Teens will smarten up sooner or gator
Not that I didn’t do my share of crazy things when I was a teenager back in the ’80s. I mean, I had a closet full of parachut pants. I thought I could fool people into thinking I’d solved the Rubik’s Cube by peeling the stickers off and putting them back on in the right order. I believed “Chicago 17” was a good album. I was a nut.
But I’m fairly sure none of my wacky teenage exploits involved a live alligator. And that wasn’t just because I didn’t live in Florida, where you can find alligators anywhere; I hear they’ve started shopping in the Publix down there.
I bring this up because of a story I saw in the St. Petersburg Times about a group of Florida teenagers who recently spotted a 4-foot alligator from their school bus window. At this point they reacted as any red-blooded American teenager would react: They hid under their seats and hoped it would go away.
Wait, no, actually that’s how I would react. What these teenagers did is find themselves filled with the burning desire to wrestle the alligator into submission and drag it back onto the bus. They’re exposed to the hot sun a lot down there in Florida.
The story gets a little hazy here, but apparently the kids somehow convinced the bus driver to stop the bus so they could proceed with their spontaneous alligator hunt. This despite the fact that the first thing they teach you in bus driver school is, if the kids ask you to stop the bus so they can get off to catch an alligator, DON’T DO IT.
Anyway, the kids approached the alligator and eventually were able to cover its head with their shirts, which, although I’m no expert, I’m thinking is probably on the short list of things that alligators find annoying. Luckily one of the students — the bus nerd, I’m guessing — was carrying a roll of tape, and they were able to secure the animal’s mouth and drag it back on board.
I’d suggest that this would have been a good time for the bus driver to express some sort of concern over the direction the afternoon’s events had taken. But apparently since the alligator was not standing in front of the yellow line or engaging in horseplay, she was OK with it.
Fortunately nobody was hurt, but I’m still concerned. Do you suppose this was an isolated incident, or that the only reason this isn’t happening on school buses all across America is a lack of alligators? And what could convince a teenager that engaging in hand-to-hand combat with something that could eat you is a good idea? Is it something in the Mountain Dew?
Regardless, I’m betting that this incident was a fluke and not some indicator that teens as a rule are getting dumber or crazier. After all, there are plenty of kids who don’t stalk alligators; it’s just that the St. Petersburg Times never writes about them. Perhaps because the first thing they teach you in journalism school is never to run a headline that says, “Local teens ride bus, no alligators involved.”
Meanwhile, at least one parent, while concerned over the laissez-faire attitude of the bus driver, didn’t seem too bothered by the fact that his child had helped corral a live killer reptile. “Kids are going to do what kids are going to do,” he said.
Somebody get those kids some Rubik’s Cubes, quick!