Randy White - Everglades

Mercury Marine, once a maker of classic American outboards, had had a bad couple of years in which their image and their reputation took a beating. It was not a good time for the company, or boaters who used their product.

Those of us who make our living on the water are necessarily fussy about equipment. We talk freely about what is good and what is bad. A year or so back, I’d begun to hear the rumors that Mercury was back on track. They’d finally gotten it right again.

So I made the switch. A lot of the guides were making the switch, too.

It was a nice day to be on the water. The bay was a gelatin skin that lifted and fell in broad sections; moving with the slow respiration of distant oceans, faraway storms. The air was balmy, scented by the tropics, it had a winter clarity. The sky was Denver-blue, and on the far curvature of sky, beyond Pine Island, were cumulous snow peaks. The clouds were coral and silver: vaporous sculptures, carved by wind shear, adrift like helium dirigibles.

Standing at the wheel, I could look down and see the blurred striations of sea bottom. I could see white canals of sand that crossed the flat like winding rivers, and I could see meadows of sea grass-blades leaning in the tide as if contoured by a steady breeze. Ahead, there were comets’ tails of expanding water as redfish and snook spooked ahead of us. The fish created bulging tubes on the water’s surface, as if they were trapped beneath Pliofilm.

Behind us, in our slow, expanding wake, the tiny clearing that was Dinkin’s Bay Marina-wooden buildings, a few cars and docks, the Red Pelican Gift Shop, my house on pilings-was the only break in the great ring of mangroves.

Sitting to my right, Tomlinson finished his beer, crushed the can in his hand and said, “When’s the last time you and I did a Bay Crawl?”

“Bay Crawl” is a local euphemism for an afternoon spent going from island to island, barhopping-or pub-crawling-by boat.

“It’s been a while,” I said. “Too long. But I have to fill that order for horseshoe crabs. This time of year, it’s not going to be easy.”

Which was true. Each winter, horseshoe crabs appear on South Florida’s mangrove flats en masse; a slow, clattering minion plowing blindly to copulate. Thousands of creatures ride the floodtides into the shallows; the big cow crabs dragging smaller males behind, each tuned in to the instinctive drive to exude and spray; to lay and fertilize. They are animals as archaic as the primal ooze to which they are attracted, dropping bright blue eggs in the muck; hatching one more generation of a species that has not changed in two hundred million years.

Come spring, though, they are not as easily found.

Tomlinson said, “I don’t want to go back to the marina for a while. So I’ll help you collect the little darlings. Then let’s say we start at the Waterfront Restaurant at St. James City, have a few beers and say hello to the twins. Then hit the Pool Bar at ’Tween Waters. After that, work our way up to Cabbage Key, and maybe even Palm Island. The Don Pedro softball team’s supposed to play the Knight Island team tonight. Plus, Passover begins at sundown-what better reason to celebrate?”

I touched the throttle; felt the pleasant, momentary G-shock as we gained speed, a jet-fighter sensation, as I listened to Tomlinson add, “Speaking of baseball, I got an e-mail from Marino today.”

Marino Laken Balserio is my son. He lives in Central America with his brilliant and beautiful mother, Pilar. Having Marino was unplanned; a surprise to both of us.

I said, “I know. We trade letters a lot now.”

“He told me he loves the Wilson catcher’s mitt you sent him. Said the Rawlings mitt is a piece of junk, plus he hates the way that Rawlings does business in Costa Rica. Can you believe they’re still connected with Major League baseball? Bionts have infiltrated our sport.”

I chuckled. “He inherited his mother’s intellect, and her heart.”

“So there’s another good reason to go bay-crawling. You have a brilliant son.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, pushing the throttle forward.

Much of what Tomlinson and I did that night remains a blur. Like most drunken intervals, the evening came back to me in a series of lucid snapshots rather than a continuous flow of memory.

After collecting more than a hundred horseshoe crabs and depositing them in a holding pen near my stilt house, we ran east across the bay to Pine Island, where we had two or three beers at the Waterfront, and ate a bucket of local clams. Then we sped back-country to Pineland and the Tarpon Lodge, where we had more beer, and a spectacular portabello stuffed with fresh oysters.

By then it was close to sunset, so we made a straight shot between Patricio Island and Bokeelia to Boca Grande, and tied off at Mark Futch’s seaplane dock. We walked to the Temptation Restaurant where Annie, behind the bar, served us drinks, but refused to read the tarot cards for us.

“Not when you two are together,” she said. “I done it once, and once was too much.”

Weaving only slightly, Tomlinson told her, “I remember when you did the reading. But you didn’t tell us what the cards said. What’s our fate?”

He was grinning.

Annie wasn’t.

“I didn’t tell you for a reason,” Annie said cryptically. “So please don’t ever ask me again.”

The next mental snapshot I have is of us pulling into the Palm Island docks, off Lemon Bay. We had ribs with Swamp Sauce at Rum Bay Restaurant, then borrowed Jill Beck-stead’s golf cart and drove around Don Pedro Island with a tin bucket filled with ice and beer, feeling a dark, sea-oat wind, smelling Gulf air off the beach.

On the way back, we stopped at Cabbage Key-two more beers with Rob and Terry at the bar-then we were at the Green Flash, drinking Rogerita Margaritas with Andreas, the owner. I remember getting into an intense discussion with a tourist lady from Seattle-her name was Gail-about the important role horseshoe crabs play in cancer research.

As scientists around the world have discovered, I told her, the blue blood of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, reacts dramatically when endotoxins are introduced. Endotoxins, which are dead cell walls and bits of bacteria, cause horseshoe crab blood to clot immediately. The blood is an excellent diagnostic tool.

I told her, “It’s actually an arthropod, not a crab at all. It’s more closely related to ticks and scorpions. Fascinating, huh?”

Gail was an attractive redhead with lively green eyes. Turning away from me, she said, “Not really.”

Moonrise that Wednesday night was a little after ten, and by the time Tomlinson and I idled into the Dinkin’s Bay Marina boat basin, it was adrift above the mangrove rim, a gaseous orange mass in a sky that was weightless, black.

“The paschal moon,” Tomlinson said. “The first full moon before Easter Sunday.”

When I told him it was a couple of days past full, he said, “Details. It’s still the Passover moon.”

We’d both sobered on our trip back. Comfortable silence is one of the barometers of friendship, and we rode most of the trip wordlessly, watching the moonrise, enjoying the familiar bay nightscape of strobeing channel markers, hedgerows of mangrove shadow, pocket constellations of light on island enclaves such as Useppa, Safety Harbor, De mery Key, South Seas.

As I banked through the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay, Tomlinson finally spoke, mentioned the moon and then said, “If I haven’t told you already, I’m embarrassed about the way I behaved at Sawgrass. It makes me want to scream, the way that wicked bastard manipulated me. I feel embarrassed. Weak and guilty as hell.”

I said, “I can relate,” in a tone so bitter that the intensity startled even me.