What The Shell, Let's Go to Sanibel - Laskins in Florida, April 2019

In which the vacationing Laskins fly south like birds and also like everyone else in Massachusetts in April, eat a bunch of grouper sandwiches, and nearly become osprey lunch during an epic kayak tour.  Read on . . . 

What The Shell: Arrival

I’ve said it before I’ll say it again:  there’s no place busier than Logan Airport on an early morning during April school vacation week.  Is everyone going somewhere?  Yes, and we Laskins are getting in the spirit by flying cheapo Spirit Airlines which does not, in fact, live down to the hype.  It’s been a long frozen winter and it turns out from Instagram and Facebook that we are not the only family we know who are seeking relief in the Sunshine State this week. 

If you’ve been there you know that the feeling when you step out of the airport in a subtropical zone – all warm and deliciously damp and fecund-smelling – is really sublime.  It is like walking into the hot tub room at the gym except it is outside and sunny and there are birds and flowers and white cars everywhere.

After much uncharacteristic backing and forthing, and downright late planning, we ended up choosing to spend our few days of April break on Sanibel Island, just off the coast of southwestern Florida.[1]  Partly motivated by an enthusiastic endorsement from my friend Kristy who’s been coming down here with her family for ages, and also by Bill’s memory of bringing Peter down when he was three (when I was on that Harvard alumni cruise), and maybe just by a direct flight and relative lack of effort required to plan, here we are. 

But is there any here here?  This is the question that haunts some of us.  What is the essence of Sanibel, what is its defining feature, beyond admittedly lovely long beaches and an excess of Lily Pulitzer?  Stay tuned. 

Our wee cot-tahge at Castaways Cottages is completely devoid of sand when we arrive, but that soon ends.  It’s also predictably frigid as is everything air-conditioned here and it is situated in a small resort right at the very tip of Sanibel island, straddling the not-as-busy-as-we-expected road:  Gulf of Mexico on one side, marina and Pine Island Sound (more on THAT later) on the other.  We’re told this is one of the great shelling beaches on the island, which is generally known as a shelling mecca, so we are expecting jewels of the sea to litter the beach at every turn.  We’ll find out about that, but what we really like is that it is a corner of the island, which sets up some interesting actions and wave currents, and there are some trees in back under which you can take cover from the blazing sun.  We hear the sunsets will be spectacular and the water is shockingly warm. 

While our cottage is perfectly OK, it is small, and one bathroom with two teenagers makes for endless “are you done yet” and damp towels everywhere.  I don’t know how anyone gets anything dry here. 

Kristy and Gil pop over for a drink after dinner to welcome us to the island, and it is very nice to see old friends, even if in our tiny frozen hut.

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[1] I know, you’re dying to know:  why didn’t we go somewhere exotic for a whole week like we usually do?  Because Izzy’s French class had a jam-packed trip to Québec over the first weekend.  We basically dragged her off that bus and on to the plane for this.  Out of the poutine pan and into the fire. 

What The Shell, Day 2

Things I do not love about Sanibel:

The food.

It takes forever to get anywhere and you have to take the same damn road behind all these slow old Florida drivers in their white cars.

It is white white white.  (More on that later.)

One of the big activities to do here is kayak around the Sound side of the island.  There are lots of mangrove swamps and islands, and you might see manatees and dolphins and other jumping fish and you will definitely see about a billion birds.  If you follow Kristy’s advice, and ask the old guy at the marina who will confirm it, you will want to find the little water path into the mangrove swamp on Buck Key, where even more natural delights await.  But you shouldn’t follow Kristy’s advice when she gives it to you the night you arrive and forgets that you are staying at the place on Sanibel not the place on Captiva because it turns out to be like a five-mile kayak, the second half of which is against the wind in the Sound and during which you are in some danger of being swamped or swept back into the mangroves and it takes about two hours and you are so pissed at your husband for blithely following this advice that when he says “I have three things to say” you respond with “You are not allowed to say anything unless it is how to find a faster way back.” And he shuts the heck up.

At one point during this odyssey three osprey started flying along with us (or as Peter noted, just holding still in the air because the wind was that strong).  It was unclear if they were concerned about us, or were waiting for us to die so they could pick us up like giant fish and take us back to their nests to feed their young.

My boat-mate Izzy, who was strong and intrepid, suggested that we sing songs to make the time go and the work easier, and so we went with the old Civil War lineup – Goober Peas, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Yellow Rose of Texas, and I’m a Good Old Rebel.  Why didn’t you sing some camp songs, said Peter?  The only one I could think of was the Titanic song, she replied, and I didn’t think that was appropriate.

But we survived and felt that our efforts permitted us to eat a vast quantity of pretty good fried chicken at the Pecking Order.  And now it is a story.

Needless to say, that afternoon was spent sklathing around on the beach.  But later we went over to the Gertsens’ place in the correctly-named Chateaux Sur Mer neighborhood (we scholars of French were pleased with the proper pluralization and correct use of accents in street names like Rue Hélène).  There we hung out with the senior Gertsens (who are looking pretty great), the soon-to-be-at-Harvard Emma, and Kristy and Gil, and were treated quite nicely to cocktails and snacks and alligator babies and a really lovely sunset on the beach near their house.  Not to mention the driving of their 25 year-old golf cart which might be the highlight of Izzy’s trip.  Also, Kristy’s mom Carol gives us lots of good ideas for things to do, that will surely show us what is here, here.

The day ends on a high note as we find a bar with hockey on TV and we don’t feel quite so far away from home. 

What The Shell, Day 3

If you tune in to the oldies station around here, Florida native Tom Petty inevitably shows up and so becomes the radio soundtrack of this trip.  Something tells me we aren’t in New Mexico anymore.[1]

We took the kayak kruise yesterday because today has a forecast of storms (thought we’d beat the wind – hahahahahaha) and indeed, on my early walk on the beach, the wind is strong and the STORM TEAM 2 truck is parked nearby, with a reporter set up to do a morning live spot on a seriously eroding section of beach right near us.  It’s hot and humid and windy and feels like before a hurricane.  And my phone keeps lighting up with dire NOAA warnings about rip tides and waterspouts and severe storms and GET INSIDE NOW. 

So we head out on the Carol Gertsen tour.  Show us what ya got, Sanibel!

This might be the moment to recall Peter’s outburst last year in Los Angeles,[2] that all of our vacations are exactly the same.  We either ski and eat or go to a beachy area or go to a city, and we go to a lot of museums and we eat a lot of local food and at some point all of us except Bill get grumpy about going to all those museums and I get anxious that I am making everyone else travel all over tarnation for what may or may not be a good meal but that Bill thinks might be a bit much and Private Hokey Pokey just wants to read her book or see what’s on Instagram and Peter observes it all from his great height with a combination of barely-suppressed irritation and soon-I-will-be-away-from-this-but-I-guess-they’re-all-I’ve-got eye rolling.[3]

True to form, we’ve heard there’s an interesting cemetery on Captiva.  Oh good, says Bill, you know cemeteries are my happy place. 

Off we go, with the Payroll Officer and I noting in unison, as we navigate this remarkably narrow island that “if we just go straight we’ll end up at the main drag” and the realization breaking afresh on our children that we are old people and bear an alarming similarity to those Geico ads about becoming your parents.  On neighboring Captiva island there is a charming simple chapel and a cemetery with a tragic origin story about a girl who so loved the spot that the main homesteader on the island sold it to her for a gold coin that her grandparents gave her.  Then she stepped on a rusty nail, and became the first inhabitant of the cemetery and now her grave is a tear-jerker of little lambs and lots of seashells left in remembrance.  It is a lovely, tranquil spot, but we wonder how there are burials there since we understand that cemeteries in low-lying areas usually have those crypts like in New Orleans. 

There aren’t any graves older than very late 19^th c. there, and that’s because the first settlers to these islands came in the 1880s.  They’d had fishing camps here before that but otherwise the place had been unpopulated – since the Calusa, who’d only been there for about a thousand years (literally) were wiped out in the 16^thc. when the Euros arrived with their germs and guns and slave irons and that, as they say, was that for about 1,000 years of culture and life in the area. 

Once you’ve sat with that for a while we’ll get back to the story.

I can’t say much about Captiva, because that was our sole jaunt over there.  But we did learn about local settlement at the delightful Sanibel Historical Museum and Village which was the next stop on the rainy-day activity tour.  While this started as a museum in one of the few remaining older houses on the island, someone had the brilliant idea to collect some of the older structures, and bring them together into one spot, to re-create the early years of modern Sanibel civilization.  You start by watching a completely bizarre video in which this girl tries for an Anne-of-Green-Gables vibe to tell you about early 20^th c. Sanibel while prancing around some buildings.  Eventually she goes in one (literally SKIPPING, and she’s like, 20 years old) and converses in a totally stilted manner with one of the remaining Bailey sons, which is interesting but we’re still wondering about the absurdist moment when Mr. Bailey is asked if he remembers Aunt Deedee and he says NO and looks into the camera in a meaningful way and then there are images of chickens running about.

None of us really know how to respond to that. 

Also, Anne and Old Man Bailey keep referring to some movie called Sandbars to Sanibel which turns out to be a lite homemade affair about life and love and a mysterious letter, set in the 1920s.  I don’t think we’ll be seeing it on Netflix anytime soon. 

But here’s the actual story of Sanibel.  Back in the late 19^th c. the island was apparently brilliant for agriculture, so some folks who had been just fishing around the area came to farm, and the Baileys built a packing house, and a company-style store meaning that if you couldn’t pay your bill you signed over a few acres to the OG Old Man Bailey (he was also the JOP and so pretty much ran that place).  Supporting agriculture and fishing camps did well, until the Hurricane of 1926.  That storm pretty much swamped this flat island so the soil was destroyed, lots of buildings were too, and according to one docent, after that there wasn’t much going on here for a while.  That would be about the next three decades.

The other turning point in the island’s development was the mainland’s desire to develop Sanibel into a massive resort for 90,000 people, and the locals’ efforts to stop this.  While the Baileys and their allies didn’t prevent the building of the causeway in the early 1960s (they wanted access to remain by ferry), they get themselves incorporated as a city and were able to pass all kinds of ordnances to prevent high-rise development in the early 1970s.  And, critically, they got about two-thirds of the island to be protected as nature preserves.  So it became a kind of restrained tourist economy, although seems to be doing pretty well today.    

Anyway, as you go around the buildings at the museum, you learn about pre-hurricane and pre-causeway life and post-hurricane and post-development life.  But you might be forgiven for thinking after that video that you are only going to learn about white life on the island, and while it remains really very white now, you wonder about that if you have thought about the South at all ever for a nanosecond. 

Guess what – you do!  It feels a little patronizing in its obviousness, and they don’t have a lot to work with, but credit for effort, you know?  Here’s the story.  When the land was being developed for agriculture (pre-hurricane), black families moved to the island to sharecrop.  But since the storm destroyed agriculture, which was the only economy on the island, now what do you do?  Move away, ergo no communities of color.  About three African-American families stayed however, and their lives are well-documented in a small exhibit in the restored generator house.  There was segregation, of course, even for such a tiny minority - the school was known as the school for white children, and you learn that while all teenagers on the island took the ferry to Fort Myers for high school, the black kids had to take the later one because the white kids got to go early.  That said, perhaps the small size of the community made integration easier, as the town fathers, following the lead of the Episcopal Church, which integrated in the early 60s, dropped “white” from the membership rules of the community land owners association shortly thereafter.  You can’t help but wonder what it would have been like if that hurricane hadn’t had the impact it did.  Would the long arm of agriculture and sharecropping have made for a more diverse society eventually?  But would then the civil rights movement have come to the island with more force in the 1960s?  Would we see more people of color today?  We’ll not know the answers there but it is interesting to think about.  

At any rate, the buildings in the museum are interesting, and well-preserved.  We particularly adore the kit-house, ordered from Sears Roebuck and arriving in 30,000 parts including electric lamps – except since no one on the island had electricity they didn’t know how to install sconces and so did them upside down.  The store is filled with 1920s vintage products including cereals like Kellog’s Krumbles, and the school for white children has the requisite rows of desks that we pose the children in.

The last building was the original museum, and is the oldest house on the Island.  It is made of Florida pine and the docent has us pick up a length of that wood, to see how heavy it is.  Why?  Because it is filled with resin, which over time makes it incredibly hard and durable and water- and bug-resistant, and therefore an excellent building material for southwest Florida.  But don’t light a match nearby because of the above-noted resin and that’s why we don’t build so many houses out of Florida pine anymore.

This is a fun museum and we are particularly charmed by the docents.  Several of the buildings have quite knowledgeable older folks placed therein, who will give you a whole lecture on the building and its relationship to the village and the families.  They really know their stuff!  And they are delightful and very grateful to see people on this rainy quiet day.  “Do you want to hear the whole spiel or do you just want to look around?” asks the gent in Bailey’s Store, hopefully.  Oh, the spiel, of course.

One of the bands of the storm roars through while we are there.  Petey takes the opportunity to note, once again, that we do the same thing on every vacation – rainy day on the island, we go to a museum.  They even have a Fresnel lens here, although nowhere near as impressive as the one on Martha’s Vineyard.

Bill:  Shall we go to the shell museum after lunch?

Peter:  What the shell. Oh god, just put me out of my misery.

So yes, we doubled down and hit two museums today, checking out the far more popular Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum, which is kind of mobbed with families later in the afternoon as more downpours threaten.  The live animal demonstration emphasizes that mollusks are ANIMALS and their shells are parts of their bodies, so treat them with respect please!  And did you know that bivalve refers to the shell, not some watery propulsion system?  It means double-shelled, and serious conchologists know that in fact it is just one shell, attached by a hinge.  We all want to correct the otherwise very knowledgeable biologist who gives the talk because she says mull-usk not moll-usk and this drives us all slightly bats.  But she also patiently agrees with the four-year-old in front who wants everyone to know that fish can open their mouths, so cheers to you, Becca the Conchologist!

After a while this museum becomes overwhelming – there are SO MANY SHELLS – but they are pretty amazing and beautiful and of course, this being the shelling capital of Florida you are lured into thinking that you just might find a carrier shell or a left-handed Junonia while strolling along the beach.  But there are only two of the latter known to exist in the WHOLE WORLD, so joke’s on you.

Of particular note is a distinctly home-made looking exhibit about something called sea silk – a fabric that is spun out of filaments (byssus) secreted from the pen shell (pinna nobilis).  The shell itself looks like a mussel on steroids, which makes sense if you think about the beard on a mussel which helps it attach to rocks or other mussels – that’s where the byssus lives.  People comb the filaments out of the hairy bits, then spin them into fabric which apparently sparkles gold in the sunlight.  Needless to say, it takes an awful lot of pen shells and an infinite amount of patience to produce a tiny little bit of this stuff.  And while there are actually examples of byssus-garments from antiquity (it was big with kings), there are in fact some old ladies in Sardinia who are still doing this.  One old gal claims she is the ONLY one who does it anymore in the entire WORLD and got some people to build a museum about her but others think she just manufactured this story about being the only one left to promote herself.  The sea silk industry is pretty cutthroat!  The whole point of this little exhibit is that there are a lot of pen shells around here so a local person gave the making of sea silk a try a few years ago and you can see the result.  It is a small, rusty square that looks like a homemade potholder. 

Also at the National Shell Museum there are some spectacularly large shells (“Shell of the Show at the 1982 National Shell Show”), and sailor’s valentines (pretty pictures in boxes, all made out of shells but not, in fact made by sailors for their lady loves but by locals who SOLD them to sailors to take home – sorry to burst your romantic bubble there) and just a lot of cool-looking stuff that lives at the bottom of the sea in warmer waters than our own here in New England.

Should note that today we also checked out the lighthouse (tall) and ate some more grouper sandwiches and key lime pie.

Right, about the food.  We have been advised that you don’t come to Sanibel for the food, and we have confirmed this.  The upside:  you can get a grouper sandwich pretty much anywhere, anytime.  This isn’t a bad thing but unlike the Great Green Chili Cheeseburger Hunt of 2017 in Taos, or the Marionberry Crisp Caper in Oregon later that year, grouper sandwiches turn out to be remarkably the same everywhere so the Grouper Gambit gets old quickly.

You’d think, being an island, in the ocean, that there would be a lot of good local seafood, and you’d be right to an extent, because there sure is is all the grouper you can eat.  And it is always broiledfriedgrilledorblackened, best served on a bun in the ubiquitous sandwich.   I’m pretty sure you could have one for breakfast if you wanted. Petey says blackened is the best, and he’s not wrong, although Izzy goes for fried upon occasion.  You can get your grouper fancy in some places, which mostly just means the above methods sans bun.  But there is a suspicious amount of coconut involved in other seafood preparations here, and you know I steer clear of anything that involves the vile threads.

Now key lime pie on the other hand, which is also ubiquitous, is not quite so mono-flavoid so we are on that trail with more gusto.  Obviously we aren’t in the official Florida Keys but that doesn’t stop the locals from making some pretty good versions of this pale pie.  We have it everyplace they have it on the menu, but think the very first piece we ate, at a resto called the Sandbar, was the best.  Nicely tart and creamy, with some heft to the body, not too floofy but not too dense.  You can’t go wrong with a good piece of key lime pie. 

The big sportfish here is something called tarpon, which the fishermen love because it puts up a good fight and is big and silver and looks impressive – when you land a tarpon you know you’ve really conquered the sea.  But apparently they are full of bones and kind of smelly so you don’t want to eat them, thus it’s all catch and release. 

The storms roll through over the course of the day, and indeed they are pretty intense.  So much for the Sunshine State, mutters Petey, staring out into the deluge.

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[1] Recall that for some reason the Eagles accompany us everywhere in New Mexico.  And most other vacations that require any driving too but apparently everyone in our party thinks of it as a NM thing.

[2] See Tomorrowland, La-La-Land, and some Very Weird Sh*t:  Laskins in Los Angeles, April, 2018. 

[3] He’s right, of course.  This is exactly what we do and it appears that we could make one of those Progressive insurance ads about becoming our parents.  Joke’s on you, Petey, you’re next in line!