A few reflective days back in our favorite place in the world prompted a few memories. We'd thought we'd share them...again. The original post can be accessed by clicking here:
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
Monday, May 28, 2012
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