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Edited on Mon May-10-10 03:14 AM by lostnfound
The Gulf:
A kaleidoscope.
Pale green and gently choppy in a 42-year old photo of a 5 year old girl, being held tightly by her dad who didn't want her to drown. The dad is long gone, but she still has the photo.
Stormy and a tide coming in, on the one and only schoolday skipped in high school. Two high school seniors begin the long trek back from the tip of Honeymoon Island. Each hour precious, they hadn't wanted to leave, but the Gulf is threatening to overtake a landbridge, about to leave them stranded -- the water circles around their legs and the tide is pulling on them, at the same time a friendship is deepened.
Water washes onto a beach where thousands of red hermit crabs in one area and fiddler crabs in another scurry along the sand, an osprey returns to its nest and a dolphin plays near to the land in a narrow strip of water surrounded by sand dunes. Yes, that was all in one magical day and all in one magical place.
"What is the ocean?" the child asks, and this child learned the answer not from the huge swells of the Atlantic or Pacific but from the rolling rhythm of the warm waters of the Gulf, whose demeanor did not sound like a fearful threat but instead whispered "I am gentle and warm like the loving arms of your mother, but giant like Mother Earth, and the voice I carry is not an echo of a fearful God but of a friendlier God who meets you with the cheer of a peach and pink sunrise and a reverent God whose rhythm brings your soul to the same timbre as the sound of Amazing Grace". If this ocean could see into the future, it might tell the child "In years to come, when you have some sorrow, confusion, or heartache, come lie down directly on the bare silky clean sand for an hour or two and just listen. As you get a little older, your ears will hear the full measure of 'I once was lost, but now am found', as your heartache will leak out into the limitless cool white sand, and in its rhythm of the waves you will find your own lost inner voice."
But the ocean doesn't know the future, the ocean is everpresent as 'now', an everchanging fluid beauty. It teaches 'now' to us, and we keep a record of some of its 'yesterdays' in our memories.
A few years later, through the silky white sands, a wife and a daughter push and pull, heave and sigh, in a desparate struggle to drag the wheels of a wheelchair through the sand, to bring a man out to hear the ocean for what was one last time. This was the place that he had chosen for his family, to live near this Gulf, when he was a younger man in the early 1950s. There was no clarity in his eyes until they arrived at that ocean and stopped. The sight and sound of those gulf waters calmed him and healed some wound in his heart, and in wordless wonder all three soak not in its water but in its intense beauty. No words, all the way home.
A few years later still, both the man and his wife are gone, and the daughter is out on the sparkling beauty of the water near Dunedin causeway, learning to windsurf. Over and over she falls into the water, and the current is pushing her out between Caladesi and Honeymoon Islands. She wonders if she will be swept out into the Gulf of Mexico. Exhausted, she thinks she cannot swim and cannot paddle hard enough against the current, so she has no choice but to learn to balance and learn to sail, if she wants to get back to shore.. Twenty minutes of fear and tears later, she found her balance, and began a thrilling new passion.
The turquoise waters of Longboat Key hold too many moments to mention, but the best of these were just a few years ago, when she took her three year old son in for an impromptu swim. With wide eyes and staying quiet, they watched a dolphin swim closer and closer in the shallow water until finally he brushed right against them.
This is MY Gulf. I own it because it owns ME. It's not a possession like a camera or a car that can be replaced if stolen by thieves. It is my heart, my lungs, my kidneys, my father, my childhood, my son, my wishing well and a fountain of youth. You who have poked a hole in the bottom of my ocean, to bring up something black and gooey, poisonous and smelly -- which is still to this hour gushing out 3 or 4 or God knows how many barrels per minute into MY Gulf -- are stealing something irreplaceable, and killing someone I love. You think YOU own it because your engineers and your money can drill down a couple miles below its sparkling surface, while I am nothing but a "swimmer" or now "a tourist"?? You own it because you can squeeze the life out of it? You own it because you can make it work for you, can turn it into cash? You take it for granted so much that you con some corrupt bureaucrats or bribeable politicians into letting you cheat on it, lnto rubber stamping your permits and absolving you of responsibility?
You're big and powerful, and I am just one little person, and tonight I have shed tears thinking about whether or not you have indeed killed my Gulf, whether it will end up like the Aral sea. Maybe you've stolen one of the great loves of my life, and treated her so badly that you've destroyed her. Maybe nothing can bring her back now. I know your secret, everyone does: You married her for her money, and never knew who she was. It was an arranged marriage, and she certainly never loved you.
It's me that she really loved. Me, and a million other little 5-year old kids building sandcastles on her shores. Me, and the seventh generation of people like me for whom she was intended. Me, and the dolphins and hermit crabs, the osprey and the fish and maybe even the accursed jellyfish and an occasional shark or two - no great love is ever without its danger. She gave her love freely to those who knew her, comforting those who cried on her shore, purring 'you are loved' to those who heard her quiet voice, thrilling those who danced in her waves, taught and enthralled those who gathered around her edges, at the tide pools.
I don't know whether she'll be able to recover or whether she'll be gone for good at the end of this terrible injury. We stand helplessly by. What can we do?? All I can say is, that you are an animal, you are inhuman, and you need to be put in a cage, so that you can never, ever, ever do this again.
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