The Man Who Ivented Florida (2 page)

The extraordinary thing, though, was that only a small percentage of people living along the 26th parallel noticed. In North Africa, there were wars to consider, and there was also the damage caused by the sandstorm itself. In the Azores and Abacos, spectacular sunsets were nothing new, but satellite television reception was. Sunsets could not compete. The same was true in Florida, but on a richer scale. There was television, Nintendo, tourist traffic, air-conditioned malls, lottery tickets, Epcot, condo association meetings, greyhound races, cool, dark bars, and water beds. October in Florida is hot. People don't get out to look at the sky much.

A few did.

On a Thursday morning that October, in the Gulf Coast village of Mango, Tucker Gatrell stepped off the porch of his ranch shack and considered the sky. It was dawn and the eastern horizon was the smoky, iridescent color of a hot camp fire. "Holy Lordy," he said, touching his old horse, Roscoe, on the muzzle, "I ain't never seen nothing like that." Then he stood and looked for a while before saying, "Either the Everglades is on fire or they gone and blowed up Miami. Probably killed millions." When Roscoe shook his head and popped the ground with his hoof, Tucker said, "Me, too. I'm pulling it's Miami."

On that same morning, on the Loop Road in the belly of the Everglades, Ervin T. Rouse noticed the sky for the first time, and he went inside to get his fiddle. More than forty years before, Rouse had written a song titled "The Orange Blossom Special" and he sold all rights to a New York publisher for three hundred dollars. The song became world-famous; Rouse did not. But he still liked to play and write, and, man oh man, that sky deserved a song.

Thirty miles north, looking through a second-floor window of the Everglades Township Rest Home, Joseph Egret blinked his eyes when he saw the boiling crimson sky and sat down quickly on his bed.
Them fat nurses,
he thought to himself.
Them fat nurses is giving me weird drugs. I gotta get out of this goddamn rest home.

Up and down Florida's west coast, people living on boats noticed the sky because people on boats don't have much else to do. A man named Tomlinson, who lived on a sailboat in Dinkin's Bay, Sanibel Island, saw the sky, and the beauty of it was like a sweet, sad weight that brought tears to his eyes. He sat on the bow of his boat in full lotus position, face to the sunrise, and began his morning meditation:
This earth, this earth, so magic and so tragic. Magic and tragic . . .

On another sailboat, anchored out in the same bay, Sally Car-mel was holding a mug of coffee, staring. The strange clouds, the bizarre fluorescence—it was so lovely, but what could cause such a thing? Along with a lifelong interest in birds, Sally had a minor in interior design, a master's degree in photojournalism, and she knew a great photographic opportunity when she saw one, so she hurried below to get her camera gear. She would skip her morning swim.

Living on a house on stilts in Dinkin's Bay, a man named Ford, who ran a small marine-specimen supply company, noticed the sky and puzzled over it. He moved around the boardwalk that fringed his house and looked again. He checked his watch, for he was a punctual man and eighteen petri dishes, already prepared with saline solution, waited for him in his lab. But this phenomenon—this flaming orange sky—invited thought, and Ford could not resist. From the bookcase beside the reading chair, he selected three books and began to read. Ten minutes later, he put two of the books away, still puzzled. He stood and went to the world globe in the corner and, from a book on meteorology, matched the wind-stream currents to the 26th parallel on the globe. It took him a while to assemble the possibilities, but then he smiled to himself and closed the book. "Sandstorm over the Sahara," he said aloud.

Then Ford put the book away and began his work in the lab.

ONE

Seen
from a mile away, the sailboat was a solitary white husk suspended on space. Each day at sunset, a lone female figure appeared on the boat's deck, striped off T-shirt or bikini with a careless gesture, and dived into Sanibel Island's Dinkin's Bay.

It was something hard not to watch. But Marion Ford, who lived in a house built on stilts in the same bay, refused to watch. Not that he didn't want to. Oh, he wanted to, yet wouldn't allow himself—not since the first time when he stumbled upon the woman's ritual, scanning the bay with the Celestron telescope mounted on a tripod near his reading chair by the north window.

He'd seen the woman materialize out of the boat's companion-way, watched her stand at the taffrail with her back to him, peeling the shirt over her head—a woman he had never seen before on a boat he did not recognize. Ford had held his breath, eye to the telescope, some atavistic sense hoping, perversely, that she would not be as attractive as her hair and shoulders promised. Then his breath caught as she turned slowly, shaking amber hair down onto tanned shoulders, good strong face, long, long runner's legs, and the late sun glazing muscle cordage, rich body, and body hair in honey-shaded light.

Ford had let his breath out slowly, watching.
Whew-w-w-w.
Feeling a pain akin to loss because, shimmering on the radius of the telescope's lense, the woman seemed as remote and unapproachable as a far small planet.

That first time, Ford had stayed near the telescope, watching her swim, waiting for her to climb up the stern pulpit so he could get another look. And he was at the scope the next afternoon, too . . . which is when he caught himself. . . .

Acting like some damn Peeping Tom.

And the reality of what he was doing, imposing on a stranger's privacy, set him back a little, offended his own sense of self, and that was it. No more telescope. Not at sunset, anyway, no matter how badly he wanted to look.

Ford found nothing wrong with using the scope to sweep past the boat at other times of the day, though. He had used the telescope before the sailboat arrived, and he convinced himself that it was a breach of his own private habits to give it up. So in the week since the sailboat had showed up, he had assembled a personal portrait of a woman he had never met but who, at sunset, drew his eyes like a magnet, standing on the stern of the small white vessel, a lean silhouette on the blue distance.

Island woman, with her long legs and long hair, skin glowing. Living out there alone, wearing floppy hats, taking photographs of wading birds and pelicans, up and out at dawn on her dinghy to use the stark morning light. Rowing the boat like she knew what she was doing. Bicycle lashed on the cabin roof, sack of oranges hanging from the stanchion along with the wash-bright cotton skirts, towels, and blouses—and a steering vane, so Ford knew she was rigged for a long trip, probably touring the coast.

He liked that. Independent woman out making her own way, designing her own life. At least, that's the way he imagined her, him sitting there alone in his cabin, reading or listening to his shortwave or working in his lab at night. Taking the unknowns and building them into a person of his own creation, seeing the woman he wanted to see, one that matched her beauty, and it gave him something to think about when the late wind freshened through the clattering mangrove leaves and night seeped through the cracks of his old house.

So why didn't she come out to look when he puttered by in his twenty-four-foot flat-bottomed trawl boat? Or idled by in his flats skiff, acting as if he was looking for waking fish but actually hoping for an opening to hear her voice, her name? And why did she never come into the marina?

Sunset was not an easy time for Ford. He busied himself in his lab or gave himself small jobs and hoped visitors would come by. He spent even more time working out—running, calisthenics, swimming in the bay—than normal, and, for the first time in his life, he began to read newspapers. Newspapers were great blotters of idle time, an effective antidote to introspection.

Ford avoided the telescope. ...

FISHING CELEBRITY MISSING IN GLADES THIRD DISAPPEARANCE IN FOUR WEEKS

Television fishing celebrity William Bambridge was reported missing yesterday, according to a spokeswoman for Everglades County Sheriff's Dept. The host of the popular fishing show "Tight Lines!" Bambridge was reported missing by the show's producer, James Lawrence Jennings.

According to Jennings, Bambridge left Barron Creek Marina, five miles south of the village of Mango, alone in his 17-foot boat two days ago, Oct. 13, to scout the area in preparation for the next day's shooting. "He didn't come back that night," according to Jennings's statement to the department, "so we just figured he'd broken down. Since our sponsor manufactures the motor Willy uses, we weren't too eager for publicity. But we've looked and looked. We just can't find him."

Bambridge's disappearance was the third report of a missing person the department has received in the last four weeks.

On Oct. 1, Chuck Fleet was reported overdue, then missing, while working in the remote island region north of Everglades National Park boundaries. Fleet was working alone, and neither he nor his boat have yet been found. Fleet is a surveyor.

On Oct. 5, Charles Herbott, an environmental consultant contracted by the state, was reported overdue, then missing, while working in the same area.

The region is one of the largest uninhabited areas in the United States. It is known as the Ten Thousand Islands because of the complex network of islands in the area.

According to a network promotional release, "Tight Lines!" is a fishing show geared to upper-economic-income-range sportspeople. The release describes William Bambridge as "not just an excellent fly fisherman. He is also a college literature professor, and viewers love Big Bill's poetry reading at the end of each show."

Bambridge is known as "Big Bill" because he is said to weigh in excess of 300 pounds. He is author of the book
To an Unknown Tarpon, With Love. . . .

Just before sunset on Thursday, October 15, Tomlinson took advantage of Ford's invitation to stop by the stilt house for supper. Tomlinson, the late sixties hipster who wore his shoulder-length blond hair and dark beard like tattered flags; a gentle-hearted soul who power-pounded beer and grinned like a stray dog. Tomlinson, who lived on his sailboat, a sun-battered Morgan moored a few hundred yards off the mangrove bank and just across the channel from Ford's stilt house. Lived there alone with his books on history and philosophy, his Moody Blues and Grateful Dead tapes, the cabin smelling of oiled teak, diesel, sandalwood incense, and the Japanese reed tatami mat upon which he sat to meditate each sunrise and each sunset while his boat,
No Mas,
swung on its mooring line like a weather vane.

Ford liked Tomlinson; liked the man's intellect, his kicked-back quality,- was amused by his outlandish hippie politics. He had watched him earlier, sitting cross-legged on the bow of his boat, burning incense: a bony silhouette as motionless as a wading bird. Saw him stretch, disappear into the cabin, and return dressed, hauling his dinghy in hand over hand, so Ford knew it was time to finish up work in the lab.

Now Tomlinson sat in the chair beside the telescope at the north window, wearing a long-billed fishing cap, a baggy tropical shirt, and flip-flops, leg draped over one arm of the chair, holding a beer. Miller beer in a clear bottle, and he was looking at Ford through the bottle, saying, "Man a' man, you look weird. A real strange shape and color 'cause of the glass."

Which Ford didn't understand at first, but then he got it: The bottle was distorting his image.

"Uh-huh. Just don't spill anything. I scrubbed the floor yesterday, got down on my hands and knees."

"You know the transporter room on 'Star Trek'? An energized

body getting beamed down—that's the way you look. Or that crazy sky this morning. Fizzy molecular dispersement."

"Right." Not paying much attention, Ford was concentrating on his old shortwave radio, a Zenith Trans Oceanic. Beside the radio, on the table, was curled a black cat, Crunch & Des. The cat had been named after two famous fishing guides by the fishing guide friend who owned him. Ford said, "I cleaned out my main fish tank, too. Changed the sub sand filter, checked the salinity, the pH. The whole business. I had a squid die last week, always a sure sign of trouble. They're so delicate."

Tomlinson said, "Wouldn't you hate getting ordered on a landing party with Kirk and Spock?"

"Huh?"

"The television show. Being sent down with those guys."

"Spock? I don't think I know . . . Dr. Spock, the baby guy?"

Tomlinson was still viewing the world through the bottle: a huge blue eye. "Just about certain death for a common crewman, getting beamed down with Kirk and Spock. They don't last even one commercial. I'd crap my pants right there on the command deck, tell Kirk I'd gotten some bad Romulan prunes or something." He lowered the bottle, resting it on his leg as something on the table caught his attention. "Hey," he said. "You aware of that? Your phone, it's off the hook."

Ford said, "I know."

"You want it off?"