It’s 10:37 p.m., and I’m kneeling in a boat on B.A. Steinhagen Lake, roughly 125 miles northeast of Houston. My right hand clutches the yellow-and-black striped tail of a 3.5-foot alligator; my left hand grips its neck. At 7 pounds, this pseudo-dinosaur with 80 sharp teeth and a ferocious bite weighs less than a miniature poodle but isn’t nearly as cuddly.
Moments earlier, Randall Kroll, a wildlife biologist at Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, used a deep-sea fishing rod to hook the gator beneath one of its bony scales, then pulled it aboard with his bare hands. Working quickly, he wraps its jaws in electrical tape, but it still squeezes out a few unsettling barks.
“That’s the call for its momma,” Kroll explains.
“Let’s hope she doesn’t arrive,” my dad says.
Enjoying this article?This isn’t my idea of a fun summer evening, but for my dad it is, which is why I’ve invited him along. He spent his high school years setting traps and trotlines on and around Steinhagen, located at the heart of Martin Dies, Jr. State Park in Jasper. Here an estimated 3,000 alligators reign over an 11,000-acre kingdom of bass, catfish, gar, snakes, and turtles.
This is a world away from the strip malls and parking lots of southwestern Dallas, where I grew up. As an artsy teen preoccupied with an expanding CD collection, I’d hear my dad reminisce about his deep East Texas adventures—the time he and a cousin hooked a giant snapping turtle or chased a baby alligator through a swamp—and mostly tune him out. When he regaled dinner guests with tales of ancient cypress trees 15 feet wide, I’d roll my eyes.
But at some point, I started listening. And in 2016, I finally climbed aboard a rickety aluminum jon boat with him to see the places he was always talking about. From Steinhagen’s northeast end, we followed the muddy Neches River up to the forks, where it meets the clean, deep Angelina River to Bee Tree Slough. This lazy web of isolated channels and oxbow lakes is named for the hollow, honey-filled trees that existed before Hurricane Rita obliterated them in 2005. My dad, a Lord of the Rings enthusiast, lovingly dubs it “The Shire.”
The place stunned and terrified me. In a claustrophobic corner some locals call Alligator Pond, the sound of bellowing reptiles brought to mind something my grandfather liked to tell my dad: “If anything happens out there, we’ll call it your final resting place.”
After that trip, I started having vivid dreams about alligators. At Buffalo Bayou in Houston, where I lived, they blocked my path at every turn, raring to eat me. I’d wake in a daze, wondering why my mind kept replaying this horror movie.
I knew my fears had grown excessive, so I decided to follow the example of the children’s author C.S. Lewis, who overcame his bug phobia by studying entomology. “I am inclined to think a real objective curiosity will usually have this cleansing effect,” he wrote in his 1955 memoir, Surprised by Joy. I knew I needed to return to Steinhagen and Bee Tree with my dad—in a wider, sturdier boat.
But if I hoped to confront my fears with an up-close alligator sighting, I got much more than I wished for. Searching for a worthy vessel, I called TPWD, and Kroll generously invited us to ride along as they tagged gators. Since 2022, the agency has collected growth and range data on inland alligators. Such data is sparse: The few 20th century biologists who studied them included a Marshall man who hatched an egg in captivity in 1961 and kept the reptile as his pet.
We meet in the evening at the Walnut Ridge boat ramp. After everyone dons life jackets, Kroll fires up the motor of his Pro-Drive outboard. Before I know it, we’re flying, a white spray of water arching behind us like a tail.
The lake resembles a giant mirror, its glassy surface reflecting marshmallow clouds rimmed by trees. Black-bellied whistling ducks soar overhead—the first we glimpse in a series of waterfowl, including cormorants, ibises, and egrets. “Incredible,” Dad says, like he’d never seen this before.
By the time we reach Alligator Pond, the full moon is rising, and the mosquitoes are swarming. The boat’s engine gurgles as Kroll points out a dense bed of water primrose matted like something is lying on it. But no alligator appears.
Somewhere in my subconscious, I’d confused alligators with the pirate-stalking crocodile of Peter Pan and its real-life counterparts in places like India and Australia. But alligators—the American and Chinese varieties—are timid, reclusive personalities. They’re typically only aggressive when threatened. In the last 200 years, just two people in Texas have died from attacks.
Who can blame them for their shyness? Hunting and habitat loss since the 1850s, when fashionistas first sported reptile skin, decimated the species. In 1936, hunters “literally cleaned” the Neches River of them, the naturalist Geraldine Ellis Watson wrote in her 2003 book Reflections on the Neches. From just one pond, they killed 40 gators in three days.
It took a series of state and federal protections, first enacted in 1967, to save the American alligator. Now Texas has 500,000 of them, but their relations with humans remain strained. The construction of dams and reservoirs has sent alligators swimming toward new territories like Waco and Dallas, where they aren’t exactly welcome. Housing development also pushes up against their historical habitats, resulting in 10-footers wandering near people’s lawns. Only the luckiest escape culling and end up at Gator Country, an adventure park in Beaumont with more than 450 reptiles living out their days safely behind a chain-link fence.
In retrospect, I could have just visited Gator Country. But I thought the only real way to shake my fears, irrational as they were, was by heading into the wild, where the reptiles roam free.
Kroll predicts we won’t see any gators before dark. To avoid getting lost in Bee Tree Slough, we speed back to Steinhagen. Right after dusk, I glimpse my first pair of eyes, flickering like two candles above the water. Kroll hands me a spotlight and tells me to scan the banks for more.
“There’s one,” I shout.
Per Kroll’s orders, I hold the lamp steady to stun the animal. He steers the boat toward it and, about 15 feet out, cuts the engine. Frogs chirp, moan, and gick-gick-gick as Kroll casts two treble hooks at the gator. They hit the water with a plunk, and the eyes disappear.
This is no easy work: We zigzag for three hours, chasing more than a dozen gators before Kroll finally nabs the 3.5-footer. Wearing a headlamp strapped atop his baseball cap, he conjures a labor and delivery nurse assessing a newborn baby. He measures it, weighs it, and examines every inch—from the armor-like scutes ridging its back to its cloaca, an opening in its soft belly that reveals its sex. “Stick your pinkie finger inside,” he says. “If you feel anything, it’s male.” I politely decline, so the job falls to the intern, a long-haired biology major, who announces we have a girl.
We name her Bobbie, after Willie Nelson’s late sister. Kroll pierces the webbing between two back toes with an identification tag, then inserts a Passive Integrated Transponder tag in one leg just in case, since gators often lose extremities when fighting. It’s time to say farewell. Holding Bobbie, Kroll unwinds the tape. With a flick of her tail, she’s gone.
Fierce as she was, Bobbie wasn’t half as formidable as the creatures I’d feared. It’s only the next morning, visiting my dad’s cousin nearby, that I finally glimpse something resembling the creatures of my nightmares. The skin of a 12.5-foot alligator nabbed during hunting season stretches across his office wall, its long toenails dangling like Christmas ornaments. The detached head grins atop a filing cabinet.
Alive, it might be as scared of me as I would be of it. But in Bee Tree Slough, I discovered something my dad has always known: All great beauty harbors danger. You can’t untangle them, and neither should you want to. “I want the wild places to be wild,” he says.
