You’re never too old to feel like an idiot.
“I’ll grab the oars,” I call to Jono as I head back to his pickup truck.
“Oars go in oar locks,” Jono points out, “Those are paddles.”
Fuck me. I hate it when I say stupid shit. I grab the paddles and make my way back down the sandy incline to the river. It’s the color of sun tea, gently drifting to the left. I kick off my flip-flops and scuttle in, ankle-deep. The Hillsborough River is chilly, but not unbearable. Jono and I launch the canoe, he at the stern and I at the..um…bow? Helm? Front? Shit. Whatever.
Just an hour or so earlier transpired a brief sorting of good paddlers and bad paddlers, nature neophytes and Jack Hannahs. I was paired with Jono Miller, a current tour de force in the race for one of Sarasota County’s vacant Commission seats. I shared a class with Jono last semester and am fortunate enough to share another with him now. He is mildly cantankerous, but well spoken and knowledgeable, a sort of Renaissance man of all things Florida and long-time proponent of the preservation of the Myakka River. The more I learn of him, the more I like him. Unfortunately, it seems the more Jono learns of me, the further his feelings careen in the opposite direction. My personality is akin to Compari: either you like it or you don’t. Sadly, for my desiccated comedy career, most folks fall into the latter classification.
Back on the river, our fearless leader, Professor Ahab, instructs us to run sweeper. He charges Jono Audubon and the Freckled Land Porpoise with the clean up of any capsized revelers and their jetsam. The paddle strikes on the sides of the aluminum crafts sound like sleepy cereal spoons playing gallon milk jugs during a morning repast. This glaring evidence of a lack of coordination that afflicts the majority of the contenders all but ensures our job security.
After a brief circling in the launch area, we head upriver. The current is so subtle we needn’t paddle much to maintain an easy pace. Jono, well read in local flora and fauna, gestures to an amalgamation of plants on the water’s surface. They begin from the banks, bound to the bottom by long tethers, and spread out into the river.
“Hydrocotyle umbellate,” he gushes, enthusiastically.
What I curse in my lawn as dollar weeds, Jono has both reverence and a fancy name for.
As we continue, he points out snowy egrets, blue herons, limpkins and anhinga, live oak, cabbage palms, and bromeliads, to name a few. Learning has never been so much fun.
We approach our first dinosaur – an alligator that stretches eight or so feet. He saunters into the tannic river from the bank on our left, leaving exposed only the ridges of his back, eyes, and snout. Our pace matches his. The combined angles force an inevitable 90-degree intercept. As we near the beast, he fills his ballasts and quietly slips beneath the surface, vanishing below us never to be seen again.
“Its total body length…in feet,” Jono asserts, “is equal to the distance, in inches, from its eyes to its nose.”
“So he’s about eight feet?” I ask.
“I don’t know. That’s not my strong suit,” he mutters.
Satisfied with my uncanny ability to perceive precise measurements from a distance, we paddle on.
I spot a group of turtles playing musical chairs on an angled log that quietly juts from the river’s maw. My cohort tickles my senses with a rather ghetto fabulous method of ensnaring turtles. Evidently, 9 out of 10 turtles who sit on logs prefer those of the gently angled persuasion. If one submerges a shopping cart just beneath the surface of the water, beyond the precipice of the high end, fleeing specimens will vault off, only to be detained by this contraband grocery hauler. A crafty vagabond need only return with a burlap bag, firewood, and some drawn butter. Thrill of the hunt be damned.
The group ahead turns back downriver, eschewing the original route for an offshoot that branches off and returns like the handle of a teacup. Over-harvested cypresses, knees like stalagmites, long gave way to moss-draped oaks, which cover this pleasant diversion like a lazy canopy road. The shade gives us a temporary but welcome stay from the probing hot sun. We soon breach the awning, reentering both the watchful eye of the sun and the tug of the river’s flow. As labor free as the paddle was upstream, the trek down is even easier. We soon pass our point of entry and come upon the Tampa Bypass Canal, a lock for the diversion of potential floodwaters.
The next point of interest on our schedule is, for better or worse, the Interstate 75 overpass. One can nearly taste its acrid funk in the vitriol-laced commentary of some in attendance. Though enough headroom exists for Shaquille O’Neil to do jumping jacks, the floating sugar hippies recoil in horror, ducking as they pass under it. What makes this beast such the whipping boy? Is it the gray, concrete pilings? Or, perhaps, the crudely-scrawled evidence of one of the nation’s worst education systems? In contrast with a rustic, covered bridge or the dignified stance of the Sunshine Skyway, this overpass seems to possess the romantic qualities of the Berlin Wall. For the sake of argument, I choose to see it through another lens. With well-worn paths to the banks, it appears that many folks take the time to pull off the interstate for a breather and to, perhaps, drop a line in. The underbelly of the overpass hosts graffiti extolling love – the cave paintings of a new generation. Randomly strewn garbage abounds. Bottles and cans, just clap your hands. This is what Beck was talking about. I am where it’s at and “it’s” where I-75 intersects with the Hillsborough River. What’s the difference between a pile of chicken wing bones and beer cans and a Native American ceremonial shell midden? I am not a proponent of litter. I merely question the parameters with which we seek to classify such matters.
As we progress, the current picks up a bit. We spot a Cormorant. The river twists and turns. The gap narrows. At this point, Jono and I tacitly agree to forfeit our thankless and tiresome roles as rear guardians. We discuss potential thesis topics. Jono is all but decided on a dissertation of the cabbage palm. We know little about this beautiful and tasty tree, he tells me. It eventually sheds the vertically angled, triangular scoops that adorn its trunk throughout early life in lieu of a cleaner, smoother appearance. No one knows why. It’s kind of like George Clooney with the hockey hair when he played Booker in Roseanne. He grew up, cut his hair, and, voila, success. We spot a fallen specimen that has managed to continue growing from a prone position; its top returns vertical, an old man’s pipe protruding from the water. The section beneath its moppy dreadlocks holds in its core what Loren “Totch” Brown regards as “swamp cabbage”. Unlike most plants, however, once we harvest the bounty of the cabbage palm, this majestic creature dies.
A gasp erupts from a boat up ahead. It must be a big one. We round a tight left turn. On the right-hand bank lies a 10-12 foot gator – the biggest I’ve ever seen outside of captivity. There is something quite different in the physical proportions of alligators that exceed ten feet. They no longer retain a sleek look. Instead of the more slender, tapered form of their smaller brethren, their heads take on a potato-like, bulbous quality. Their bellies distend from decades of subsisting on meals of opportunity. Luckily, for all involved, this big fellow opts to hold his post in the sun.
The rush of lasting an encounter with a surviving member of the Cretaceous Period barely wanes when our one-lane road opens wide. I can only describe this aperture as Disney-like in its colossal scale. Like walking to the edge of a cliff and surrendering to the vast unknown below, this was the inverted, Bizzarro Superman translation. Flanked by scores of whispering pine skyscrapers, the river broadens fifty fold with the odd, Volkswagen-sized flat brush island peppered about. The upper reaches of the trees teem with well-dressed vultures that look on as the Thanksgiving Day Macy’s Parade of pink humans spoils by.
We take this opportunity to hold position in anticipation of the rest of the group, which has fallen back quite a bit. Professor Ahab recounts an ill-thought decision on a previous voyage to become one with nature through the ceremonial addition of river water to his scotch. I smile to myself, thinking of how many times I have let my better judgment scream past my deaf ears. How imprudent we can be in our quest for symbiosis with our surroundings.
