Randy White: Everglades

Professionally, I was doing okay. My monograph entitled Adaptive Behavior and Problem-Solving Aptitude of the Atlantic Octopus (Octopus vulgaris) as Compared to Selected Primates had received national attention and was causing interesting debate.

Also, I’d been contracted by Mote Laboratory to help with the organization’s massive five-year study of Charlotte Harbor-an ambitious project designed to investigate, then quantitate, the condition of an entire littoral. From sea grasses, to water quality, to fishes, dolphins and manatee, the objective was to assess the ecological health of a complex biota.

I’d been working with them on assessing the ecological role of sharks. Over many miles of sea bottom, we’d anchored forty acoustic hydrophones. They ranged from Sanibel’s Tarpon Bay to well north of Boca Grande Pass. Then we’d caught a total of sixty-six sharks and fitted them with internal or external acoustic transmitters. Nineteen of the fish were bull sharks-a specialty of mine. The results were spectacular. We could now precisely follow their movements. Valuable data was piling up.

True, I’d fallen off my normally rigorous exercise routine. I no longer ran daily, swam offshore daily, nor did I lift weights two or three times a week as I have done most of my life. I’d gained some weight and I was nowhere close to the level of aerobic fitness that I’m used to.

However, I had found a new recreational passion: windsurfing-a sport charming for its intimate relationship with wind and water, yet one that also consistently kicked my aerobic butt.

There were other good things. My cousin, Ransom Gatrell, had been dating a sane and stable bank president, Marvin Metheny, so there seemed hope the woman was going to abandon her wild ways and give monogamy a real try. Her (and my) quasi-adopted daughter/sibling, Shanay Money, had passed her high-school equivalency test, enrolled in a local junior college and appeared to be well on her way to a productive future.

Sometimes, her old Labrador retriever, Davy Dog, would spend a night or two with me. Crunch amp; Des endured him, which is to say the cat ignored him, occasionally staring at him as if he were made of inexpensive glass. Nothing more.

My personal life was going okay, too. I was enjoying a relaxed, sometimes intimate relationship with Grace Walker, a Sarasota realtor friend who made no demands beyond honesty. The chemistry wasn’t great, but it was comfortable.

Also, my old pal Dewey Nye had moved back into her house on Captiva. She is still one of my favorite people in the world-despite the fact that she’d been pressing me constantly to get back in shape and become her workout partner once again.

Finally, Dinkin’s Bay Marina was now enjoying a new source of quirky, human theater that small, good marinas tend to generate or attract. It was, not surprisingly, thanks to Tomlinson.

Mack, the marina’s owner, was the first to notice: Strangers were showing up at the front desk, with no interest in renting a boat or a canoe, hiring a guide, purchasing fresh fish or a fried conch sandwich from the seafood market. But they were very interested in anything Mack or anyone else around the marina could tell them about the storklike man with the hippie hair who lived aboard No Mas, the sailboat anchored a hundred yards beyond the docks.

“Tomlinson types,” Mack told us. Meaning oddballs. “The New Age, touchy-feely kind. Strangest thing is, most of them are from Europe, Asia-faraway places. When they ask about Tomlinson, it’s like they’re in awe or something. Like he’s a rock’n’roll star, and they’ve come all this way just to get a look at him.”

It was an accurate description of an ever-growing number of marina visitors.

At first, the attention surprised Tomlinson. He handled it with humor, and a kind of childlike grace that is at the core of what makes Tomlinson Tomlinson. But, soon, the escalating number of visitors began to upset him. Then, I think, they began to frighten him-perhaps because of the devotion they exhibited. Or simply his dwindling privacy.

He never offered to explain why strangers were now seeking him out. I asked twice, and twice I received cryptic answers.

Once, he said, “Start reading at Matthew seven: fifteen, and keep going until you get to the part about corrupted fruit.”

I answered, “The Bible? I’d have to borrow yours.”

His second reply made even less sense. “I’m aware that the universe is filled with weird, wonderful things patiently waiting to be understood. But the whole scene, man, the way the energy’s growing around me. It’s like some karmic snowball getting bigger and bigger-”

He held his palms up: confusion; worry. “-I refuse to encourage it. Or even to participate.”

So I did the research on my own. It only took a night’s work on the computer for me to discover the surprising explanation. It had to do with an essay he’d written while an undergraduate at Harvard. It was formally entitled, “Universal Truths Connecting Religions and Earthbound Events.”

The paper was part of a sociology project, and it later received a wider audience, and some acclaim, when it was published in the International Journal of Practical Theology, a respected publication out of Berlin.

Professional journals don’t have a large readership-particularly when they’re in German-so the acclaim was brief. The essay was forgotten. That is, until two years or so ago, when an ecumenical professor in Frankfurt rediscovered it, and reviewed it for the same journal, declaring Tomlinson’s writing as “brilliant” and “divinely inspired.”

Which was no huge deal until one of the professor’s students began to circulate excerpts from the essay on the Internet under a new title: “One Fathom Above Sea Level.” The title was taken from a line in the text. A fathom is the nautical equivalent to six feet, so it referred to a universe as viewed from the eyes of a human being. Tomlinson’s eyes.

Communication is now instantaneous. The same is true of Germany’s surge of interest in Tomlinson and his writing. It wasn’t long before enthusiastic linguists began to translate his writings.

Because “One Fathom Above Sea Level” had much to do with Buddhism, it was first translated from German into Japanese, then from Japanese into several Asian languages, then into French and finally (and only in the last few months) into English.

That’s when Tomlinson- our Tomlinson-began his transformation from a quirky Sanibel character who loved sarongs into an international cult figure. It happened fast. His essay is only about ten pages long, so people read it quickly, copied it and forwarded it along.

I discovered that someone had already set up an Internet Web page where Tomlinson’s fans could post little notes about how reading “One Fathom Above Sea Level” changed their lives, saved their sanity, led them toward enlightenment, created friendships, romance, health, laughter, love, all kinds of positive things.

There were several hundred entries.

I found another site where devotees could post personal information about Tomlinson as they discovered it.

A recent posting confirmed the rumor that Tomlinson was an ordained Rinzai Zen Master who lived aboard a sailboat on a secluded bay, Sanibel Island, Florida.

So the explanation was amusing, but also had the potential to cause my friend real trouble down the road.

Which is why I kept the information to myself. Didn’t tell a soul. Not even Tomlinson. I decided to let the theater that is Dinkin’s Bay Marina play itself out.

So I had some reasons to smile. Life goes that way sometimes. Just keeps getting better and better and better. So maybe my depression, the feelings of loss and guilt, were finally fading.

One of the most powerful laws in physics, however, is the law of “momentum conservation.” It states that momentum lost by any collision or impact is equal to the opposite momentum gained.