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 19th
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 16thc. 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 20th 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 19th 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.
[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!
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