Don’t ever let them tell you it isn’t worth it.
I’m walking along a shore of pistachio nut beaches. Because there is no sand here. Only shells. Everything under your feet that at first glance looks like coarse sand is tiny, fragile husks from millions of creatures that have come and gone. The cormorants pick the flesh from their ovoid shelters and leave them to bleach in the sun. All of the shells, big and small have been pecked and cleaned, with only shattered pieces to spare. There are broken oysters and sand dollars, but it’s hard to find anything bigger than a fingernail that is still intact.
The beach is so shallow here that waves have been swallowed somewhere out where the white turns to a deep, cerulean blue. The Floridians sit slightly in the water, with their asses wet in their short-legged chairs and a cooler of beer between them. Their shirts are as gaudy as you would expect, and they sit with zinc on their noses and tan-lines that highlight the crow’s feet from their eyes to their ears. They invite me to sit down and have a beer with them. I politely decline their offer and continue walking in the smoothest ocean water I have ever seen. The cuffs of my khakis are rolled up, but they’re wet anyway. At least I remembered to haul along my old canvas shoes because the shells would slice my feet like razors.
On the beach, among the seashell talus I find a flawless, white cardita shell that fit perfectly in the palm of my hand. When I think of shells, I think of shells like this one - a fan with ribs that curve as they splay outward. An evanescent white, flawless in its shape and color.
On the ferry back to Tampa, we see manta rays, racing the boat on the shady side. The ferry captain slows the boat so we all can see and because he doesn’t want to catch one in the rotors. “Rays are good luck!” he says, and we all agree, because he has had more experience with lucky rays than we have.
***
Five days later I am in the desert. At 4,000 feet there is no sea-level air to help hiking, and I notice the extra effort. Everywhere around me there is sand. Real sand. The kind that is made by wind and water, and millions of seasons from winter to summer and back again. There are no seashell beaches that stretch into that Florida blue. I am in the rust of the rock and tumbleweeds that have been caught in the barbed wire along the side of the road, where weathered juniper trees peel paper-thin bark from their trunks layer by layer.
Nobody else is here, and I don’t expect them to be because after a lifetime in the desert, I have learned how to find the quiet places. As I walk barefoot across the warm rocks and sit under the shade of a tamarisk tree and I finish a bottle of warm water, I say aloud into the wind;
“This is my home.”
But others don’t see it that way. My home is being given away – to gravediggers looking for coal or oil and missing the important part. It’s the surface that is worth saving.
Egmont Key, with its tortoises and cormorants and pistachio beaches will always be there, because there is nothing underneath it but water. Saving it was an easy decision because there was no money to be made by exploiting it. But this place, pocked with sandstone potholes, and impossibly large arches. The home of scorpions and rattlesnakes, coyotes and endless valleys of rabbitbrush, prickly pear and sagebrush is also the resting place of plants and animals millions of years before the desert. Packed beneath the subtle hues of the desert, where coal can be mined and oil can be pumped, there is money to be made.
In my hand I have a cardita shell from 2,000 miles away. I rub the smooth, seductive inside with my thumb and notice that the stark white is so out of place where all things are eventually stained a henna brown. Rays are good luck, or so they say. But maybe seashells are too. Maybe one can be a talisman blessed enough to protect the rest of this hard country.
Just before I go, I leave the cardita shell in a small indent rubbed smooth, like an opened box for a single jewel. A place made for the inconsonant traveler abandoned so far from home.
Listen if you must to the politicians, the moneygrubbers, the thieves of silent places, but stand in front of them while you do. Stop them when you can.
And don’t ever let them tell you that it isn’t worth it.