Anastsia Island Morning by Dan Barfield

 

Anastsia Island Morning

            You know what it's like on Anastasia Island early in the morning when the tide is flat low and before the sun has come over the curve of the earth? When the sky is still dark but turning pink and gold and purple on the eastern horizon. .The sun is shinning through the ocean then, and the ocean is lite from below, shinning all silver blue. When the sky is still dark but turning pink and gold and purple on the eastern horizon. .sky is all pink and gold and purple and the ocean is flat and glowing all silver-blue. It’s brighter than the sky then, and looks like it’s lite from below. Little shore birds run peeping at the edge of the tide and Pelicans fly just above the water in military like precision. When the only sounds are the lapping of the water, the peeping of the shore birds, and the breeze in the palm trees behind the sand dunes. Then the sun begins to race up over the horizon. Just as it has cleared the ocean it seems to jump those last few inches into the new day.

            There is no one on the beach, then. Maybe a lone fisherman casting out into the low tide stillness. The beach is not developed here. No motels, no parking lots, no cafes and sandwich shops. No people. Behind the beach are the sand dunes where the Sea-Oats wave golden-brown and you can still find Gopher turtles. Then the palm trees and windswept Pin oaks until you reach the marsh and the 'Salt Run' where the crabbing is good at high tide. Across the Salt Run is the ranger station and the access road that takes the beach goers to the south end where there is a parking lot and a walkway through the dunes, but that’s a few miles away.

            So you walk along then, ankle deep in the tide, looking for shells and sand dollars, maybe a good piece of driftwood. Little Coquinas buried in the wet sand blow out drops of water, seaweed and mermaid's purses, necklaces of conch and whelk egg cases. Cannonball jelly fish. And sometimes there are the Portuguese Man of War and you have to be careful not to step on their thread-like tentacles. Even a dead jelly fish can sting you, and those tentacles stretch a long way. They burn and hurt like hell! Ammonia and vinegar will ease the pain, so I always carry a little bottle in my tackle box. Sometimes those tentacles will get wrapped on your line and you don’t know it until you touch it.

 Sea turtles eat them. I’ve seen it a few times when I was fishing far off shore. I guess their skin is too tough to be stung, but their eyes are vulnerable. So they close their eyes and sort of half turn their heads.

You seldom find a Whelk or conch shell here. Broken pieces, or an old and bleached out shell, peppered with tiny holes, but seldom a perfect one. And if you do, it usually has a hermit crab living in it.

Oh, they are here, but you have to know where and how to look. You can find them in the marsh behind the old mission and in the mud by the sea wall. Just not on the beach. You do find Sand Dollars here. In the right months they are here by the uncounted millions, buried below the sand and just off shore. Then you wade out about waist deep at low tide and feel around for them with your foot. When you feel the little hump of sand you dig your toe under it and flip it over because you can’t see the mound of sand, but you can feel it. Then dive down and get them. Hang them on a line to dry out and bleach white, then you can stain them with coffee or tea, or paint on them. Harden them with a few coats of Spare Varnish and put them on a necklace. The souvenir shops sell them for a dollar or two.

            If I walk all the way to the point I can see the walls of the old Spanish fort and the red tile roofs of St. Augustine. I've painted that view a couple of times, and it's nice to see it in the early morning, but that's a long walk. Imagine what it must have been like four hundred years ago when the walls were white with an earth red strip around the battlements. You walked out of the Florida jungle, wild and untamed jungle of swamps and alligators, savage Indians, and saw the Castillo de San Marcos and the walls of St. Augustine, America’s only walled city. Shining bright in the hard Florida sun. You must have felt like a sinner released from hell.

     Ah, well, the walls are gone now. Only the fort and the city gates remain. A shame, really. A road ran from those gates all the way to Mexico City. El Camino Real, with missions spaced about a day’s travel apart. Another string of missions ran up the Apalachicola river and Chattahoochee river into tennesse, and a third string went up the Atlantic coast as far as Santa Elena island in South Carolina.

            They don’t mention that in United States history, do they?

            Naw, the history they teach in schools in this country is a fairy tale.

            Kathy Ray said that she was down here one evening and walked up on two people 'boiking.' I'd never heard it called that before. Thought it was a funny word. I walk the beach all the time, but I've never seen anybody having in sex on the sand. I did come up on a bunch of girls from Flagler College swimming nude once, though. That was not in the morning, but late in the afternoon, early evening.

            When they saw me, they sat down in the water up to their necks and giggled and waved. I smiled and waved back.

            Ah, to be young again!

            HO! Not a day under fourty!

            I'm beginning to see turtle crawls where the sea turtles have come up in the night to lay their eggs. These are loggerheads. We have hawksbill and Ridleys here, but they nest way down south in the Caribbean. They come in the night under a bright moon. Ancient creatures little changed since they shared the seas with marine dinosaurs. If you sit quietly and don't show any light. Not even the glow of a cigarette. You will see them come to the edge of the surf and wait. When they sense that it's safe, they lumber up the sand to above the high tide line and scoop out their nests. Then they lay usually one hundred and ten white Ping-Pong ball looking eggs. Cover them over and make their way back to the ocean, a ritual repeated every year since the world began and the continents rose from the deep.  Year after year they return to the same beach on which they were born, but now those beaches are being crowded out by resorts and condominiums.       

Later in the morning the Turtle patrol will come and put a cage over the nests to protect the eggs from raccoons. When it’s time for the eggs to hatch the cages will be dismantled and the little hatchlings will run the race of death to the water. Maybe one in ten will survive the onslaught of waiting birds and crabs to reach the sheltering arms of the ocean. I don’t know how many of those that do live to maturity. Shrimp boats used to kill a lot of them when they would get caught in the nets and drown. But now they have the T.E.D.’s so that doesn’t happen anymore. Except for the damned Chinese fleets. They kill everything in the ocean.

            I've always like turtles and tortoises. The Box turtles and Gopher turtles, and water turtles. In years gone by, when I was a child and we would go on road trips, there would be dozens of Box turtles crossing the roads. My mother would always stop the car and I would run back and get Mr. turtle and take him home. Sometimes we would pick up a dozen, once in a rare while more. Sometimes less. We carried a box to put them in until we got home. Then we took them out to a fresh water pond where there were a lot of blackberry bushes and persimmon trees and let them go. My granddaddy fenced it off and called it my turtle ranch.

            Well, progress has not been kind to the land turtles. You might see one or two crossing the road today, if you are lucky. They survived for millions of years, but they aren't going to survive the automobile.

            That's a soap box I don't want to climb on right now. I've got a lot to say about progress, and not much of it is good.

            Walk a little farther. You can find prehistoric shark’s teeth here if you know how to look. Find a place where the tide has left behind a lot of coquina shells. That’s where the tide will have left them. Scoop up a handful and wash it in the water. The shells and sand will wash away, but the teeth are heavier and will stay…..Kind of like panning for gold, I guess.

Speaking of gold, I wonder where Mr. Lewis found those four gold doubloons? Somewhere on Anastasia, but he never said where. Probably on the south end of the island where that Spanish plate galleon went down in 1514. Coins struck from Mexican gold looted from the Aztec with blood and fire. He said that there were four of them lying together on the sand, just waiting to be picked up. Since they weren’t coral encrusted, they had not been in the ocean. The storm must have eroded them out of the sand.

            Ha! I really wanted one. Not for the value of it, but for the beauty and history. I wanted to hang it on my watch chain. I never found one. Other people have, though. Every few years one or two will turn up. There are so many fortunes lost and waiting in these waters from the Spanish treasure ships. Mel Fisher hit it big with the Atocha down in the Keys, but there area a lot more just as rich just waiting to be found. (400 hundred million)

            Old Barrel House Joe found that gold dime between the bricks of Avelas Street. Said at first he thought it was just a piece of gold foil, but it didn't look right. He scraped it out from the bricks with his pocket knife. He said it was only worth around twenty dollars. Not the same as a gold doubloon. Those things can be worth thousands of dollars.

            You find all sorts of things along this beach. Last summer some vacationers found a human skull on the south end of the park. They thought it was from the Challenger disaster. Naw, it was a prehistoric Indian, according to the archaeologists. Over a thousand years old.

            We're not supposed to call them Indians, anymore, are we. Supposed to call them Native Americans. Well, sorry about that. Anybody born in the Americans is a native American. North, South, or Central. I think the Canadians have got it right. Call them First Tribes, or First People.

            And African American? Uh-uh, not unless you were born in Africa and moved to America. I'm not a European American. Just an American. A friend of mine, Oluwamba Akendala, is African American. He was born in Africa and immigrated to the United States. 

That man was so proud when he became a United States citizen, I don’t think his feet touched the ground for a week.

            My granddaddy found a human skull once when I was in the fifth grade. So I was…What? Eleven years old?  We were fishing on Cockspur Island at the mouth of the Savannah river, which is a protected historical site because of Fort Pulaski. Most of the island is wild and few people venture away from the trails and the fort itself, but we had gone a good ways back through the woods to a place in the marsh near the south channel. We had been there for a while, swatting mosquitos, when he found it. It was half buried in the dirt and wasn’t the bleached out white that you would expect. It was stained a sort of light brown by the soil. It had a gold tooth and I really wanted to keep it, but he said no. Then he kicked around and found a shoe. It was old and the leather was all green and stiff and the laces had rotted away. When he turned it upside down and shook it, foot bones fell out.

            We went back to the Ranger Station, like I said,Cockspur is a protected historical sight, and told the rangers what we had found. A few days later somebody called and said that they had found another skeleton near it. They were Civil War soldiers, probably Confederate, and probably killed when the Union forces had attacked the fort. They moved them to the little cemetery on the island.

            Ah, well, long time ago. Anyway, sun is well up now and the tide has turned. Time to go before it gets too hot. I’ll walk this beach again tomorrow dawn and see what the tide has left for me. Probably not a prehistoric skull or a gold doubloon, but maybe something just as interesting.

-Dan Barfield