Swamp keeper’s shows go on, teaching golden rule of nature

Okefenokee Joe’s dark eyes were watery and tired, and he moved slowly on the small amphitheater stage at the Gwinnett County Fair last week.

He’d barely begun his show-and-tell on deadly snakes and other wildlife — one he’s done hundreds of times at schools, pow-wows and fairs across the Southeast — when blaring music from the nearby children’s carnival rides drowned out his baritone.

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Kimberly Smith/ksmith@ajc.com

Dick Flood, as ‘Okefenokee Joe,’ holds Wiggles, a rat snake, Thursday before a show at the Gwinnett County Fair in Lawrenceville. He urges kids to be ‘grateful,’ not ‘hateful’ to animals.

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“They were supposed to turn that down when the show starts,” Joe said.

But the swamp beckoned as soon as the grizzled bear of a man picked up his guitar and sang his toe-tapping ode to the American alligator.

“Swimming on the lily pads, digging up crawdads,” Joe sang to the sparse gathering of fairgoers sitting on aluminum bleachers. “Feeling right at home there, knowing he belongs there, that’s how a gator has fun.”

A young girl started to dance, twirling with a pinwheel she held high in the air.

Okefenokee Joe, whose real name is Dick Flood, was off and running.

At 75, Joe nearly retired when blocked arteries put him in the hospital earlier this year. But he’s kept going, booked for six more events this year, including the Stone Mountain pow-wow in November.

“I’ll do them as long as I can,” Joe said. “God wants me to do this.”

He’s performing two shows a night at the Gwinnett County Fair through Thursday.

Joe has been a traveling, one-man show since 1981, when he left a private park in southeast Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp, where he took care of snakes, deer, alligators and other animals. He didn’t go to school to learn his craft, but watch him handle a coiled, tail-shaking, 6-foot-long diamondback rattlesnake, then ask yourself if it matters.

Two public television documentaries starring Joe — “The Joy of Snakes” made in 1988 and “Swampwise” made in 1990 — still air at least once a year on Georgia Public Broadcasting Television.

His message is simple. People have a lot to learn from wildlife. The main lesson is what Joe calls the golden rule of nature: “If you don’t need it, leave it.”

Animals don’t kill other animals for spite, Joe told his audience. They’re not wasteful. They kill only what they need to eat.

His second, more specific message is, most Georgia snakes are non-venemous, and even the deadly ones will only harm people when threatened. Rats and mice are their meal of choice.

Once that’s understood, “maybe instead of being hateful, we’d be grateful,” Joe said.

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