My Place on the Gulfshore

Why would anyone choose to live on a mangrove island that has no beaches, little or no nightlife (unless you like chatting with frogs and raccoons) and summer heat that can almost melt the paint off your walls?

The question sort of answers itself.

No reason at all.

Or, to put it differently, every reason on earth.

When we moved to Pine Island, my wife had only two criteria for living here. She said, very stubbornly, "I want a pond and a turtle." Well, Pine Island had plenty of ponds, and we soon found a two-and-a-half acre parcel with a house on it that had a one-and-a-half acre pond fairly brimming with soft-shell turtles.

What's more, on one end of the pond there was a resident eagle. Great blue herons, cormorants and anhingas were regular visitors. And our home on Pine Island was, and still is, a little piece of that proverbial heaven you always hear people talking about.

We have been here 10 years, during which time we have written an equal number of books. We find the quiet rural atmosphere conducive to writing, not to mention meditating, which is how a lot of writing really gets done in the first place.

Pine Island is the perfect place to affix the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair, and to let the mind go its own way as you drift off to anywhere you want to go. Or, as Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Time is but the stream I go a-fishing in."

In such timeless manner, I have written a 300-page book in less than three months, something that surprised me, our two Great Danes, our cats, and even our blue-fronted Amazon parrot, who squawked when I tapped out the last line.

Friends ask, "How do you do that?"

And I answer, "What else is there to do?"

Actually, there are plenty of things I could be doing, if I had a mind to do them.

For instance, sport fishing, fly fishing, kayaking, canoeing, hiking, sunning, shelling or just about anything on, in or around the waters of Pine Island Sound, Charlotte Harbor and Matlacha Pass. In an area where there's so much to do, one frequently opts to do nothing at all.

Still, the truth is, when I am not writing, or thinking about writing, I am observing the world of nature. I cannot seem to get enough looking done in the course of a day, for there is always something to see; and, God willing, I just might see, or perhaps, hear, something I've never seen or heard before.

One of my favorite ways to see/hear is to take to one of the shell roads that crisscross the island. There are still island characters out here who easily rival the best of those in Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' memoir Cross Creek.

One of my favorites is Bob Washington. He has a white beard when he isn't drinking carrot juice to improve his eyesight. Otherwise he resembles Yosemite Sam. You know when he's been at the juice because his beard turns a rusty red orange color. Be that as it may, Bob can't hear a blessed thing; but he has, at almost 90, the steadiest, most sure-footed walk you ever saw on an octogenarian. And he talks the whole time he's walking with you. Once when I was trying to keep up with Bob, I had to shout in his right ear so he could hear me.

"How's the neighborhood?" I yelled.

"Well," Bob yelled back, "John Painter just grew a mango that set a world's record."

"How big?" I bellowed.

"Four pounds, four ounces," he bellowed back.

"That's nice," I shouted. "Say, Bob, how're your raccoons?"

"The mom's got a new baby," he roared.

"She had another baby?"

"No, she found one."

Then he told me about how the raccoon mom with six kits that he'd been feeding at his back door every night had gone out into the woods and picked up a feral kitten, and it was learning how to be a proper raccoon with the rest of the litter.

"She taught that tiny little stray kitten to wash its food in the water dish just like all the others," he hollered.

"Is that so?" I hollered back.

By then we'd gone way over to Wayback Road and down Ridge Road to Bottlebrush; and, well, you get the idea-there was a lot of shouting and walking and talking going on between the two of us.

However, not all the stories I hear come from human beings. At least once a week, a wayfaring animal flaps, paws and slithers its way into our lives, and I learn something extraordinary. Once I hooted at a horned owl and he chased me all over our property. My hoot must've sounded like a mating call or something. Anyway, his hooting lordship comes back once a year to check me out-to see if I've grown any feathers, I suppose.

One fall we had a Pine Island rat that took up lodging in an old unused duct behind our dryer out in the garage. He grew quite fat once he chewed through the dog-food bin I have out there. He'd burrow in and chew the night away. That rat got fatter than a possum. I tried every which way I knew to draw him out of the dryer duct, which is where he took refuge during the day, but nothing short of explosives was going to work with that fat, crafty rat. He had it good and he knew it. I brought the dog-food bin inside, and he came in with it in the middle of the night-I don't know how, unless the mysterious duct emptied into our chimney.

Anyway, my wife said, "Maybe we should get a snake."

That seemed like a capital idea. Same day, as if appointed by providence, a snake showed up. Not a little one, either. This was a 10-foot indigo snake as thick as a linebacker's thigh.

Now, indigos like to dine on Pine Island rats. And this particular one did a bivouac tour of our yard, and then it asked-I mean that, too-to be let into our garage.

I opened the side door, and that magnificent creature spilled over the threshold, all gloss and midnight blue, as mighty a serpent as ever there was. After a few minutes of nosing around the old dryer duct, the indigo went in and got his man. Now every summer, that same great snake comes back looking for another fat rat. However, I'm pleased to say, we only had that one; and so the indigo goes off, if not empty-handed, empty-coiled, so to say.

There is never a dull moment over here, but when I tell that to a writer buddy of mine who lives in New York state, he likes to ask the same question: "How do you tell one season from another?"

And I like to turn it around, ask him a question: "Have you ever seen a whole flock of pink ibis fly overhead while you're doing the backstroke in your pool?"

He chuckles: "I don't like to swim and I don't have a pool."

I bait him a little bit: "Do you like to fly? Because that's what it feels like to lie on your back and watch the ibises go by. You sort of fly off with them."

He chuckles again, but he is not sold on our state.

"Thank goodness," my wife says, "that there are still some people who can't abide Florida. If everybody loved it the way we do, we'd be out of luck."

Indeed.

The fact is, though, we have a sundial of seasons on Pine Island. And if we are missing something in the way of seasonal subtlety, I am not aware of it. (Oh, yeah, snow.)

The other day, a writer friend of mine asked if Pine Island had a real spring or just a blend of warm winter that fell into hot summer.

I quickly told him that our spring begins in February, the same month the redbirds started singing. Before then, if they're here at all, they're pretty quiet. We have a redbird, or cardinal, if you like, that wakes us up each morning with a sharp, sweet one-syllable refrain: "Cheer! Cheer!"

Spring, I explain to my writerly friend, is whippoorwills calling all night long with their three-beat threnody. Spring is also soft pink camellias, star-bright confederate jasmines, and pale white gardenias that perfume the whole porch. Let's not forget the bougainvillea, though, with its neon splash of rouge so bright you cannot look at the little bracts without sunglasses. Our oak tree, naked for much of the winter, leafs out in a single, sultry, beneficent spring day.

Maybe summer does come a bit too soon, I say to my inquiring word pal, but it is always welcome. For then the beaches open up, and they are mostly empty of people. Summer-for me-is skinks running relays under my feet. They dance away in glittery, jittery feints, in passionate zigs and zags, looking more like digitalized snakes than prehistoric lizards.