The Skinny Island Post

You never know what you’re going to find here on Skinny Island on any given day.  A few years back this Cuban raft washed ashore right near the house.  No people aboard when it came in; we don’t know what happened to them.  It had taken quite a beating in the crossing, but still showed signs of remarkable ingenuity and perseverance, with a canvas deck, safety lines, a make-shift sail, and most amazing, a V-8 truck engine amidship, connected to a prop at the stern.

We’ve found dolphins, sharks, a Harbor Porpoise, bottles from France and Germany, about seventy pairs of sunglasses, some very nice, nearly two dozen mask and snorkel combos and, twenty-something years ago, the body of a man of indeterminate age, who had been in the water a long time.

These more recent finds are more mundane, but still interesting.

This wonderfully rendered pyramid appeared about a week ago, undoubtedly sculpted by aliens.  Nobody on Skinny Island is that skillful, and there were no permits for pyramid construction issued by the Governor’s Office.  Or for anything else, for that matter.  We are not great believers in permits.  Our official attitude is, if you think you can build it; go for it.  If it kills you; oh, well.

This is a rare find, an Eastern Coachwhip snake.  It is the longest snake native to Florida, and lives in coastal dunes.  This one was nearly six feet.  In more than twenty years, Ive never seen one.  Unfortunately, we found him dead on the west side of A1A.  Apparently his first and last mistake was leaving the dune.  I guess he was hit by a car and managed to haul himself to our side.  As you can see, there are some wiggle marks in the sand.

We had a most interesting coda (a concluding remark, event, or section), to this year’s Biketoberfest this afternoon. I heard a series of motorcycle and car horns blaring and went out to investigate.  I found a guy standing on the sidewalk next to my driveway waving a large Trump flag to passing traffic.  Being a strong advocate of free speech I used some of my own, and encouraged him, in explicit anglo-saxon he could understand, and eschewing compound sentences, to please move on, this being, as the residence of the Governor of Skinny Island, a politics-free zone, and retreated into The Little Hacienda.  Giving it some thought, and continuing to hear the honking, I realized this was a rare opportunity for dialogue, so I went back out and engaged him in a friendly debate.  I sincerely wanted to know his reasoning for feeling as he did.  He told me he was a practicing Roman Catholic, and Trump supported everything he believed, among other talk radio nonsense.  In the brief theological discussion that ensued, during which he revealed a woeful misunderstanding of the New Testament to someone who knows it inside out, we agreed to disagree.

He then fell into patriotism, claiming he was a veteran of the Iraq incursion, and was a former Green Beret.  Now, as a veteran myself, I have developed a rather infallible way of telling whether someone is, or is not a veteran.  He was not.  It’s in their eyes. I’ve experienced this on several other occasions, and the telling clue is that they all claim, the ones who bring it up, to have either been a Navy Seal, or a Green Beret.  They never admit to being in the motor pool, or a company clerk, or a medic, like me, all worthy service.  It’s like people who claim past lives; they were always King Ferdinand, or Queen Latifa, or someone grand, never a poor working stiff, or slave, or artisan.  Insecurity is rampant.

It ended when, though he was fifteen years younger, he realized that, while I had accurately read the depths of his capability, he was unsure of mine– again, it’s in the eyes– and he moved on, even while throwing out the last pathetic threat that he had a license to carry.  A fitting coda.

Should there be any question, we would have insisted the same of someone waving a Che Guevara flag on our sidewalk.

Thought we’d do a little compare and contrast in this post.  This time of year, Fall, we have some of the most spectacular sunrises on Skinny Island, and it’s also the time, this weekend, for the supposedly secondary invasion of the motorcycle crowd to our little county, Biketoberfest, a marketing strategy meant to fill hotel rooms in the lull between Speed Weeks, the stock car extravaganza, and Bike Week in March.  In the thirty plus years we have observed the motorcycle invasion, we have seen it grow, from a somewhat interesting sociological phenomenon during which the bad-ass, 2% real bikers, Hells Angels, Outlaws, etc., showed up to wreak havoc and party, to a depressing scene of over-aged, bald, grey-gotateed and do-ragged posers, with their fat wives and girlfriends riding behind, imposing whatever they pleased on our peaceful beach community.  The idea now is to be as loud and abrasive as they possible can, which, fundamentally means, eliminating all mufflers.  The Little Hacienda, unfortunately, is situated very close to a convenience store and gas station on A1A where all those folks feel compelled to enter.  They leave, as befitting their immense insecurity and need for attention, with a window-shaking roar, until about 2 a.m., and then we have a few hours, and the dawn, to recuperate.

Here’s what we saw this morning.

We’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, one of the inevitable traps of aging, I guess.  But it’s harmless, and feels good; self-indulgent, but stimulating.

I’ve always been a reader, the first step in being a writer.  Growing up, our house was full of books, and music.  More on music in another post.  My father was a great reader, and introduced me, by the proximity of the books, to his favorite authors.  It should be no surprise that they were the literary hero of his generation, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway.  He read The Old Man and the Sea aloud to us when it appeared in serialization in Life Magazine, so there you go.  That one counts as probably the finest piece of fiction I have ever read, but it is a novella, or better, a long short story, so it doesn’t make this list.  I got to all of them in time, but my first immersion in reading was through books given to me, or acquired by me, from a great-uncle, my grandmother’s sister’s husband, a pipe-smoking, extraordinarily interesting man, who had a massive collection of early twentieth-century novels.  They were, for the most part, books written for boys, and they opened the door.  First up was a series of books by one G.A. Henty, (1832-1902), a prolific British writer, who wrote historical adventure novels.  Under Drake’s Flag was my first.  Then came several Horatio Alger books, rags to riches stories of plucky lads who mad it by perseverance and pluck.  I also loved a series by Archibald Lee Fletcher, about heroic boy scouts, written in the early years of the twentieth century. Boy Scouts in the Everglades, or The Island in Lost Channel was my favorite.

From age 12 to about 16, when the demands of school somewhat curtailed my independent reading, I devoured books.  I would take a bus to the library by myself to check them out.  Between the classics, War and Peace, Anna Karenina, A Tale of Two Cities, Moby Dick, and others, I made discoveries of my own which more directly satisfied my boyish tastes.  My first independent discovery was a series by Clair Bee, a successful college basketball coach, about a young gifted athlete named Chip Hilton.  Chip was a three sport star in high school, who decided it better to work his way through State college by working in a drugstore than take a scholarship.  His exploits on the gridiron, basketball court, and baseball diamond, were infused with both heroism and humility.  He made me want to be a quarterback, which I did, if briefly.  And then, in my mid-teens, before the world became aware through Sean Connery and the movies, I found Ian Fleming.  I got hooked on James Bond, and the original On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, remains one of the greatest spy thrillers of all time for me.

Many more great books were interspersed and followed, but here are my top five.  Remember, if you will, that any listing like this relies on a wholly subjective experience, contingent upon a host of irrational feelings.

At number five we have a tie.  I know, I can’t do that, but they are so closely related I beg indulgence.  They are both impressive tomes, and I still refer to them for inspiration and comfort.  They are: The Oxford Book of English Verse, and The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.  Anyone who has written verse in the English language, from Anonymous to Leonard Cohen, are included.  All the heavies; Donne, Shakespeare, Byron, Wordsworth, Keats, Yeats, Stevie Smith, (“Not Waving, but Drowning”); you name it. Should be a go-to standard on any bookshelf.

Number four is a memoir; the memoir, as far as I am concerned.  A Movable Feast, Hemingway’s posthumously published account of his Paris years, is both a manual on how to write, and the most controlled, poignant and exquisite use of language to evoke a very focused depiction of love for people and place, romantic but sparsely rendered.

Which segues to number three, The Sun Also Rises, Hemingway’s first novel, written during the Paris years, which, in the many years since its publication, has stimulated the ridiculous proclivity for (mostly men) to prove their manhood by running with the bulls. Despite that, it is an extraordinary novel, with perhaps the absolute best last line in literature, “Isn’t it pretty to think so.”  Geeze!

Number two was difficult.  There are so many.  I had to dig deep into what moved me, not necessarily what I knew to be great story-telling.  That elevated All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, (beating out The Light in August, by Faulkner.)  I am, quite naturally, a sucker for southern fiction, and Penn Warren’s story of the rise and fall of a southern politician, told with such grace and accuracy, along with his spot-on telling of life down on the Gulf coast, moved me in a way no other book has.  It demonstrated a way to write that both dug the depths of emotion, and sold with great authority, a moral imperative.

OK, the novel that shook me the most was One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez.  How to explain.  The breadth; the scope; the narrative risk.  The standard for magical realism.  I admit to a profound influence that greatly influenced my own writing for many years.  This book, and the Marquez short stories, “An Old Man With Enormous Wings,” and others,  and the exquisite novel Love in the Time of Cholera, solidified Marquez, in my thinking, as one of the greatest of all time.  But One Hundred Years of Solitude, moved literature into a wholly new space.  Everything pointed to it, and pretty much everything after, in an experimental sense anyway, imitation.

Honorable mention:  Rabbit Boss, by Thomas Sanchez. Seek it out.  A voluminous account of the Washo indians.  What an extraordinary read.  And Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert Persig.  It’ll set you free.

These are books that have meant a lot to me, as a life-long reader.  I highly recommend them, and reading everything.

So, we have another storm out there, and while the early track showed it making landfall right here, the latest shows it staying far offshore, but with the same arc as Dorian.  Hoping it skips the northern Bahamas, and us.  Maybe a wave-maker, but predictions show a lot of on-shore wind, which will make a mess of the swell.  We’ll see.  Not boarding up; a low-grade tropical disturbance at worst.  Whatever.  Pretty tired of all this.  Blustery winds already; with rain predicted.  We need it.

Meanwhile, sitting out back a couple evenings ago, we saw this rascal on the palm next to us.  You have to hand it to nature for this kind of camouflage, but I’m still not sure it’ll fool our snakes.  Just don’t move, dude.

And while we generally work to stay clear of politics in The Skinny Island Post, the photo below caught our eye on a recent jaunt through wonderful Lake County, Florida.  Let’s just call it “Social Commentary.”

More hurricane minutiae, this time with a purpose.  Surfers love hurricanes, even old decrepit surfers, who can’t help themselves.  We see something form in the far Atlantic, or Caribbean, and we start envisioning what might come our way.  Of course, we want nothing like what has happened to our brothers and sisters just off our shores in the Bahamas, and our hearts and prayers go out to them all, but generally speaking, these storms are our gifts.  If you watch the Weather Channel, or any of the cable outlets, you invariably see footage of some kook paddling out in the middle of the storm, with some anchor voice-over rightfully admonishing them.  That’s not what it’s about.  Depending on how far offshore the thing passes, provided it does, the fun waves come as it retreats.  Though not the best I’ve seen here on Skinny Island, Dorian provided us with some good swell as it moved up the east coast.

Here’s how it works:  When a storm is offshore south of us, it send sends swells our way from that direction, obviously, making for a southeast swell that breaks as a right-hander.  Directly offshore, the break is generally a parallel close-out, or, rarely coming in as a-frame peaks, the very best, meaning you can go either left or right.  As it moves away north, you get a northeast swell which generally breaks to the left.  All this is only important to surfers, of course, in that every surfer has a way of standing on the board, either left foot forward, known as regular-footing, or right foot forward, known as a goofy-foot.  A right-breaking wave benefits a regular footer, because you are facing the wave as you traverse, and a left-breaking wave, a goofy-footer, for the same reason.  I hope that is clear.  Yesterday’s waves were right breaking; today’s left.

As a regular-footer, I am more comfortable with a right breaking wave, but you go when the conditions are there.  Today was one of those days.  Light off-shore winds, and still a decent left-over Dorian swell.  Our son came by for breakfast, and after that we paddled out.  We have been surfing together since he was around eight years old, some 35 years.  It was gorgeous, clear skies, glassy conditions, with 4-5 foot breaking waves.  The only drawback was that it was low tide, and the waves were breaking in extremely shallow water on the bar.  The water was actually sucking up on the bar into the wave, so that there was barely a foot of water if you made the drop.  I caught one, and quickly realized I would be pummeled on the bar of I held on, so I backed off.  I’m not as quick as I used to be.  Jesse was not to be deterred.  The photo below shows his paddling into a good five-footer, which hammered him on the bar.  Thankfully, it’s not a coral reef here.  I retreated, the better part of valor, and took some photos with the GoPro from the bar.

But it was all so extraordinary, the beauty and power of the ocean, the danger– I got whacked so hard on the bar by a breaking wave I thought I’d broken ribs– and most of all being out with my son doing what we love most in the world.  The perfect day.

We got brushed by a major storm, and we’d like to make a few comparisons with other storms which came close.  Matthew came by considerably closer in 2016, and absolutely devastated our beach, washing out pieces of A1A and rearranging the beach and dunes. Irma, in 2017, did more of the same.  Dorian was a different beast, and there are several reasons.  First, it was farther offshore.  That makes a lot of difference.  We lost shingles, power lines and a lot of beach in the two prior storms, and none of that with Dorian.  No power outage, either, which may be the most significant difference.

We probably need to thank FLP for replacing our power poles over the summer, and restringing the lines.  We had all new concrete poles set in all along A1A, and I think it made a difference.  This photo is a great representation of the last three storms.  Matthew bent everything it didn’t take down, the pole on the left; Irma is the middle one; with the new concrete pole on the right.  We laugh, now, at calling them telephone poles, because, of course, they’re not. But it seems to have worked, and we are grateful.

The second takeaway is our fence to the north, next to the condo, didn’t blow down for the first time ever.  That has always been a major issue, one requiring lots of post-storm effort.  Again, we are grateful.  But maybe the best takeaway is that the surge, such as it was, re-established our sand bar, which had been nonexistent for many months.  It carried enough sand out to build a bar, with a deep trough just offshore, allowing the waves to break a hundred yards out, like they used to.  Taking advantage, when I saw it, I paddled out yesterday afternoon and caught a couple great little peeling waves.

We were slow in getting to our feet, but the waves were forgiving, there were dolphins nearby, and it was beautiful. We have decided to maybe have a toe-tag or bracelet with our name, address and phone number in case we croak out there and end up at the end of Skinny Island at Ponce Inlet.  It’s all worth it.

We’re all buttoned up here at The Little Hacienda, AKA The Little Bunker, but it looks like we may have dodged this bullet.  After several days over the Bahamas, Dorian finally started north and northwest this morning, crawling out at 2 mph, then increasing to about 5 in mid afternoon.  It’s taken a little wobble to the west, but by the time it’s up near us it’s supposed to start turning east, and be close to a hundred miles offshore.

Big increase in rain bands cycling through today, but it hasn’t amounted to much, around .7 inch by our rain gauge.  Very wild surf, with the winds driving water far up onto the dune, winds peaking at about 16-17 mph, nothing much yet. High tide was around noon, and the water was up to the vegetation when I went down to look.  Another high around midnight, but we don’t think it’ll breach A1A.  Dorian is supposed to be farther out than Matthew, which tore up the dunes along here, and took out chunks of A1A in places.  Doesn’t look like we’ll get that.

We’re actually under a mandatory evacuation order, something, as Governor of Skinny Island, we find impertinent, and always decide for ourselves before leaving.  But apparently a number of the island residents have heeded that call.  It’s been comfortably deserted around here today.  Absolutely nobody on the beach this morning, and we hardly ever see A1A this deserted.

Our remaining anxiety, then, is the power going out, always the worst thing about these storms.  After Matthew and Irma, and the several that blew through in ’04, we were without power for days, up to and past a week.  For several reasons, we have opted not to get a generator.  We’ve got plenty of ice, and we’ve already shut down the A/C, and enjoying the cross-ventilation, so we’re comfortable and acclimated.  Pekoe, our amazing and very cool cat, keeps asking, as he did while we were being blasted by the deluge this time last year in the tent at Big Bend National Park, “Is this camping, Papa?”

Yes, dear one, it is.

So, this amazing hurricane has essentially parked itself just east of Freeport in the Bahamas.  Showing one mph progress to the west until the 5 pm advisory, when it went stationary.  This is really good news for us, because the longer it is parked, the more time there is for the high in the Atlantic to break down, allowing for a northerly track, which should take it clear of us.  We are the little blue dot in the photo above, experiencing some winds in the 15-20 mph range while we enjoy an evening libation out on the back deck.

Beautiful morning walk on the beach this morning, which included a brief squall moving in off the ocean.  The seas are running in the 8-10 foot range all day, with higher waves for tomorrow and Wednesday.  Swimming and surfing prohibitive.  We met several of our regular walkers this morning, and all said they intended to stay, unless the track indicates a more westward turn.  Beach people are a special bunch.  It’s not bravado or foolhardiness; it’s attunement, a sympathetic relationship.  It grows on you, almost unawares, until one day, when you step back and look, you find that you are not only governed by the weather and cycles of this extraordinary place, but an integral part of it.   Hard to understand, I guess, unless you live here.

Anyway, we really want to stay.  Hoping for a definitive north turn later tonight or early tomorrow.