Just Breathe

By Bill Yanger

The back fender clangs staccato as the salty beach cruiser bounces off the pavement and onto the sandy path that leads to my church. A seagrape leaf, red veined, round and waxy, hangs just close enough to slap my shoulder and two plump breasted dove take to startled flight, wings whistling in reproach of the sudden intrusion and harmonizing with the melodic hum of a late day sea breeze through the brittle limbs and needles of Australian pines tilting, always, to the lee.

Scattered orphan pine needles provide traction over the shifty sand as the path bends first to the left around a scarred and sagging sable palm and then back to the right toward my sanctuary. I jump off just as the tires bog. I lay the bike behind a dune sprouting tufts of sea-oat grasses and look out over the brigades of kindred dunes marching in either direction while morning glories pop with purple panache along their jade-green railroad vines snaking between.

I squint at the path funneling out onto a blinding whiteness, like a giant sugar bowl has tipped and spilled its contents in front of me, broken only by a cresting high tide depositing a ragged line of Sargasso clumps and sea cockles before disappearing into an emerald infinity called the Gulf of Mexico. The air sniffs briny and young, as if newly conceived, then freed to flutter and soar.

In the near fifty years I’ve been coming here, I think to myself, the changes have been subtle but they have been certain. I first walked the point with my father, my little heels swallowed by dad’s deep damp footsteps as I stretched to follow the large man’s strides in the sand. He pointed to the cloud of seabirds nesting on Passage Key, what some called Bird Key, just to the north, and beyond that on Egmont Key to the broad shouldered old fort lording over the entrance to Tampa Bay. Both spits of land now seem smaller and less consequential, and Egmont’s fort is no longer the stuff of my childhood pirate fantasies, sulking into the sea.

In those days the Sunshine Skyway Bridge further to the east was a long dark monster piggybacking cars across the bay and allowing ships to pass under its fifteen story hulk of iron I-beams and rivets. The hump overlooked three counties, a dozen cities large and small, four barrier islands, mangrove tangles too many to number, three downtown clusters, a state park, a bustling port, Tampa Bay and the Gulf. This particular summit also provided a stunning surprise to the uninitiated traveler. As you approached the crest of the old bridge the hypnotic chocka-da chocka-da chocka-da of poured concrete slabs ended with a sudden rude blare of tires on an open iron grid, erupting like feedback from an amplified microphone. Those willing need only have glanced over their shoulder to see down through the road on which they were traveling, through the brawny metal grate and fifteen stories below to the whitecaps and the deep. But during a demonic morning thunderstorm that erased visibility in the shipping channel and caused a navigational apocalypse, the cargo vessel Summit Venture slammed into the looming structure and toppled it like a child’s toy erector set. Thirty five souls were lost when several cars and a Greyhound bus were unable to keep from following the twisted and wounded structure those fifteen stories into the sea. Mayhem and sorrow, then rebirth.

The bridge now mimics a fanciful two-masted schooner with soaring golden sails over sun bleached gunnels slipping across the bay in the warm afternoon light. Real sails tack under the Skyway’s broad reach and lumbering freighters push mounds of water in front of their bows headed to Port Tampa 30 miles up channel.

In later years I came to the point to fish, usually alone. I tied leaders with a knot my Jacksonville cousin, a charter captain, taught me to twist. He called it “slim beauty.” I prepped lures and lines late into the night and rose before the sun to shuffle in side-step along the point’s lazy lapping shore break, hunched over as if hiding from them helped, to bounce a feather tail jig along the swirling shallow bottom in the path of ghostly squadrons of torpedo shaped snook. When the sun broke above the mangrove shore toward the fat river mouth to the east, crisp long shadows erased the camouflage of the hazy early light and allowed for easier spotting so I rarely returned home without the fish part of my grandfather’s favorite breakfast, fish and grits. Granddad stirred the buttered bubbling grits at the stove top with his catcher’s mitt hands and a characteristic silence while I salted, peppered and pan fried the cornmeal dunked chunks of the morning’s take, maybe snook or maybe redfish or mackerel, sometimes a mangrove snapper. We ate in appreciative silence until Granddad scraped the last of his grits with a final sideways pull of his fork across the plate and said, ”Good stuff, boy,” a proud grin above the hard angles of his Germanic chin.

At night we shuffled waist deep netting blue crabs by spotting eyes above the sand bottom, lit like opals in the hissing glare of a mantled propane lantern. Mom and Aunt Jackie boiled the crabs with key lime wedges and a dozen or so shakes from a spice can with holes punched by Granddad’s awl and ball-peen hammer. The family stayed up past midnight “pickin” the white flaky flesh into mounds of the sweet meat and the next morning Grandma stirred it all into a chunky tomato sauce that was more garlic than tomato. The meat and the claws teased us for hours at a low saucy simmer until the pot was poured over what seemed to me then like an acre of steaming spaghetti noodles. The evening’s entertainment was watching newbies wrestle with cracking claws and extracting the prized meaty nugget without spraying a stream of red sauce across the table or on a neighboring shirt.

Years later I brought my son Zack here and we chucked white feather jigs and talked one day about grade school and little league and, it seems, the next about why his moving to Colorado after college is not such a bad idea. My daughters loved to spy on the point’s nesting shore birds from the scratchy dunes and imitate the symphony of peets and screeches floating from the momma birds hunkered down low over new hatchlings. Rachel tried the sweet short tonal whistling of a crested royal tern and Rose squeaked the squeak of an ornery orange-beaked black skimmer. We shuffled back through the sea oats to where we left our flip-flops and laid our bikes and pedaled home the long way, taking their “super-secret” route through the alleys and narrow easements and abandoned sidewalks of Anna Maria, the little beach town I love.

Yes, this is it. The Point. I have come here to walk, to talk, to fish and to remember times before. I have come here to pledge love and a lifetime of devotion to my soul mate. I have dripped sweat here in July and shivered in a January drizzle. I have laughed here, whooped out loud here and I have cried here. It is church, sanctuary, nirvana, eden.

I come here to breathe.

All the best to you and yours this holiday season.



Bill & Sherry