When I stopped reading, Dewey took the paper from me. Folding it, she seemed subdued and reflective, as she said, “Sooner or later, I guess we all experience an earthquake or two. It’s inevitable.”
I said, “Yeah. Inevitable.” Then I said, “Let’s go run.”
Twenty minutes later, I was standing a little more than two miles from the shell road that leads to Dinkin’s Bay Marina, bent at the waist, hands on knees, my T-shirt soaked with sweat and gasping for oxygen.
Dewey stood beside me patiently, not sweating and not breathing much faster than normal. “Sorry, Doc. Maybe I was pushing a little hard. I’ll slow the pace way down.”
Her kindness hurt me far worse than her characteristic sarcasm.
“How long’s it been since the last time you ran?”
I had to clear my throat to form words. “Eight months,” I croaked. “A year.”
“Oh my God, no wonder. Maybe we should just walk. Have a nice relaxing stroll, then get you back to the house.”
She said it sincerely. Like she was talking to her decrepit old father. chapter twenty-three
On Wednesday, April 16th, three days before an associate and friends reported Frank DeAntoni and Sally Carmel Minster as missing, the wide-bodied former wrestler called me on his cell phone just to talk, he said, but also to ask a favor.
Because my answering machine has a recording that suggests callers try me at the marina’s number, that’s where he found me.
I was sitting on the stool behind the glass counter next to the cash register where Mack, the owner and manager of Dinkin’s Bay, holds court and keeps an eye on the money. Mack’s originally from New Zealand; a Kiwi who loves cold cash even more than he loves cold Steinlager.
We’d been discussing the most recent of governmental outrages imposed upon our little boating community. It concerned Captain Felix Blane-all six-feet-five inches and 250 pounds of him-who’d been out in his twenty-four-foot Parker, Osprey. He’d had a party aboard when an unmarked flats boat came screaming up alongside, portable blue lights flashing, and forced him to stop.
Two plainclothes U.S. Fish and Wildlife officers then proceeded to accuse him of ignoring the new Manatee Protection Laws that require boaters to travel at idle speed when within five hundred feet of certain mangrove areas.
“One of the Feds had a ponytail,” Mack told me. “The smart-ass undercover-agent type, and he gave Felix a lecture about how he needed to learn basic boating skills, and start caring about wildlife. In front of his clients.”
Captain Felix, who’s been guiding around Sanibel for nearly thirty years endured the lecture like the professional he is, then told the officers, “Do you have navigational equipment? Check your GPS. We’re more than half a mile from the mangroves. I’m way outside the manatee zone. I haven’t broken any laws.”
The long-haired officer replied, “In my judgment, we’re closer to the mangroves than your GPS says. And that’s all that matters. If you want to hire an attorney, I’ll see you in Tampa federal court five or six times over the next few months. So you can start canceling your bookings for May right now.”
May, the beginning of tarpon season, is one of the busiest times of year for guides on Sanibel and Captiva.
I said, “If that’s true, it’s terrible. That’s a sophisticated kind of extortion. No fishing guide can afford to fight federal attorneys, plus miss all those days on the water over a couple-hundred-dollar ticket.”
Mack said, “It is true. Almost the exact thing happened to one of the guides out of Cabbage Key. You know Captain Doug. The plainclothes Feds stopped him twice. The same hippy-looking bugger pointed and told him where he was allowed to run his skiff above idle, then a second unmarked boat pulled him over and wrote him a ticket. It’s not that they tricked him. It’s just that those sots don’t know the area, they don’t know boats and they don’t know the water.”
Sadly, he was right-I’d heard too many similar horror stories to doubt it. I was nodding, as he added, “I enjoy the outdoors and wildlife, manatees, as much as the next man, but it’s just getting too crazy. Environmental wackos, mate. I think they’re tryin’ to take over the entire bloody earth.”
Because I didn’t want to get into an argument with Mack, I shut my mouth tight, walked out to the docks and stepped down into my twenty-one-foot Maverick. I had several five-gallon buckets aboard, and I’d stopped at the marina to fuel up before heading out on a collecting trip.
I don’t have much patience with the term environmental wackos or the callous, shortsighted philosophy the phrase seems to signal. As a marine biologist, I am also, necessarily, an environmentalist. I take pride in the fact that some of the research I’ve done, certain papers I’ve published, have played a role in protecting our dwindling marine resources.
In the minds of many, what is now known as the “environmental movement” began in 1962 with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. It is a fact that, at the time, America’s natural resources were in terrible shape. The Great Lakes were so polluted they were unsafe for swimming. Our rivers were such cesspools of chemicals and petroleum waste that they caught fire and burned. In industrial cities, all six of the most dangerous air pollutants tracked by the EPA measured off the scale.
Private enterprise and a profited-minded government were slowly killing an entire continent. The environmental movement deserves full credit for changing that.