My Abstract for the Graduate Research Symposium at WCU

Paula Michele Bolado


Wulfert Road and the Alligators: Turning Fear into Respect for Sanibel Island’s Natural Ecology




“Wulfert Road and the Alligators: Turning Fear into Respect for Sanibel Island’s Natural Ecology,” a creative nonfiction piece, describes the incredible natural beauty of Sanibel Island, Florida from the perspective of a young precocious girl. While walking home from the bus stop on her ninth birthday, singing and dancing along the way, she suddenly is confronted with the “Marlon Brando” of all gators, a marvelous twelve footer in the road. “Alligators usually were what all the kids cared about most because they have incited curiosity and fear in the hearts of many on and off the island.”


Thematically, her fear of the beast grows into a healthy respect for all the oddities of the island, including spiders and panthers. However, the young girl shows how fear can serve as another reason to control the unknown: development, a tragic consequence for 800 acres of Sanibel’s ecosystem and habitat of animals, birds, and creepy crawlers surrounding Wulfert Road. The endangered woods have been replaced with golf courses and stucco homes, proving developers can wipe out an entire ecosystem due to their fear of the unknown, the unexplored, and the unadmired.


The idea of this piece is to express how a child can see the world of Wulfert Road and the alligators, partly with fear, mostly with wonder, and making peace with it all. She does this with heightened sensory details, where one can smell the salty bayou and oysters and almost touch a heron’s wing: “One night, I saw the largest great blue heron wading in low tide by the dock. It peered out to me through the knees of the mangroves. I watched it lift one leg and then the other, like a ballerina, over the mud and oysters. I couldn’t help myself, so I crawled into the mangroves to get close to the five foot high dancer. It was so beautiful I wanted to run my fingers across its oily grey feathers. But as I neared, the heron took off like a great glorious blue plane.”