Randy White - Twelve Mile Limit

One of the bodies of water the feds want to close is our own Dinkin’s Bay. If they get their way, it will mean no more powerboats, no more fishing guides. No more Mack and his marina, no more of the cast of quirky liveaboards who make their home here. No more Sanibel Biological Supply, the small business that I run, providing fish and tunicates, squid, crabs, sea stars, octopi, anemones, and a whole long list of specimens, preserved or alive, to labs and schools around the country. No more of the traditional Friday parties after Mack ceremoniously locks the gate. No more Red Pelican Gift Shop with its exotic silk and incense wares, no more fish market or fried conch sandwiches.

In short, if the laws are implemented, it will be the end of life as we know it. Finally, the inevitable will occur far, far in advance of it being inevitable: Our small marina family will have to say good-bye and go our individual, solitary ways.

An ironic fact: As Tomlinson and Ransom argued about losing the Dinkin’s Bay family, we’d already unknowingly lost one of our members, Janet Mueller. As we spoke, she was somewhere out there, adrift, alone on a horizon of gray, almost certainly fighting for her life. Alive or dead? It was a question that would take me thousands of miles from home and would get good people killed before I learned the truth-if there can be truth in such a situation.

I stood at the stainless-steel dissecting table, holding a 300-milliliter flask in my hand, attempting to concentrate on the Winkler Titration method of determining oxygen content in water, as Ransom raged at Tomlinson, “Here’s what I’m thinkin’. What I’m thinkin’ is, if you used your brain as much as you like to use something else you got, you’d understand a very simple fact. People, us people, we all more important than any fat no-brain creature that swim around so slow and dumb it can’t keep outta the way of boats. You one sad old hippie, you can’t see the truth in that.”

She stood there, hands on hips, speaking with her island accent, the words joined together like musical notes, the inflection surging up and down. She was wearing a hibiscus-pink tank top and purple jogging shorts. Every day at lunchtime, the two of us had been running Tarpon Bay Road to the beach, then along the water for two or three miles and back. She’d come dressed and ready to work out but had ended up in an old argument that was becoming increasingly tiresome.

As I dipped the flask into one of my fish tanks, I watched Tomlinson’s long and nervous fingers comb hair from his eyes. Blue and bloodshot eyes. Judging from all the fragile, broken capillaries behind those two wise old lenses, he’d been drinking, partying, smoking more cannabis than ever. Seeing lots of women now, too, after ending several months of sexual exclusivity with Ransom-probably another source of the woman’s fury.

I listened to him reply, “My dear, dear lady, that’s precisely where you’re wrong. Animals, humankind-there is no difference. One’s as valuable as the other. Like the koan my old instructor, my roshi, really flogged my consciousness with: Does a dog have Buddha-nature? Spend a few years meditating that one and your ass will go numb. So does it? Have Buddha-nature, I mean. Yes. Absolutely. Animals have Buddha-nature, ’cause as it says in the Nirvana sutras, ‘All sentient beings possess it, a living consciousness, their own karma.’”

Ransom used her hands to wave away her disgust. “You crazy, man.”

But Tomlinson continued right along. “It’s true. Replace the word dog with manatee and you’ve got your proof. Does a manatee have Buddha-nature? That’s exactly my point. We let them go extinct? Might as well accept the fact that we’ll soon follow. All of us. People, I’m talking about.”

Ransom made a grunting sound of contempt, rolled her eyes, and turned to me. Bright blue eyes looking out from her African skin, eyes that were alive, fierce. “He know lots a pretty words, but he still full of goat shit. Got his head so far up his backside I’m surprised he not walking into walls.”

“He walks into walls all the time,” I said. “Usually around midnight. A couple days ago, he staggered up my steps and fell into the shark pen.” I was adding a manganese solution to the beaker. Next would come the iodine base. Then I would titrate the solution and watch for color change.

Ransom said, “I wisht they’d eaten the crazy fool,” as she looked through the window at her new skiff tied outside. A pretty little teal-green eighteen-foot Hewes with a ninety-horse Yamaha for power. She’d just bought the thing but, within a few months, might not be able to use it on the bay waters around Sanibel. Most of us are eager fans of the environment, until its maintenance threatens to inconvenience us.

The question of the manatee, however-and more and more so-called environmental causes-is: What is necessary maintenance? And what is symptomatic of very human and predictable attempts by government and nonprofit bureaucrats to expand their power?

The line has become so broad, so gray, that I sit way, way back and gather all the information I can before choosing sides in any environmental debate.

In Florida, considering environmental issues has, increasingly, become a time-consuming job. Truth is? Sometimes there are no good choices, and there is almost never a perfect choice.

Ransom said, “Tell him he’s full of crap, my brother. All the people here at the marina, they all hate the idea of these crazy new laws ’cept this ol’ rummy pal of yours, Mr. Peace Love Dove Hippie Boy.”

I said, “Don’t put me in the middle of this. I’ve got problems of my own, right here in my lab, and listening to you two bicker isn’t exactly expediting a solution.”

I did have problems, too. Nothing major, but problems that were increasingly perplexing and irksome. Over the last two months, someone or something had snuck into my lab and stolen more than three dozen stone crabs and seven calico crabs. Took them from the hundred-gallon aquarium where I’d been stockpiling them, and always one or two crabs at a time.

It was bizarre. At first I thought a raccoon might have found some kind of secret ingress through the wobbly wooden floor of my old house, or maybe through some unseen space between the wall and the tin roof. I searched and hunted, and found nothing bigger than a mouse-sized opening, but the crabs continued to disappear.

Maddening.

Finally, I covered the aquarium with a pane of heavy glass. If some animal were stealing crabs, a cover would certainly solve the problem, right?

Nope, it didn’t. Crabs continued to disappear, one or two at a time, always at night, but in no other predictable or understandable pattern. Finally, I started sealing the lid of my crab tank with a small metal vise.

I’d begun to think some of my marina friends were playing a practical joke on me-“Hey, know how we can really mess with Doc’s mind?”-but then, concurrently, my octopi began to disappear, too. Two species of octopi live in the waters around Sanibel and they are not easy to collect or keep alive, and my friends are knowledgeable enough to know that. They wouldn’t mess with my octopi, not just because they are valuable creatures but also because everyone at the marina knows that octopi-like manatees-are among my very favorite animals.

I find octopi fascinating, compelling even, for a number of reasons.

As members of the phylum Mollusca, an octopus is a mollusk, like a snail or clam, but that’s where all similarities end. Octopi are the intellectual giants of their phylum. They have the most complex brain of all invertebrates, and they are a hell of a lot smarter than most animals that do have spines, and that includes some people I know.

Octopi have precise, uncanny long-term and short-term memories, and they learn to solve problems by trial and error, by experience. Once they solve a problem, they file away the solution and can then solve similar problems quickly.