Handsome Steve

I don't mean to dwell on loss, but I feel Steve deserves this,...he was one of the entities that made my life what it is, a being that I would lounge around and relax with out on the dock, in what felt/feels (to me) like harmony,..harmony with beautiful exotic, extraordinary creatures, harmony with nature, with the world.


Steve was always there,...on cold days when none of the other iguanas would show-up,..Steve would,..on rainy days,....no one else would show,..but guess who would be there?


.....he was just always there.



When I was young I had the privilege to go, (with my parents) to St.Thomas, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. While being checked into the small individual "bungalow" I was taken-back, amazed, and immediately enamored with the three or four large lizards scampering up and over the domed cement roof  of the cottage.
I couldn't get over the beauty of the animals, the surroundings, and the nonchalant relationship between the West-Indian Gentleman showing us to our rooms and these large lizards.
 When I asked the man what they were he casually said "Oh day jus Iguana mon,...they no bodder wit no one"
 I returned to my temperate New Jersey fantasizing and swearing that someday I would  move-to, and live in a tropical place where Iguanas roamed free, and were just everywhere.

I did, and Steve is/was an integral part of that life, my life, mine and my wife's world.


The last three days of his life were spent curled up under a Papasan chair ottoman.

Steve about 24 hours before the last time I would ever see him.

Carl and Steve; the last time I ever saw them together, in the background, (in the water) is neighbor "Miles" telling me that Armondo, (behind him on the opposite dock with no shirt) had to "whack  a big orange one with a shovel because it was about to attack his dog".


Meanwhile, the "big orange one",..is the small dark lizard behind/next to Carl in this photo????
A lizard that is/was 12 inches from head-to-vent, (base of the tail),..and 24 inches of tail, (3 feet total),...but again,...only a 12 inch body.

I don't fault Miles for the way he told me, and as a matter of fact, his wife Pam, (also in the picture, in the water talking with Armondo) is a big fan of Carl's , (she calls him "Redman").

....but while Miles was telling me this story, about this big orange lizard, (that was today,..in fact a small dark green lizard that never asked to be born here), dying slowly in front of me.

The way Miles told me this story made me realize that he, (and most likely then majority of other humans) think that these animals come and go,... that they are all just on the move, like rouge nomads ravaging the landscape at will.
Nothing could be farther from the truth,.. these little guys stay in one area, are creatures of habit,..they will go to the bathroom at the same place everyday at the same time,... we have had the same core group of  about 12 individuals, at our end of the canal,...(my little piece of paradise),...for years.

I'm also quite positive if I were to try and point out to Miles, or even  to Armondo, (who actually hit Steve), that this was the same lizard,..they would say something like;   " oh no this guy was big and orange,..that is not the same one", not being aware of the fact that these animal change color, and shape in seconds through the use of  chromatophores, body compression, leg extension, and the raising and lowering their spines, (yes they have control over their spines).  

I have now witnessed 3 iguana deaths, one via a large Broad-Wing Hawk snatching a hatching, and now,..two via human.
.

The two pictures above are the last time I ever saw him, I offered him Hibiscus flowers, (his favorite) and Romaine,...he ate one Hibiscus blossom from me by hand,...I went down about a half an hour later,...and he was gone.

This didn't have to happen.

We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature, and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth. 

-Henry Beston

 A young Carl and Steve, (two years ago, spring 2010)

Steve is on the left

I am going to miss you buddy