Writers Read

SUNSET ZOMBIES....Dedicated to Dave Robertson, wherever he may be

(Note: This is a story from a larger story I wrote a few years ago.  Dave Robertson  hailed from Massachusetts and I met him in Periwinkle Park.  He was camping out of a small sedan at that time.  He had never spent time in Florida and fell in love with the state.  I saw him several times the following summer when I returned to Maine because Dave would come up to visit me.  Eventually he bought an old green van, stuck his old motorcycle into it and moved down to Florida.  I saw him the next winter.  He rented an apartment in Fort Myers.  The last time I saw him he had rented part of a house along a beautiful stretch of the Caloosahatchee River.  The photo at the end of this story that I now use on some business cards was taken at Blind Pass on the evening Dave invented the Sunset Zombies.  ENJOY!)

     One evening my friend Dave convinced me to hop on the back of his motorcyle and ride with him to watch the sunset at Blind Pass.  Dave always kept a small pair of binoculars with him in a little case he attached to his belt. Dave enjoyed looking at things through his binoculars.  He often offered them to me but I don't need to look at things up close the way he does.
     At Blind Pass Dave stood on the beach and looked through his little binoculars at the setting sun. I couldn't figure out why Dave needed to see the sun up close.  I have a difficult time looking at the setting sun.  I constantly fret about burning out my retinas.  Not Dave.  He stared directly at the setting sun for the longest time.
     "Yes," he said suddenly without taking his binoculars away from his eyes.  "You see them come out every evening at this time. The Sunset Zombies.  They don't come out all at once.  They are usually about forty feet apart but they always come.  The Sunset Zombies."
     I looked around.  I understood what Dave meant.  He had invented the perfect label for the people assembling on the beach near us to watch the sun melt into the sea. They were staggering.  Some had been drinking too much, others couldn't keep their footing in the sand and sometimes it was a combination of both. They looked like the zombies in old movies.
     Dave is a very tall man.  I feel vertically challenged whenever I am standing next to him.
      "Hey," I asked, peering up at him. He is so very tall.  "Tell me do you  think there are Sunrise Zombies?"
     "Yes," Dave answered immediately.
     "Really?" I asked.
     He lowered his binoculars, then looked down at me, staring seriously and directly into my eyes. For a long time he didn't say anything.  Eventually Dave spoke.
     "Yes," he said.  "Really.  They are over on the East Coast."
     Then Dave raised his  binoculars back up to his eyes and returned to staring at the setting sun.  He tried to keep a straight face but broke out into laughter when I did. 
     A few moments later the sun disappeared.  Now Dave looked at the horizon lit up with afterglow.
     "Watch," he said.  "Go ahead.  Look around.  The Sunset Zombies will disappear from the beach.  They go back to wherever it was that they came from.  They don't stay out very long.  See?  They are all leaving but they'll be back tomorrow night for sure."
     I looked around at the people staggering off the beach.  I asked Dave if he thought the Calusa watched sunsets.  He said they probably did.  We stayed a little longer and watched four young guys fooling around with surfboards braving the small waves in the afterglow.  They reminded me of a poster from an old surfing movie called The Endless Summer.  I pointed this out to Dave and he noticed the similarity immediately.  I wondered if the Calusa ever surfed or if it was strictly a Polynesian invention.
     So much destruction has occurrerd here in Florida during the past one hundred years.  The Calusa were here for 10,000 years.  I wondered how many Calusa lived here.  A census was taken of the Calusa by the first Spanish to discover them.  By using it I have determined there might haver been about 1,500,000 Calusa during their entire 10,000 years of occupation.
     Dave called about a year ago to tell me he had been  diagnosed with leukemia.  He said he was up in Tampa, going to a hospital there.  I tried calling him but never got through to him.  I haven't heard anything from him.  I watched a sunset at Blind Pass the other  night.  I thought about Dave.  It was a chilly evening.  Shivering I pulled on my sweatshirt and plodded along on the sand, my feet sinking into it.  I found a good spot to stand near some Sunset Zombies who held glasses of wine and were laughing.
     My foot kicked something.  I am always on the lookout for good shells.  I leaned over and looked for whatever it was that I had just kicked.  I saw something in the sand.  It was bright red.  I stooped over to pick it up.
     It was a child's tiny toy, a figurine made of red plastic.  I turned it over in my hand,  an Indian brave, posed dramatically, frozen in a positon with his feet spread apart and his knees bent.  In one hand he held a bow with two feathers.  His other arm is flexed and it looks as if he has just released an arrow.  He wears a loin cloth and fringed mocassins that go up to his knees.  His hair is very long and there are two feathers in it.  He has six pack abs.  On his back the word CHINA is stamped.
     I found a tiny spotted feather earlier that day.  It was on the ground near a picnic table where I had eaten some crappy fried fish sandwich.  I collect feathers and this one was unusual so I put it into the pocket of my jeans.  I decided to keep this red plastic Indian.  I stufffed him into my pocket right next to  the feather.  I didn't stay to watch the afterglow but staggered off the beach with the rest of the Sunset Zombies.

sights

Being Captured by the Incredible

There are moments here on this island where I am captured by the incredible.  Sometimes it can happen when I see a bird.  Here's an osprey that was perched over my head while I was biking along a trail at Bowman's Beach.  The osprey had no fear of me and I managed to capture an entire series of photographs.  I like how fierce he looks in this one.

Other times I am captured by flowers.  This beach access path is particularly beautiful in the late spring.  The path is like a portal to another world.  The flowers have no smell and the vines have thorns.

Happy Halloween

This man and his son were spooking the shorebirds yesterday at sunset.
I thought they looked like bats.

More Far Out

Shark Fishing

     I bumped into a young man on the bridge at Bowman's Beach who was casting a net to catch mullet for shark bait.  He has yet to learn respect for the shark.  He puts the whole mullet onto his hook and casts it far out into the water.

                     
Here are some photos from a book that I edited for a friend.  He had no respect for the shark as a young man. The name of the first photo is "Biting Back".  It shows my friend with a hammerhead shark. The second photo is of a bull shark that my friend and another young man caught. They would put mullet on a hook and then row the bait out into the surf past the second sandbar.  It seems that most shark fishing takes place at night.  I don't think shark sleep but are always awake and hunting.  These photos were taken in the early 1970s.  Back then sharks were caught, killed and their jaws taken for trophies. Nowadays guys who hunt for sharks release them.

These and a great many other photos of island life from forty years ago can be seen in the book I edited called ISLAND BOY, A LITTLE SANIBEL. The author is Johnny Rocco.  You can order a copy through the McIntosh Bookstore, Periwinkle Way, Sanibel, FL 33957.  My editor's notes are on the backcover.  It is an amusing read, not very long and again filled with great photographs from the not too distant past.

It takes skill to throw one of these casting nets and it makes for a nice sunset photo!

                     

BOO!

    Ghost Crab

Far Out

Spooky Mysterious Graves

    In the small cemetery near Algiers there are spooky mysterious graves. One is a child named Baby Wiles who died in  1967. Near the grave of Rebecca L. Turner who died in 1914 at the age of 32, is a headstone that has become so worn it is no longer legible.  Perhaps Turner Beach is named after Rebecca. There is the grave of an unknown male found near the lighthouse in 1961.  Was this a drowning accident and his body washed ashore? Next to him is Gloria Johnson whose grave bears only her name and is missing dates.  Perhaps she didn't want anyone to know her true age!

Former Islanders

     For years whenever I pedaled between Casa Ybel and Algiers, I wondered about the identities of the souls eternally at rest in the small island cemetery. I made a diagram and took notes on the twelve graves. Betty Anholt's book The Sanibel Story provided most of the information I needed.


            

     One marker resembles a tree trunk engraved with the words "Woodman of the World" and "At Rest".  At the base is a small relief of a beautiful calla lily in bloom. This is the grave of Newton Rutland, born in 1892 and died in 1915.  Newton was the son of Irene and Othman Rutland.  Othman was the island's first lighthouse keeper. 

     The saddest grave to me is Yvette "Cookie" Redinger.  Born in 1951, Cookie lived only ten short years.  She had a heart defect that she never outgrew.  Her mother's name is unknown but she was thought to be Cuban. Her father, Joseph, is buried next to her.  He was a mail carrier.  He drowned in 1964, just three years after Cookie passed away and was 43 years old.

     The grave of William H. Reed indicates that he lived to be 91.  Like so many early homesteaders on Sanibel, Reed discovered the island while serving in the military as a Captain during the Civil War.  He hailed from Maine.  The Reed family included William's wife Lucy, two sons and one daughter.  Shortly after settling on Sanibel, tragedy struck when a son, Eugene Grant Reed, age 21, became hopelessly tangled in fishing paraphernalia and drowned in Tarpon Bay.  The family returned to Portland, Maine where William found work as a shoe salesman but eventually they all came back to Sanibel.  William became known as "Commodore" and socialized with a "roisterous Englishman" named Sam Ellis.  Sam lived in a rough house made of palmetto and spent much of his time drifting about on Tarpon Bay with a jug. According to a story in the Ft. Myers PRESS dated April 21, 1921 "Captain Reed dropped anchor at last and was buried in Penosbscot Bay, Maine."  Was Captain Reed's body shipped north to Penobscot Bay? Many old timers doubted that he was moved and his grave appears to be here in this family plot. For years a beautiful pink hibiscus grew between the graves of Eugene and his mother Lucy. 

                                

                                                            

Saturday Around the Fishing Pier

 Picture Perfect

 Fisherwoman

 

One That Didn't Get Away

 Breezing Up

Bird Brains Seen at Casa Ybel

After a Shower

Unsusually warm fall weather produces afternoon showers and some amazing sunsets.  This was one.  Scroll down please to see a larger version of the image.  I have been making photographs since childhood.  For many years I displayed my work at outdoor art shows and became involved in the "circuit".  I was a member of N.A. I. A. (National Association of Independent Artists) and local art organizations in Maine (Saco Bay Artists).  I won prizes for my photography including first place prizes in Bar Harbor Art in the Park, Wrentham Massachusetts Art Fair, second place at Ft. Myers Artfest and many purchase prizes including the Rangeley Maine Sidewalk Art Show.  When I was a typesetter for the York County Coast Star the newspaper published dining guides and hired me for the photography.  As a result the paper won a national first place prize for "Best Advertising Idea" based on the strength of my photographs.  According to one review my photographs of restaurants were "like going into a candy store and trying to decide which one."  Enjoy!

After a Shower

East End

Sunday at the Pass

Gator Guesstimate Contest

This is the first contest sponsored by the Window Wench. Email your guesstimate and only one guesstimate per person. The prize for the closest guesstimate is a free lunch at an island restaurant because we all know that here on Sanibel there are a great many free lunches. I saw this alligator under the bridge crossing to Bowman's Beach the morning of October 15. Beachgoers were astonished.  The gator swam under the bridge, stopped briefly to float around and then continued along to settle in the mangroves. So how big is this critter?  Although there are no points of reference, look closely at my photos. Shadows might be helpful clues. Multiply the number of inches from snout to eyes by ten to arrive at the length in feet.  Although big breeding alligators have been removed from Sanibel I look for ones that got away or have grown. Have fun!