Scariest Moment Excerpt
continued with March 09 Newsletter
“It might be
a good idea to angling southwesterly toward Egmont Key,” I thought.
If the boat flipped at least land would be closer. Egmont Key was a
refuge, a national wildlife refuge for brown pelican, terns and
other nesting birds. The Feds built Fort Dade on Egmont in 1882. Gun
batteries were added at the outbreak of the Spanish-American War,
and a small community built up around the fort. Old buildings still
stand from that community. If the wind blew me into the Gulf beyond
Egmont Key, no telling what would happen. No other boats of any kind
were out, at least in this section of Tampa Bay. Flipping wasn’t on
the agenda, only a possibility to be thought through. Actually, I
was grateful with how well the Old Town was handling in the big
water and how the spray skirt was taking a major pounding from the
water and not failing. I would swim if the spray skirt gave way.
Egmont Key was still a good mile away. I managed the kayak over wave
after wave after wave. An amazing characteristic of humans is they
can get used to anything, from being in prison to being a
billionaire. And I was becoming used to this. The deep fear in my
gut remained, though the initial shaking and adrenaline rush of my
body had subsided. I knew not to let up. As soon as that happened,
the waves would flip me over like a pancake at the IHOP
I just read,
then rode, wave upon wave. It went like this: get pushed atop the
wave, top out then descend into a trough. Repeat. Get pulled here,
then there. Abruptly, a wave picked up the rear of the sea kayak,
turning the boat 180 degrees and parallel to an incoming surge that
crested above me. Here it came, the swell destined to take me down
and push me over. With no time to move I leaned into the rush of
green power and dug in the paddle, remembering Tom’s suggestion. The
salty splash popped my face just as I closed my eyes. In that dark
moment of slow motion I began to fall to my left, and dug in
further, grasping the paddle with a death grip. The wave crest
passed over me, and then the kayak fell as if in air into a deep
trough to my left. I opened my eyes and was still upright, though my
hat was off my head, hanging by a string around the front of my
neck. My panting shortness of breath and the feeling of impending
doom briefly returned. Then I turned the experience around: If I can
survive that wave I can survive another.
Anna Maria
Island became my goal at this point. Making Egmont Key was a pipe
dream. The wind and sea ruled here, pushing me southward. Anna Maria
seemed far away, just a flat line of trees with specks for houses.
Egmont Key was due west. The waves just kept on, and the fear
evolved into a gut ache, like waiting for test results to come back
from the lab to see if you have cancer. I passed near another bell
channel marker at the south end of Egmont Key and began to feel the
effects of the Southwest Channel, another entrance into Tampa Bay.
The tide here began pushing me around, though not as wildly as
before. The trees and houses of Anna Maria Key were getting closer,
slowly but surely, a slow motion relief. I began heavy power
paddling, not forcing the paddle though, for there was no forcing my
way through the waves, but rather riding the waves and stroking hard
when possible.
Passage Key,
just a sandy spit, was ahead. The shallower water near Passage Key
lowered the crazed sea, but the undulations were still hitting hard
– as if the entire force of Tampa Bay was slamming into me. A look
on a map will show that the northeast wind is exactly the worst
direction wind to have in this spot. Passage Key had felt the
effects from high winds in times past. This sandy spit of 30 acres
had been a wooded mangrove island with a fresh water lake when the
U.S. established it as a national wildlife refuge in 1905. In 1920,
a hurricane flattened the island, turning it into the meandering
barrier island it is today. Because of its small size and importance
to nesting birds, Passage Key is closed to public use.
Passage Key
looked especially small in the waves, as I paddled southeast,
finally making the shallows of Key Royale Bar. This sandy shallow at
the head of Anna Maria Sound was beaten by quick, crashing waves
turning over the bay floor. I splashed through the whitewater and
the deeper, rolling waters of Anna Maria Sound – my arms were
positively aching and I was chilled colder than a twelve pack of
beer at a November tailgate before a Tennessee-Kentucky football
game. Paddling slowed the cool down, at least stabilized the chill
toward hypothermia, before I finally stopped in a spot out of the
wind near Cortez. Movies last around two hours right? Well this
horror movie lasted about that long. Except it was real. I could
have waited another day at Mullet Key, and probably should have in
retrospect, but I didn’t and learned my lesson, a few lessons for
that matter, one of which was don’t cross Tampa Bay in big winds.
The other was don’t risk your life for 33 dollars.
Additional Excerpt
I swung around to the east side of the island -- mostly marsh with a few red
mangrove trees. This is the northerly limit of this coastal tree. Mangroves are
one of the few trees that can tolerate growing in salt water. The secret for
them was the ability to obtain freshwater through saltwater, by secreting excess
salt through their leaves.
Red mangroves are also known as the “walking tree.” This tree grows at the
water’s edge, its trunk supported by numerous tangled red roots, known as prop
roots, since they prop up the trunk of the tree. These roots give them their
nickname, as they seem to walk on water. Mangroves may not actually walk but
they do benefit Florida’s coastline. They provide a sort of protective nursery
for small fish, crustaceans and other shellfish, which in turn are fed on by
larger fish. Mangroves are rookery sites for coastal birds, like pelicans and
roseate spoonbills. For human coastal residents, mangroves absorb wind and waves
coming inland, stabilizing shorelines with their roots.
Mangroves reproduce interestingly. Seeds sprout on the tree, and a mini live
mangrove eventually drops down into the water. From there the winds, currents
and tides find it a home, where they sprout roots and grows to produce seeds of
their own. So, in this case, the fruit may not fall from the tree, but it does
have legs. These tropical mangroves here were small. The Suwannee area is the
mangrove equivalent of the North Pole, this is the most northerly latitude where
mangroves survive, and cold snaps like the one I’d paddled through can kill
them. They fare much better in South Florida, especially the Everglades where
they reach their greatest heights and concentrations.
From the mangroves, I banged and bashed my way to the island interior, where
a small evergreen shrub, yaupon, grew abundant. Florida’s Indians made a
concoction from yaupon berries that English-speakers called “black drink.” The
berries of yaupon make an emetic, and the Indians drink the “black drink” and
throw up, purging themselves during certain rituals. That’s the funny thing
about Indian words, we’ll never know exactly what they were, what they meant or
how they sounded, only the English corruption of such. Florida Indians may have
called the drink “eye of the god,” or “kool-aid” for all we know.
The appropriately named Spanish bayonet, a bush with sharp pointed leaves,
ambushed my legs at every opportunity as I walked through the dense growth. I
found a couple of other camps, unfortunately with too many beer cans. Stacks of
crab traps were piled by an old tin-roof shack. In the marshy edge a bird, an
American bittern, waded the shallows, slowly and methodically looking for an
aquatic meal. It spotted me and froze with its bill pointing skyward, trying to
blend in with the background of marsh grasses. One of the most fascinating
aspects of God’s creatures is their individual evolutionary track on thriving
and reproducing here on earth. For some reason, the bittern’s implausible
defense had worked enough for it to be in the genetic program.
The wind picked up and I retired to the campsite. I lay down in the warm sun
on a bed of pine needles 3 inches thick, smoking a big ol’ cigar and thinking.
How unfortunate that natural beauty is sometimes its own demise, by way of man’s
mess-making. For, if a natural creation of God is never viewed, how can its
beauty ever be gauged? To be gauged, it must be seen -
once seen, it will gain attention. Once it gains attention, it will gain
notoriety. Notoriety may bring its downfall and possible demise. My life seemed
so short and insignificant when compared God’s creations. What lasting
contributions would or could or should I make on this earth? To this earth?
Or was my function as a human being to tread lightly, then go away? What was
my purpose? What was the purpose of this land? The answers were not easy or
clear. This journey was just one foray among many, all amounting to a lifetime
spent trying to answer such questions.
Later, I enjoyed my first Gulf sunset of the year. The colors imperceptibly
yet unmistakably transformed from yellow to red to orange to pink to gray. I sat
before the fire -- the temperature had already dipped into the 40s -- turning
back every once in a while to see the sky darkening through the intertwined
limbs of live oaks. The wind died and the night quieted, save for the hissing of
firewood, as the fallen tide and lack of wind rendered the ocean mute. The
sounds of the woods, especially my hoot owl companions on the Suwannee, were
conspicuously absent, as I drifted to sleep under the stars by the fire, feeling
the soreness of a new way of paddling. This workout was better than I could get
in any health club. In the days of the Indians and settlers, just getting along
day-to-day required plenty of hard work and exercise for the average person.
Nowadays, most modern peoples just hunt money, instead of food and shelter
directly. Most jobs consist of button pushing, talking on the phone and watching
something. A few hundred years ago the thinking world would have laughed at
people pedaling away on stationary bikes, lifting weights and doing calisthenics
by the name of aerobics, led by a personal trainer. You’d think with all the
mirrors in those fancy health clubs that some of those spinners would notice
they were going nowhere fast.
The cold night dipped below freezing again. Once I got up, I noticed the tide
was low, way low. A big mud flat separated me from the water, so I waited for it
to come to me. I hung around the campfire, drinking coffee and warming my toes -
through three pairs of socks. Remember, wood warms you three times: when you
gather it, when you break it up and when you burn it. Sometimes it’ll do a
little more, like burn things too close to burning wood. My wool socks were
burning and my feet were in ‘em! I pulled my dogs away but the damage was done.
The outer pair was ruined. The remainder of said socks went into the fire,
stinking up the camp with an odor not too different than human hair burning.
After all, wool is just sheep hair.
I was now anxious to leave Deer Island, one pair of socks short.
And there’s more! |
