by Sarah Gerard
A few days later, as I’m leaving town, G.W. texts to say he has something to tell me.116 He won’t tell me over the phone—he insists I inform him when I’m back home in New York so he can text it to me from Florida. I text him as I walk through the door of my apartment. He replies, “I think I over-exerted myself last Sunday,” referring to the last time I saw him, at Sunday dinner. We’d finished serving, and he had emerged from the fellowship hall elevator and shuffled across the tile floor, his breathing shallow. His face had been shiny, his gaze distant. He’d sat down heavily in a chair and nodded to me. He’d told me he wanted to start doing yoga.
“I’d been on my ass literally all week,” he texts me now. “And then I, full of blithe stupidity, drank three beers on Friday. I had another attack, a small one. But I just can’t do it anymore. I’m trying to get my head on top of the hill. Hang with me.”
He hasn’t taken himself to the hospital because he doesn’t want to go. He’s been sleeping for days. He says he just wants to rest. It occurs to me that rest might be what he’s wanted all along.
With the help of Celebrate Outreach’s connections, the meals have been relocated from Trinity Lutheran to Christ Methodist, down the street. This past Sunday’s was the last to be held at Trinity Lutheran.117 For the time being, the Missio Dei church is homeless. But they’ll find another place to live, and more money. This has happened before, and he’s used to long odds.
Two weeks later, G.W. sends me another text: “Hey! I’m writing. How about you?”118
Sunshine State
Characters in the following story are presenting their own versions of events and do not necessarily reflect the truth, which we may never know. Some names have been changed to protect anonymity.
The Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary sits hidden behind a bank of palms on a curve in Gulf Boulevard, which follows a strip of barrier islands from the top to the bottom of Pinellas County, Florida. The curve marks the place where Redington Shores stops and Indian Shores begins. Pastel-colored luxury hotels and salty stilt houses flank the sanctuary, and a giant fiberglass pelican marks its entrance, its paint chipped and faded from the sun. Next to the pelican a rainbow flag reads “OPEN.”
Growing up in Pinellas County, I visited the sanctuary many times as a child. I remembered it being a place of encounters—with strange species, with wild instincts. Standing in the faintly shit-scented gift shop on my first day as a volunteer, I told the coordinator, Adrianne Beitl, that I’d returned to write about it. I’d be working at the sanctuary for six weeks, doing research.
“Are you a journalist?” she asked.
“I’m more of a memoirist.”
Adrianne had hair the color of wet sand and a face that looked perpetually confused. I filled out an application and handed it to her. We looked at each other.
“There have been bad things written about us in the paper,”1 she said.
I thought I would write an essay about birds. In a lightly magical way, I’d begun to notice them all around me. A few weeks before, I’d found a fledgling pigeon on the sidewalk in my Brooklyn neighborhood. Its feathers were coming in and it couldn’t yet fly, and I’d feared for its safety on the busy sidewalk, unable to find its nest. I brought it to a bird hospital on the Upper East Side. In the examining room, a veterinarian fished trichomoniasis buildup out of its throat with a cotton swab on an orangewood stick and, in the custom of the shelter, named the fledgling Sarah. I felt I was on the trail of something ancient. I felt I was hunting something powerful and primal.
The Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary was founded in 1971 when Ralph Heath, a newly graduated premed zoology student on his way to do some Christmas shopping, brought home a cormorant he’d found dragging a broken wing on the side of Gulf Boulevard.2 At the time, Ralph was living with his wife, Linda, and his parents in his robin’s-egg-colored childhood home, which later became, and remains, the sanctuary office. With the help of a local veterinarian, Ralph and his father nursed the bird back to health, named it Maynard, and let it live in their front yard. Soon after, a local bait fisherman caught wind of their success and brought them an injured gull. Then the postman left a bird on their doorstep. Then birds began arriving outside their front door every day.
Ralph recounts the story in Flying Free 2, a low-budget video history of the sanctuary—an experiment in nontraditional camera angles, somehow costarring local newscaster Bill Murphy. Like old friends, clad in matching safari shirts, the two sit across from each other on wood pilings inside the brown pelican enclosure and engage in what sounds like a casually overrehearsed conversation about Ralph’s history.
“Ralph, let’s talk a bit about someone who had such an impression on you and the direction of your life,” says Bill, looking straight into the camera. “Talk a little bit about your dad.”
“My father was a very unusual doctor,” Ralph replies, as if hearing the question for the first time. “He was an MD, not a veterinarian. But he was probably the best surgeon Tampa ever had. He could put anything with tissue back together.”
Now in his seventies, Ralph has lived on sanctuary property for more than fifty years.3 His house is across the street from the sanctuary office and overlooks the Gulf of Mexico—he lives on the bottom floor.4 The first time I saw him, Ralph was wandering down the dirt pathway in front of the hospital, shirtless and in flip-flops, speaking into a flip phone, saying, “We haven’t really had money to do that.” I’d assumed he’d been removed as the sanctuary’s director, having followed up on Adrianne’s recommended readings: Ralph had been in the news a lot over the last decade, for all the wrong reasons. So I asked another volunteer, an older, short-haired woman, who this slovenly, beer-gutted man was, as he seemed to be making decisions. Just moments before, she’d offered to dissect an owl pellet for me, so I’d decided she was friendly.
“That’s the founder of the sanctuary, Ralph Heath,” she said. “He’s a very strange man.”
“So, he’s here a lot?” I asked.
“More than we want him to be.”
I watched Ralph shuffle toward the office on his phone. His hair was thin and uncombed, and patches of scabs and scars dotted his bare skin. He paused in front of the vacant visitor information counter to look at a night heron perched on the roof like a gargoyle. The bird stared back down at him.
“What does he do?” I asked.
“Nothing. He drinks a lot, if I had to guess. So, if you see Ralph Heath, founder of the sanctuary, in the newspaper,” she concluded, “you’ll know to stay away.”
The cover of the August 1974 issue of Smithsonian shows a blue heron standing on a grassy bank in front of a calm lake. A hunter’s arrow dangles from its throat. Below it, the caption directs readers to an article on page thirty, titled “Volunteers Rescue Injured Wildfowl.” The article is richly photographed. In one picture, Linda Heath’s delicate hands slip a pill inside a baitfish to serve to a sick cormorant. In another, a hawk with a bandaged wing perches atop its cage, as if in thought. The article says Ralph and Linda “have become experts in the ways, deliberate or inadvertent, that birds come to grief at the hands of man.”5 Linda cares for the baby birds in the hospital while Ralph fashions prosthetic limbs for birds whose legs must be amputated. “Heath is at his best saving birds which his fellow citizens have damaged,”6 the writer asserts.
That year, the Suncoast Seabird Sanctuary became the first facility in history to mate the brown pelican in captivity.7 After years of exposure to pesticides and pollutants, the bird was endangered and on the verge of extinction.8 By the following year, the sanctuary had hatched the first brown pelican egg9 and Dewar’s Scotch had featured Ralph in their Dewar’s Profile ad campaign.10 According to the ad, which ran nationwide in publications like Esquire and Playboy, Ralph’s hobbies included restoring antique cars and filmmaking. His favorite book: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. In the ad’s photo, he lifts a healthy pelican onto his forearm, its wings raised in preparation for flight before a virgin shoreline. Ralph is
young and muscular, his dark hair full and perfectly mussed, ’70s moustache responsibly trimmed yet wild. His gaze meets the camera as if he’s about to speak; his hand ever so gently touches the pelican’s soft breast. The two make a perfect couple, an iconic union: man and bird.
20/20 did a special on Ralph and the sanctuary,11 then the Today show and the New York Times.12 Editorials showed up in the local papers every few days with headlines like “Birds: Our Responsibility”13 and quotes from Ralph about the value of animal life and the public duty of seabird ministration. Disney came to the sanctuary seeking animal stars for its Discovery Island14 theme park. Soon, Ralph was sending rehabilitated birds to zoos all over the world, in Greece15 and Singapore, Spain16 and Barbados.17 On a trip to deliver pelicans to Texas, Navy Commander and president of the local Audubon Society Bruce McCandless, the first man to float free from the Challenger shuttle—“all atilt, with no tether,”18 as Ralph later put it—took him bird-watching in his amphibian aircraft.19 Ralph’s reputation as a wildlife documentarian grew as he shot films from the sanctuary yacht, the Whisker,20 and fully inhabited his role as an advocate for the plight of birds everywhere.
Ralph and Linda divorced three years after the sanctuary opened,21 and in 1982 he married Beatrice Busch,22 millionaire Anheuser-Busch heiress, wildlife photojournalist, and world traveler.
Beatrice had spent winters in Tampa Bay with her beer magnate father,23 August A. “Gussie” Busch, also president of the St. Louis Cardinals. While at the family’s beach house in Pass-a-Grille she came across an article about the sanctuary in one of the local papers and recalled hearing the captain of one of their boats talk about Ralph. Beatrice had worked for a time at an animal orphanage in Nairobi and had just finished filming a television special about the migration of humpback whales with her filmmaker ex-husband.24 She was interested in people who were interested in animals, and decided to pay Ralph a visit.
She arrived just as Ralph was leaving to rescue a pelican hooked by a fisherman,25 and on a whim accompanied him. Despite the dirty work involved—they were out in the muddy mangroves in tennis shoes, grabbing birds with their hands, getting nipped by cormorants26—it was love at first flight for Beatrice and Ralph.
Their wedding took place a year later on Grant’s Farm, a three-hundred-acre St. Louis estate27 that was once the home of Ulysses S. Grant and on which Gussie had raised seven of his ten children. On the farm sits a cabin hand built by President Grant, a thirty-four-room neo-Renaissance château, the terrace of which was the site of the ceremony, and a fully operational private zoo, which included chimpanzees and elephants Gussie had trained himself.28 Within three years of marrying Ralph, Beatrice had given birth to three sons:29 Andrew, the oldest, and twins Alexander and Peter. Within another two years, Ralph and Beatrice had separated.30 She’d been rehabilitating birds and traveling with Ralph to promote the sanctuary as well as spending ample amounts of time with the animals at Busch Gardens. But she was ready to move back to St. Louis and be with family. Ralph refused to go with her. He couldn’t leave his birds.31
In the beginning, the birds had united Ralph and Beatrice.32 After the wedding at Grant’s Farm, they could have left on honeymoon to Switzerland—the rest of her family resided there and Beatrice wanted Ralph to meet them. But instead, they postponed their trip until the St. Petersburg City Council reached a verdict33 on whether to let Ralph expand the sanctuary onto a 125-acre plot of land in the environmentally sensitive Gateway area, called Sod Farm. It was a plan he’d been working on since 1974,34 when he’d gotten into the habit of buying land as a way to preserve it against booming development along Florida’s coasts,35 leaving it wild for the birds. Now Ralph wanted to build a zoological park on Sod Farm, and had community support.36 But the city wanted to zone the land for industrial use.37 They were expected to come to a decision in December.38
The story had monopolized Tampa Bay news circuits for the last several months, and petitions in favor of the park collected hundreds of names.39 Ralph and City Manager Alan Harvey faced off in the headlines: Ralph claimed he’d been “double-crossed,” as Harvey first had promised him the plot and then retracted his offer when he realized just how much land the city stood to lose. Reading an impassioned statement at a city council meeting that fall, Heath urged the public to stand against any government employees who didn’t behave as environmental stewards, claiming such people couldn’t possibly hold their constituency’s best interests in mind. “These individuals do not yet realize that mankind and wildlife live in the same ecosystem,”40 Ralph declared. “If we destroy the environment for the wildlife, we destroy the human race as well.” In the end, the city turned the plot into a landfill.41
People came from everywhere to see the birds. At its height, over a hundred thousand individuals and ten thousand birds entered the sanctuary’s grounds every year, making it the largest nonprofit wild bird hospital in the country.42 It hosted events and presentations every week by organizations like the Florida Native Plant Society and Eckerd College; gave regularly scheduled tours; visited schools; published a quarterly newsletter, Fly Free;43 and held wild bird photography workshops. At its largest the sanctuary employed forty-four workers,44 including an internationally praised bird rehabilitator, Barbara Suto;45 a staff veterinarian working in state-of-the-art emergency facilities and a surgical center;46 licensed veterinary assistants;47 groundskeepers; office staff; a marketing director;48 an all-volunteer rescue team bringing in up to forty-five new birds every day49 in pickups emblazoned with the sanctuary logo; and volunteers keeping tight shifts on the grounds and in the sanctuary hospital.50 Ralph was the face of it all, the bird god of Indian Shores. It seemed as though nothing could bring him down.
When Chris Walls, the sanctuary’s groundskeeper, showed up for work on the morning of March 4, 2013, he was met with an unusual sight. On a normal day, the sanctuary hospital would have already been open and Barbara Suto, the hospital director, would be checking on her patients. Matthew McDermott would be making rounds of the enclosures, doling out fish to the pelicans and shore birds, mealworms and seed to the perchers, rats to the owls, and raw chicken to the raptors. Micki Eslick would be unlocking the sanctuary office and going about her morning paperwork routine with her son, Donnie. There would be volunteers at the outdoor laundry folding towels to deliver to the hospital. The place would be bustling. But that day, the sanctuary was a virtual ghost town. In the hospital sat twenty-four sets of keys, each bearing a Post-it resignation. Along with his boss, avian supervisor Greg Vaughan, and Greg’s wife, Kellie, Chris was one of only three people there.51
I wanted to talk to Chris about that day. I found him leaving the wading bird enclosure on his way to the outdoor hospital with an empty fish bucket. Behind him, a sandhill crane stalked along the far edge of its concrete water pool like a ghostly ballerina. Nearby, other wading birds called from their shady corners: blue herons, egrets, gulls, white ibises. Chris wore knee-high rubber boots and fishing waders. He has a patchy beard and scruffy dirty-brown hair. He’s tall and gregarious, but humble, glad simply to have an occupation. We talked as he knelt in the dirt over a stack of feeding charts in the outdoor hospital, an area with two rows of cages separated from the rest of the sanctuary by a wooden fence, where seabirds are sent to rest further before release. A few feet away, a blue heron was nursing a broken wing, and three enclosures housed juvenile night herons and snowy egrets separately.
There were now six paid employees working at the sanctuary.52 Chris had begun four years ago, doing community service for a Roxycontin charge. He banged out fifty-five hours of community service in two and a half weeks, doing laundry and grounds repairs, then stayed on as a volunteer as he was looking for paid work. When another employee quit, Chris was given his job. Even in 2012, he said, the situation was far from perfect. A lot of employees weren’t getting paid, and some of them were falling behind on their rent. People were steadily leaving jobs at the sanctuary.53
Around this time R
alph was accused of stealing money out of the donation boxes54—outed to the press by former employees. The following year, Ralph announced the sanctuary would no longer be rescuing birds55 and would be transitioning to a volunteer-based staff due to its inability to keep up with debts.56 The IRS was pursuing them for almost $200,000 in unpaid payroll taxes.57 They owed more than $21,000 in employee back pay.58 All of it made the papers. Then, in November 2013, Ralph was arrested and charged with workers’ compensation fraud59 for failing to pay workers’ comp insurance for seven months the previous year. During that time, a man had slipped in a truck while delivering ice at the sanctuary60 and had gone to the hospital.
I asked Chris why people weren’t getting paid.
“It was the management,”61 he said. “Our CFO at the time didn’t know what she was doing. She always got paid, her son always got paid, but no one else got paid.”
This was Micki Eslick, who denied any wrongdoing when I later interviewed her. I’d seen her in Flying Free 2. She appears in a bizarre interlude, though she’s not identified as the CFO of the sanctuary but rather as Ralph’s cousin. She wears French-tipped acrylics and has short black hair. In a smoker’s rasp, she tells a story about ten-year-old Ralph.
“If you can remember, back in the day,” she says, as if to me personally, “the chicken farmers would put wooden eggs in the chicken pens so the chicken snakes would go in and eat the wooden eggs. Then they’d go off and die, and not bother the chickens.”62