The Skinny Island Post

A melancholy Monday rain that promises to be around all day.  Fine.  We’ll just go with that.  It’s good to let go and embrace it.  On days like this my attention turns from a preoccupation with the ocean to the Hammock behind the house.  No, not the kind you lie in, the flora kind, perhaps unique to Florida, a stand of hardwoods, palmettos, and palms; no pines. There is a section of Flagler county to our north on A1A called The Hammock, where this phenomenon can be experienced in a natural abundance, but our small one stands alone in this part of Skinny Island, the rest having been clear-cut for building years ago.  On rainy days it takes on a special character, the trunks of the Florida Bays and oaks glistening black, the palms and palmettos quietly rustling. It isn’t big– maybe a hundred by a hundred feet– but it seems bigger because standing just behind the house you can’t see the back or side fences for all the vegetation.  Maybe a little local geography will help the picture.

In the natural state of terrain on the seaward side of these barrier islands there is, of course, the beach, the width of which is determined by tides and storms, which can either take away sand, or build it up.  After the hurricanes of ’04 there was a twelve-foot vertical drop at the dune vegetation line, resulting in the ocean being much closer in than normal for quite some time.  It has gradually filled back in so we have a beach nearly wide as it was before.  Then there is the first dune, a buffer really, on which typically sea oats, beach sunflowers, cactus and palmettos flourish. Continuing westward, what naturally occurs then is usually a trough, and then another dune.  Highway A1A was built in what would have been the trough, so you can’t see it anymore.  One of the only places I know to really see the natural state is at Canaveral Seashore, and in a few places on Amelia Island.  Our house was built into the second dune from the ocean, and you can see the natural terrain very well, as the dune falls off a good twelve feet behind the house, and the hammock begins.  I built a small deck at the top behind the house, then descending steps, then a larger deck some eight feet down, the western side of which is still five feet off the ground. Our three-year old grandson loves it back here.  He calls it The Jungle, and can’t get enough of it.  I have cleared a fifteen by twenty-foot section on the north side for a garden, a project which, other than upkeep on the house, has proved to be the most challenging.  I’ll have much more to say about the garden another time, the soil and salt issues.  For now though, in this blessing rain, the parsley, cilantro, dill, oregano, rosemary, mint, basil, and lettuce I have managed to coax along are doing beautifully, rich and luminescent.  I’m hoping to have a breakthrough with vegetables this spring with some new methods. Planting is just a couple of weeks off.

Wet Hammock

Wish I could put in the sound, too.  Gonna be a great nap today.

Passing Rain

Rain overnight.  Woke to soothing sound of dripping eaves.  All rain collection units filled now, water we will use for plants through the dry times.  One lone fisherman on the beach, working with a headlamp in the amber chill.  I will wet a line when the water gets above sixty degrees.  The guys you see out here now are all snow birds, for whom this weather is balmy.  It’s not.  I know it and the fish know it.

Managed an early run on the beach in spite of aching knees.  Saw many dead starfish; some immature Laughing Gulls; a substantial gang of Gray Gulls with a single Skimmer in their midst, looking lost.  Rolls of somehow comforting Payne’s Gray clouds, deepening in hue miles out where the rain still fell.

***

And now to the business at hand.  This is a bit like writing your own obituary; there’s no stiff yet, but there are large chunks of memory now inaccessible, and you’re starting to smell a little, so you make an effort to condense your life down to a few paragraphs, so your family, in their bottomless grief, won’t get it all wrong when you’re gone.  With that literary license in hand, I want to talk about newspapers, an elegy, if you will, somewhat premature, perhaps, but not by much.

I love newspapers.  I have a genetic predisposition to newspapers.  My great-grandfather was an early editor of the Tampa Tribune, in the city in which I was born.  He left a remarkable account of late 19th century Tampa in a series of remembrances he wrote and published in the paper late in life.  I didn’t know all that as a child, of course, and he was long dead by the time I was born, but I do remember my grandfather reading the morning Tribune in the extraordinary luminescence of the sun porch of their house on Watrous Avenue.  He read every page of every section in absolute silence and concentration.  In the evening, before supper, he read the Tampa Daily Times, which published every afternoon until 1958, when it was bought out by the Tribune.  Two daily newspapers, delivered to the door.  Amazing.

We had the Tribune delivered to our house as well, but not the Times, as I remember.  On Sundays there was a local radio program featuring a man who read the Trib comics aloud while you followed along.  Imagine that.

I have tried to read newspapers everywhere I’ve lived, and as my respect for the craft of news writing deepened, some newspaper writers have crept into my personal Pantheon of literary heroes.  Chief among those is one Herb Caen, who wrote a daily column– I said daily– for The San Francisco Chronicle from 1938 until 1996.  It was, and is, some of the best writing anywhere, particularly given how little turnaround there was for each piece, a penetrating and lovingly wrought portrait of the beautiful, grand, mundane and ugly elements of one of the world’s great cities.  Along the way Caen had considerable influence on culture and language, coining the term “beatnik,” and popularizing the term “hippie,” neither of which could have come from anywhere other than San Francisco.  I was fortunate to have lived in San Francisco near the end of Mr. Caen’s long career, and count among my greatest experiences reading his column over a cup or two of cappuccino in Malvina’s on Washington Square, before trudging back up Union Street, both humbled and inspired, to wrestle with my own imagery.

All of which leads us to the practice of a morning ritual here on the skinny island.  Rising before the sun each day, my wife and I adhere to this practice with little variation.  Whomever makes it to the little galley kitchen first starts the coffee, and feeds Pico, the inside cat.  (More on Pico in a later posting; there is some contention over how he spells his name.)  Then, one or the other of us will take food outside for Melba, the outside cat, and pick up the News-Journal, our local paper.

The coffee now ready, we settle into side by side chairs separated by a small table, and divide the paper.  My wife almost always begins with the main section, while I start in sports, moving quickly through Local and Accent, in that order, finishing those before she has completed the main.  More often than not, after completing his morning business in the litter box, the concrete evidence of which will later be dispatched in the paper’s plastic delivery bag, Pico will climb up on the table between us for a head scratch while I await the rest of the paper.

That’s it; nothing earth-shaking, really, just another thing mostly older people do the rest of the world can properly do without.  I get that, and though I personally lament the demise of newspapers around the country, (ours survives, but shrinks almost weekly,) the cutting of staffs and bureaus, the condensation of much of what remains into glib flashes and bad writing, I also understand the inevitability of change.  Perhaps unbelievably to some, I am learning to embrace social networking, and clearly have leapt feet first into blogging.  Lamenting change is generational; we all do it.  The problem, I think, lies not in lamenting change, but in finding it evil.  They are not the same.  Fast-paced technology and newspapers are not mutually exclusive, but there is only so much money and attention to go around.

I like holding a newspaper.  When you’re done you can wrap mullet in it, line a puppy box, or put it down for a drop cloth when painting.  Newspapers are compostable.  So, I will not read a newspaper on-line, not just yet.  And anyway, it will probably work out that newspapers will finally disappear for good about the time us codgers do.  That is fitting.  In the meantime, I have a morning ritual I want to keep, a lamentable loss, when it occurs, and this is an elegy.

A cloudy, raw day on Skinny Island today, friends.  Watch this spot for semi-regular reports and observations of the natives.