My earliest Aqualand memories were those of a little girl playing the excelsior packaging beneath the rough, plywood table in the work area of the gift shop warehouse, as mommy and the other ladies unwrapped, priced and prepared items they would sell in the upcoming tourism season of summer.
The Boxes were forts, the excelsior my bedding. I could spend hours there, no doubt chattering and creating homes for my dolls.
But when I truly dream of my childhood, I remember vividly that time between being too young to ride my bike alone and being old enough to get a social security card so I could be on the payroll. (in those days one did not have to register their children for a social security number, but one was required to draw a paycheck).
These were my years of being an independent contractor. I tried many entrepreneurial ventures, but those that paid the best were those of picking up garbage, catching frogs and finding peacock feathers.
All of these were tasks my grandfather, known to most as Uncle Pat, paid me in coins: quarters, nickels and dimes- enough for a soda pop or cotton candy or on an especially profitable day, a new beaded necklace from the Aqualand gift shop.
Riding my little blue bike from my childhood home to the parking lot at Aqualand was quick business. I needed to be done collecting garbage before the doors opened for the day, and they opened at 9 am. So by 8 am I was picking up a trash bucket, and walking first through the parking lot where any number of ridiculous items were cast off by less than tidy visitors from the day before. Most common were the wrappers and pop bottles, cigarette butts and dirty diapers- the things that no one wanted to keep in their car for the ride back home. In the late sixties, while Mad Men wrote their ads, people did not concern themselves with disposing of trash carefully. The crying Indian Warrior, the first and most enduringly powerful "Anti-Littering" National Campaign was still a few years away.
Once the parking lot was done, I would move in one of two directions, the animals side or the ponds side of the park. The ponds side was kind of mysterious to me, an imaginative little blondie. I was slightly afraid of the spirit of the turtles, who lay deep in the muck of a morning before the sun warmed enough to draw them to the surface. Next to the main turtle pond was the pond for the alligator snappers, three foot long horny shelled monsters who lived beneath the water in their enclosure. I knew they were humongous and had vicious snapping jaws, and I also knew that there was no one else about to bear witness if they somehow grabbed and ate me. If I managed to survive them, I moved on to the spookiest place of all, the back musky pond. This was where my father and grandfather told visitors that "Old Mose" lived. Old Mose was the fabled gigantic musky. That trophy that everyone wanted to catch a glimpse of. As I dragged my fearful steps around the pond, scooping plastic bags from the water with my net and picking up the other trash, I looked in vain for his bulk in the murky water.
It was really a Miracle I lived to tell the tale. Between the danger of my mission and my wild imagination, I would have thought I should have surely expired...
Once the trash was collected, there was a walk through the grounds to retrieve peacock feathers. more prevalent in late July and August, it was my job to gather dropped tail feathers daily, sometimes twice a day. The feathers had value and were sold in the gift shop. But visitors who found them frequently missed the signage throughout the park explaining that such feathers were the property of Aqualand. Confiscating them was never pleasant, so we endeavored to gather them ourselves to avoid the conflict.
My final money making opportunity was to catch leopard frogs, which I could sell to Aqualand for feeding the muskies. On a good day I would catch a dozen or so in the little creek across the road from Aqualand. It was truly only a couple of years ago that I realized the culvert from the musky pond must have been the source of the frogs in the creek. So in essence, I was merely re-catching the frogs my grandfather had already sold to visitors once. These were the smart frogs who evaded the muskies to live another day. I wonder how many of them I caught again and again.
Business was good for a budding business woman in the 1960's especially when one grew up in a magical kingdom of frogs, muskies and peacocks; deer, bear and timber wolves. Narnia didn't have anything on Aqualand, and Aqualand was real.
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