(I spent the past week visiting Ft. Myers, Florida, where i once lived. My mother just retired there. I've had one foot out New York's door the past couple years, dreaming of someplace warm and wet. With mother and aunt and friends there, my old home is tempting. It's hard to imagine living someplace so congested, conservative, and corporate, though. But in this country, finding a place that isn't at least two of those qualities is getting to be tricky.)
Eric and i loaded a cooler, and drove to Lover's Key State Park. We pulled his kayaks off the van, and slid into the water. I was wearing new aqua shoes and a Chinese wide-brimmed hat. I'd decided to avoid sunscreen for the rest of my life, adhering to the sentiment "Nothing ON my body that i wouldn't put IN my body". So i trotted out my new standard sunwear - long white garments of the lightest possible material. The messiah look. In this case, thrift stores had yielded cotton pants with a drawstring and an XL "Mallards Hockey Club" shirt. On my outfit's debut day, i went against my philosophy and agreed at Eric's wise urgings to put all-natural sunblock on face and ankles. With the reflection, being on the water is an extra-intense sun experience, and i was undeniably a pale northern boy.
We paddled to Mound Key, at 33 feet the highest peak in Lee County. It had been created by Native Americans. We were on the lookout for goats, being told that two of them were now kept there so the owners could get a farm subsidy.
Seeing no sign of human or Capra hircus, we swam and chatted for a while, then made our way inland (as inland as a 200-meter island would allow, anyway). I quickly came upon a maze of spider webs, each one a meter or more wide. At the center of each was a conspicuously large arachnid. Black and yellow argiope spiders. They didn't seem to care about us, so we continued on. I fell back, deciding that Eric's familiarity with the place made him the logical leader. The fact that there were hand-sized spiders everywhere had NOTHING to do with my choice.
After another fifteen feet, i noticed a swarm of insects gathering around Eric's pack. A couple of mosquitos had announced their presence around my own head, and i thought how awful it would be if that swarm were mosquitos, not the gnats or somesuch i assumed they were.
Oops. Upon closer inspection, they were mosquitos. We both started trotting, trying to lose our growing swarms. If you've ever tried to outrun a mosquito swarm, you may start laughing now. Eric pointed out a gopher tortoise hole that fascinated me (but not enough to slow down). We arrived at the peak, and had a moment of Chevy Chase VACATION Grand Canyon head-nodding, before we and our swarms turned tail. I barely spied an actual gopher tortoise, and called Eric back. The tortoise had bugs all over him too. We took in his beauty for four or five seconds before hurling ourselves down the trail, a la Indiana Jones in that spider/big boulder tunnel. We jumped into our kayaks and paddled to open water, our swarms happy to come along. It only took us a half mile to lose them.
Our next stop was a lovely mangrove island so tiny we didn't get out of our kayaks, but we idly paddled around it for a while, entranced by the manta rays that were drawn to it.
Our next stop brought us the most exotic wildlife of the day. We paddled through a beautiful inlet which gave us access to the Gulf side of one of the barrier islands. There we saw several specimens of pantless, floral-shirt wearing homo sapiens. There were no women in sight. Eric had told me that the unofficial boundaries of the nude beach in Lover's Key had been growing. Why the fashion of the day was a shirt with no pants, was never made clear.
We didn't copy the fashion, though. I was too pasty to consider it, and even if i hadn't been...well, i suspect the trace lingering elements of homophobia present in even very progressive heterosexual males such as us, would have stayed us from going au natural. Perhaps if it hadn't been just the two of us...but it didn't even occur to me, truly.
We swam in the Gulf of Mexico for a bit, then had a lovely lunch. After a dandy frisbee session, we packed up and hit the open water again. I was positive that i would have aching muscles and hand blisters from the day's exertions, but neither turned out to be the case...though i did come away with pretty harsh ankle/hand sunburns. Our final excitement came a mile or so later. I looked up from my paddling. I saw something twenty feet ahead, sticking out of the water and moving across our path. I saw that Eric didn't see. I then calmly said one word, for the first time in such a context in my life: "Fin". Eric, excited, tried to follow the shark. But it lazily dove away without a glance back.
A few hundred yards later, we pulled our kayaks back onto land, and headed home.
Eric and i loaded a cooler, and drove to Lover's Key State Park. We pulled his kayaks off the van, and slid into the water. I was wearing new aqua shoes and a Chinese wide-brimmed hat. I'd decided to avoid sunscreen for the rest of my life, adhering to the sentiment "Nothing ON my body that i wouldn't put IN my body". So i trotted out my new standard sunwear - long white garments of the lightest possible material. The messiah look. In this case, thrift stores had yielded cotton pants with a drawstring and an XL "Mallards Hockey Club" shirt. On my outfit's debut day, i went against my philosophy and agreed at Eric's wise urgings to put all-natural sunblock on face and ankles. With the reflection, being on the water is an extra-intense sun experience, and i was undeniably a pale northern boy.
We paddled to Mound Key, at 33 feet the highest peak in Lee County. It had been created by Native Americans. We were on the lookout for goats, being told that two of them were now kept there so the owners could get a farm subsidy.
Seeing no sign of human or Capra hircus, we swam and chatted for a while, then made our way inland (as inland as a 200-meter island would allow, anyway). I quickly came upon a maze of spider webs, each one a meter or more wide. At the center of each was a conspicuously large arachnid. Black and yellow argiope spiders. They didn't seem to care about us, so we continued on. I fell back, deciding that Eric's familiarity with the place made him the logical leader. The fact that there were hand-sized spiders everywhere had NOTHING to do with my choice.
After another fifteen feet, i noticed a swarm of insects gathering around Eric's pack. A couple of mosquitos had announced their presence around my own head, and i thought how awful it would be if that swarm were mosquitos, not the gnats or somesuch i assumed they were.
Oops. Upon closer inspection, they were mosquitos. We both started trotting, trying to lose our growing swarms. If you've ever tried to outrun a mosquito swarm, you may start laughing now. Eric pointed out a gopher tortoise hole that fascinated me (but not enough to slow down). We arrived at the peak, and had a moment of Chevy Chase VACATION Grand Canyon head-nodding, before we and our swarms turned tail. I barely spied an actual gopher tortoise, and called Eric back. The tortoise had bugs all over him too. We took in his beauty for four or five seconds before hurling ourselves down the trail, a la Indiana Jones in that spider/big boulder tunnel. We jumped into our kayaks and paddled to open water, our swarms happy to come along. It only took us a half mile to lose them.
Our next stop was a lovely mangrove island so tiny we didn't get out of our kayaks, but we idly paddled around it for a while, entranced by the manta rays that were drawn to it.
Our next stop brought us the most exotic wildlife of the day. We paddled through a beautiful inlet which gave us access to the Gulf side of one of the barrier islands. There we saw several specimens of pantless, floral-shirt wearing homo sapiens. There were no women in sight. Eric had told me that the unofficial boundaries of the nude beach in Lover's Key had been growing. Why the fashion of the day was a shirt with no pants, was never made clear.
We didn't copy the fashion, though. I was too pasty to consider it, and even if i hadn't been...well, i suspect the trace lingering elements of homophobia present in even very progressive heterosexual males such as us, would have stayed us from going au natural. Perhaps if it hadn't been just the two of us...but it didn't even occur to me, truly.
We swam in the Gulf of Mexico for a bit, then had a lovely lunch. After a dandy frisbee session, we packed up and hit the open water again. I was positive that i would have aching muscles and hand blisters from the day's exertions, but neither turned out to be the case...though i did come away with pretty harsh ankle/hand sunburns. Our final excitement came a mile or so later. I looked up from my paddling. I saw something twenty feet ahead, sticking out of the water and moving across our path. I saw that Eric didn't see. I then calmly said one word, for the first time in such a context in my life: "Fin". Eric, excited, tried to follow the shark. But it lazily dove away without a glance back.
A few hundred yards later, we pulled our kayaks back onto land, and headed home.
No comments:
Post a Comment