The side-kick had been nasty. I’d be feeling a burning sensation in my shin for a week, maybe longer.
I turned to her when she squeezed my arm and saw an intense, appraising expression on her face. A little bit of surprise in there, too, as she said in a low voice, “My God, you’re something. Professor-I figured, yeah, the perfect nickname ’til watching you just now. Like he was a sack of corn or something, that’s the way it looked when you threw him. Un-damn-believable. ”
I used peripheral vision to make certain Camphill wasn’t rethinking his surrender. “He’s a sack of something,” I said. “You want to get another drink?”
8
And it still wasn’t over. We stopped at the Green Flash because it’s a good place, then walked along the narrow beach road to ’Tween Waters Inn, the Gulf off to our left, a vast lens of starlight and black water without horizon.
Everyplace we stopped, we collected people; old friends and fishing guides and islanders out for a Friday night, more than willing to help us honor Janet. On the islands even a bad reason is good enough for throwing a party, and this was a great reason. So by the time we got to the Crow’s Nest at’Tween Waters, there were more than twenty of us, and the place was already crowded.
One look told me why. The bar has an extended dining area that can be partitioned off from the elevated dining room. The partition was closed except for a door-sized space through which I could see tables of men and women wearing name tags. A sign on an easel read: “Save All Manatees.”
Welcome SAM members!
Damn.
I remembered Camphill saying he was the national spokesman, which meant that he was bound to show up sooner or later. In fact, they probably had him housed in one of the little cottages out back. I took Rhonda and JoAnn aside and told them, “I think we ought to collect our people and get out of here.”
But Rhonda was already locked in animated conversation with Wally, the chef, and Janice behind the bar, so, as she hurried back to them, she said, “Doc, you worry too much. You think Mr. Hollywood is going mess with you again after you put him in orbit? I don’t think so.”
That wasn’t what I was worried about. I didn’t think there was much of a chance that Camphill would give me another try, but the dining room was filled with SAM people, and there was Jeth in his barbecue-a-manatee T-shirt, plus most of the Dinkin’s Bay family.
Something I saw underlined just how irrational and mean the issue had become. The Crow’s Nest is built around a hardwood bar in the shape of a broken L. At three corners of the bar are hand-carved manatees-a classy, ornate touch in a classy sportsman’s bar. Really beautiful pieces of work. On the belly of one of the manatees, though, someone had recently used a black marker to draw a bull’s eye, complete with an arrow. Above the arrow were the words, “Save a Fishing Guide, Kill a Sea Cow.”
A disturbing bit of graffiti.
I worked my way through the crowd and finally found Tomlinson holding court next to the fireplace beneath a mounted tarpon. When I tried to talk to him, though, he was slurring his words so badly that I gave up.
I decided that, if there was going to be trouble, there was nothing I could do to stop it.
Turned out I was right.
Frieda Matthews, one of Florida’s best biologists and field researchers, motioned toward the lighted building and told me, “I’m supposed to be in there speaking tonight, but they fired me.”
I said, “You’re kidding.”
She smiled. “Nope. But I still get paid. In our line of work, that’s what counts, right?”
Feeling claustrophobic among all those people, I’d stepped outside and spotted Matthews leaning against a palm tree, sipping a fresh beer. I’d met her years ago at a symposium near her office in Tallahassee and had come to respect her work-particularly her articulate field-research papers. She’s a fine observer and has a gift for precise, lucid, declarative sentences. Unlike an unfortunate and growing number in our field, Matthews is an advocate of science, not a scientist who advocates a particular point of view. She is generally regarded as a leading expert on Florida’s sea mammals. Thus the manatee connection.
I asked, “They canceled your talk? Why?”
She was still smiling, a healthy-looking woman with a good jaw and short hair wearing a dark business suit with a pale blouse. “Why do biologists and expert witnesses usually get fired? Because their employers doesn’t want to hear what they have to say. The thing that really irks me is, their so-called experts in there obviously haven’t read my recent papers. If they had, they could have fired me by telephone, and I could’ve saved myself a trip. We’re swamped in Tallahassee, plus I had to leave my husband alone with our four-year-old.”
The implications of her sudden dismissal were interesting. Suddenly, I wished I’d brought a notebook.
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “The SAM people paid you to come here, but now they don’t want you to speak? I don’t get it.”
So the lady explained it to me. I stood there fascinated, listening, as Frieda listed the accumulated data as she knew it. She spoke softly, but as articulately as any of her fine papers.
She and her staff had spent the last five years collecting manatee data, she said, performing necropsies, doing manatee counts by plane and helicopter on both the Gulf and Atlantic coasts of Florida, yet it was only in the last three months that her team felt they had sufficient information to publish their partial conclusions.
“All valid biological data,” she told me, “indicate that the population of our West Indian manatee is increasing, not decreasing. Not only that, the population has been increasing for the last twenty-five years. The manatee should be taken off the endangered species list. It doesn’t belong there, and our research proves it. Florida has plenty of environmental problems, and that’s where the money should be spent. But the manatee people don’t want to hear that.”
I listened to her explain that the minimum manatee count has increased at a rate of 6 to 7 percent per year but that it was really probably closer to 10. “You know me, Doc. I always use the most conservative figures possible. I take my work damn seriously. I’m not going to manipulate or exaggerate the figures for anyone. At the cost of what? My professional reputation? No way.”
She went on to explain the data in detail, and the bottom line was that the sea cows were back and doing well. I didn’t say what I was thinking, though: I’d recently read a report issued by one of the federal agencies that said exactly the opposite. Boat-related manatee deaths had risen from 25 percent ten years ago to 33 percent now, and the increased death rate far outstripped the slow-growing manatee population. Furthermore, in that same ten-year period, Florida had registered more than a hundred thousand new boats-bad news for anything in the water that was big and slow moving. But here was Dr. Frieda Matthews telling me about her own work, her own observations. It was not the time to debate.
Instead, I said, “That’s great news. So why’s this the first I’ve heard it? There ought to be headlines. Instead, they’re trying to close down whole hectares of the water around here.”
She shrugged. “I’ve got a private theory about that, but I’d hate for you to get the impression I’ve gotten old and cynical. Don’t get me wrong, Doc. Manatees should continue to be fully protected, but they’ve recovered to a level where, clearly, they’re no longer an endangered species. Fish and Wildlife ought to down-list them from endangered to threatened, at most.
“This afternoon, I expected SAM’s board members to clap and cheer when I told them what I was going to talk about. They’ve done a hell of a good job getting the word out, educating boaters on what to look for and how to avoid contact. They deserve a fair share of the credit, right along with another club, Save the Manatee. I was going to tell them congratulations, score a big win for the good guys. Instead, I watched their jaws drop open, and they looked at me like I was a heretic. They couldn’t get me out of the room fast enough. The club’s president-get this, Doc-she’s afraid of big bodies of water, won’t get on a boat, but there she is, running the whole show. She actually screamed at me. Called me a liar and… what was the phrase?” Matthews tilted her head, thinking about it. “She called me a ‘stooge for the boating industry,’ that was it.