THE AMERICAN STORYBAG

by Gerald Hausman

  On one trip I was stalked by a curious or famished barracuda of about five feet in length. He followed me almost to the beach with his toothy under bite and his primal eye always coming closer. (This particular fish was finally caught by a fisherman after attacking a swimmer about a year later.)

  Another time in a tropical depression, I found myself caught between a forest of staghorn corals and a battery of coral heads, which left me no choice but to dance on the froth when the tide sucked out, and to sort of surf when it came back in. That was a touchy situation but I managed to get back in with only one gouge on my right ankle.

  During a similar predicament, while cruising the coast with mask and fins, I was suddenly sucked into a marine cave. Then I was hurtled through a barnacled tube that spiraled twenty feet or so, and let out in a mysteriously quiet azure cove.

  Cramping is probably the solitary swimmer’s worst enemy. I learned to give myself calf and leg massages in those rough waters where I was a mile or more from shore. One of the things I did while I swam—to keep my mind entertained—was to work on stories I was writing. Often these tales had to do with mariners who were shipwrecked, and I was able, while swimming, to visualize them completely. Sometimes, I became them; or they became me. Whichever way it was, I was beginning to understand that survival swimming involves so much more than being in good physical shape.

  I discovered that it was more mental, perhaps, than physical. This explained why characters that I was writing about began to seem more human in my writing. They got tangled up, for instance in sargassum weed, and imagined they were being pulled apart by a giant squid. Friendly porpoises turned into hungry sharks, and even a tiny swallow of saltwater turned into a life-snuffing tidal wave.

  The mind plays all kinds of games with you when the bottom disappears underneath, and there is nothing left but blue, big blue miles of empty sea, where the swimmer feels the myriad eyes of the deep are trained on him. Open sea swimming brings you face to face with the most primal fear there is—staying alive. Sometimes I had to fight back the overwhelming fear of drowning even when I felt okay, but because the shore seemed too far away, and the more I swam towards it, the farther it seemed to recede. Optical illusions and mind games run rampant in deep water, open sea swimming.

  Well, eventually, after nine years all told, I had a storehouse of experiences and a lot of words on paper. But I was not writing a book and my writing, like my swimming, seemed more for exercise after a while than for any specific purpose. The truth was, I wanted to write a sea adventure, but I did not know what to write about. I couldn’t tell endless tales about swimming the north coast of Jamaica.

  Then, one autumn when I was back in the states, a close friend, Jonathan Huntress, sent me two boxes of archival maritime tales from his father’s nautical library. Dr. Keith Huntress, Jon’s dad, was a well-known author and archivist of shipwrecks and disasters. Some of the books had the scent of Penobscot salt on their yellowed pages. Most were first-person narratives written in the 19th century. With the books came a message from Jon: “My father would’ve liked knowing that these are now in your possession. Maybe you will be inspired to use them in a book of your own.”

  These sea stories came at a pivotal time for me. In them I found just what I was looking for—stories of common men and women who were forced to deal with uncommon events in and on the ocean, and also on land. All were castaways, shipwrecked people, who had to learn from scratch what it meant to survive. They seemed to lose all sense of time and place. They fumbled and foundered on islands and keys, and some were driven to insanity.

  Interestingly, the tales I read were not unlike some of the ones I invented while I was swimming myself. I felt a great common bond with historical people, who were born in strange times and on faraway lands, and they were, I thought, just like me. They were swimmers in the sea of life, struggling to stay afloat.

  However, the ocean itself was the main character. The truth is, human beings have never been more absorbed with the mysterious waters of the world than at the present time. Now more than ever stories that reveal the ocean’s hidden fathoms draw our immediate interest. Certainly this is brought on by the fact that the ocean is three-quarters of our earth’s surface; and we have never lived in closer proximity to it. Nor has this world of water been tamed or much influenced by human technology or our desire to be one with it.

  So we are today not unlike the brave mariners of Homer’s time in ancient Greece—still wary, still worried about the next big storm. Rogue waves, tsunamis, hurricanes and all wild weather phenomena are our common lot. Ships like the Titanic are still being built, and still being sunk by the sea. The ocean, above and below the surface, is an unknown frontier. As unfathomable as what we like to call “the vast reaches of outer space.” We will probably never conquer the ocean.

  In the stories I have chosen to write for this book, you will find identifiable characters from human history. However, as I swam farther and farther from shore--in swimming and writing--I became the people I wrote about.

  I was one with the widowed woman who found God in petrel feathers; the marooned sailors who found love and charity on a sun struck sandspit; the man who cruised round the world in a rebuilt boat and who fought pirates and ghosts with his wits; the swimmer who could not drown but could easily die on land; the furious soul who succumbed to madness on an island of beasts; and the seeker of solace on the great river of grass.

  All of these I became in the swimming and the writing. And, in the end, I knew there was nothing better in life than keeping the head and the heart up—and when you cannot see the shoreline, always putting one hand, one word, in front of the other.

  The Ancient Itch

  We live on a barrier island off the mainland of Florida. It's a place where there are no condos and no-see-ums. We like it here. There's plenty to like and plenty not to like but once you get in the island groove you either don't want to come out of it or, for one reason or another, you can't. We have people named Mango Jack, Darryl-with-Teeth and Darryl-with-no-Teeth. There are plain Darryls, too, but we don't count them. People have seen jaguarundis here and eighteen foot saltwater crocodiles and Burmese pythons that share the canals with monitor lizards as large as alligators. (We also have a Win-Dixie Supermarket.) I wrote The Ancient Itch for Gulfshore Life Magazine, and it won an award. I got a lot of calls from toothless and toothful Darryls telling me to pipe down and not write so much. "You'll have people visiting us," they said. "Not as long as we have the ancient itch," I said.

  A large green tropical iguana ran across Stringfellow Road yesterday, and I had to stop and look twice to see what it was.

  Was it really an iguana?

  Or rather, is this Southwest Florida?

  The reality is that some of our unspoiled barrier islands (and even the well-combed ones like Gasparilla) are running wild with loopy lizards and other exotic runaway reptiles. We now have boas in the Everglades and monitor lizards that roam the north end of Cape Coral. The sometimes-six-foot monitors get into the mangrove fringes of Pine Island. I saw one the other day and did my usual double take: Was it, is it, where am I?

  What author Paul Theroux said while kayaking here applies: “You can travel for days among the low and misleading islands on the outer reaches of Charlotte Harbor and never see a golfer, which I suppose is one definition of wilderness.”

  Our father-in-law, an avid golfer said, “You have it here, the wilderness. But what are you going to do with it?” I would answer like Carl Sandburg that there is a menagerie, a wilderness inside myself, and this other one outside is a great comfort to me, and I don’t always know, or care, the reason why.

  Theroux handles his wilderness view with an eye to danger. He paddles innocently and eloquently, as if imagining Pine Island rather than experiencing it. Meandering in the network of waterways, barrier islands, Indian mounds and reptilian isles, Theroux paints a bas-relief of unmapped subtropical fantasy that is, nonetheless, our reality.

 
What he’s talking about is the watery wilderness that precludes shopping malls, macadam main streets and designer domiciles. When roads of pitch black soften to white shell, when the heart of Florida can be felt within and without, our friend and fiend, the wilderness, is speaking directly to us. Our inner menagerie is under our rib cage, talking.

  For some this may happen by merely glancing out a condo window at a panoramic view of the water. For others it may be seeing a footloose iguana, the kind you thought you would see in Ixtapa or Cozumel. Here the creature seems a bit out of context, and yet it is also appealing—to those people that like it. Florida has always had an eccentric wildness about it, a feeling that there are things growing here, even under your own skin, that don’t belong. Things that beat to a different drummer, as it were. I call it the ancient itch.

  When I first moved here, I had it bad. Well, to be perfectly frank, it sent me—this primordial itchiness—to a dermatologist, who, believe it or not, said I had a case of “bad sand.” I could not define that. Neither could my dermatologist. He did say, however, that it was not something you got in Kansas. And he gave me some cream that had cortisone in it.

  But my misplaced itch never went away. It’s the thing under the skin that makes me love it here. I used to think low tide smelled bad—what did I know, I came from Santa Fe where the tide had gone away a million years before I got there. Now, I take a deep breath of that same mucky elixir and I get the old itch. “You gotta love it,” my crab-happy neighbor says, “’cause there ain’t nothin’ like it.” I’ve heard it put differently. I heard a guy getting off the plane say, “Ahm fixin’ t’breathe some air that’s thick enough to spread on toast.”

  “Where you been?” I asked him.

  “Up North,” he said.

  I am called back to my ancient itch whenever I see creatures. Actually, I believe the presence of them, or the lack of them, defines our parameters of primal nature. We need them, not just to instill the ancient itch, but to keep it beyond the instant remedy of cortisone cream.

  Alden Pines Golf Course on Pine Island is beautified with homes, but also remarkable animal populations that confound some of our more squeamish visitors. Some there are who don’t enjoy seeing an Eastern Diamondback rattler coiled up in a bunker. And there are those who don’t appreciate watching a common house cat lifted off its hind feet by a predatory eagle.

  A few days ago, a friend invited us over to her house on a private estuary and while we were sipping a little rum on the lanai, a finch flew into the living room. Annoyed that the finch wouldn’t leave, our friend began to clap loudly. “What’s that for?” I asked. She answered, “I want the bird to fly out of here.” I asked where their ladder was, got it, and climbed up to the highest window in the house where the poor finch was fluttering against the glass to escape.

  I reached out and the bird was in my palm, its vibrant little body humming with sentient life, droning like a bumblebee with…the electrical impulse of the wilderness. When I set it free by opening my palm I remembered what a friend in Jamaica once told me: “A bird at sea has a wind vibration, a bird on land has a land vibration.” This little golden finch still had its wind vibration and I felt it restoring my soul, seeping through my body and enchanting my heart. I felt it humming under my ribcage.

  Thankfully, it’s still here, the wilderness. Still with us. But can we keep from clapping and trying to make it go away? Can we refrain from trying to clap away the intrinsic, harmless nature that enters our lives? I don’t really know. However, I hope we grow more patient; I hope the itch reminds us of who we really are. That we came, as Sandburg says, out of the wilderness, and it is to the wilderness we shall one day return.

  I, for one, want the wild nature of the water in me until the day I die. “Life is good,” says David Kherdian, “unless you weaken.” I don’t want to weaken, neither does he. That’s why he also quotes his favorite Armenian proverb, “Making a living is like taking food from the tiger’s mouth.” Every once and a while, no matter what our age or respective financial position, we ought to gamble on a brief tussle in the woods or in the water—with something larger than ourselves.

  I met a 97-year-old named Murph the other day who told me he couldn’t swim in the Gulf anymore. Ruddy-faced and winsome, he laughed and added that his girlfriend, the same one who’d restricted his swimming, was twenty years his junior. He winked at me then. “She keeps me on my toes,” he said with a quirky smile, “but she’s forbidden me to swim with the sharks.”

  “Are you going to follow her orders?” I asked him. He chuckled, then said, “When I built my house back in the 1940s, A.J. Edwards—yes, the man himself—told me not to invest in Florida real estate because it wouldn’t pay off. I just sold my last house for a million dollars, and they had to tear it down because it was old looking and small, and well, if A.J. couldn’t drive me off the sand, how’s my girlfriend going to drag me off the surf?”

  I told him that I used to go for sharky dip off Casey Key in a weird little spot where I always got bumped by some hard, prehensile snouts. “It wasn’t sharks, I told him, “but some finny fellows running from them”.

  “I know exactly where that is,” he said. “You get hit by a bunch of mullet making their fast runs to the south. Once I saw something torpedo-shaped, chasing them, and it went right past me. I guess I’m too old and tough to be tasty.”

  A couple days after talking to Murph, I found myself on Caya Costa. The last thing on my mind that day was a “wilderness reckoning” but it happened, as it often does, when you’re not expecting it to.

  I was jogging across the width of the island in the late afternoon by myself, when I almost ran into a black feral sow and three little piglets with twitchy tails.

  There was barely time for me to throw on my Adida brakes. Grinding to a halt, I stopped just in front of that monstrous, unmoving mama pig. A dark mist of flies swarmed around her head. She grunted. The sweat poured down my neck and trickled into my shorts. My heart was beating loudly.

  Funny how things happen. You imagine you’re at peace with nature, and then--bam—she’s right there in your face. And her face doesn’t look friendly. It looks truculent.

  The first thing you do in such a situation is get calm. And then, if you’re me, a whole waterfall of literature flows through your brain while you stand there sweating in the hot sun being examined by two mean little pig eyes in a vast hulk of hair and fat.

  But was it so unlike me, who almost ran into it? This grand thing of flank and snout and tusk and hoof?

  And thus, I sat down on my own haunches, and took the weight off my mind and my body. The great sow cast a shadow over me and the long afternoon of golden green. I regarded her; she regarded me. Centuries of nut eating, berry nibbling, lizard munching, bird and snake snatching had refined her genetics, and made her grandiose by any scale of the imagination. She was as big as a building.

  For a brief moment, I visualized that building hurtling itself towards me and grinding me, mauling me into pulp mash.

  All this life-flashing-before-me stuff lasted but seconds, yet seconds are eternities when your life is imagined to be on the line. That huge mama’s eyes took me in. I saw her ears flicking, fanning flies. The piglets under her belly squealed; they wanted to move on. But before she did, that giant sow gave my head a brief sniff.

  She smelled me. That monstrous-looking beast checked me out, and deciding that I was what she thought I was, she turned and trotted off into the jungled curtains of Caya Costa.

  That night I got up from my favorite Pine Island easy chair, and picked up Theroux’s Fresh Air Fiend. Finding the essay “Trespassing in Florida” I read about how Theroux “…nearly drowned…in one of the sudden storms that frequently explode over these islands.” He describes being roughly a mile from dry land when a storm with 60 mph winds nearly outraced him to shore.

  What I wanted to know was, how did he feel afterwards? After he made it safely to shore? Theroux doesn’t really say. He w
rites “…the mud flats, the mangroves and the mosquitoes, have in their way kept much of the area liberated, obscure, and somewhat empty…”

  There is comfort in those words. For I’d never brag about running into a wild pig that could’ve rendered me into shreds of red, raw meat. I won’t brag on my courage, or for that matter, my timidity, but I will always remember the peculiar, peaceful feeling that came afterward.

  I truly felt Theroux’s notion of being liberated, obscure, and somewhat empty like the land itself. The sense of knowing that the menagerie under my ribs hadn’t let me down, but had in fact sat me down. The ancient itch was still in me, and it had seen me through another moment of truth. Once again I was one with the wild, the pal of the world, who didn’t stick pigs, yet, for better or worse, was stuck to them by the wilderness.

  Out Of This World

  A Visit to Cross Creek

  This story about Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings was originally published as a poem in an anthology put out by Pearson Educational Publishers. It also came out as a poem in the Longhouse booklet, Bokeelia, the name of the West Coast town in Florida where I've been living for the past 17 years. I've told this tale at schools because it's a story-of-place and, as we know, certain places have a spiritual power all their own. It's a ghost story of sorts, but mostly it's about being in a haunted wood where you're often looking over your shoulder. And perhaps, Miz Rawlings, as she was called, in a time long gone, is looking over her shoulder as well.

  The orange grove is gone but the silver-board house where Marjorie Rawlings wrote The Yearling is still here. So is the hanging moss. I'm a little surprised to see her worktable sitting outside in the sun. I wander in the wet air, swim is more like it. The humus, detritus, tannin-stained tea colored water, the distant smell of decomposition. This could be Florida, circa 1930.