Randy White - Shark River

In Florida it takes fertilizer. Tons and tons of inorganic nitrogen and phosphorus. Much of that fertilizer is not absorbed by fairway grasses. It washes off into water hazards and the water hazards drain into creeks, the creeks into rivers, and rivers drain into bays. In all brackish and saltwater live, suspended, myriad species of microscopic plant life, or phytoplankton. Microscopic plants react to fertilizer in the same way Bermuda grass does-they turn a bright, rich green.

That’s great for a golf course, but terrible for a bay. When water turns murky, the depth that sunlight can penetrate is reduced. If sunlight does not reach the sea bottom, sea grasses cannot grow. Sea grass is the perfect habitat for the shrimp and crabs on which game fish such as sea trout, redfish, and snook depend. Filtering species such as tunicates and sponges also use sea grass as a necessary anchor.

If murky water kills the sea meadows, then shrimp, crabs, and fish are eliminated as well, along with the very filtering animals required to make the bay clear and healthy again.

It is a hugely destructive intrusion that needs to be taken seriously, yet state bureaucrats spend far more time and money thwarting private homeowners from building docks (which provide excellent underwater habitat) and trying to implement such pointless boondoggles as manatee idle zones. The idle zones can’t be enforced and, worse, will have negligible effect on manatee fatalities because of the simple fact that the draft of a vessel is often more problematic than a vessel’s speed.

There are many fine, intelligent state-employed bureaucrats and biologists working in Florida, but the mandates they receive, and the objectives with which they are charged have, historically, been tragically shortsighted or misdirected.

The woman said, “We get back, I’m gonna fry up some of that conch, what you men think? Catch me a nice snapper, I’ll make that, too, with johnnycakes and some good fish gravy.” Ransom was talking while she studied her clipboards. Apparently, she was adding up numbers without having to be told. I liked that.

Tomlinson was still shoveling his hands through mounds of grass. “How ’bout you let us buy you lunch at the Tarpon Lodge? That old restaurant on the hill.”

She smiled, still calculating. “Oh man, I like the sound ’a that, but I don’t have no clothes for a place so fancy. I got me a pair of jeans, a lil’ ol’ black skirt, but nothing good enough for rich man’s place.”

Tomlinson said, “Oh, baloney-excuse my language. See what I’m wearing?” He touched the sleeve of his tattered, hibiscus-pink Hawaiian shirt before plunging his hands back into the pile. “We’re on an island. This is considered formal wear. Pair of flipflops and cutoffs, you can go anywhere but a funeral, which they don’t have out here anyway. They don’t have funerals because the rules don’t allow members to die while on club property. So when we get ashore… awwww-OUCH!”

Tomlinson’s scream was oddly high-pitched, so feminine that I would have laughed had he not tumbled hard over onto his side, holding his right hand as if he’d been stabbed.

The woman and I were both immediately beside him, helping him up. He was breathing hard; seemed a little dazed and was still holding his wrist. “I just got the shit shocked out of me! Like there’s a fucking 220-volt line in there!” He was staring at the last pile of grass and gumbo, but wary of it, keeping his distance.

I looked at his hand. No puncture wounds, no blood, but it was streaked with red.

“Damn, that hurt! ”

I was on my knees again. I had the little wooden-handled dip net, searching through the grass. At first, I thought he’d grabbed a saltwater catfish or stingray-unassertive animals with painful defensive systems. A stingray’s spine has serrated edges and two groves that run the length of it, venomous glands in each. A thin layer of skin called the integumentary sheath covers the spine, and a complicated proteinous toxin is released when that sheath ruptures upon penetration. I stepped on a small stingray once, and it took all my resolve not to sit down and bawl like a baby.

Saltwater catfish are almost as bad. Their dorsal and lateral fins are serrated like double-edged saws, and the slimy venom secreted from axillary glands in the sheaths of their spines is an extremely painful protein-based poison. Because there was no puncture mark on Tomlinson’s hand, though, I figured he’d grabbed some kind of jellyfish-the stinging nematocysts of a Portuguese man-o’war, in sufficient number, are potent enough to hospitalize a grown man.

I saw that it was neither. Lying on the deck, beneath the gumbo, was a banjo-shaped animal that was a little less than two feet long. It had the round body of a ray, but the truncated tail of a fish. Its milky gray body was covered with peculiar triangles, circles and semicircles that were suggestive of military camouflage or some weird alien, computer coding. An unusual and highly adapted animal.

“What the hell is that thing?”

I touched it gently with the tip of the wooden handle. The fish moved ever so slightly, its black eyes indifferent, gill clefts moving rhythmically, secure in its own defense system.

I said, “It’s an electric ray. We don’t get a lot of them around here, but when we dragged along that sand beach? That’s probably where he was.” I used the handle to lift it slightly, then amended. “Sorry, where she was. The way you tell is, they’re kind of like a shark. The males have elongated claspers.”

We were all three crouched over it now. I turned the misting water spray on the ray to keep it cool, and still it did not react.

Tomlinson’s eyes were wide, very excited. “Its skin was really smooth when I first touched it. Then it was like he flipped the power switch. Zap! Serious voltage that went straight to my brain, then arched down to my toes. Awesome! Like a bright red light flashed on behind my eyes and I could see a wiring schematic for my entire nervous system. Far out, man!” He paused; was looking at the ray, thinking about it. “Hey… what happened was, it hurt like hell, yeah, but it also gave me a kind of weird high. It wasn’t just painful, it was… interesting. In a chemical-electric way, I’m talking about. A really far-out sort of rush.”

Ransom said, “Lordy, Lordy, some pair, you two white men. My brother, he have a bullet cut his arm, it don’t even bother him. Mr. Thomas get a shock, he like the feeling.”

“No, no, what you don’t understand is, I am a scientist, Ransom, a very dedicated karma explorer. Pain and pleasure-they’re not that far removed. Or maybe I… what it could be is, I’ve been desensitized by some very high voltage.” He lifted his hair and pointed to the tiny lightning bolt scar. “Mother nature zapped me once. I also spent a couple weeks doing a little table dance which some Freud-geeks used to describe as electroshock therapy. Didn’t have much choice about either one, but this, yeah, it wasn’t too bad.”

I said, “This is what they call a lesser electric ray. It’s got chemical tissues”-I pointed without touching-“there and there on its body which can generate something like forty volts. Maybe not even that. But it’s got a relative in the Atlantic-I’ve found a couple in the Gulf, too-an animal called ‘torpedo ray,’ maybe because of its shape, but probably because it packs such a jolt. A torpedo ray can knock you on your butt. It’ll produce a lot more than a hundred volts.”

Before I could consider stopping him, Tomlinson reached out and touched the ray again, then looked at me, still holding his fingers to the fish, breathing fast and shallow. I watched his expression transition gradually from pain to exhilaration and then studious delight as he began to speak as giving dictation. “Not bad… not bad… whoa, got a little surge there! Yes, a very natural high. Yep, beginning to move through the cerebral cortex down into limbic Happy Valley. There… there… yes! My plumbing’s now on-line! Doesn’t really hurt, man, once you…” His eyes widened. “Oooh-lah-lah! Man, this is like a neurological cleansing!” He yanked his hand away and sat back heavily. “Phwew!”