Matching Tracksuits

We arrived at the Everglades at a little past one, stopping for a lunch of alligator at a roadside cafe that had four and a half stars on Trip Advisor. One bite and we realized why. Much to my surprise, though the Girl ordered shrimp, she was quite eager to try the gator.

“Tasty, but too hard to chew,” she said.

The plan for the day: hit the national park as hard as possible for the last half of the day. The ranger had told us in the visitor center to leave the first walking path for last as that was where we would most likely find gators. We made it through several paths, including one that wound through the last few pines in the Everglades and one that highlighted an enormous mahogany tree. We saw gars and egrets, giant grasshoppers and snakes, but we still hadn’t managed to see what we were all hoping to see: an alligator in the wild.

We made it to the very last stop on the road, Flamingo Visitor Center and marina at the Florida Bay. The center had been ravaged by Hurricane Irma to the point that the national park service has decided to tear down the old center, dating likely from the late fifties or early sixties, and build entirely new facilities. We wandered around, saw a couple of manatees in the bay that were none too eager to do more than peek their head above the water for just moment.

By the time we made it back to Royal Palms visitor center to head up the Anhinga Trail, it was late in the afternoon, probably close to six. Early evening, I guess. We started up the trail, hoping to find some gators resting in the grasses that were along the trail when we discovered karma: a six-foot gator resting just by the trail, not moving, seemingly daring anyone to approach.

A French-speaking family stood and watched for a while until one of the daughters, seeing the size of the grasshoppers that were mating on the walkway railing and realizing just how close she was to the gator, broke down in tears and walked away, the rest of the family comforting her. She was probably around sixteen.

On the other side of the gator, a couple waited, presumably wondering whether or not to chance it. They would have approached from the tail end of the gator, so I would have thought they had the best chance of making it by without arousing the gator’s interest.

In all likelihood, any of us could have walked calmly by the animal without much danger at all. A quick glance at images Google shows from the trail indicates that it’s a common occurrence and that there are often many alligators sunbathing by the walkway. Still, with little kids in hand, there was no sense in doing anything more than admiring from a distance. After all, it’s not often one gets to see an animal that has been on the Earth for about 37 million years…

“G, come here! There’s water in the hall!” I was lying in bed, half-asleep, thinking, “I should go ahead and get up while I’m half awake instead of waiting until I start drifting into a deeper sleep,” but that certainly got me up in a hurry. There was a puddle in the hallway that led down to the back bedroom and ran between the kids’ bedroom and the kitchen. I moved into the living/dining room area to find a bigger puddle there. Multiple puddles. We looked to find the source and quickly determined it was coming from under the kitchen sink. I reached under to turn off the water, hoping it was just something in the connection from the wall to the faucet when, getting quite a bolt of electricity shooting through my arm, I realized that whoever installed the garbage disposal had not done so according to code.

We located the load center only to discover that not a single breaker was labeled. I did the logical thing: I turned everything off. Armed with the flashlight on my phone, I went back to the kitchen and tried to turn the water off, but it only increased the flow: the actual connector was somehow loose and trying to turn it off only compromised the connection further.

In the midst of all this, I was trying to get in touch with our Air B&B host:

Major issue here. The kitchen sink was leaking. Water everywhere in the floor.
Today at 7:41 AM

Tried to turn the water off. Got a good shock from the garbage disposal
Today at 7:42 AM

Found the power shut off and turned it off. Tried to turn off the water under the kitchen sink but it’s still leaking.
Today at 7:56 AM

Not dripping but literally running.
Today at 7:56 AM

We put a bucket under the sink, but the only thing we found was a metal bucket. I’d turned the power back on so that we wouldn’t be sweltering in a few moments and told the kids just to stay on the bed and off the floor — it seemed unlikely that anything could happen, but why take a chance? When the bucket got full, K asked if she should just the bucket it out to empty it.

“Not unless you want to get a shock,” I said. I told her to just stand there as I went through the breakers and tell me when I’d disconnected the power to the kitchen. I reached to turn off one breaker; nothing. I turned off the second; nothing. I reached to turn off the third and, touching the metal of the breaker box itself, got a little shock.

“Screw this,” I thought, grabbed a plastic hanger, and turned off all the breakers.

Still no word from our host. I sent another message:

Just got shocked at your breaker board trying to figure out which breaker is for the kitchen.
Today at 8:08 AM

The host finally arrived — “finally” I say because from our perspective, it seemed to be an almost endless ordeal — and I told him everything that had happened. Texts can only provide so much detail.

Needless to say, we didn’t stay another night. There are apparently plumbing and electrical issues galore in the place not to mention water everywhere, and so we went through day as planned and then drove an hour and a half south to cut our driving time to the Everglades tomorrow.

And what was planned? A visit to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium, which really should be called an animal hospital. We got to see Winter, the tail-less dolphin who inspired a movie, sea turtles missing fins, sharks that had been caught by a commercial fisherman who didn’t realize that they would grow to be as big as they did and asked the CMA to help — a host of wounded and healing animals. It included a boat trip with a marine biologist who talked about the various animals they trolled for in the bay, then pulled up nets and with an assistant took inventory of what they found.

A final afternoon at the beach and we packed our bags and headed further south. Tomorrow, on to the Everglades.

To see the amount of engineering and the problems surmounted to get people into space, to get people on the moon, to create all the equipment, materials, procedures to accomplish all this — to see it all in person is somewhat overwhelming. And then to think that, despite all this, we can’t even get along with each other.

Castillo de San Marcos

We began the day visiting the oldest masonry fort in the continental US. The Spanish built it in the late-seventeenth century after Sir Francis Drake attacked and leveled the city of St. Augustine. Was Drake a pirate? It sounds like a pirate-esque thing to do. Not quite. He was a privateer, which is basically a pirate to everyone but the country from which he originated.  As long as a British privateer didn’t attack British ships, he was not officially a pirate for that country. The Spanish regarded Drake as a pirate; the British, as a hero.

The fort itself was constructed of coquina, which is essentially a sedimentary rock made of compacted shells. It had to be pulled out of the ground — not quite mined, not quite quarried — and then left to dry for up to two years. When you look closely at the walls of the fort, then, you essentially millions upon millions of tiny shells and shell fragments. Though it could take a direct hit from cannon fire, the coquina, according to the masons who built the fort, could crumble in one’s hands.

The Boy was fascinated with the cannons; the Girl was fascinated with very little.

Oldest Wooden School House

Described as a “historic cedar-and-cypress building offering a glimpse of school life in Spanish Colonial times,” the old school house on St. George Street provided some insight into how much the education system in the States has changed.

For one thing, there was the method of dealing with troubling students: slow learners got to wear the dunce cap; students showing disruptive behavior were put in a small space under the stairwell leading up to the teacher’s private quarters. We deal with such learnings in a more humane way these days.

The other difference is how the education was funded. Each student had to pay some sum for each week’s instruction. If a family couldn’t afford to pay with money, they had to barter with the teacher. Today, we have free universal education, a system that at one time would have, no doubt, been labeled as socialist but somehow today seems acceptable, even beneficial.

Pirate Museum

What’s a pirate? What’s a sea captain? It seems that it’s like a terrorist: one man’s terrorist is another’s hero. One country’s sea captain is often another’s pirate.

We learned that a fair amount that we thought we knew about pirates as, predictably, false. Much of it seemed like those things we learn to be myths about which we later think, “That’s obviously a stupid thing to believe. How could such an idiotic idea take hold?” Take for example the idea of attacking a ship with the Jolly Roger flying, cannons and muskets firing. It’s just silly, the guide explained. What if the pirate ship gets a lucky shot? The vessel they’re trying to loot sinks, along with all its booty. What if the attacked ship gets a lucky shot? The pirate vessel sinks, along with all its crew. Instead, pirates flew the same flag as the target ship and ran up the Jolly Roger only at the last minute as a sort of psychological terrorism for the victims. And killing all the people aboard the ship? How would they get the word out about how terrifying the pirates were? Better to torture or kill a few crew members then send the rest on their way.

The greatest irony of the museum? On display was Captain Kidd’s family Bible, one of the older existing copies of the King James version. On the other hand, perhaps not quite so ironic: some of the carnage of the Old Testament would make Kidd’s adventures seem almost playful.

Anastasia Beach

This was our third day at the beach. We’ve all been impressed with the size of the waves compared to those on our SC beaches, but today, they were positively enormous. The lifeguard had put on a red condition flag: hazardous. We soon saw why: enormous waves and a couple of obvious rip tides on the beach. We kept the kids close to the shore and close to us, and an enormous advantage became clear: with such huge waves, even the lingering moments of waves were good enough for the kids to boogie board.

I, of course, took on some of the large waves a bit further out. I learned a couple of things. They’re brutal when trying to ride them on a boogie board: they tend to toss you around like a rag doll if you hit the wave too late. The second thing I learned: the force of relatively small waves can be enormous, which put into perspective the tsunamis that hit the Indian Ocean in 2004 and the Japanese tsunami of 2011: the waves rushing in look to be only a few feet tall in the videos and, they are indeed. However, knowing how those relatively small waves today knocked me back, even when I dove under, even when I tried to crest them by diving over them — I cannot imagine the terror the victims of those tsunamis experienced.

As in Warsaw last year, I couldn’t shake the thoughts of what horror that is for parents when they cannot protect their children from evil. We take for granted in the Western world that things like that don’t happen to us.

Depressing thoughts to have on a vacation, but such thoughts also always remind me of how fortunate, how simply lucky we are to have the life we live.