Florida Waterfront

I spent most of my youth in Florida, and lived for a year in a house situated similarly to the homes in this picture. We lived in a house at the end of a canal, our yard just above sea-level. Our grass did not run into the water as does the weedy growth seen in this picture. Our pier was not the obvious safety hazard seen in this picture. Our pier was well-built, its perimeter surrounded by a solid wood fence against which I leaned heavily while fishing or staring into the dark waters of Tampa Bay. Fishing was done in our back yard but in such shallow waters we knew that catfish would be our heartiest catch.

The waters at the end of the canal were a tantalizing void into which I stared. At low tide I saw horseshoe crabs, stingrays, catfish, turtles of widely varying sizes, and other mysterious-to-me sea creatures that seemed lost, having wandered far from the open waters into the dead-end gulley that was a place of random theater. At low tide the creatures would get trapped in the disappeared waters, forced to wait for the tide to return so they could swim again. Sometimes I saw horseshoe crabs flipped over, immobile, their creepy-crawly pedipalps and pusher legs flailing in the hot sun. We had a long stick which we sometimes used to flip these crabs back on their feet, but the gesture often failed to return them to open water.

The water was dangerous. There were no fences along the water’s edge. The boy who lived next door once fell in. I did not know what to do. I ran to the front door of his house, opening the door without knocking or ringing the doorbell, looking for James’ father. I ran into the living saw James’ father, sitting calmly in his easy chair reading a newspaper. I yelled “James fell into the canal!” and the man spontaneously threw the paper aside and leaped from his chair, a reflex action for which he needed no training. He ran out to the yard and pulled James from the water, the boy’s body soaked in the filthy, mangy water of Tampa Bay.

James considered me his hero after this incident. He claimed I saved his life. Had I not run for help he said he would have drowned, or been rabidly stabbed and then feed-frenzied by a haul of swordfish. James lavished me with tokens of appreciation, ceremonially presented to me in the safe space under the trees that separated our yards. One of his gifts was a tennis ball he found floating in the canal. Another gift was a pile of leaves and branches he collected from the trees in his yard.

The fear of falling into the canal was no joke among residents of those houses lining the waterway. I never fell in but after James did I heard the stories of others who stumbled into deeper waters further up the road. These tales, told by men younger than I am now, needed no fanciful exaggerations but were nevertheless embellished with fantasy creatures and impossible scenarios. Alligators were commonly seen in the waters but never the swordfish that some parents claimed would impale our little bodies should we dive in to these waters. Piranha are freshwater creatures from South America but that didn’t stop some chucklehead parents from swearing that a swarm of them patrolled the canal, waiting to leap from the water and munch on the face of any child caught staring.

These tales informed the respectful distance I kept from the canal, but they also fed the panic that arose like encroaching sea filth when the waters rose high and our back yard flooded. Never did the floodwaters reach more than a few feet past the sea wall but this small overflow removed the point of division between the sea and the land, and it fed my nightmares with images of sea creatures wandering onto the land, curiously poking around and picking through the things of a human. The theater stepped from the stage. I mostly feared those horseshoe crabs, which I knew from school to be mobile creatures. I thought of them as giant cockroaches — not out of any disdain but simply because to me they resembled the hard-shelled, oversized cockroaches I saw and sometimes heard hissing on our porch.

The waters covered our yard and I tried to sleep, knowing for sure that my room would fill with horseshoe crabs and turtles and their mucky cast of cronies. I do not know what happened. I do not know what parade of visitors rose from the canal to inspect my sleep but I know my room filled to the ceiling with filthy bay water and swirling schools of stingrays and swordfish.