This little section of Skinny Island is not without its interesting folks and characters, present company excluded.  The ones I can attest to have either passed in front of the house, were seen on the beach, or encountered on walks along A1A.  I can’t speak to the ones undoubtedly hunkered down in the many nearby condominiums, like whoever lives in the one just up the road with the Christmas tree and light still up.  You don’t have to look far or work hard here, stuff just all eventually comes by.

A guy we’ll call Ray is probably the best known.  I started seeing him about ten years ago, very nattily dressed then, usually with a straw fedora rakishly set.  Apparently in his fifties, somewhat diminutive, he walked with a distinct swagger, swinging his arms, as if some Bon Vivant out for a stroll.  But I noticed he would stop periodically and stare at the sidewalk, or at a beach sunflower, or a stick, for minutes at a time.  Again, impressive to me.  I appreciate someone who will stop to appreciate the smaller things.  But in my first actual encounter with him– he suddenly appeared at my side while I was repairing the fence– I found him vacant and completely nonsensical.  His periods of stopping and staring at nothing on the sidewalk grew longer, and then he was gone, for months, I think.  It went on like this for years, times of seeing Ray, and times of his being absent.  A neighbor said once he had been picked up and taken somewhere for walking into someone’s house.  He came to our door once, muttering something unintelligible, and I chased him off, but I’ve never seen him at all threatening.  A few years ago his appearance changed dramatically.  He appeared in dirty, disheveled clothes.  I heard that he had lived with his mother down one of the side streets, and as long as she was alive, he was well dressed, but now she was gone, and a brother, who was his caretaker, was not so caring.  I also learned, or so the story went, that he had been struck by lightning as a child, and had been in and out of institutions all his life.  He began a practice he continues to this day, somewhat useful, actually, of picking up every cigarette butt and minute piece of trash he can scour along A1A, out at the crack of dawn in a hooded sweatshirt.  But he has become more and more oblivious to his surroundings, and wanders into the road quite often.  At least a dozen times I’ve seen him narrowly avoid being hit, and I’ve admonished him to watch what he’s doing, but my words were just met with that vacant scowl.  He will get hit, I’m sure of that.  I just don’t want to see it.

Just in the past three months another piece of work has appeared, again seeming to live or camp somewhere nearby.  He is a large, bearded man of happy countenance, who pushes one day a bicycle, the next a shopping cart up the sidewalk, while wearing a fully loaded backpack and carrying a saxophone case.  Sometimes I see him with a woman.  I had a kind of conversation with him once, which is to say he caught me coming up the sidewalk from a walk and proceeded to regale me with the most tangential, loopy, mumbo-jumbo I’ve ever heard.  I agreed with everything, excused myself, and went inside.  He just passed by moments ago in the rain, lugging the saxophone.  Must have a gig.

One morning I went down to the beach and found the sand under the deck scooped out to form a cozy hollow, and a blanket spread out.  I never saw anyone, and the blanket was gone the next day.  For years there have been beer cans and chip bags there in the morning, but not so much since my son and I cleared out a massive invasive species choking out the palmettos and providing cover; at least no one is living there at the moment.

And then there’s Running Boy.  He still makes an appearance now and again, but I haven’t seen him this winter.  He’s a tall, very thin, very tanned young man, with tousled blond hair, usually seen carrying a couple of plastic grocery bags containing all his worldly possessions, and always engaged in a running monologue.  But besides the speech, he’s an actual runner as well.  On several occasions, while running or walking the beach myself, he has blown past me, sans grocery bags, at a good six-minute per mile pace, monologue intact.  You can’t talk to him; he’s in his own world and, clearly homeless, a survivor who loves the beach.  Stay safe, running boy.

Gone for years now, maybe the most interesting was Duct Tape Man.  Usually seen on highway 40 on the mainland, he did put in a few appearances here on the island.  He sported a huge, conical helmet constructed of duct tape, and he was a mutterer too.  I’d love to have known his story.  I think the Mother Ship he was waiting for finally came for him.

The rests are walkers we’ve seen daily for fifteen years but don’t know by name and aren’t really deserving of a nickname.  Most are old ladies, widows, probably; a few dog walkers; a doofus guy in short shorts; a lady who walks and sings, badly; a corpulent bicyclist who insists on ringing his little handle bar bell; a couple of mouth breathers; and a sweet Chinese couple, him tall, her half his height, usually in jeans with matching Lands End jackets and hats, and always holding hands.

But we all miss Yolanda.  A fixture when we got here, she was very old, probably in her nineties and, with her sturdy cane, a regular and quite vigorous beach walker.  Yolanda could stride out, people, with a look of determination, not at all unpleasant, mind you, that nevertheless said steer clear. I was coming home from seeing a hospice patient in Flagler Beach one afternoon and came up on an accident on A1A in front of the convenience store two-hundred feet north of us.  Yolanda had been hit crossing the highway from the beach.  EVAC arrived as I reached her, but it was too late.  She died in my arms.  Such are the comings and goings of Skinny Island.