Yesterday, Valentine’s Day, we said good-bye to our home dock at the St. Petersburg Municipal Marina. We won’t return.
Last night we anchored where Tampa Bay meets the Manatee River. This morning I took a long last look across the Bay to Pinellas County, our home for the past eighteen years. That’s longer than I’ve lived anywhere. I hated it when we arrived in 2005. Now, I have tears in my eyes.
Early this morning we dinghied Looper ashore for a walk through Emerson Point Preserve, a birding sanctuary and home to the Portavant Mound. Portavant is one of many indigenous temple mounds in Florida. Looper yanked his leash impatiently, not buying our explanation of leash laws and nesting sites.
We hiked around the temple mound. I wondered about the Safety Harbor people who built it and the archaeologists who can read history through middens shards. By 900 AD, the Safety Harbor culture displaced the Manasota, who’d been there for 1400 years. The mound also holds Caloosahatchee and other Mississippian artifacts. By the end of the 18th century, these cultures were almost a thing of the past.
Now, Emerson Point is a bird sanctuary — without a whole lot of birds. I imagine Florida’s flocks and rookeries before Europeans arrived with their thirst for gold, conquest, and Christian converts.
Back at the beach, we startled Eastern Willets foraging in the shallows. I caught one on camera as it lifted its graceful black-and-white wings. Its long legs stretched out as it flapped and splashed into the morning.
The National Audubon Society says when a willet stands on the beach it “is simply a large plain shorebird; but its identity is obvious as soon as it spreads its wings.”
This seems a fitting description of Pete, Looper, and me as we weigh anchor and head south toward Fort Myers, the Caloosahatchee River, and the Okeechobee Waterway that will carry us to the East Coast. We, too, are large and plain on land, but when we spread our wings – or a wake astern – we seem to find our best selves.
Irish Hurricane 