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On Broadway
(Lake)
By Pete Wachsberger
 The
legend (almost) of Broadway Joe
If you’ve been following these columns over the past
year, you’ll know that up to this point, I’ve always managed to find
something of interest going on at Broadway Lake, even during the
winter months when I explored the possibility of ice fishing. Of
course, in recent months, Family Day provided me with easy material,
especially last month, when this column was replaced by a page of
photographs.
But, little did I imagine when I first started
writing these monthly pieces that I had placed myself in position to
tell a story of potentially monstrous proportions, the Legend of
Broadway Joe.
No, I’m not talking about that old guy who once
quarterbacked a New York professional football team. I’m referring
to Broadway Lake’s answer to Nessie, Loch Ness’s supposed creature,
the alligator that reportedly now haunts Broadway Lake. I say
“haunts” because, as with Nessie, sightings have been sporadic, and
descriptions have varied. I’ve spoken with people who swear that
it’s over six feet long, and some who describe it as substantially
smaller.
Anderson County Park Police Chief Bill Striewing, who
has been assigned the duty of removing Joe from Broadway Lake,
reports that he did, on one occasion, manage to catch sight of the
elusive gator, and ranks himself among those who put its size at the
small end of the scale, “around three feet.” Chief Striewing told me
that what he saw might actually be a cayman instead of a “normal”
alligator. With the discrepancies in the descriptions, where do we
begin to seek the truth? All the folks I’ve spoken with seem to be
persons of good repute, not prone to exaggeration or
sensationalistic tendencies. Until, or unless, someone actually
produces either a specimen or at least a clear photograph, we must
draw our own conclusions.
Since the volume of evidence is insufficient for
anything but speculation at this point, I now offer my thoughts on a
possibility that none have yet considered. If one followed the Loch
Ness story at its peak, one recalls that some thought Nessie might
be a plesiosaurus, descended from a dinosaur that had somehow
survived the mass extinction of 65 million years ago. Alligators are
known to have survived that event, and in fact to have existed
hundreds of millions of years before dinosaurs even came into being,
shrugging off the cataclysmic events that brought about conditions
that allowed for dinosaurs to even have their day in the sun and
then lose it.
What if Broadway Joe is actually not a modern day
species of alligator, but something that goes back even further? In
the past few months, scientists in Latvia have discovered a partial
skeleton of Ventastega curonica, a tetrapod (which is what gators
are) that existed 365 million years ago. It is assumed that the
species died out, but what if it didn’t? What if a North American
cousin somehow survived and began a line of extremely reclusive
descendants? Joe might be the latest in the line, a rebel who has
decided to actually allow himself to be seen on occasion. If the
common error of mistaking a crocodile for an alligator has been
made, then we should consider the possibility of Sarcosuchus
imperator, crocodile ancestor which like the Latvian gator,
predates, and coincides with, the dinosaur era, albeit by
substantially less than 300 million years. This would be in line
with my editor’s thoughts; when I first brought this story to his
attention, he speculated that the thing might be, ahem, “a
croc.” Being of the sort who always wanted to break
bread with Sasquatch, greet the aliens when they disembarked from
their UFO, or water ski behind Nessie, I hope, but do not reasonably
expect, that Broadway Joe will turn out to be as fantastic a
creature as I’ve suggested.
So, the legend grows ... or shrinks. But whether
Joe’s a gator, Ventastega curonica, a cayman, Sarcosuchus imperator,
or “a croc,” we obviously have the makings of an ongoing story here.
I’m on it.
As always, I’d love to get your
thoughts on this, and on anything else I might write about. My
e-mail:
pete@bergerkingstudio.com.
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