To the casual eye, the island does not seem to have changed much over the past decade. The tide still comes in and goes out. High tide 9:29 p.m. Low tide 7:47 a.m. Seas 3 to 5 feet and choppy in protected inlets. Winds from the northeast at 20 miles an hour. High of 60, low of 42. Overcast. Sunrise 6:08 a.m. Sunset 4:56 p.m. Full moon. Moonrise 2:41 p.m. Moonset 3:28 a.m. Strong high-pressure system moving slowly east.
Then there are the works of man, which have to be puffed. Highway 98, billed as the Miracle Mile along the Emerald Coast, is still lined by shops, restaurants, and old beach houses swamped by dubious development. A hundred feet on each side and you`re back in the unchanged terrain of the Southern yeomanry, now augmented by immigrants of various hues, and all sustained by the schools of tourists and retirees that float past their nets. It`s a very American combination of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O`Connor and Amy Tan.
The shoreline is full of enterprise and movement, yet the eye always turns to the expanse of sea. The waves still soothe and rouse.
A perfectly straight line of seagulls comes skimming across the water`s crest, then rises in a swirl, and is again the same straight line. How do they do that?
Monarch butterflies keep arriving straight in from the Gulf without papers.
The sugar sand on the beach is so tightly packed it squeals when you walk on it.
The sandpipers scurry across the beach like commuters with an appointment downtown, lacking only tiny attache cases.
A lone girl down the beach wades out to feed the gulls, exercising her dominion over the birds of the air.
The boy is eager to get out and hunt up a Sunday New York Times. We already have several unread ones we`ve brought along. On vacation it becomes clearer that news is news, old or new. The stories stay the same, only the names change.
This Sunday they`ve blocked off part of Highway 30. Intermittent cyclists come spinning past in some kind of race. The object apparently is to rack up the most miles but not go anywhere. Something like the news business, or a political campaign.
At the convenience store down the road, the news racks overflow with speculation about what the next president will be like-FDR? Jimmy Carter?
Howdy Doody?
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How long before even the chattering classes find the new president-pardon the thought-a bore? Three months? Six months? It may be a matter of weeks, considering the current velocity of American politics and style. These days some of us need two, three cups of coffee to work up enough interest to write another one of those empty pieces of speculation with a knowing sound.
The questions keep being posed: Will Canute command the waves to stop or only roll more slowly? What spirits will he call from the vasty deep? And in how many deeply significant ways will they not come? There seem to be just enough such questions to fill every edition, every news segment. They keep breaking like the waves, except, unlike the waves, they are not individuated, unique, perfect. There is a name in the trade for such articles: thumbsuckers. I won`t mind if the president-elect turns out to be a bore. It`ll be a good sign for the system. The country hasn`t been able to afford a bore in the White House since Calvin Coolidge. Just as long as he isn`t a disingenuous bore. Surely he`s learned better by now.
A couple of years ago, before the president-elect became the president-elect, we ran into him at a Chinese restaurant. He was with his family, the place was closing, and he did not seem interested in convincing anybody of anything. There was nothing ex officio about him. As usual when he is with his daughter on other than ceremonial occasions, he seemed fully human. We talked about her homework. So do we gain whatever significance we have through others, and ultimately through the Other.
Someone has left behind a copy of Hemingway`s Nick Adams stories in the place we`re staying. I had forgotten how good they were. They make the later novels sound like parodies, like entries in a Bad Hemingway contest. ”Of the place where he had been a boy he had written well enough,” the Dying Writer pronounces in a later short story. As well as he ever would and probably better. So do we usually fail to notice what is best. But there are other times. Grace happens.