Randy White: The Mangrove Coast

He wasn’t wearing the glasses, but this was Calloway on the floor. And, yes, he was dead; had been dead for… how long? I’m a marine biologist not a medical examiner, but it wasn’t difficult to make an educated guess. How long would it take for a pool of water to evaporate off tile on a balmy, April afternoon? How long did it take for blood to coagulate and dry? An hour? Two hours?

Not long. He hadn’t been here long.

I placed my hand beneath Calloway’s shoulder, lifted and turned him slightly. No blood on chest or bloated stomach… perhaps a hint of priapism.

Did that suggest death by head wound? Maybe. I wasn’t sure.

I let the body settle on the tile; tried to ignore the rumble of internal gases. Crossed to the kitchen sink and washed my hands-a compulsion I would not have felt had a living Calloway and I shaken hands or whacked each other on the shoulders while trading jokes over beer.

Stood there knowing that my next logical move was to pick up the telephone and dial the police. Maybe Calloway had come wet from his swimming pool, slipped and taken a bad fall.

It happens.

Or maybe, just maybe, I had stumbled onto a crime scene. Either way, dutiful private citizens turn such matters over to the authorities.

But I did not behave as a dutiful citizen should.

There were reasons. Maybe they weren’t great reasons but they were my reasons. One reason is that I had made a promise to a determined woman. Another reason was an implied promise to a long gone friend, a guy named Bobby Richardson. The fact that Bobby had been dead for nearly twenty years seemed to matter less and less.

A promise is a promise. Right?

The promises I’d made created a couple of problems. For one thing, I hadn’t exactly been invited into Calloway’s house. I’d been invited TO his house. We were supposed to meet for drinks promptly at six. On the phone, he’d said, “But if you’re like a lot of these islanders, always late, tell me now. I’ll just keep working till you surprise me.”

Meaning I’d better be on time.

My reply had been a bit more terse than he’d expected: “Geez, Frank, I’ve got nothing better to do than bounce around doing favors for your family. Your ex-family, I mean. So, yeah, make it six. I’ll try real hard.”

One of the oddities of living on a coast bordered by islands is that it is often faster-and a hell of a lot less nerve-racking-to travel by boat. Because of the configuration of roads and because it was close to peak tourist season, it would have taken me more than two and a half, maybe three, hours to drive from Sanibel Island to Boca Grande. Bad traffic and toll bridges. Lots of stoplights. Many intersections with Kmarts and Burger Kings, busy 7-Elevens and city-sized malls, their parking lots jammed with Winnebago clones and midwestern license plates. Acres of asphalt, drifting exhaust fumes and metal baking in the April heat.

In my fast Hewes flats skiff, though, on a calm day, the trip was forty minutes of open water and good scenery.

Not a tough choice to make.

I left my piling house in Dinkin’s Bay on Sanibel Island at precisely 4:30 P.M.-plenty of lag time in case I saw something interesting and wanted to dawdle. I am, by profession, a marine biologist. I make my living collecting sea specimens, which I then sell to research labs and educational facilities. The name of my company is Sanibel Biological Supply. I am sole owner and lone employee. This means that dawdling-and the right to dawdle while on the water-is part of my job description.

It’s one of the perks of working for myself.

So I got in my skiff and I ran the inshore flats past Chino Island, Demere Key and Pineland, then cut northwest toward the blue convexity that is Charlotte Harbor. The bays and water passages of Florida’s west coast resemble lakes more than they resemble seacoast. It’s because they are hedged by mangroves. The mangrove is a rugged, wind-stunted tree that elevates itself above swamp on monkey-bar roots. Because the tree employs its arched roots to creep and expand, it is called the ‘tree that walks’; the name itself alluding to qualities of silence that hint at dark groves of speechless men.

These roots grow so densely that mangrove forests not only protect; they also isolate. You can’t walk through a mangrove forest; you must climb. Which is why the most inhospitable sections of the world’s most inhospitable tropical regions are always, always marked by an expanse of mangroves. And yet, as seen from a distance, mangroves give the misimpression of lushness and shadow that one associates with fresh water.

It’s an illusion. Mangroves denote harsh sunlight, salt and sulfur. When it comes to dependence on the chemical processes of the tropics, mangroves are as basic as lightning or ozone. Coconut palms are trees of tradewinds and ocean currents. Mangroves are creatures of muck and equatorial heat. Because of the primeval conditions in which they thrive, they are trees that seem more intimately related to the basic procedures of cellular life. It is one of the reasons that I am an admirer of mangroves.

I am not troubled by illusions that I understand.

So I headed north through long lakes created by mangrove islands. It was a good day for it. Lots of sun and very little wind. The starboard beverage locker was packed with crushed ice, bottled water and a couple of bottles of Bud Light. In the port locker, I had stashed swim shorts, towel, a mask, snorkel and my trusted old Rocket fins just in case I got the urge to get in the water. The bottom of my Hewes had been recently pressure-washed and I’d just had my 200 Mariner serviced and tuned, so the throttle handle was sensitive to the touch; a tempting energy conduit that, if pressed to sudden speed, seemed to dilute gravity as it created velocity.

Just turning the key caused the fiberglass hull beneath me to oscillate like the skin of a nervous horse.

I like that feeling: the feeling of being alone on open water in a fast boat. It’s more than recreation, it’s more than transportation. It is a chunk of the scaffolding upon which I hang my life. Going alone on water is an act that, at once, insulates and defines.

It feels like freedom. It is freedom.

Which is the way I felt on this hot, hot April afternoon, a Thursday. Heat radiating off the water created distant mirages that, as I approached at speed, dissipated into panels of quaking light. I flushed cormorants and wading birds. I left a billion swimming, crawling, oozing life forms-the living, breeding, breathing body of the tropic littoral-in my indifferent wake.

April is also the front edge of tarpon season, and Boca Grande Pass is one of the most famous tarpon fisheries in the world. For two months out of each year, the water space between the islands of Gasparilla and Cayo Costa becomes a fiberglass municipality; a night-bright and morning-light city with its own rules and laws and procedures.

It is a city that drifts with the tide while its members, running beam-to-beam, jockey and leapfrog and shout and swear, all fighting to maintain strategic position over the pass’s deep ambush holes.

With time to kill, I idled through and watched several hundred boats-from mega-yachts to Boston Whalers-moving in patterns that were no less strange than the deeply coded patterns of pelagic fish beneath. Sat there in my skiff riding the outgoing tide, taking it all in and enjoying myself. Boca Grande Pass during tarpon season is equal parts drama and slapstick comedy: a hundred million dollars’ worth of high-tech equipage designed and purchased so as to more effectively hook a chromium, six-foot fish that is primeval, unchanged, so primitive that it can breathe surface air, not unlike the first sea creatures that crawled landward out of the slime.