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He remembered Gramps’s most terrifying Betsy story, about one of his friends who’d been bitten by a water moccasin while making his way through the flooded streets.

A water moccasin may glide silently past, and a few times we’ve seen iridescent alligator eyes peering out at us before they sank back down into the depths.

Or the gators cruising along the lake shores or water moccasins coiled and sunbathing around cypress trees.

“He was kind of a grumpy snake, and everybody was going, ‘Omigod, omigod, it's a water moccasin, kill it!’” she recollects.

We lived on Lake Eloise across from Cypress Gardens so, of course, we skied until we dropped, hopefully well clear of the gators and water moccasins that were facts of life in still-wild Central Florida.