and slowly dared to inch open my car door!  I did check underneath the car with a flashlight – from a distance – just to be sure, but luckily my carnivorous victim was nowhere to be found.  Then again, I suppose one might argue that not knowing whether a vengeance-seeking gator is out there on the loose somewhere, plotting to one day return the favor when I least expect it could be even worse than just getting dragged to my own horrific mauling and getting it over with in the first place!

Only in Florida, indeed…