No Mas was back at its familiar anchorage, out in the bay, a short boat ride to the marina or to my docks.
No sign of life aboard, though. On Saturday, I tried to hail Tomlinson via VHF radio. No reply. I stopped by in my skiff and banged on the sailboat’s hull. No answer.
Strange, because his little dinghy was tied off the stern, which meant that he was aboard. I could smell the cloying odor of incense and marijuana. I could hear the stereo playing the monotone Latin chants he always listens to when in a certain mood. Live at the same little marina with a person, and over the months and years you will come to know his quirks and react accordingly. Tomlinson wanted to be left alone-which suggested his voyage with the Verner twins had not gone well.
A couple of times that day, Ransom made vague references to Tomlinson and his whereabouts, before she finally said, “I like that Mr. Thomas, but he kind of a strange old hippie, ain’t he? He just go off and disappear, never say a word to me about where he gonna be.”
“You think he’s acting strange now?” I said to her. “Stick around.”
I listened to her tell me what I already knew-tomorrow the two of them were driving to the little bayside village of Mango, because, according to Tucker, he’d left something there for her to find.
If I knew Tuck-and I did-he’d try to bounce us all over Florida just for fun, which is why I wasn’t going to join the hunt until my work in the lab was done.
I listened to her say, “I look into that Mr. Thomas’s face and it like looking into the face of someone who were maybe an owl in a different life. Or one of them saints in an old painting like you see in church. He act so young, but his eyes, man, they old, real old, and filled with sadness. What the problem with that crazy boy, Mr. Thomas?”
Her tone suggested personal interest and warm concern. Maybe romantic interest. She was asking me for specific information in a sly way with her innocent, general questions.
After the third or fourth inquiry, I told her, “He’s got a lot on his mind. Tomlinson, he’s a very emotional guy with a strong sense of right and wrong. It could be… well, I think he feels a lot of guilt about something… maybe something that happened in the past. It’s finally caught up with him for some reason.” I told her I didn’t know why. She’d have to ask him about it, not me.
I didn’t like the niggling little surge of conscience my disclaimer produced.
I realized I not only didn’t like disappointing Ransom, I wasn’t comfortable lying to her, either.
Ransom said, “Man you can’t eat ’em. Why would anyone want to pay good money for something so ugly?”
She meant the five-gallon bucket of horseshoe crabs she’d collected. A horseshoe crab looks like a plastic, caramel-colored helmet with a spiked tail. The hairy legs beneath contribute a spidery effect.
It was still Saturday, the 10th day of February, the day of the new moon according to my almanac calendar. No matter what time of year, summer, winter, or fall, tides on the new and low moon are called “spring tides” worldwide. Because the moon is in direct alignment with the sun, the combined gravitational influence of those two bodies has a substantially greater effect on water mass.
Not that tides are always dependable or predictable in the Gulf of Mexico. Ask any boater. They are not. Sanibel, Captiva, and adjacent islands generally have semidiurnal tides, which means two equally high and low tides per day. Because the moon rises fifty-eight minutes later each evening, those tides usually peak nearly an hour later every twenty-four hours.
Usually.
Because the Gulf is not much more than a gigantic saltwater lake joined to a larger ocean, there is a kind of slopping-bowl effect. It’s easily illustrated. Put water in a bowl, then tilt the bowl slowly and rhythmically, one side up, one side down.
Tilt the bowl to the right and water rushes away: low tide on the left edge. Tilt the bowl to the left, and water rushes back the other way: high tide on the left edge. But soon, very soon, the wave thus created will separate into two opposing waves. When those two waves collide, water in the bowl does not fluctuate much at all. Which is why, about once a month, tides around the islands do not seem to change.
One-tide days, we call them.
Weather over the Atlantic and Caribbean can also often override the lunar pull. Distant winds can push water into the big bowl or winds can slow the water from leaving the big bowl-“wind-forcing,” in scientific terms.
Random-that’s the way tides seem, at times. What is not random, though, is that on each and every spring tide, full moon or new, the bays and shallow water flats around Sanibel become livelier, more interesting places.
Which is why I almost always go out collecting on those days-lots of interesting stuff to see and find. The strong gravitational influence keys very predictable animal behavior, too. A good example is the horseshoe crab. Every Florida spring, on the highest tides of the month, female horseshoe crabs plow their way to shore and lay their eggs above the tide line, out of reach of lesser tides. In the same way, every Florida spring, on the full and new moon high tide, the eggs of those same animals hatch (often in concert with a storm, for reasons unknown to me) and the miniature animals plow their way back toward deeper water again.
I’d described that cycle to Ransom over coffee that morning, and she’d insisted on coming along. She told me, “Man, I grow’d up on the ocean, but it like my eyes wasn’t workin’ too good ’til I met you, my brother. I go with you and learn some more about what I should already know. Besides, Mr. Thomas, he don’t answer when I try to call him on the radio.”
Her mind on Tomlinson again.
I’d steered us out the mouth of Dinkin’s Bay, then northwest on Pine Island Sound. I ran a mile or so to the back side of Sanibel Bayou, which is part of Ding Darling Sanctuary, a national preserve. On the bay side, there is a long sandbar that traces the mangrove fringe from Dinkin’s Bay clear to Wulfert Channel, a sand bridge interrupted only by narrow creek entrances such as MacIntyre Creek, the Umbrella Pool, and Hardworking Bayou.
It was 11:30 A.M., low tide. Pine Island Sound more closely resembled a flooded golf course than a saltwater estuary. The bar was exposed, dry and firm, a temporary peninsula ten meters wide and several miles long. On the Sanibel side, separated by a fringe of muck, were red mangroves elevated above the water on monkey-bar roots. On the bay side were hundreds of acres of turtle grass as green as spring wheat, that plateau of green pocked with sea pools and guttered by creeks.
Idling toward the bar, I could smell the salt and sulfur and iodine mix that is the smell of low tide, the odor of life and rot and the spermious musk of reproduction.
I anchored my boat in two feet of water and we waded in, both of us wearing white rubber boots and carrying five-gallon buckets. I had that order from Waldron College for horseshoe crabs, plus I needed sea anemones.
We had no trouble finding both. It was as if someone had pulled a plug, exposing a sea bottom alive with hundreds of species of wiggling, crawling, squirting, drifting plants and invertebrates. As we slogged along, I answered Ransom’s questions if she asked about something; occasionally I would point out an animal I found unusual or interesting. She was quick and perceptive, but her interest in science seemed uneven, and her attention was prone to wander.
Mostly, we worked.
At the edge of the bar were hundreds of female horseshoe crabs. Some were nearly buried in mud, actively laying eggs. Others were in transit, drawing a half-dozen or more smaller males along behind, all of the males primed to deposit their white milt when the female was ready.
At one point, Ransom said, “You keep talking about their eggs like there’s something to see. Back on Cat Island, we go out and collect turtle eggs sometimes. The green turtle and the hawksbill, they the best, but we sometimes eat them big ol’ leatherback turtle eggs, too. Scramble them up with grunts and grits. Or maybe a nice piece’a pork if you can find it. Them turtle eggs, they something good, man. But I never seen no crab eggs.”