A real John Wayne leaves us wondering how we would endure a brutal attack
A real John Wayne leaves us wondering how we would endure a brutal attack
It’s hardly the setting for an ambush. The tamed river is wide, a quarter mile or so, one side a seawall with docks and shops, the other a rock embankment leading to a paved road. It’s the commercial district in Moore Haven, which is rural central Florida, but not quite the Everglades.
There is a spot on that stretch of the Caloosahatchee that’s iffy, where a large tree with heavy branches sags into the river along the embankment, the only heavy concealment on either side of the broad river. It turned out to be a good ’gator hiding spot.
On a hot July day in 2012, Kaleb “Fred” Langdale and two boys swam that point in the river. Another boy and a girl cheered from the docks. There was no fear of swimming the brackish Caloosahatchee.
Langdale’s public ordeal began when a bull alligator made a rare move on the boys racing back and forth across the Caloosahatchee. The 10-footer had lain in
wait under the sagging branches. Langdale’s right forearm was snatched off, and with it tasks as simple as zipping pants.
Suddenly the world wanted to know “Gator Fred” Langdale, about his defiant fight in the river and seeming indifference to his loss. Looking back, however, Langdale notes that an alligator attack is a cruel way to gain notoriety. Alligators are so mechanical, so brute stupid. The instinct upon meeting Langdale, as guileless as a puppy, is a wish for the town to have avenged the attack― which it did, killing the alligator within hours.
And yet Langdale, now 20, is remarkably good-natured and optimistic. That he survived is good. But that he endures, that he tells you things are OK, that’s the story.
Langdale is not alone, of course. Alligator attacks on humans do occur occasionally, and are often deadly. A dozen or so people have died in Florida since 2000, including two on Sanibel — Janie Melsek and Robert Steele died from alligator-inflicted bites. The city has imposed heavy fines and restrictions on feeding alligators, which by most accounts encourages them to attack.
Understanding Kaleb Langdale is to wonder whether you would maintain his amazing optimism, minus a forearm and the weird stigmas of a wild animal attack. Could you cope with the phantom pain amputees say is very real, that Langdale lightly medicates to soften?
Langdale was fitted with a prosthetic forearm, his nondominant left hand reconditioned to hold a fork and tap a keyboard. He uses pincers on the prosthetic arm to grip or steady what he’s holding, his left hand to finish the chore. Untying a knotted rope is an example, or hitching a trailer to a truck, as he did during a visit to talk about his injury. The machine on the trailer was a four-wheeler to hunt wild boar. He has a handgun on his left hip, a shotgun he racks with his hand. Only once did his handicap impede the trip―when the prosthetic device came apart, apparently from grappling with airboats and heavy machines at the family’s home, where a dozen or so hunting dogs are also kept fenced. He screwed the arm back together in less than a minute. “I can still shoot and hunt and work,” says Langdale, wearing a crooked smile. “Hey, I know a guy missing two arms, and he’s fine. I have nothing to complain about.”