The Man Who Ivented Florida (6 page)

The woman took a deep breath, reached up, and pulled the privacy curtain around his bed, then threw back the sheet that covered Joseph's hips.

The woman was astonished. Joseph would have known that from the expression on her face, even if she had not sputtered, "Goodness gracious!" Surprised and maybe a little bit pleased, too, for Joseph was guilty of hiding neither a wine nor a whiskey bottle. He was only in a romantic mood. "Why ... I'm very sorry!" The woman's face was red, and she was smiling but trying not to, and he hoped he recognized a flicker of interest in her eyes.

Joseph didn't mean it, but he said, "I sure am sorry about this, too, ma'am. But a woman pretty as you, I just can't help myself." Testing the sincerity of her interest, watching her face.

"You don't have to apologize.... I should have been more . . . then I was just so surprised...I mean, it's not like I haven't... I mean, I have a gentleman friend, but we don't . . . then to see
that..."

She was stammering so badly, Joseph reached out and took the woman's hand. Then he held her when she made a unenthusiastic effort to pull away. Joseph was no bully, but it had been his experience that a woman came to a man's bed only for one reason.

"Please, Mr. Egret, I'm working."

He was pulling her closer, closer, then he pressed a friendly kiss to her mouth, tasting the lipstick.

"You can't do this, Mr. Egret.... We can't... I don't even know you: I'm not well; I'm not. I have this heart condition .. . please!"

Joseph interrupted modestly, "Aw ma'am, I'm pretty sure your heart's outta my range."

But the woman would not consent, and so she sat and talked to him for nearly an hour. He told her stories. He made her laugh. He knew white people liked to hear the old stories about what it was like to be an Indian in the Everglades. A few of his stories were even true.

She gave him a hug and a little kiss before she left, and Joseph had the feeling she might be back. He was right. Long after dark, she leaned over his bed as if to see whether he was awake, and Joseph kissed her. The volunteer whispered, "Hi there yourself!" and immediately assumed the sexual offensive, attacking him with a vigor that startled Joseph and made him feel almost meek.

Later, she gave him a sponge bath and rubbed his back. The next day, when she was supposed to be at her gentleman friend's country club selling baked goods for the greenskeepers' fund, Marjorie returned instead to the rest home with a tin of Copenhagen snuff and a brand of chocolates that Joseph Egret said he loved.

THREE

Late
Monday morning, October 19, Ford was standing over a half dozen five-gallon buckets, all of them filled with seawater. Along with the seawater, each bucket held odd-looking mobiles made of wood and rope. From each of the five wooden crosspieces hung nine short lengths of rope knotted into another wooden crosspiece on the bottom. And each strand of rope was alive—or so it seemed to Ford. Each was a solitary host to a small world of living, siphoning jelly masses and sea growth: sponges, soft corals, tunicates, sea squirts, barnacles, oysters, and tiny skittering crabs.

"Biofouling assemblies," the books called the strange mobiles. Ford had made these himself, then set them out in the bay beneath buoys to attract sea life. One month later, this was the result.

Ford bent over the buckets and looked into them. A few of the crabs had jettisoned from the hanging mass and now crawled around the bottom. He wanted to weigh each assembly so that he could calculate how much growth the units might be expected to attract on a week-to-week basis. Later, after they had spent more days and nights floating in the bay, he wanted to be able to arrive at the optimum growth potential for each assembly. Set up a cubic-inch ratio.

For the research paper he wanted to do, such bits of datum would be important.

He stared at the buckets, hefted the weight of the sea mobiles experimentally, then gently returned them to the water. He scratched his nose, then hefted another.

I'm wasting time, he thought.

His notebook and pencil were at his right on the stainless-steel dissecting table. But the screened window was on the left—a window through which, if he bent just a little, he could see the lone sailboat out there near the mouth of Dinkin's Bay. So his mind kept wandering; kept thinking about the woman. Not consciously thinking of her—not much, anyway—but a steady undercurrent of musing and projecting going on in the cerebral layers that should have been considering the biofouling assemblies.

Not that he wasn't interested in his creations. He was. It was a new hobby, a fresh little project. Ford always had a short list of new projects and a long list of old ones. He was compulsive about it, as if he didn't want a free moment in which his mind might be allowed to wander. It was always one species or phenomena after another: bull sharks or tarpon or redfish or red tide. Filling notebooks with diagrams and observations in his tiny fine print. Dissecting or photographing or collecting and cataloging. Spending orderly hours in an orderly day interrupted only by his nightly timed runs (from Dinkin's Bay Marina to Sanibel Island Elementary and back), calisthenics, and a swim in the bay.

But Ford's mind was wandering now. Taking the lithe brown shape he'd seen through the telescope and giving the woman a more detailed face,- supplying her with a cool, sure personality. Putting himself on the boat with her, relaxed and lost in interesting conversation. She'd be intelligent, of course. Many sailors were, though their egos too often were proportional to their intellect, which was a sign of immaturity. But that wasn't an absolute; no proof that she would be that way. And sailing a boat single-handedly along this shallow-water coast implied a rogue spirit that he liked. And to strip off her clothes like that and dive into murky water where lesser, prissier people worried about sharks and stingrays...

Ford threw down the pencil he was holding. "Concentrate, damn it!" Talking to himself, trying to get his mind back on the project at hand. "You're acting like some moon-eyed adolescent. Get to work!"

He pulled a yellow legal pad to him and wrote:
"Reversing the Effects of Turbidity and Nutrient Pollution on Brackish Water Littoral Zones."

There, he was started.

He wanted to demonstrate the impact of murky water on sea-grass beds and, hopefully, find out for himself just what effect the siphoning animals—sponges, sea squirts, and tunicates—had on murky water. That's why he had built the sea mobiles. That's why he had set them out in the bay to attract the kind of growth that boaters and dock builders despised.

He touched the pencil to his tongue, then wrote:

It is generally accepted that there has been a decrease in the population of finny fishes in the coastal waters of Florida. It is also generally accepted that the growing pressure of commercial fishing and sportfishing have had an injurious impact on the fishery. In Florida, for instance, more than 40,000 commercial fishermen and more than 5 million sportfishermen access the resource annually.

Ford stopped and reread what he had written. He would have to footnote the statistics, but the sources were from his own library and he could look them up later. And he didn't like the word
injurious
—to him it implied a sentimental, or at least a sympathetic, interpretation of an observation. He struck a line through it, replaced it with
adverse,
then continued:

However, it is the purpose of this paper to demonstrate that gradual changes in the water quality— i.e., increased turbidity from loss of ground root structure, and the increase of nutrient pollution from sources generally thought to be benign—i.e., the fertilization of lawns and golf courses—play an equal, if not greater, role in the reduction of the population of finny fishes in shallow water zones.

He stopped again. Jesus, he was beating around the bush. What he wanted to say was that Florida's coastal regions had lost more than half of their sea-grass beds because of fouled water. Hundreds of thousands of acres of sea meadow gone because there was too much phosphate and fertilizer from too many mine pits and developments draining daily into the estuaries. The fertilizer caused phytoplankton to bloom wildly. Saturated with the microscopic algae, the once-clear bays turned a murky, milky green. The murkier the water got, the more grass beds that died because sunlight couldn't get through the murk. No sunlight, no grass. That simple. When the grass died, the shrimps and crabs disappeared. So did the fish. So did the sponges, the tunicates, and the sea squirts that filtered the water and had once ensured that it would remain clear.

There were other factors, of course. Fluctuating salinity—many saltwater fish couldn't tolerate that. By building the Tamiami Trail, by digging the Buttonwood Canal through to Florida Bay, by dyking Lake Okeechobee, just to name a few, the state and federal governments had inexorably altered the flow of water through the Everglades. Then the state biologists, who were notoriously shortsighted, brought in an exotic tree called the melaleuca because it was a fiend for water and they felt it would help drain breeding areas for mosquitoes. But melaleuca trees were also fiends for reproduction, and even fire wouldn't destroy them. Now the melaleuca—just as the exotic kudzu had in Georgia—was taking over the Everglades. Out of control, it competed with other exotics like Brazilian pepper and casuarina trees to sap the land dry.

Oh, there were many other factors. But Ford had settled upon the question of turbidity because it was so seldom considered.

In his paper, he wanted to demonstrate that it was a terrible, destructive cycle. No, not a cycle, because that implied a return to course. It was more like a cancer. It just kept getting worse and worse. In the meantime, the sportfishermen blamed the commercial fishermen. The commercial fishermen blamed the sportfishermen. A passionate argument requires that issues be black and white, a straight path of cause and effect. Too few could look beyond the logged weight of fish corpses to see what the real problem was. Even fewer wanted to understand, because to acknowledge the real problem was also to acknowledge that banning cottage-industry netting was not a solution, only a delay. And the water just kept getting murkier, suffering gradual and insidious changes not only in turbidity but salinity, as well.

It all came down to water. . . .

Ford began to write again, but his pencil tip broke. He spent five minutes sharpening it, using a lab scalpel to get it just right. When the point broke again, he stood and threw the pencil across the room.

"You're not getting any work done at all!" Reprimanding himself, but unaware that he had spoken aloud, just as he was not aware that he sometimes spoke aloud to the fish in his big tank. "You're farting around, wasting time."

Yeah, and that troubled him. Ford hated interruptions in his workday. Now he was the interruption—his imagination, anyway. Which was frustrating as hell, frustrating to the point where he felt like banging into the wall a few times, like the horseshoe crabs he kept out in his big tank. Maybe that might clear his head a little bit.

It's her, that's the problem. The woman out there on her boat.

Finally, he gave up. He put his notebook and pencil away, then carried the buckets outside so he could return the sea mobiles to the bay. As he lugged the buckets, he thought to himself: By definition, she's your neighbor, and neighbors are supposed to be friendly. So just go out there and introduce yourself.

Oh sure. Had he gone out and introduced himself to Ralph and Esperanza Woodring, who lived out on the point? Nope. It had taken him a year to meet them. Had he gone over and introduced himself to Tomlinson, who was anchored just across the channel? Nope. They'd finally met at the marina, both in to buy cold quarts of beer.

"You're not only acting like an adolescent, Ford, now you're lying to yourself." Talking again as he returned to his cabin and began to change into a fresh knit shirt and khaki sailcloth shorts. Thinking, What's happened is, you've created a fictional personality for a woman. You want to meet that woman because you hope she might be just a little bit like you want her to be. But you're afraid, too, because she may be a disappointment, plus you might make an ass of yourself, going out there uninvited.

Ford sat on his cot and began to put on clean socks. You pride yourself on honesty, so at least try to be honest with yourself. You have no interest in welcoming a new neighbor. You're lonely. Hell yes, admit it—you're lonely living out here by yourself.

He was putting on talcum powder, thinking about it all. At least trying to put on talcum powder—he couldn't find the damn stuff. Ford was hunting around, moving things on tables. He found a box of baking soda. Well, maybe he didn't have any talcum powder. So he looked for cologne, but all he could find was a bottle of vanilla extract that he used in eggnog at Christmas.

"Goddamn it, what the hell kind of bachelor am I? No talcum powder, no cologne. No wonder I live alone."

Might as well be a hermit, like Tomlinson said. Hesitating over the box of baking soda, he poured a little into his palm, sprinkled in a few dashes of vanilla extract, and mixed it between his palms. I used to get invited places. Key West for Hemingway Days. To Greek Epiphany Day at Tarpon Springs: the sponge diver thing.