David Shealy's life mission is singular, a little lonely, and sometimes jinxes him with the ladies. None of this may be surprising, given that for more than a decade Shealy has tried to convince the world that outsized, lumbering ape-men call the Everglades home."It opens up a whole Pandora's box," Shealy, 41, conceded one recent sweltering morning as the sun made soup out of the air in Ochopee, a blip of a town in Big Cypress National Preserve, 30-odd miles west of the Miami-Dade County line.Shealy is the self-appointed world expert on the Florida skunk ape, a legendary seven-foot-tall mangy creature and presumable cousin of Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yowie, the Abominable Snowman, el Chupacabra, Harry of Hendersons fame and possibly Chewbacca the Wookiee.The skunk ape, alias swamp ape, apparently smells like bad eggs and goat dung, an odor attributed to its poor bathing habits and penchant for sulfurous alligator caves. Tales of its existence percolated in Everglades City and points north for a hundred-plus years, with various people - including a busload of highly excited British tourists who swore the creature revealed itself to them in 1997 - finding massive footprints and claiming sightings.But Shealy, tall, lanky and goateed, a man rarely seen without his snakebite-proof boots, is the first to make the Florida skunk ape a full-time, if struggling, business. He guesses about seven apes wander about Florida, with Miami-Dade's expansion flushing them his way."I don't have a choice to believe, because I've seen him three times," said Shealy, blue eyes a-twinkle beneath the brim of his gator-tooth-embossed, black leather outback hat.
View: Full Article | Source: Bradenton