Lemonade

I am continually accused of being an optimist. And I am, so I take no offense. I can see silver linings and lessons learned where others see train wrecks and doom. Lemons vs. lemonade.

My vacation this year with my family was two-pronged. One week in the mountains with extended family, and one week near the beach with just my husband and grown son. The mountains, lovely and peaceful, are never my first choice for my limited time away from work, because I am a water woman. I love to swim and therefore try to be near water – the ocean preferably – on my weeks away.

This year, halfway through our time in the mountains, we learned of the yearly red tide in the Gulf of Mexico being particularly nasty. An annual occurrence we had vacationed among before, this one was proving brutal. And it seemed stalled out where we were headed in just a few days, so it was worrisome. My husband watched it grow and move northward along the coast of Florida on the tiny screen of his phone. I emailed friends to the south of where we annually land in Florida, for our rest and recuperation, to ask about what they had seen and dealt with.

The words and photos we experienced were bad. It broke our hearts to see places we have visited and loved for almost twenty years try and absorb such havoc. Thousands of pounds of dead fish and sea mammals washed ashore seemed to be the least and the worst of it.

We hemmed and hawed about our trip. Cancel? Don’t cancel? Support what we can when we can, or collapse selfishly into ourselves and go somewhere else? From the beginning, it was a driving trip with our son, and he had a route mapped out to get us there through the beauty of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Indiana. So, we just added a few days to that part, hoping the water would be cleaner when we arrived at our furthest southern spot.

The surf still rushed, but the water was a dull green brown where it is usually every shade of turquoise on white sand. The air smelled as fetid and lifeless as the dead fish that daily washed ashore. The big dying-off had already occurred but the lingering vestiges of bacteria in the water made singular species arrive dead on the sand in abundance on single days. By the next afternoon that species would be gone, the tide working her strange magic.

So I looked up. Every day I saw the sky for the majesty that she brought to me. She was as drama-ridden as the surf was sickly. It was such loveliness and wonder. We never had a crystal clear sunset on any of our five nights on the beach, but the sun never failed to light up the clouds as she bid us farewell and sent us away from the sea and towards our bikes for the short ride to our island home.

I drove the men in my life crazy with my “Look at that!” and “Have you ever seen that before?” and “It will never be exactly like this again! Not ever.” If they didn’t both to look up, I will never know.

I wasn’t looking at them. I was looking at the beauty that was placed before me and was mine to find.

p.s. I was terribly sad for the small business owners and those who depend on tourism for their livelihood on the little island most of our family visits yearly. We kept an appointment with a small, family-owned eco-tourist boat tour company. The pain in the voice of the sixth-generation islander on what “Big Sugar” has done to poison the sea lingers in my mind. It wasn’t her family’s business she worried about the most. It was the sea and her fragile abundance. I had nothing to offer as a condolence. We all lived with her pain as we watched her maneuver through the inter-coastal waterway trying not to hit large red fish, puffer fish, and so much more that was dead.

p.s.s. That faint white line against the trees in the photo above is about three floating feet of dead fish. You can see why our captain was so upset. Really, we all should be.

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