On July 17, Eric Merda was attacked by an alligator while swimming across a Manatee County lake in the Florida swamplands and survived to tell the tale to the Washington Post.
According to the Post, the 43-year-old had some time on his hands after completing a sprinkler repair job and decided to take a walk in the woods, leaving his cell-phone in his truck. He soon became lost and on coming across a lake decided to take his chances at swimming across it rather than struggling through the thick foliage on its banks.
“That’s gatorland, man. Everybody knows that around here”, Merda said, but it was getting dark and he was desperate to find his way back.
“I felt like I was going to die as it was.”
The swim was taking longer than he anticipated so he removed his heavy work clothes because they were weighing him down. It was then that he noticed the alligator approaching.
“She grabbed my forearm from the outside and snapped it back”, he told the Post.
“Three times we went under”, Merda continued. “I had an arm around the gator, the gator had its mouth on my arm, and I just kicked, kicked, kicked.”
On breaking the surface for the third time, the reptile performed a death-roll and “took off with [his] arm”.
Thus began his three-night struggle for survival.
Lost, naked, and with the bony stump of his missing arm exposed, Merda spent the following three days in the swampland surviving on swamp-water and “semi-tasty” flowers and understandably spending as much time as he could on dry land.
Although he tried his best to find help – which at one point consisted of shouting at low-flying planes – Merda found navigation almost impossible. The foliage was thick and the ground ripped at his bare feet so that “every little half step hurt”.
And, of course, there was the matter of his missing arm to deal with which began attracting flies on his second day in the swamp.
“The pain was absolutely excruciating. I mean, I didn’t stop screaming. … The whole three days — screaming”, he recounted, adding: “I had a bone sticking out of my arm, and I was using my nub to push brush aside to get through it. I had to. You’ve got to survive, man.”
On the fourth day, just as he began to lose hope, Merda came across an empty beer bottle and soon after that, a fence, and then a man who appeared to be about to climb into the driver’s side of a truck.
“Oh, hell, no, that’s not happening”, he remembers thinking, before walking to the fence where he was seen by the stranger.
Paramedics were called and Merda spent the following three weeks in hospital. What was left of his arm was amputated.
Merda has given up his job repairing and installing sprinklers, and hopes to make a career as a motivational speaker and stand-up comedian.
[Photo: Matthew Essman for unsplash]