"What?"

Mythical...Beavers?

As you can probably guess, I'm really into folklore, legends, and fantasy. I've always been a big fan of imagination, particularly mythic-level imagination. My bookshelf reflects this. I have a few books about animals and a lot of books about history, but there is an enormous section devoted to stuff that never really existed.

With the arrival of children, I looked at all my fantasy and folklore books with a new eye. I mean, if an alien visitor popped down and perused my library, he could be forgiven for thinking that dragons and manticores were real. It's not like this stuff comes with a disclaimer or something.

So I was naturally curious about how this would fit into raising a child. Being a parent means spending an inordinate amount of time worrying about things which you probably don't need to worry about. One of these things for me has been what will happen when a child who needs to be schooled in the Real World encounters the make-believe at such a young age. We had a few story books when I was little, but they were colorful, childish things that sat on the kids' shelf. My parent's bookshelf, meanwhile, was stocked with professional-looking natural history books and a row of staid encyclopedias. The was an inherent difference between childish imaginative stuff and adult reality.

Not so with my bookshelf, which has caused me to wonder if my kids will have trouble differentiating truth from fantasy. I suppose I could go out of my way to say "this is made-up" when we encounter this stuff in a story, but that gets kind of exhausting and, as a storyteller myself, I feel like it's a betrayal to interrupt the sacredness of a narrative to say the narrative is a lie. A preface or afterward to that effect is fine, mind you, but footnotes are for academic works, not stories.

At any rate, as it would happen, the eldest had already begun to pick up on real/make-believe divide without any comments from me. Unfortunately, he came to the wrong conclusion altogether.

We were walking around a lake the other day and came across a fallen tree. This initiated a discussion about beavers, an animal that appears in one of his favorite cartoons. To my complete surprise, the child interrupted the discussion by saying "But beavers aren't real."

Yankee readers may be a little perplexed by this statement, so I should clarify: this park was in Florida. I don't know if it's the weather or the alligators, but beavers don't like it here. Since the child had only seen beavers in a cartoon, he jumped to the weird but understandable conclusion that beavers were make-believe, same as dragons. Though his thesis was wrong, this was a really good moment for me because it reminded me that even young children have a pretty good B.S. sensor and cartoons, thankfully, push that sensor into red.

I tried of course to explain to him that beavers are real and that his father had, in fact, seen beavers before. He didn't seem convinced, though, so my wife has suggested we find a zoo and settle it that way (frankly people like us always look for a reason to go to the zoo).

My own encounter with beavers is an interesting story. I was in Alaska when I was 19 or so with my folks. The first time I saw a beaver lodge out the window of our rental, I demanded we pull over so I could see if there was a beaver around. My parents were floored. To them, beavers were nuisance critters. Why would anyone want to see them?

To a Florida boy, though, beavers are pretty strange. They may be rodents, but they're giant rodents. Giant aquatic rodents. Plus they build things. Giant aquatic rodents that build things! How could anyone not be excited by them?

My parents didn't pull over, but eventually we went hiking near a beaver lodge. I tiptoed off the path, got my camera out (these being the days when one's camera was not also a phone) and made my approach. I saw a widening wake in the water and....

PAT! PAT! PAT!

Nothing.

I looked around for a minute then went back to my mom on the trail and told her about the noise.

"They slap their tail on the water when there's a predator around," she said. "It's a signal to hide."

"There's a predator around?" I looked around excitedly.

"Yeah." She gave me a significant stare.

I must admit that it took me a minute to comprehend her.

This Morning

This morning, shortly after waking up, I went outside. The sky was wispy with gray clouds and I felt a cool easterly. Something about the angle of the sun, the color of the sky, and the flavor of the breeze combined to say "Autumn is finally here."

I say "finally" because I live in Florida. Every summer as the thermometer rises, I go outside in my shorts and say "This ain't so bad," determined to not let it get to me. I power on through those sluggish, moist weeks, convinced that if I can just be optimistic enough, the temperature won't matter.

But it does matter. Optimism is fine in June, but by August I am sick of the heat. I hide in my domicile, ceiling fan whirring overhead, staring out at the bleached, foreboding terrain, worried I may be called outside to do something or that the unthinkable will happen and the A/C will break down. You see, Floridians aren't afraid of hurricanes because they may hurt us. No, we're terrified of losing power for two weeks in August, a common occurrence after a bad blow. So many power lines will get knocked down, so many transformers blown up in green technicolor fury, that we must employ outsiders to fix it all. You can always tell when a big one's hit because the interstates are suddenly clogged by caravans of out-of-state electrical trucks. I don't care if they are collecting overtime; those men are saints.

This year, the weather has had the opposite effect. We've had a number of near-misses, which aside from refilling the aquifer, has also given us the boon of overcast, almost-cool days at the end of summer. And Florida is perpetually worried about drought, so it's nice to complain about flooding for a change. It's funny how hurricanes, so terrible when they strike directly, can be so beneficial when they graze you.

Looking up now, I see very little to worry about in the months ahead. The sun will ease down into the southern sky, becoming more laid back, less harsh. Most of our clouds will blow away and leave a pale blue sky, clear and clean-looking, a contemplation of the infinite.

A Certain Kind of Bias

I hope last week's holiday went well for everyone. As you can tell, I didn't post, for which I am sorry. I didn't get to it because I was busy working. On Labor Day. The irony was not lost on me.

A few weeks back I drove up to see Lake Okeechobee. I've lived in this state for most of my life and never seen its largest lake. That made me feel like I'd failed as a Floridian.

So I crammed the family in the car, rode I-75 west and when it became Alligator Alley I took a turn onto US 27 and hurtled north through sugar cane country under a clear blue sky. You might expect the road here to be small and poorly maintained, but you'd be wrong. The highway is wide and smooth, a massive artery pumping semi-trucks full of sugar and sod down to the glittering coastal sprawl of Broward and Dade counties.

Lake Okeechobee proved underwhelming. The southern rim of the lake looked surprisingly similar to the Everglades. I wasn't expecting an inland sea or anything (okay, maybe I was), but I wasn't prepared to breathlessly climb that berm just to see...more sawgrass.

Here's a picture if you don't believe me. That open water you see is only there because it's a dredged channel for boats.

It's a sad lake that lets a palm tree grow in it.

The trip wasn't a waste, though. I had a nice picnic by the quasi-lake and, although there wasn't much open water, there was still a cool breeze, something to be appreciated this time of year in Florida.

Besides the picnic, I was glad for the drive. Seeing those cane fields laid out horizon to horizon reminded me the role sugar has played in South Florida's history, and its hard not to be impressed by the pump houses and canals which keep this marsh dry, even if they have screwed with the ecology.

I hate to end on a dark note, but it was also educating to see some of the trailers up there. They occupied a narrow band between the cane fields and the town, crammed together along narrow one-lane roads so close together that if someone wanted to borrow a cup of sugar (which they probably helped grow), they'd only have to open a window and reach over into the neighbor's kitchen. All of this just miles from a posh hacienda which belonged, no doubt, to the owner of the plantation.

Am I the only one who notices this stuff?