Jonathan Kieran

St. Augustine, Florida—“America’s Oldest City”—is my hometown. I haven’t lived there in a coon’s age, being (by now) a dyed-in-the-wool Californian of some sophistication and pedigree 🙄, but the charms and whimsical attractions of the Ancient City remain vivid.

One such memory was the Alligator Farm, located on Anastasia Island on A1A, nestled in an appropriately swampy patch of palm-laden territory. The Alligator Farm boasted hundreds of Florida’s trademark reptiles, which could be viewed from the dubious safety of swinging wooden bridges that Tarzan himself may have been reluctant to traverse. As kids of quite peccable breeding and imagination, we’d lean over the ropes and hawk spitballs and loogies at the mostly napping and immobile alligators heaped below in the brackish water.

They were mildly interesting but not all that exciting. They didn’t eat each other. They didn’t rear-up and try to grab us from the wobbly bridges. They looked bored as hell, with only an occasional jostling of position by younger gators trying to bother some old, fat gator who was in no mood to be outmaneuvered by ambitious whippersnappers.

We’d watch the gators for a while and then wander over to the little petting zoo on the premises to feed baby goats or possibly wait for the afternoon rattlesnake demonstration in the Venom Gazebo. The Alligator Farm was a fairly middling tourist trap for a time, mostly snagging the attention of visitors from Wisconsin who might not be able to tell an alligator from an octopus. We Florida kids were used to seeing gators everywhere, so patronizing the Alligator Farm had all the thrill of going to watch a hundred stray cats snoozing in the sunshine.

Until GOMEK arrived.

Gomek was a genuine Australian Saltwater Crocodile, over 17 feet long, and preternaturally terrifying. The facility acquired him through some flash of economic legerdemain or global Monster Trafficking and, suddenly, the Alligator Farm was hot stuff for locals and tourists alike. A special paddock with an underwater viewing window was built for Gomek and regular feeding demonstrations starring this exotic behemoth were enough to raise the hairs on your head. Gomek was a dinosaur. A primordial terror. When he submerged in his pool and lingered near the observation window to stare at you with his Sauron-eye—big as a pool-table’s eight ball—you knew in the quivering pit of your gut that, if not for the six-inch protective glass, you’d be lunch. And even that glass looked “iffy”.

It was a shocking sensation, a genuinely enthralling evolutionary reaction hailing from the days when our ancestors swung from trees by their tails over murky rivers haunted by gigantic beasts that could soar out of the water like torpedos and pick us off the trees like so many hairy plums.

Gomek has since died but his story (and the tale of the Alligator Farm’s subsequent rise to international research headquarters status) is a tale worth reading. Click the links above and see that I speak the truth.

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[ A new novel by Jonathan Kieran is slated for major international release in March 2025 so brace yourselves and think of England. This stuff is built for speed. Stay tuned for more info. ] 

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