I’ve watched enough Dateline and 48 Hours Mystery to know a good plan from a bad plan, and my family’s plan to kill me was pretty solid. It was a smart group conspiring against me that included a Ph.D., Harvard and Wharton MBAs, a Washington University mechanical engineer, a CPA … well, you get where this is going. Every one of these people might be able to get away with murder.
The first sign something was wrong was my boat assignment. My family recently gathered in New Orleans to celebrate my daughter’s graduation from Tulane. My niece thought it would be fun to do our own private swamp tour instead of the typical airboat one. If you book your own, you can have a beer or two as you enjoy the landscape and critters along the way. My niece decided there would be a ‘young’ boat and an ‘old’ boat. I would be on the latter. I was stunned by this assignment as I consider myself young, but I didn’t protest given the group’s demographics and her likely desire to pay me back for her years at the kids’ table for Christmas.
The second sign something was afoot was our boat captain’s lack of concern about safety. There was no discussion about life jackets, just a comment to stand up if you fell overboard because the water in most places was just 4 or 5 feet deep. I have to admit, I wasn’t too concerned after spending so much time in the Florida Keys, where the water depth is similar.
The third sign: I didn’t see any of the stuff everyone else saw. The captain pointed out birds, a bald eagle, some stuff in the water, things that jumped out of the water. I pretended to see them; I mean, I even wore my glasses, but I was always a second too late. All I saw was swampy water and mossy trees, and I spent a lot of time wondering if I could survive more than 5 minutes on an episode of Naked and Afraid.
The fourth sign of something being wrong was the sudden appearance of alligators everywhere. It was as if the sound of the boats’ motors called them. Well, that and the fish dangling from the lines off the boat. The first alligator to appear was about 5 feet long. Alligators are an unattractive species. Trying to act like a considerate conservationist, I asked our captain what alligators were good for, assuming he would say something about the ecosystem. His answer: “Nothing I can think of.” The 5-foot alligator brought a few of his friends along. They were much smaller, but next thing you know, our boats were surrounded by sharks, I mean alligators. It was entertaining watching them, yet a little scary.
And then my family put their plan in motion. The captain asked me to move from where I was sitting so he could grab a bottle of water. Little did I know he also was going to grab a fake alligator head, which he thrust toward me. Every action has an overreaction in my case, and as I barrel-rolled toward the front end of the boat, I realized I was gator meat if I continued to roll and landed in the swamp.
Needless to say, their plan failed, but it was good to hear from each of them, “No way would I have gone in to grab you!”’ I’m still not sure if they had to pay the boat captain since the plan didn’t work.