wild kingdom
As we piled into the car today for another day of pointless errands (to the Post Office to send a book to my mom, to the Red Cross so Jason could register—only to be chastised for even daring to dream that we could go home this week, to K-Mart to by tackle for a night of fishing aborted by rain), Jason glanced toward the canal and said “what’s that?”
“Bubbles!” I exclaimed, bounding from the car and down the dock in time to see the bubbles increase to Jacuzzi level. I waved my arms at Jason and he cut the engine and joined me just in time to see a form, like the bottom of a capsized bathtub, emerge from the brown water in the canal, and snuff the air like a St. Bernard.
Manatee.
So many times during my exile, I’ve felt the irony of finding refuge in a state that I’d run from screaming in frustration around eight years ago. When I lived in Tampa, I was not blind to the beauty, but I was aghast at the mis-fit between my personality and this state. I hated my life in Florida. I was miserable. Lonely. And there was such a disconnect for me. The strip malls, the giant housing developments, the conspicuous consumption, the overpriced everything. The glitz, the emphasis on newness over history, (again ironically) the desperate divide between the haves and have nots.
I am not ready to cash in my LA drivers license for a FL one. And I am still feeling the mis-fit.
But I have experienced some gorgeous hours here. As I mentioned very early on in my blog, one of my first post-Katrina joys came from seeing dolphin bound through the Intracoastal Waterway in New Smyra Beach.
Several nights later, on the last night of my stay in New Smyrna, Jason and I walked out to the end of the dock across the street from the Night Swan B&B in New Smyrna. It was around 11pm, and we were hoping to catch a glimpse of those dolphins in the lights of the bridge down the street. We stood there for a half hour or so, watching and waiting. And just as we decided to go in, I motioned to two eddies, weird currents, underneath the neighboring dock. We watched as these currents fought the natural flow of the water until they passed right underneath our dock. I was frantic, beside myself with excitement, but trying desperately to be silent (so hard, I actually pulled something in my stomach!). Two days before, Jason and a few other people had seen manatee in the waterway; I’d been inside napping, and I was so pissed at myself.
Just as the currents reached our dock, a mass of bubbles appeared and the fist-sized lump of a nose emerged. I just about peed my pants. Wonder. Childlike wonder and awe and joy.
For some reason, more than actually watching the manatee today—at least five or six surfacings in the space of a half hour of motionless watching—that night goes down in my top ten most amazing moments spawned by nature.
I added another moment to my top ten last night. Right now, we’re living on the Peace River in Punta Gorda, Fl. (Peace River—how lovely). And our particular inlet is bioluminescent. That, in and of itself, is an amazing thing. I know that there are bays and inlets in the world that actually glow starting at dusk for a few hours. My science knowledge is pretty slim; all I know is that, after dark, the fish and critters in our inlet glow when they move. We noticed this shortly after moving in, but Rita kept us inside mostly at night and it also kept the inlet stirred up which seems to abate the effect a bit.
Yesterday, Jas and I stopped at K-Mart to buy a fishing pole. All day long we hear and see fish jumping all over the canal. So last evening at 6p or so, we headed down to the dock and cast the rod over and over. Around 730p or so, dusk hit and we watched the canal light up with firefly-like fish. And then, almost precisely at 750p, it was dark and something just short of God happened.
The canal lit up with a veritable commute of fish—a river of fish, a sea of fish, an amazing swarming current of fish of all shapes and sizes of fish started moving parallel to the dock in the pitch black. Green, like fireflies, almost uniform in movement and direction. Sometimes we would see a giant fish sail by, the bioluminescence flickering off its fins, its giant fan-like tail. A fish would jump leaving concentric rings of light-stick glow in the water. Tiny shrimp, which underwater appeared like bees, were the only ones to buck the tide and swim in circles and counter-current until they bumped into each other and bounced off.
This magic hour lasted only, perhaps, twenty minutes. Not to diminish the beauty of every moment of the five and a half hours we sat on the dock and cast our rod fruitlessly into the canal—it was all beautiful, the glowing fish glowed still when we packed it in near midnight. But that twenty minutes was magic in the mass migration.
Our little kingdom is, in effect, pretty darned wild. You’ve heard now about the manatees and dolphins and the frogs. I mentioned the 4-foot black snake in my Habitat post, but we have a 3+ foot long one living right under our deck here. There are two alligators (at least I think there are two—Edgar and Ernest, I’ve named them) who patrol the canal in the early evenings (how they coexist with the manatee is a mystery). When Jas and I went to the Miami Seaquarium, we confronted wild iguana. At first we thought they were an attraction, wandering the park, until we saw HUGE wild iguana in a park by the aquarium. At Lorin’s, I saw buzzards (not a pleasant sight after you’ve been through a tragedy). And near Tampa, I saw cranes as tall as my shoulders wandering through a mall parking lot. Here in Punta Gorda, we also have herons and egrets and osprey. And fish… my goodness, at least in the light of bioluminescence look like sea monsters.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten something in this great menagerie. But beauty abounds. And there are people in the world who are lucky enough to live with it every day. Perhaps I am seeking it. Perhaps I am looking through child-eyes and loving it more than adults do. “Living” here I am reminded so often of my childhood, when I would spend hour upon hour on the dock in front of Vange’s house (my grandmother) fishing with earthworms for sunfish and the elation of the occasional wide-mouth bass. When I would spend whole days on the rocks by the dock down the street from Nana’s house with a crushed mussel or a snail at the end of piece of rope fishing for a pail of crabs that I would inevitably pour back into Long Island Sound to be fished out again in the morning. Last night I longed for a butterfly net to swoop into the water and pull out the strange sea-creatures that lit up the canal—just to be able to see them more clearly.
I don’t know. I just know that as beautiful as nature is here, as much as I sometimes muse that it would be nice to live here or somewhere like here, it doesn’t alter the fact that I’d trade all this beauty for my home. My lousy, crowded little apartment on Leontine St with my psycho landlord, even if it lacks power and potable water. I could be wrong; the caseworker at the Red Cross today told us that we should count on needing therapy after this—“Everyone here, after Charley, needed therapy. We’re all still in therapy,” she said. She told us not to underestimate how awful it’s going to be, even if our home wasn’t flooded (which it wasn’t), even if we’ve lost little (which we hope we have). The beauty around here offers a better promise to us. Perhaps that life is wild and weird and inexplicable. And horrible and lacking plan or plot. It just is.
“Bubbles!” I exclaimed, bounding from the car and down the dock in time to see the bubbles increase to Jacuzzi level. I waved my arms at Jason and he cut the engine and joined me just in time to see a form, like the bottom of a capsized bathtub, emerge from the brown water in the canal, and snuff the air like a St. Bernard.
Manatee.
So many times during my exile, I’ve felt the irony of finding refuge in a state that I’d run from screaming in frustration around eight years ago. When I lived in Tampa, I was not blind to the beauty, but I was aghast at the mis-fit between my personality and this state. I hated my life in Florida. I was miserable. Lonely. And there was such a disconnect for me. The strip malls, the giant housing developments, the conspicuous consumption, the overpriced everything. The glitz, the emphasis on newness over history, (again ironically) the desperate divide between the haves and have nots.
I am not ready to cash in my LA drivers license for a FL one. And I am still feeling the mis-fit.
But I have experienced some gorgeous hours here. As I mentioned very early on in my blog, one of my first post-Katrina joys came from seeing dolphin bound through the Intracoastal Waterway in New Smyra Beach.
Several nights later, on the last night of my stay in New Smyrna, Jason and I walked out to the end of the dock across the street from the Night Swan B&B in New Smyrna. It was around 11pm, and we were hoping to catch a glimpse of those dolphins in the lights of the bridge down the street. We stood there for a half hour or so, watching and waiting. And just as we decided to go in, I motioned to two eddies, weird currents, underneath the neighboring dock. We watched as these currents fought the natural flow of the water until they passed right underneath our dock. I was frantic, beside myself with excitement, but trying desperately to be silent (so hard, I actually pulled something in my stomach!). Two days before, Jason and a few other people had seen manatee in the waterway; I’d been inside napping, and I was so pissed at myself.
Just as the currents reached our dock, a mass of bubbles appeared and the fist-sized lump of a nose emerged. I just about peed my pants. Wonder. Childlike wonder and awe and joy.
For some reason, more than actually watching the manatee today—at least five or six surfacings in the space of a half hour of motionless watching—that night goes down in my top ten most amazing moments spawned by nature.
I added another moment to my top ten last night. Right now, we’re living on the Peace River in Punta Gorda, Fl. (Peace River—how lovely). And our particular inlet is bioluminescent. That, in and of itself, is an amazing thing. I know that there are bays and inlets in the world that actually glow starting at dusk for a few hours. My science knowledge is pretty slim; all I know is that, after dark, the fish and critters in our inlet glow when they move. We noticed this shortly after moving in, but Rita kept us inside mostly at night and it also kept the inlet stirred up which seems to abate the effect a bit.
Yesterday, Jas and I stopped at K-Mart to buy a fishing pole. All day long we hear and see fish jumping all over the canal. So last evening at 6p or so, we headed down to the dock and cast the rod over and over. Around 730p or so, dusk hit and we watched the canal light up with firefly-like fish. And then, almost precisely at 750p, it was dark and something just short of God happened.
The canal lit up with a veritable commute of fish—a river of fish, a sea of fish, an amazing swarming current of fish of all shapes and sizes of fish started moving parallel to the dock in the pitch black. Green, like fireflies, almost uniform in movement and direction. Sometimes we would see a giant fish sail by, the bioluminescence flickering off its fins, its giant fan-like tail. A fish would jump leaving concentric rings of light-stick glow in the water. Tiny shrimp, which underwater appeared like bees, were the only ones to buck the tide and swim in circles and counter-current until they bumped into each other and bounced off.
This magic hour lasted only, perhaps, twenty minutes. Not to diminish the beauty of every moment of the five and a half hours we sat on the dock and cast our rod fruitlessly into the canal—it was all beautiful, the glowing fish glowed still when we packed it in near midnight. But that twenty minutes was magic in the mass migration.
Our little kingdom is, in effect, pretty darned wild. You’ve heard now about the manatees and dolphins and the frogs. I mentioned the 4-foot black snake in my Habitat post, but we have a 3+ foot long one living right under our deck here. There are two alligators (at least I think there are two—Edgar and Ernest, I’ve named them) who patrol the canal in the early evenings (how they coexist with the manatee is a mystery). When Jas and I went to the Miami Seaquarium, we confronted wild iguana. At first we thought they were an attraction, wandering the park, until we saw HUGE wild iguana in a park by the aquarium. At Lorin’s, I saw buzzards (not a pleasant sight after you’ve been through a tragedy). And near Tampa, I saw cranes as tall as my shoulders wandering through a mall parking lot. Here in Punta Gorda, we also have herons and egrets and osprey. And fish… my goodness, at least in the light of bioluminescence look like sea monsters.
I’m sure I’ve forgotten something in this great menagerie. But beauty abounds. And there are people in the world who are lucky enough to live with it every day. Perhaps I am seeking it. Perhaps I am looking through child-eyes and loving it more than adults do. “Living” here I am reminded so often of my childhood, when I would spend hour upon hour on the dock in front of Vange’s house (my grandmother) fishing with earthworms for sunfish and the elation of the occasional wide-mouth bass. When I would spend whole days on the rocks by the dock down the street from Nana’s house with a crushed mussel or a snail at the end of piece of rope fishing for a pail of crabs that I would inevitably pour back into Long Island Sound to be fished out again in the morning. Last night I longed for a butterfly net to swoop into the water and pull out the strange sea-creatures that lit up the canal—just to be able to see them more clearly.
I don’t know. I just know that as beautiful as nature is here, as much as I sometimes muse that it would be nice to live here or somewhere like here, it doesn’t alter the fact that I’d trade all this beauty for my home. My lousy, crowded little apartment on Leontine St with my psycho landlord, even if it lacks power and potable water. I could be wrong; the caseworker at the Red Cross today told us that we should count on needing therapy after this—“Everyone here, after Charley, needed therapy. We’re all still in therapy,” she said. She told us not to underestimate how awful it’s going to be, even if our home wasn’t flooded (which it wasn’t), even if we’ve lost little (which we hope we have). The beauty around here offers a better promise to us. Perhaps that life is wild and weird and inexplicable. And horrible and lacking plan or plot. It just is.
posted by M at 12:02 AM
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