Shepherd's Warning

Shepherd’s Warning
      In the bliss of nature riding through the pastureland and scrub oak that grow along the ditches on either side of the road the Taylor County beach unfolds. The smell of an immeasurable number of decomposing micro-organisms assaults the nose like a fist only to become soothing as one takes in more breaths. The sound of wind, waves, and nature including insects on the make trying to attract a mate and amphibians doing the same rises up like stoned members of a rock band warming up their amplified instruments for an all night concert. The birds flying in the distance help to focus the eyes so one does not become dizzy from the impact of sound, smells, and the blending of the mute colors of the land with the bland color of the gulf. The breeze, whispering past, is welcoming  against the ferocious attack of the razor sharp teeth of a  million minute sand gnats intent on one objective: to create a terrorizing sting.
    “I swear each gnat is one big set of teeth. They have no bodies at all. They’re just teeth flying around.” Sophie was struggling to walk with her first load from the car. Coming to the beach was an emotional time. She was six when her mother built the house. As children, when they came to the beach Sophie and her sister, Vicky, were free to come and go as they wanted and spend time with whoever was there. They swam at the fresh water spring, or at high tide, in the salty gulf at the end of the dock. Later, as teenagers, they found other ways to amuse themselves.
    The beach meant cocktails and freedom from routine for the parents and endless exploration for the children including exploration into others of the opposite sex. Lounging in swimwear was exhilarating to say the least. Their fountain of youth bodies had curves a boy could have a wreck on just thinking about. They not only lounged in swimwear, but exhibited physical strength and endurance. Swimming, skiing, boating all took stamina, skill and brains. The truth is, at the tender age of thirteen, Sophie began the game of life, considering the possibilities of potential mates.
    As a child she explored the abundance of nature that was the coast. Scalloping with a bucket floating in an inner tube, picking up the Shell Oil Company logo shellfish like Easter eggs. On the shoreline in senseless circles she herded masses of fiddler crabs singing the theme song of the TV show “Rawhide”. She and Vicky boated into the fresh water estuaries in a three foot by eight foot green wooden boat that had a three horse power outboard motor. They crafted clay collected from the random deposits in the unearthed sandy banks of manmade fresh water streams and with her parents she cut swamp cabbage from palm trees. She and Vicky maintained crab traps that had to be baited and checked with the changing tides. They fished on the dock and in the canals and watched the sunset with a sigh of relief because the night brought a different crowd of people and a breeze to die for.
    Growing up inland, on the sandbar that is called Florida, the coastline was, for most people in Taylor County, the only respite they had in their lives. It was a change of scenery but also a change of lifestyle with its own culture. It was an acquired taste. Like Taylor County itself, if you didn’t get used to it as a child, most probably, you never would like it. And having a house there gave an extra edge into class, status, and high school popularity. Only a few maintained property there. It added extra dimension to what was already thought of as a unique place to live. 
    Sophie’s mother wasn’t talking. She had monopolized the conversation in the car coming down when she had Sophie as a captive audience. She had talked endlessly about her childhood memories. She told Sophie about her first memory. Her father took her to the hospital where her mother and baby brother were staying.  The date was August 3, 1928.  “I had turned 2 years old, March 13, 1928, so I am two years, 5 months old when my baby brother is born and my father is taking me to the hospital, a word I had never heard before.  Turned out to be the biggest building I had ever seen.  We enter, and I am carrying a bouquet of flowers for some reason or another, which my father had asked me to hold.  And this huge building had a smell I had never smelled before.  On the way to the hospital I remember asking, “Where did baby brother come from”?  I was answered, “From God in Heaven.”  As we walked and walked through the hospital my father said we were going to get on the elevator and go up.  I had never heard of an elevator nor been on one.  I am overwhelmed with all this new experience.  The way I put it together was that the elevator could go up to God, get my baby brother and bring him down to this hospital to my mother who was waiting for him.”  Sophie pointed out to her mother that her father, Sophie’s grandfather, must have been very excited about the birth of his son to have overlooked the opportunity on his daughter’s first elevator ride to explain all about elevators and how they work. For some reason this comment seemed to irritate Sophie’s mother.
    Sophie’s grandfather was a mechanical engineer. Sophie’s mother never grew tired of telling stories about all the interesting pulleys and gadgets he installed around her many childhood homes. Once he made a motorized fan with peacock feather blades. Sophie’s grandfather had given Sophie’s mother the money to build the beach house. 
    Sophie set her first load down on the kitchen bar. The kitchen was very small but the cathedral ceiling and the open-bar sink area looking out into the living room made the house seem bigger. Double French doors framed by two windows led out onto the screened in front porch which was the entire length of the house. Under the window to the left was a day bed where her mother liked to sleep. There was a round dining table which doubled as a games table where many a rowdy card game had been played in the past.
      Sophie looked over at the rock fireplace. She knew it was significant in the family dynamics or should she say family dysfunctionality. Her sister, Vicky, had explained it to her once. It was a unique fireplace--there was no other on the island. Mother identified with it. Since Daddy didn’t like the beach it was her house and had nothing to do with him. We all identified with it. Everyone knows the house by the fireplace and we use it as a landmark. It’s a landmark that is Mother, us, our house, and family. A family that excludes Daddy thought Sophie.
    Sophie’s paternal grandfather homesteaded land in Taylor County and raised his eleven children living off the land and selling vegetables in town for cash money. Sophie’s father had walked barefoot five miles to school and five miles back home. He was raised without electricity, he read at night by candlelight. His mother used flour sacks to make his sisters’ dresses. Sophie’s father didn’t use indoor plumbing until he joined the army in 1941. Sophie’s mother always laughed when she told people she had house-trained her husband.
    Sophie’s mother wasn’t from Taylor County. She had moved around a lot as a child. She had lived in North Carolina, Indiana, Virginia, and as a teenager in Indian River, Florida where her father also got land homesteading only to have it confiscated by the government to build Cape Canaveral or Cape Kennedy it was later named.
    Sophie went out to bring in another load. “It looks like a storm is brewing,” her mother commented. “Yeah,” answered Sophie. “I saw a red sky this morning.” Sophie looked up as she put her hands on the straps of another load. The sky was a swirl of scarlet, pink, orange, and lavender. The sun was shining through a layered wall of silvery clouds that looked like billowy curtains. Shining down to earth were slanted rays of sun like a heavenly portico. “Yes, send me help,” Sophie thought to herself, “and patience to make it through this week with my mother. And please, help me to bite my tongue.” Sophie was always saying things she regretted and she didn’t want to do that this week with her mother. 
    After Sophie stashed all her clothes and toiletries away she put clean sheets on the bottom bunk of the triple bunk beds her brother-in-law, Terry, had built. Later, she would arrange her belongings in some obsessive grand design meant to fit all reason and the meaning of life but for now she was going to ignore the urge to be organized. The beach meant getting a new lease on life. It was something about the changing tides, the smell, and the stark furnishings that inspired Sophie to try to make new beginnings for herself. She went onto the front porch to sit. Behind her chair was a window looking into the bedroom she was sleeping in. On either side of the window were two rocking chairs. The rockers faced the water which was about an eighth of a mile away. On the left of the house was Lewis’ house and on the right side was the hard top road.
    Sophie looked out to the water. There was no beach. The Taylor County coastline was on a shelf. At low tide a person could walk out 20 miles and never reach waist high water. You had to wear shoes to walk in the water. The bottom was the most disgusting squishy mud imaginable. Most people couldn’t stand it. Terry wouldn’t get in the water. He said it was full of sewage. That was debatable. Terry wasn’t raised in Taylor County. He liked the beach for some of the same reasons Sophie and her mom liked the beach. It was the atmosphere and the let loose attitude one assumed at the beach that was so much fun.
    Sophie began thinking about her first memory. She was two and a half years old and had been loaded into the car. She could sense the feeling of anticipation but even at that age she knew she didn’t have to think about it. Change is exciting but with all change there is anxiety. Leaving behind the known going into the unknown creates concerns. Of course, she didn’t feel concern or even excitement for that matter. At the age of two and a half going to the supermarket, or to church was the same routine for her as this move her parents were making to a new city, to a new house, to a new life, which was, by the way, her father told her later, when she was a teenager, the reason for her parents’ divorce. Maybe that’s why it was her first memory. She remembered crawling next to the back window. She had a bird’s eye view of her family and she kept an eye on her mother who set the tone for all family life, and most importantly, her life.
    “From the lack of cars it doesn’t look like many people are here”. Sophie jumped at the sound of her mother’s voice. She was always startled by the appearance of people when she was in a place by herself in her thoughts. Sophie’s mother sat in the rocker next to Sophie. Sophie moved to the swing and started swinging herself wildly. “I see Susan and Drexel over there,” Sophie said referring to the retired couple who had a house across the grated road, over to the left, in front of their house. “The wind is picking up a little,” remarked Sophie’s mom. Looking over at the canal Sophie said, “it’s high tide. What do you want to eat?”  “Let’s make hamburgers,” suggested her mother.
    After eating and cleaning up the kitchen it was dark. The beach house had no TV. “I’m going to bed,” announced Sophie. After she washed her face, brushed her teeth and put on her pajamas she got in to bed. She switched on the reading lamp attached to the wooden frame of the lower bunk. She began reading but soon she turned off the light. She could hear her mother softly snoring on the day bed outside her bedroom door and the rhythmic sound of falling rain on the roof of Lewis’ outdoor aluminum storage shed.
    The blinding flash of lightning and the crash of thunder made Sophie cry out, “What was that? It sounded like an explosion”. Sophie’s mother got up. The electricity was out. Sophie past her mother and lit a candle with a match from the emergency supplies in the drawer by the sink. Another crash of thunder made Sophie jump. The French doors blew open blowing out the candle’s flame. “Listen to the rain. It sounds like bullets hitting the roof,” Sophie said as she went closer to her mother. “Look at the water,” her mother whispered. A wooden board from the deck of someone’s house hit a section of the front porch screen ripping it out of its frame. There was enough light from the moon to see that the water, the gulf, had risen and was slowly coming across the grated road. The back yard, where the car was parked, was lower than the front yard. The family had always meant to have it filled in with dirt but had never done it. The sound of the wind was frightening. Sophie closed the French doors but they blew open again with a gust of wind nearly knocking her down. “Do you think we should head to town?” Sophie asked her mother. “Yes, I do. Let’s go,” her mother said decisively. Sophie felt her way to her sweatshirt which was still in her bag. She pulled a pair of sweat pants over her pajama bottoms and slipped her feet in to some crocks she had left beside her bed as she heard the unbelievable sound of the aluminum shed coming apart and banging against the ground as its pieces rolled through the side yard.
When Sophie and her mother stepped out the back door they realized it was too dangerous to get to the car much less drive anywhere. All sorts of debris, tree limbs, boards, pieces of metal from peoples’ roofs were flying everywhere. Already the water was lapping under the back deck.  Their clothes were literally soaked with rain from the tiny moment they had spent surveying the scene from the back door. It was as if the events taking place were being fast forwarded so much was happening at once. When they stepped back through the kitchen they could feel the salt water seeping into their shoes and the slippery silt on the bottoms of their feet. All of the front porch screens had ripped and were flapping in the wind. Debris had blown in and was covering the floor and furniture. Leaves, seaweed, pieces of clothing, branches, wood, boards and a dead bird were visible inside the house as the stroboscopic lightning lit up the room like a huge flash from a monster camera. It was the noise that was so horrendous. Like being in the middle of a horrific battle Sophie could feel the impact of the sounds pressing against her. There was the howling and whistling of the wind, there were bangs and crashes as objects collided, there were crunches as wood split and the rhythmic poundings of objects still held in place by a thread whacking other objects. Sophie saw that Drexel’s Volkswagen Beetle had rolled against the porch. The glass of the French doors and the windows on either side had long given out to the debris flying into them. A part of the roof gave away from the bathroom. A ten foot palm tree slammed into the porch frame like a ball player swinging a baseball bat. It was an earthquake, hurricane, and a tornado happening simultaneously. All this occurred within fifteen minutes since the candle Sophie lit had blown out. By the time they made it to the bunk beds the water was up to their calves and lapping at the bottom bunk. They climbed to the top bunk and covered their heads with one pillow each to avoid being hit in the head with debris, or to protect their heads in case the roof caved in or the bunk bed fell apart. Within twenty minutes the water was up to the second bunk. By now the power of the wind and the gushing water had knocked down the kitchen outside wall and most of the inside porch wall with sections of the roof falling in with them. There was so much noise it felt like someone was firing a million firecrackers inside Sophie’s head. After twenty more minutes the water saturated their top bunk mattress. The wind began to die down. It was so dark it was as if the moon had been blown out of the solar system.
    It is hard for Sophie to recall the rest of the night. Maybe not remembering was her mind’s way of coping with the tragedy. The rain and wind eased up gradually and finally stopped. There was an odd, eerie, creepiness about the silence. Sophie and her mother were too frightened to leave the top bunk. From the shelf that was beside the top bunk bed they took several wool blankets and wrapped them around themselves. They remained like that throughout the night observing the debris floating past them until just before dawn when the water inside the house had receded to about a foot high.
    Everything in the house was destroyed. Only the rock chimney, the hearth, the main stud wall of the house and the set of triple bunk beds remained. If Terry hadn’t built the bunk beds right into the stud wall they wouldn’t have survived. Eleven people, including three children and a baby, died in their area in what was later named “The Storm of the Century”.  Trucks and cars were carried more than one half mile inland by the wind and water. The tree tops one half mile away from that part of the coastline were littered with all kinds of debris including boats, thousands of boards, doors, window frames, clothing, furniture and even refrigerators and freezers. Of the thirty-eight houses on Sea Gulf Beach only three remained standing through the storm. It looked like an atomic bomb had hit. It seemed a tsunami had struck because the water receded back into the gulf almost as fast as it had risen on to land. After the Taylor County firemen and volunteer rescue workers helped Sophie, her mom, Drexel and Susan into a fire truck Sophie’s mom said, “Thank goodness for the triple bunk beds”. Sophie thought about the red sky she had seen the morning before.