The Fecund Gulf

"O God, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.

Yonder is the sea, great and wide,
it is teeming with countless creatures,
living things both small and great.

There go the ships, and Leviathan that you formed to sport in it."
--Psalm 104:24-25

Last weekend my sister came to visit (hurrah for lovely sisters who sacrifice their time and their money to come and see you--and as a birthday present, no less!) and it was fantastically refreshing. We ate too much, we slept in (a little), we got sunburned and bug-bitten. And we got to have those great long conversations where you find you don't have to explain yourself because all the ground work is already laid--you've known each other for so long, learned each other's habits, passions, mannerisms and endearing and/or annoying idiosyncrasies, and so the person you're talking to already gets it, gets you. It's like jumping right back into the middle of a book you haven't picked up in five months, and not having to go back and reread to catch yourself up because you know the story so well. And to think we used to fight about who crossed the invisible line in the back seat of the car...

The other thing we did last weekend was Nature. We saw and experienced so much wildlife that I told The Sis we should be getting our own Discovery Channel show. Here's a little taste:

Saturday we went to the beach armed with cameras and sunscreen and wandered out onto a dock with some kind of shorebirds perched on the end, hoping to get a shot or two (The Sister is a photographer, amongst other things).

While she was on her belly stalking these two smidgeons of birds--who, seemingly incapable of flying far enough to get safely back to shore, just kept edging closer and closer to the end of the dock until they had nowhere else to go--I was experimenting with the effect of my shadow on a school of tiny fish swimming against the current like iridescent grains of rice. Suddenly a great, beautiful heron flew almost directly over our heads. The Sister was trying to follow it with her camera as it passed us, when, lo and behold, a second heron as magnificent as the first came in to land about twenty feet away from us on our dock. Yes, we were laying low, and yes, we weren't really moving, but I was awed that such a normally skittish bird (the same species that takes off from the pond I run by in the mornings if I so much as breathe wrong) would choose to stay this close to humans. The heron (a great blue) just stood there for 10 or 15 minutes, unperturbedly grooming itself, inspecting us, and scanning the horizon for... what? Its partner? Food? Do herons just sit and veg out sometimes with no purpose other than to stand there lookin' good?

The highlight of the visit in terms of comedy was definitely the "heron pretends to be dog by scratching itself with long clawed feet" routine.

I'm a romantic, I freely admit it--but in the tradition of Native spirituality, it felt like the Heron Spirit had deigned to pay us a visit. It felt pretty special.


Next The Sister tried wading out into the water to snap a few photos of a bosomy pelican napping on a pier piling. It didn't seem to feel too enthusiastic about posing; but I got some good shots of my sister realizing she was knee-deep in saltwater holding a battery-operated device!

As she waded back out of the water, we were approached by another form of wildlife: a 2-year-old gabbling incoherently about the little crabs in the reeds--or something. Lest you think he is a little behind developmentally in terms of learning to speak intelligibly, we learned from his grandparents that he is learning to speak English and Portuguese--we just felt dumb compared to a little kid who could tell whole stories about marauding airplanes and spies in two different languages (albeit at the same time).

Later that afternoon we took it into our heads to go crabbing, an adventure which started out at the marina bait shop with a lesson from an elderly black lady who taught us how to tie a lead string onto a crabbing net like she'd been doing it her whole life--which, come to think of it, she probably has; another lady we met later that afternoon was crabbing for "groceries," as she put it. This is one way people put food on their tables down here.

Then off to the grocery store for a pack of chicken necks, one of which we tied to the sweet spot in the middle of the crab net and lowered off of the public pier (see The Pier). When lowered to the bottom, the upper ring of the net collapses flat onto the lower ring, leaving the bait innocently lying on the ocean floor, free to tantalize passing crustaceans. Every 20 minutes or so (we were told), you pull the net up and see what you've captured. Easy enough, we figured--we'll have caught enough in a few hours to give us both a few boiled crabs for dinner, no problem. Heck, let's invite the neighbors!

Four hours later, grand total of caught creatures (drumroll, please):

-1 one-clawed, midget crab too small to keep.
-1 shrimp. Which fell through the net.

Dinner was a DiGiorno's frozen pizza from Winn Dixie.

* * *

I should mention some more, well, impressive denizens of the Gulf we encountered at the Pier. A whole family was fishing and crabbing at the very end of the pier, and amidst the shrieks and laughter and the sound of aluminum can tabs snapping open, we heard a pre-teen voice squeal "It's a dolphin! Look, a DOLphin!!!!" It was, in fact, 3 dolphins (species unclear)--a mother and a baby swimming cheek-to-cheek, so to speak, and a third animal (Dad? Mom's BFF? Godparent?) swimming a distance away. They came within, what, a quarter of a mile of the pier? and then moved back out again, staying in the area for quite a while. We saw them from the bay bridge the next day, as well; because they stayed in the same place for two days running, and because the mother and baby were swimming so close together, we hypothesized that Momma had just had the baby and was sticking in a sheltered spot to help it get used to swimming on its own. I'd never seen a dolphin in the bay before--I'm sure it happens all the time, but all the same, the cetacean sighting along with the heron visit conspired to make me feel we were having an enchanted day, despite the crab fiasco! (I've since been informed, by the way, that crabbing at the public pier probably did it--it's overcrabbed. Next time, The Sis and I will be heading out to the Gulf to a less popular spot to get us some crawly critters for dinnah.)

The next day we borrowed a friend's kayak and hit the wetlands. I am proud to say that it took us almost no time at all before we were smoothly gliding through the water, paddles synchronized in a glowing example of sibling solidarity... well, minus the numerous times I though The Sister needed some help turning and I added my own back-paddling or braking, thus throwing off her careful calculations about how much reverse thrust would be needed to bank a turn. I couldn't resist--I was just trying to help!

But seriously, we executed some sweet maneuvers, including reverse paddling and three-point turns, and we only got stuck once--in someone's front yard! I was unaware that private individuals have docks leading from their houses out into the wetlands, and that, even if you are inadvertently intruding into their "lawn," they will wave enthusiastically and walk all the way to the end of their dock laden with Cokes and cups of ice to cool you down from the hot hot sun. Now THAT is Southern Hospitality!

Aside from mastering the art of the kayak--which can be really euphoric when you get a good, coordinated pace going and find yourself slicing cleanly through the water--the rest of the experience was rather Alice-in-Wonderland. Kayaks sit so low in the water that you end up at eye-level with the reeds and the mud, and the red-winged blackbirds squawking at you that you're invading their territory are actually perched menacingly close above your head, so that you feel they may indeed have the upper hand and it would be best not to incur their wrath. This circumstance also allows you to drift in close enough to observe the minuscule crabs burrowing into the mud anchored by the waving grasses of this water-prairie. At times, the blackbirds and the great blue heron which buzzed our watery foxhole (the same which starred in yesterday's dockside drama??) actually made me feel I was traveling through a rolling Illinois grassland.

The labyrinthine* channels leading off of the main waterway are so precise that you wonder if they weren't laid out by humans hands. Every twist and turn as you navigate their meandering corridors is a surprise; once we turned a corner a bit too quickly and surprised an alligator out of its nest, right into the water beside us. Alligators move fast, so fast that my sister missed the whole thing because my head was in her way (I was sitting in the front). This capacity for speed, coupled with the fact that we were now sitting in a very low-slung plastic shell (which no longer seemed very sturdy) in opaque brown water concealing the whereabouts of a creature whose bite PSI** can be comparable to that of having a small pick-up truck dropped on you evoked a response that can be best summarized by the word:

PADDLE!!!!

We saw neither hide nor claw of this superb predator after it slipped into the water, fortunately--just a whole lot of fish jumping and flopping out of the water (trying to escape alligators?? Trying to grab an insectual snack?), a small <--- green heron (they're about 18 inches in body length), and a whole lot of boaters destroying the wetlands by going so fast through the main channel that their wake violently slammed the fragile reed-laced mud, thus carelessly washing away vital habitat. I felt like painting a gigantic NO WAKE sign in red letters on white plywood and installing it in a prominent location in the marina, perhaps under cover of nightfall in some sort of eco-guerilla action--hmmm, it's dark out now...where do we keep the spray paint?

This intimate tour of an unfamiliar ecosystem was like getting to peer at a Caravaggio up close; maybe beforehand you had a vague notion that the painting was a masterpiece, but you had never really looked at it that carefully. I'd heard how magnificent and ecologically vital the wetlands are; but now, I've stood nose-to-nose with the brushstrokes and discovered for myself this magical world teeming with incredible life, an entire network of organisms that, from afar, only looks like a lot of grass and water--pretty, but unanimated. Ah, how very artful is Mother Nature!

*awesome word, no?

**http://amos.indiana.edu/library/scripts/alligator.html