Finally, Dinkin’s Bay Marina was now enjoying a new source of quirky, human theater that small, good marinas tend to generate or attract. It was, not surprisingly, thanks to Tomlinson.
Mack, the marina’s owner, was the first to notice: Strangers were showing up at the front desk, with no interest in renting a boat or a canoe, hiring a guide, purchasing fresh fish or a fried conch sandwich from the seafood market. But they were very interested in anything Mack or anyone else around the marina could tell them about the storklike man with the hippie hair who lived aboard No Mas, the sailboat anchored a hundred yards beyond the docks.
“Tomlinson types,” Mack told us. Meaning oddballs. “The New Age, touchy-feely kind. Strangest thing is, most of them are from Europe, Asia-faraway places. When they ask about Tomlinson, it’s like they’re in awe or something. Like he’s a rock’n’roll star, and they’ve come all this way just to get a look at him.”
It was an accurate description of an ever-growing number of marina visitors.
At first, the attention surprised Tomlinson. He handled it with humor, and a kind of childlike grace that is at the core of what makes Tomlinson Tomlinson. But, soon, the escalating number of visitors began to upset him. Then, I think, they began to frighten him-perhaps because of the devotion they exhibited. Or simply his dwindling privacy.
He never offered to explain why strangers were now seeking him out. I asked twice, and twice I received cryptic answers.
Once, he said, “Start reading at Matthew seven: fifteen, and keep going until you get to the part about corrupted fruit.”
I answered, “The Bible? I’d have to borrow yours.”
His second reply made even less sense. “I’m aware that the universe is filled with weird, wonderful things patiently waiting to be understood. But the whole scene, man, the way the energy’s growing around me. It’s like some karmic snowball getting bigger and bigger-”
He held his palms up: confusion; worry. “-I refuse to encourage it. Or even to participate.”
So I did the research on my own. It only took a night’s work on the computer for me to discover the surprising explanation. It had to do with an essay he’d written while an undergraduate at Harvard. It was formally entitled, “Universal Truths Connecting Religions and Earthbound Events.”
The paper was part of a sociology project, and it later received a wider audience, and some acclaim, when it was published in the International Journal of Practical Theology, a respected publication out of Berlin.
Professional journals don’t have a large readership-particularly when they’re in German-so the acclaim was brief. The essay was forgotten. That is, until two years or so ago, when an ecumenical professor in Frankfurt rediscovered it, and reviewed it for the same journal, declaring Tomlinson’s writing as “brilliant” and “divinely inspired.”
Which was no huge deal until one of the professor’s students began to circulate excerpts from the essay on the Internet under a new title: “One Fathom Above Sea Level.” The title was taken from a line in the text. A fathom is the nautical equivalent to six feet, so it referred to a universe as viewed from the eyes of a human being. Tomlinson’s eyes.
Communication is now instantaneous. The same is true of Germany’s surge of interest in Tomlinson and his writing. It wasn’t long before enthusiastic linguists began to translate his writings.
Because “One Fathom Above Sea Level” had much to do with Buddhism, it was first translated from German into Japanese, then from Japanese into several Asian languages, then into French and finally (and only in the last few months) into English.
That’s when Tomlinson- our Tomlinson-began his transformation from a quirky Sanibel character who loved sarongs into an international cult figure. It happened fast. His essay is only about ten pages long, so people read it quickly, copied it and forwarded it along.
I discovered that someone had already set up an Internet Web page where Tomlinson’s fans could post little notes about how reading “One Fathom Above Sea Level” changed their lives, saved their sanity, led them toward enlightenment, created friendships, romance, health, laughter, love, all kinds of positive things.
There were several hundred entries.
I found another site where devotees could post personal information about Tomlinson as they discovered it.
A recent posting confirmed the rumor that Tomlinson was an ordained Rinzai Zen Master who lived aboard a sailboat on a secluded bay, Sanibel Island, Florida.
So the explanation was amusing, but also had the potential to cause my friend real trouble down the road.
Which is why I kept the information to myself. Didn’t tell a soul. Not even Tomlinson. I decided to let the theater that is Dinkin’s Bay Marina play itself out.
So I had some reasons to smile. Life goes that way sometimes. Just keeps getting better and better and better. So maybe my depression, the feelings of loss and guilt, were finally fading.
One of the most powerful laws in physics, however, is the law of “momentum conservation.” It states that momentum lost by any collision or impact is equal to the opposite momentum gained.
Which is why, during good times and bad, we need to remind ourselves that just when it seems life can’t get any better-or worse-things inevitably change.
Tomlinson refers to it as humanity’s seismic roller coaster, his point being that, going up or down, we might as well hold on tight and enjoy the ride-a goofy kind of optimism that he usually exudes, and why I seldom refuse his invitations to travel.
chapter eight
Tomlinson had gone to the Everglades in search of what some Floridians call the Swamp Ape, or Skunk Ape, which is the tropical version of Big Foot or the Abominable Snowman. Because he’d cajoled and pressed, I’d agreed to join him.
I don’t believe such a creature exists, of course-no reality-based person could believe it-but Tomlinson is not a reality-based person, nor does he claim to be.
As the man once described himself: “I am a citizen of many universes, many dimensions, and-thankfully-wanted by the law in only a few.”
He often cloaks his personal, innermost beliefs in self-deprecating humor.
One thing I could not criticize, however, was the amount of research Tomlinson had done on the subject. When I told him that there was zero possibility of a primate, unknown to science, living in the wilds of Florida, or anywhere else in North America, he smiled his gentle, Buddha smile. Later, he handed me a thick folder of newspaper clippings and printouts from the Internet.
He’d pulled together some interesting data. Recorded sightings of the Everglades creature dated back to the time of Spanish contact. In the late 1500s, a Jesuit missionary, sent to live among the indigenous people of Florida’s west coast, described seeing a “… giant man, befouled by a body of hair, running away into the swamps.”
Occasional sightings by Europeans and Indians continued over the next four hundred years, but reached their peak of frequency in the early 1970s.
“The reason for that is obvious,” Tomlinson explained to me one night, sitting on the stern of his old Morgan sailboat. “That’s when construction was booming in Miami and Lauderdale, everything expanding west into what was then the Everglades. The bulldozers and draglines were draining the edge of the big swamp, scraping it bare, taking away all the cover. The River Prophet had to move around, maybe for survival… or maybe to investigate the damage being done to the biosphere.”
River Prophet-Tomlinson’s personal identifier for something that was more or less consistently described as a gorillalike creature, over eight feet tall, covered with hair, and that had a distinctive, sulfurlike odor. Thus the “Skunk Ape” reference.