The Skinny Island Post

We talked in an earlier post about giving up on submitting the local plants and grasses to our will.  The results, I guess, are in the eye of the beholder.  We are certainly aware that some passersby see only a cacophony of palmettos and weeds threatening to engulf The Little Hacienda, an eyesore, if you will, amidst the well-maintained grounds on either side of us.  But on closer inspection, on a more micro level, a beautiful, colorful, intricate and dynamic world emerges.

We have one area off the front deck where a curved wall of bougainvillea runs, that the native plants have taken over.  There are many beach sunflowers there.  There is another, larger area, about twenty by forty feet, next to the driveway, where bees are now a nearly constant presence.  We had a good amount of rain in early spring, which encouraged an explosion of flowering growth.  Much of it has continued into summer, and the bees love it.  There were many butterflies through the spring, but their numbers have tapered off now.  Maybe it’s too hot for them, or the flowers they prefer are gone.

We mentioned the rain lilies before.  We have no idea how they got started here, but they are prolific, and show up after a good rain.

And then there’s this extraordinary specimen below.  It looks like some kind of wild orchid to me.  Anyway, there are hundreds blooming now.  It looks like something someone has made up, or constructed from pieces of other flowers.  If someone knows what it is, let us know.

*

We are also keeping an eye on Tropical Depression #3 a little southeast of us in the Atlantic.  Doesn’t look like trouble, but could be a wave maker.  Noticed the beginnings of a little swell this morning on the walk.

We pick up sand dollars whenever we find them on our morning walks.  We frequently find fragments, but rarely whole ones.  When the animal dies, a species of urchin,  phylum Ehinodermata, class Echinoidea, they are very brittle, and rarely survive the pounding of waves.  But we do find them.  I have become adept at locating them in the sand where others miss them; a small rounded dome in the sand, often covered with a crust of some kind of parasite attached to the surface, which I scrape off while walking.  It is the exoskeleton we collect, solid but delicate, though we have found a few living, or recently dead specimens, which are brown or purple, unlike the bleached white deceased ones, soft and pliable, with an underside of cilia, they use to collect food.  We try to return those to the ocean. The mouth of the organism is in the center bottom.  They not only use the cilia to eat, they use them for mobility, and for burrowing in the sand just offshore.  A remarkable creature.  We have a west window in the studio where we display the ones we have found. We have over sixty.

When I was a kid on the Gulf coast, we used to find I lot more, I think.  Just fragments when we beachcomb there now, like here, on the Atlantic.  When you examine a broken one, you see all the internal rooms and chambers.  I’ve long thought it would be great to play saxophone late at night in a beach-side dive called the Sand Dollar Room.

• I was in Boston, Cambridge, specifically, having accompanied a high school friend in June of 1969 there, because his girlfriend was attending Harvard summer school.  My life plans were very short-sighted that summer.  I had attended Florida State University, majoring in English Literature, minoring in Advertising, for four years, but had not graduated on time, due to a bout with mononucleosis my junior year, which caused me to drop out for a semester, and put me behind.  It was a rough time. If you didn’t graduate in four years, or have a graduate school deferment if you had, you were immediately classified 1A in the draft.  This, of course, was only months before institution of the draft lottery, which assigned males a number, by which you were either drafted, or set free.  My lot was cast. Like clockwork, on or about June 10th, I received my 1A classification, along with a note telling me I had to report for an induction physical on such and such a date.  My friend, our high school valedictorian, had graduated Summa Cum Whatever, from Washington and Lee, but by an extraordinarily strong ethic, and to the dismay of his girlfriend, had refused to apply for an easy graduate school deferment, because, he articulated, so many did not have that option, and were dying in the rice paddies of Viet Nam.  I must admit, I had no such motivation, rather no motivation at all.  He said he was going to enlist as a medic, rather than be drafted as a grunt, and since the army seemed to actually honor such commitments, I followed.  We broke into his old man’s liquor cabinet, had a few shots of good Scotch, and went down to enlist.  We took a delayed entry, meaning we didn’t have to report until September, and that was that.

We were shortly put on a bus for Jacksonville for our induction physical.  It was discovered that I had a slight heart murmur, but the physician said it wasn’t significant, and I passed.  I now have had open-heart surgery to repair the offending valves, and have a pace-maker, as a result of that murmur, but who’s counting.  Outside the facility, while waiting for the bus to take us back to Tallahassee, we ran into another high school classmate, who had, quite unexpectedly, been denied service, because of the discovery of some skin cancer behind his ear.  Whatever.

Our reporting date was September 17, and my friend announced he was going to Boston to spend the summer with his girlfriend.  I signed on.  We hitch-hiked through Georgia, North and South Carolina, and Virginia, then took a bus from there.  After an interesting night in the New York Port Authority Bus Terminal, we caught a bus through to Boston.

The girlfriend was sub-letting an apartment in the Peabody Towers apartments in Cambridge, a short walk from the Charles river and Harvard Square. The actually renters were picking grapes in the northwest.  It was 1969.  I was basically an uninvited co-conspirator, and slept on the couch, but it was fine.  We did some odd jobs around Cambridge, and did some busking in Harvard Square. Somebody dropped a small wad of opium in the guitar case along with some change one night.  Across the square was the Orson Wells Cinema, that showed avant-garde films, and next door to that was a store-front where you could go in and play in a giant sand box.  A guy came by one night offering rides to Canada in an old school bus for $20.  We didn’t go, and instead found employment in a factory in South Boston that coated fabric with rubber for women’s shoe linings.  Seriously.  We took the MBTA to southy, then walked several blocks, past the Gillette factory, to our nondescript factory building.  I operated a machine that was about fifteen feet long.  It ran a large bolt of cloth on rollers from front to back, over dryers, and my job was to slop liquid rubber on at a blade, the rubber then smoothed out and dried as it ran to the other end, where it was rolled again, collected, and cut into designated lengths for shipment to shoe manufacturers.  Hot, nasty work.  We got the job because we told the shop manager, a brusque, hard-ass Italian with a shirt always unbuttoned to the navel, we were Harvard students. I guess he had a soft spot for Harvard guys.  My most distinct memory is of the guy who worked in the floor below, the basement, turning powdered rubber into liquid, which was then sent up to us in buckets.  He was an Albanian, at least 60 then, always covered in a white rubbery powder when he emerged at intervals to see how it was going above.  I can only imagine what diseases he contracted.

The point is, it was the time of the moon landing, July 20, 1969.  We went to a Moon Landing Party, at an apartment somewhere in Cambridge, an apartment, it turned out, where the Boston Strangler had struck not long before.  Draw your own analogies and conclusions.  The place was filled, and there were at least three TVs going, and a small group in the kitchen, assembling moon lander modules in cardboard, and another stalwart assembly on the roof, looking skyward, as if they could see the whole thing unfold. Maybe they could.  I saw only blank sky.  It was a remarkable night, and we all knew it.  I was transfixed by the TV account of the proceedings.  They kept showing a crawler that said, Live from the surface of the moon.  That was hard to fully comprehend.  I think that’s why the group was outside on the roof looking up.  Somehow looking at it made it all real. It was 1969.  Please read Norman Mailer’s account of that first moon walk.  It’s all based on transcripts, but rendered as perhaps only a fine novelist could say it.  An extraordinary event in an extraordinary summer, and if you were alive and paying attention, part of who you are. There were several more interesting and significant events to come that summer, 50 years ago, which we will address in posts to follow, but that’s where I was when those crazy test pilots landed.  Today, 50 years ago. Where were you?

We have a family of Indigo snakes living at The Little Hacienda.  There are at least three of them, distinguishable by their various lengths.  They, or their ancestors, have been here for many years.  When I built the outside shower some twenty-three years ago, overlooking the lush back hammock, (a must for a beach house,) an Indigo was the first patron.  I made the last connections for the water, tested it, and went to put away the tools.  When I returned, there was a four-foot Indigo enjoying the wet decking of the shower.  Welcome.

There have been long periods when we didn’t see any, years, in fact. We have seen numerous red rat snakes, a coral snake, and once, a pygmy rattler made his way through the back door and into the house.  I caught him and escorted him out.  Returning from the beach once across A1A, fifteen years ago, I encountered a gigantic Eastern Diamondback rattler on the path.  I went around another way to fetch Barbara to see.  He was thick as my arm, and a good six feet long.  We watched as he made his way into the palmettos, and we haven’t seen anything like that since. Plenty of dune mice over there, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see another any time.

I love snakes.  They are among the most beautiful of creatures, quite graceful and dignified, if you will.  When it’s hot and dry they come out of the bush seeking water.  We leave bowls and pans of water for them. The Indigos are especially elegant and almost friendly.  The Eastern Indigo, of the family Colubridae, is native to the eastern U.S., and the longest snake species in the country.  They have a uniform blue-black back, and often a reddish-orange tint to the throat.  In bright light they appear blackish-purple.  I sit on the back deck most evenings, to write a little while enjoying a vodka martini, and for the last several months they have frequently appeared.  Last evening I saw the large male, a five-footer, three different times.  He came quite close once, raised his head to acknowledge me, then moved to the water tray to drink. We are most fortunate.

One of my all-time favorite poems is “Snake,” by D.H. Lawrence.  Look it up.  It’s about a snake coming to a water trough to drink, and the narrator’s pettiness in growing a rock to scare it away.  D.H. Lawrence lived in Taos near the end of his life, and grew quite attached to the motion and beauty of the natural life there.  Same with Robison Jeffers, in Big Sur, and his observations of hawks and life there.  It’s all around us, even in the cities, and it is instructional. Enough preaching.  Get out there.

You hear that phrase everywhere now, “It’s All Good,” but like much of pop culture, it undoubtedly started in California. California is the land of It’s All Good.  Ask anybody.  You hear it in the Safeway, frequently from the mouths of baristas, professionals and school kids, and always from gnarly dudes in surf shops. On the surface, it expresses the quintessentially laid-back California attitude that tends to keep aggression at bay, something folks here in Florida could use, but on a deeper level it is, of course, completely unrealistic, and reinforces a dualistic world view, even through the effort to eliminate comparison.

It isn’t all good, (whatever situation we are addressing,) just as it isn’t all bad. What it is is  Post-Modern Relativism, the doctrine that says knowledge, truth, and morality exist in relation to culture and society, and are not absolute. I’m okay; you’re okay.  It’s all good. People use the phrase in a variety of ways, but mostly it’s to deconstruct any idea of responsibility.

Case in point: when I was standing in the check-in line at the San Jose airport for my flight back to Florida a few days ago, I overheard the man behind me in conversation with his wife or girlfriend, I surmised from his opening remarks.  He then related a quite interesting tale, as interesting for his choice of words as it was for its subject.  After inquiring about the other’s well-being, he said. “I’ve done a very bad thing.”  Well, that piqued my interest.  What bad thing? Embezzlement, adultery, murder?  He was going on the lam, and was making his farewells? Oh no, you can’t make this stuff up.  “I’ve done a very bad thing,” he repeated.  “I booked a flight from San Diego to San Jose, instead of the other way around.  I’m at the San Jose airport to fly to San Diego, but I booked the flight the other way around.”

This was the very bad thing he had done.  Note he didn’t say, very dumb thing, or even, very funny thing, which is what it was, or even very absent-minded thing.  Curious.  And then he said.  “But I’m sure they can straighten it out here.  It’s all good.”  Ha!  It’s all good.  See, that’s why he chose to say he’d done a very bad thing; that’s covered by the blanket negation of It’s All Good.  Being dumb isn’t.  It’s better to admit to being bad than dumb in California, apparently, because if you admit to being dumb, that’s like wandering off into the desert by yourself with just a hip flask of tequila, while admitting to being bad, then flipping it, is membership in hipster paradise, and who doesn’t want that?

So how does all this nonsense reinforce a dualistic world view?  On the surface it seems to be quite the opposite, as in, “comparisons are odious;” let’s just say it’s all good, and poof! no dualism.  Au contraire! It’s like sweeping cat hair under the rug or, like in our house, beach sand, (with a little cat hair).  Ignoring it doesn’t make it go away and, it may be growing something under there.  Repression is insidious, and counter-productive. Better, I think, to say, It’s happening!  The greater insistence that it’s all good, gives strength to its opposite. Here’s what I have to say on the subject: Whatever is, is right. Whatever is, is. Whatever is. Whatever.

I usually like to include a few photos with these posts, but I didn’t have any to match up with the subject matter, and anyway, it’s all good, so . . .

We’ve been in the California Republic for a week, hanging out with son and grandsons, our visit luckily coinciding with a nice little south ocean swell, thanks to the retreating hurricane Barbara.  We’re in Santa Cruz, a quirky little city of several distinct neighborhoods, each with its own character and, depending on the time of day, its traffic snarls.  Santa Cruz is hilly, and there are no straight roads.  It’s easy to get turned around and lost, but you always end up where you wanted to be.  There are piers and wharfs, cliffs, marinas, and even a garish boardwalk with rides along the curving shoreline of the magnificent Monterrey Bay.  But first and foremost, this is a surf town.  Everybody surfs. Little kids; pregnant women; testosterone-fueled bad-asses; old, white-haired dudes. Because of the convoluted coastal configuration– much of it actually facing south-there are at least a half-dozen named, and distinct surf spots, something for every level of experience, from entry-level and always crowded Cowells, next to the boardwalk, to the famous and challenging Steamer Lane, where the pros rule, and where many reputations have been made, and lost.

It’s a dream come true for me to be doing this, and it took a long time coming.  I was first bitten by the surf bug in land-locked Tallahassee, Florida, thanks to the Beach Boys, who didn’t actually surf, but captured a feeling and an era in song, that made me want to wax a board and paddle out. But it was this movie: The Endless Summer, by Bruce Brown, the story, in beautiful footage and a simple, clean, and mesmerizing soundtrack, of two California surfers’ circumnavigation of the earth in search of the perfect wave, that pushed me into my first wave at Jacksonville Beach in 1967.  I was hooked, and I distinctly remember telling myself a perfectly acceptable goal in life was to live somewhere where I could surf every day.

Fast forward 15 years.  We had an eight-year-old towhead grom, and were living in Port Orange, five mile from the beach. We got ourselves a couple of used sticks and together we set to conquering the fairly steep learning curve of surfing on weekend jaunts to Ponce Inlet and the Sunglow pier.  In time we had two boards shaped for us by a friend.  A couple of summers, when I was writing full-time, I would work in the morning, then take a pick-up truck load of kids to the beach for a session.  We did that many, many times, and those images are deeply seared in my memory.

When we got The Little Hacienda, we were truly home. Throughout the many renovation projects I kept an eye on the ocean, a scant few yards away, and when it was good, I put down the hammer and paddled out. I was living, and still live, where I can surf every day.  I don’t, not nearly as much as I did anyway, but I can.

But California has always loomed as the promised land for surfing in my mind. I used to have a dream where I was cresting a hill, and there, on the other side, was the Pacific, all blue and clear, with a bright golden sun shining down and clean lines of surf wrapping in. So, if it meant that much, why didn’t I go a long time ago, you might ask.  I don’t know; life intervened, I guess; it wasn’t a driving force, just a dream.  Last year, with our son living here, I finally got to go out, with him and a grandson just learning, whom we had introduced to the water at The Little Hacienda.  It was wonderful, and cold! You always need a wetsuit in this water.

This trip has been the bomb! Great weather– cool, foggy mornings morphing into mild, clear afternoons– with a good south swell pumping, thanks to the retreating hurricane to our south.  A gentle swell, with occasional head-high sets pushing through.  We’ve been out three times, once with a long-time friend of our son, who came down from San Francisco for the day.  We paddled to the outside peak at Capitola Beach.  The highlight of the day for me was coming face to face with a sea otter, floating on his back, and breaking into a clam. He looked at me, took his time finishing his meal, then gracefully dived beneath the kelp.

Today the three generations went out at Capitola again.  It was a clear, warm day; the surf was perfect, and crowded.  Tough to get any waves, but the vibe was good, and we all did.  Pretty cool to surf with your son and grandson.  In surfing parlance, that was sick! Leaving tomorrow to go back to my home break. The waves aren’t nearly as good as out here, but it’s a short walk, and there’s almost never anybody else out.  Can’t wait.  The stoke is still alive.

This little poem first appeared in Christian Century magazine, in 2015, I believe.  Again, it is a dive into a New Testament passage that has long resonated with me.  This one, John 21: 1-17.  The scene is post-ressurection; Jesus has appeared several times to the disciples, and an obviously confused Peter resorts to what he knows best, what is a constant in his life: he goes fishing. Some of the other disciples join him in the boat and they go out on the sea of Galilee, but catch nothing all night. At dawn they see a man on the shore but don’t recognize him right away.  The man tells them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat and they will be successful.  They do so, and the catch is so great they can’t haul in the net. The un-named disciple whom Jesus loved understands and tells the others it is Jesus.  Hearing this, in a vivid description of devotion, Peter dives overboard and swims to shore, the others soon following.  They find the man tending a small fire and cooking fish on a grate.  What a scene! He invites them to add some of their catch to the breakfast.  Jesus is grilling fish at dawn on the beach for his friends.  How wonderful; how very mundane.  The scene culminates in the famous “Feed my sheep,” admonition.  The poem speaks from Peter’s point of view.

When we started out on this adventure we were concerned about how Pekoe would travel.  We were sure we would be making frequent stops so he could scratch in the dirt, which would adversely affect our plan for making our target of six-hundred miles a day.  As it turned out, once we put him in his cozy car carrier each day and started, he went into cat mode and we didn’t hear a peep from him.  With an A/C vent blowing directly on him between the front seats to his station on the back seat, wedged between massive mounds of gear, he remained cool.

We made it out of Big Bend without encountering any flash flooding, through Alpine and Terlingua, places we had happened upon in a magical twilight 48 years before, and on to Guadalupe Mountains NP.  Our first afternoon there, it rained.  We started floating on the floor again.  I went outside and dug a drainage trench down the slope in front of the tent.   It helped a little, but what helped more was the rain stopping.  In the morning we moved the tent to a different site, and by moving I mean we pulled up stakes and carried the whole thing down the trail to its new, shadier site.  Pekoe remained nonplussed throughout, even when this rather healthy tarantula crossed the path a few feet from the tent.

After that, Guadalupe was uneventful, if a little too warm.  We did a day trip from there up to Carlsbad Caverns, where Pekoe had the pleasure of having the entire, air-conditioned pet boarding kennel to himself.  Then it was on to Great Sand Dunes National Park, one of the few we hadn’t visited. They have an interesting campsite acquisition system there, which we discovered right away.  We had no reservation, so it was a long-shot from the get-go, particularly since the park is a long way in off the main road.  We lucked out and found a site clear for one night and put up the tent.  Being at a higher elevation than where we started, it was starting to get much cooler at night, and Pekoe began actually burrowing down in the sleeping bag there to keep warm.  The cat adjusts.  The next day we had to vacate the campsite by 1:00 p.m., because it was reserved for a couple nights starting then.  We asked the rangers for a list of sites that were available for that night, but they said, “No, no, no.”  Just like the French; “No, no, no.  That’s not how it works.”  We learned they went around both loops of the campground at 8:00 a.m., finding out who was leaving, and putting up availability cards on the posts.  They wouldn’t tell you ahead of time; you had to pry it out of them when they came to your site and told you to vacate.  So, while we were waiting for rounds, we went down and scoped out a site two doors down that was empty, hoping it would remain available, and we could jump on it.  When I went back to our tent I found the front flap open. I went inside and couldn’t find Pekoe. He wasn’t laying in the corner liked he often did; he wasn’t in his special enclosure. He wasn’t there.  He had waltzed out through the front flap and was gone, 2000 miles from home. I ran outside and started asking everyone around if they’d seen him, and when the rangers came, I told them we had a missing cat.  We were frantic. Losing the beloved cat on his first camping trip.  I blamed myself for not thoroughly zipping the front flap. The particularly unpleasant lady ranger said, “Well, I hope you find him because he won’t last the night here, with the predators we have.”  In a panic I went back into the tent for my hat, thinking to go out and start a search, and digging through the stuff at our end, uncovered Pekoe burrowed down in the sleeping bag.  Lost and found.  He looked at me as if to say, “Something wrong, Papa?”

On to Black Canyon of the Gunnison at 9000 feet, or so, the whole park driving up from the valley floor aflame with blooming wildflowers.  The first night there was a ranger talk on stargazing at the amphitheater, so we packed Pekoe up in his carry pack and lugged him down there.  He didn’t care for it.  Either the presentation or the accommodations didn’t measure up, and he let us know.  Pekoe is generally such a laid-back, easy-going guy, and when he complains, it’s for good reason.  He started vocalizing, and we left somewhere between Andromeda, and the Milky Way.

It got really cold by the next morning, so we drove down the mountain and into Montrose to get a sweater for Pekoe.  We had plenty of warm gear for ourselves, but he had only his fur which, while substantial, remained inadequate. We found what we were looking for in a thrift store, a nice knit sweater and a kind of little jacket thing.  They both fit, and Pekoe didn’t mind that they were designed for a dog, and were both pink.  He wore the sweater that night.

The next evening, for all intents and purposes, the trip ended.  Following a short hike down a trail to look at the canyon, I mixed our usual libation and pulled up a chair.  I turned to speak to my esteemed wife and long-time camping companion, and only garbled sounds came out.  I couldn’t form words.  My speech came back in a couple minutes, then departed again.  No motor deficit, no cognitive problems.  I could think clearly, I just couldn’t speak.

We scooped up Pekoe, put him in his car carrier, and drove down to the ranger station at the ark entrance.  A very kind and efficient lady ranger called the park EMT, who arrives in about two minutes and assessed me in the open doorway of the car.  In another few minutes an ambulance from Montrose arrived, as the hospital helicopter hovered overhead.  It was determined that I would be OK to transport by ambulance, so down the mountain we went.

But this is about Pekoe’s adventure, not mine.  Suffice to say, I made it, thanks to the best care I’ve ever had, with no lingering issues, (though some might argue that), and after a few days recuperating with friends in Fruita, we turned back for care and treatment in Florida.

Here’s how it went for Pekoe. After being hauled down the mountain unceremoniously, he checked into a motel, and spent an anxious night.  Next day, upon my discharge, we went to nearby Fruita for a few days, where we stayed with an old army buddy and his wife. Little did he know, but we were done with camping for a while.  We had a lovely room upstairs, and the only anxious moments were when Pekoe escaped the room.  We were sitting out on the back deck when the neighbor’s dog, a friendly sort who was visiting, starting barking hysterically.  He charged the sliding glass door to the house, and we saw a flash of Pekoe as he split back upstairs.  We found him under our hosts’ bed. Next day we started back to Florida and a left carotid endarterectomy.  For me, not for Pekoe.  He thoroughly enjoyed the ride back on the 10, air blasting, with stops in a Red Roof Inn.  Sometimes, when it’s raining, or gets too hot, or he grows weary of living so small and close to the ground, “Is this camping, Papa?”