5/3/2025 Did You Hear That?

I slept deeply and well. Katie tucked herself between us until sometime before Pete got up. I pop my ear plugs out at 0815. He’s long done with coffee.

“You got up at 4,” I say, stretching. The breeze is still up.

“You didn’t hear that,” he says flatly, like I’m deaf. We have this conversation a lot. He hears things I don’t.

“Stern line,” he says, then “You didn’t hear that,” as though he didn’t hear me say, “No, I did not.”

He couldn’t sleep with the noise. He got up and added chafing gear, then different chafing gear. But the line is not chafing, it is straining – I can tell by the sound of it — from the wind and six-foot tide.

“Maybe double the line?” I say. He glares. Because he knows this so much better than I do. Ah, the life at sea. What doesn’t kill you…

*
It’s been 18 months since IH has seen the stars overhead. I’m glad to be out from under covered docks, great as they are in Florida sun and hurricanes.

Before bed and squeaking lines, Orion was splayed across the twilight, flanked as always by Aldebaran, Capella, Castor, Pollux, and Sirius: the bull, the charioteer, the twins, and the hunter’s dog. Nice breeze, no gnats. Waxing quarter moon.

The marina put us on the fuel dock starboard side to. We have a sun deck view of the docks and shore ramp: sight-seers, dock-walkers, Loopers, cruisers, day-trippers. An old guy playing an accordion sat in front of the closed marina office.

Celtic Thunder‘s music ran through my head.

All God’s creatures got a place in the choir
Some sing low and some sing higher
Some sing out loud from a telephone wire and
Some just clap their hands or paws or anything they got.

*

After breakfast we hit the trails with Katie and our new folding bikes. Great trails of asphalt, hard sand, and boardwalk where there’s tidal marsh, through maritime forests, past mansions, marshes, and beaches, and around shopping areas.

Pete says the waterside places with their wide, green lawns had bands, lights, and partiers last night when he walked Katie. The New Gilded Age on ground once owned by Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and J.P. Morgan.

You can get a room tonight at the Jekyll Island Club for $578, parking included. In case you’re invited to a party. Which we weren’t — and me with my new black skorts.

*

The forests are Spanish moss-hung live oak fairylands filled in with saw palmetto and interrupted by salt marsh, all of it populated by ghosts: Mississippians and Timucua, Spanish missionaries, French explorers, English landowners, African slaves, Stateless Pirates, Southern plantation owners, Irish immigrant workmen, Confederacy and Union soldiers, wealthy Americans, shrimpers, and boaters. 

Ghosts. Everyone reaches the end of the line, eventually.

We bike past ladies in pink studying phone maps as they mull the correct path. Retirees on rental bikes. Gen X-ers on electric bikes. Millennials on razors with kids. Dogs and squirrels. Gnats and the slow blackflies that plagued us yesterday with their painful bites.

Seagulls, terns, herons, songbirds, dolphins — and whatever it was they made to leap Tarpon-like ahead of IH’s bow as we crossed St. Andrew’s Sound.

Predators fishing the ebb. Shrimpers working their nets. Manatees grazing.

Fishermen in old tee shirts hang over Jekyll Creek from the fishing pier beyond IH’s bow.

All God’s Creatures.