Week Two: When the Children Were Terrified of the Ocean
On the drive to Panama City Beach, I tasked the children with looking for signs that we were getting closer to Florida. These included things like seagulls, boats, sand, palm trees, and men holding up liquor stores with an alligator as his weapon. We found nearly everything before we’d even left Mississippi, but Margot was bound and determined to find a coconut. “If there are palm trees, there have to be coconuts,” she insisted. In all my years living in Florida, I can only remember seeing one actual coconut in a tree (and for all I know, that one was glued there to humor the tourists).
Meanwhile, Susan did what every reasonable parent does on the way to the beach: she researched how many people had recently died. Rip tides have had another big year, claiming the lives of several people right there in Panama City Beach. Therefore, once we arrived, Susan insisted I check the flags. Flags have been a new development since my childhood. We boogie boarded all day without sunscreen, we surfed poorly and without shark repellent, and we snorkeled out as far as we could into the horizon–then raced madly back to shore, convinced we were being pursued by man-eating squids–and our mothers and step-mothers never looked up from their smutty beach thrillers. Today, however, there are lawsuits.
The children did their part to survive, namely by being deathly afraid of the ocean. Lucy was so suspicious that she trekked all the way back up the beach to the pampas-grass-lined trail that led to the street. Eventually, though, the big kids built up enough courage to wade knee-deep, then thigh-deep, then chest-deep into the water. They particularly enjoyed “belly boarding.” (At this point, you should just assume we call everything by a completely different, made-up name.) Thankfully, Susan also built up her courage, enough courage in fact to stay home and let me single-handedly deal with the insanity of three children under ten fighting the ocean.
The low point was no doubt the snake. I will now give you Susan’s perspective on the insidious incident. The black serpent arose as if from the very earth itself, darting out of the grass in mad pursuit of…what? The sanity of every decent woman? The pure joy of every innocent babe caught unaware in its menacing jaws? As thick as my wife’s arm, it bounded across the backyard, along the fence, fleeing from the stabbing beaks of three birds. How large were the birds? Well, they must’ve been at least as large as Lucy. Perhaps larger than all of us, if they were able to terrify what could only have been a python, if not an anaconda.
My wife does not like snakes.
One of the last things we did before leaving the beach was take a walk through the Conservation Park whose raised walkways over marshy swampland suggested we might catch out first glimpse of a gator. The kids were all excited at the prospect of seeing one. Although, if their reaction to the peacefully crashing ocean waves is any indication, I’m glad we never found one.
As we drove up, signs announced that the trails were closed.
“I don’t see any barricades,” I said as we arrived at the parking lot. Furthermore, there were other cars and hikers about.
“Are you sure?” Susan asked.
“Trust me, I was born here.” Then I recalled the smoke I’d seen the day before from the beach. “I bet they were doing controlled burns yesterday.”
Not ten yards into our hike, I was proven correct: there were signs of burned underbrush all around. “See,” I said, pointing. Then I pointed out to the kids the Spanish moss and the longleaf pine trees that reached so high and thin into the sky, none of it like anything in Kansas.
Unlike the beach, there was no refreshing ocean breeze. After our second raised walkway and no alligators, I looked around at my melting family and wondered why is it so very hot? Then I spied it just over Susan’s shoulder: a smoldering tree trunk. The fire might’ve all died down, but we were still talking through the heart of its smoldering coals: an outdoor sauna in the middle of a Florida summer.
“Water…” Margot groaned through parched lips.
“Maybe we’d better go,” I said finally.
Steven J Kolbe 
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