MESSAGES AND SIGNS IN THE SAND AND THE SNOW

"E-K" the mice wrote.  What are they trying to tell us? An SOS. perhaps?

You see patterns all over the place. Mouse tracks, rabbit, coyote. Everything these creatures were doing when we weren't looking. Sometimes the tracks are far apart: an animal was sprinting, running for its life or its dinner, or merely walking, but determinedly. The snow is fresh, but the layers of rime and snow that have been covering everything since Saturday's storm are thin in areas scoured by wind. This makes it easy to spot mouse tunnels. Skyler digs his nose into spots that look promising, mouse-wise, but without result. Coyotes have got to be much better at it. If you're a mouse, survival must be precarious, living always on the edge, especially now with their tunnels so obvious. (Do you think they're trying to communicate?)

Footprints are the messages from rabbits, coyotes, mice

Another day in another place, and a different kind of message. Strolling down the beach a few days ago in Florida I spotted a lovely blue bubble with a purple line running along one side. I thought at first it was a child's partly deflated balloon that had washed up. I picked it up and photographed it.

The attractive object, in situ. 

I picked it up and photographed it. A jellyfish.

After putting that jelly back on the sand where I found it, I noticed these "things" were strewn all over the beach. Not balloons. The water was rough, and I had seen the warning flags: "High surf and strong currents" (i.e., rip tides), "Dangerous marine life." (Not the most benign Florida weather.) Later on in my stroll I met up with Christine and Mike (who had invited me to join them in a Palm Beach condo for the better part of a week) and I picked up another one of these things to show them. While I was holding it–yipes!–one of my fingers felt as if it had gotten stung by a wasp.  "Isn't that a Portuguese Man-O-War," Mike asked. Oh, you think? I believed all dangerous stinging jellyfish looked like the ones I'd seen in northern Australia: large white round jellies with long tentacles like Rasta hair bobbing in the water. But Mike was right.  It was indeed a Portuguese Man-o-War, so named centuries ago because their shape when afloat resembled the warships of that time. My finger was getting red, and throbbing. Back in our suite, lacking vinegar, the sure cure for jelly stings, I applied a slice of grapefruit and some salad dressing. It worked. I read later that a sting by one of these things on a vulnerable spot–a child's neck was given as an example–could be lethal. Lethal! A sting on the back of an adult, I read, would feel more like a severe irritation.  I don't know about that; if I was stung in the water it would be a lot scarier than an irritation.



While I was in Florida a Vermont neighbor who raises sheep had to kill one of his rams because it was becoming dangerously aggressive. He put the carcass at the edge of the woods for wildlife to feed on. Grandson Ben fastened a wildlife camera to a nearby tree to catch the action. Several stout and healthy looking coyotes got themselves photographed at the site. We walked there the other day to untie his camera from the tree. By that time, over a week afater he'd attached the camera, nothing was left of the sheep but bones and cartilage. Coyote tracks were all around.

This is all that remains of the ram.  And yes, that's Skyler at upper right pretending to be a coyote.

On the beach in Florida, meanwhile, there were plenty other kinds of signs. Because the surf was rough our first few days there, the sea coughed up a lot of stuff. Stuff, that is, being mostly pieces of plastic.

A typical assemblage:  50% flotsam, 50% jetsam (i.e, plastic junk, or trash)

Larger pieces were thrown up by the ocean as well–parts of plastic baby bottles, plastic roping, drink containers, portions of even larger miscellaneous objects–all of them plastic. Each beach hotel sweeps its section of beach and picks up this debris, but more arrives every day. It is unending.  I suppose this is what you can expect in an area that has filled up its barrier islands (and every place else along waterways) with buildings–commercial, residential, pretty much everything and anything.  The beaches will be receptacles for the trash tossed away from all the other places like this.

View from our balcony.  Can you make out that bit of undeveloped land in the middle distance?

Only a mile and a half away from our condo, across a causeway, is the single piece of undeveloped land in the area. This is the John D. MacArthur State Park. If the name sounds familiar, it is because it was named after donor John D. (and Catherine T. ) MacArthur, they of the often cited foundation that gives generously to NPR and is the source of the "genius" grants. "Undeveloped" may not be the best word, as this park has numerous parking lots, a plethora of walkways, a gift shop and kayak rental, and bathrooms dotted here and there, all of which see lots of use.

Christine on one of the walkways at MacArthur State Park

The week after we left the park would host a blue grass concert, a car show and some kind of sale, along with routine school bus tours and what not. It is evidence of the importance to the public of open land and emblematic of how little there open land there is. We should be grateful this bit exists. The width of one park we visited further up the coast in Jupiter could be measured in yards, being nothing much more than a boat launch. This lovely small park allowed us to kayak among the mangroves one warm morning. We were early enough to avoid the inevitable crowds that came to kayak later, the early quiet probably responsible for our finding osprey, herons, egrets.

Fishing at the southern end of Singer Island.  In the distance is Palm Beach.

I walked one morning to the end of "our" beach, passing one hotel or condo after another. We were on a barrier island called Singer Island in West Palm Beach. Where the ocean met the intracoastal waterway I found some guys fishing. I asked one what he was catching (Ken never failed to ask that of fishermen), and he kind of grunted and pointed to a gasping fish he'd tossed onto the breakwater. "Skipjack," he said without looking at me, concentrating on his fishing. If he hadn't had an attitude (annoyed I even asked), I might have asked him why left the fish in that state, sucking air.

The gasping skipjack

For the most part, birds on the beaches are not intimidated by people.  Sure, they moved away when someone came close (like the guy staring at his phone in the photo below), but not by much.  I guess Florida birds have had to learn to share their spaces with people,.  When I prepared to take the photo below before the guy with the phone appeared, the birds were clustered segregated by type, terns with terns, skimmers (the long-beaked ones) with skimmers, etc.  Like people, they prefer to associate with their own kind.

Laughing gulls, black skimmers and a few terns

Speaking of which. Florida is a place of enclaves. Gated communities, rows of look-alike hotels and condos in one section, the poor part of town (away from the ocean, naturally) in another more loosely defined section. And then there's Palm Beach.  Palm Beach the island.  Talk about birds of a feather.  I imagined this to be a place with mansions spread over great open spaces.  But there were no great spaces, only big–no, enormous–homes, each of which could have served as a museum in some urban setting.  They sat cheek by jowl, shut off from one another by almost impenetrable lush greenery, each outdoing the next in grandiosity.  The architectural styles, except for the occasional intrusion of some modern office-building-sized house or, less often, an imitation Colonial, is strictly Italianate/Spanish Mission, a style I would describe as "Movie Mogul."  When you leave that enclave on a bridge to the mainland, you arrive at another enclave, or in a way, an extension of the same enclave:  a famous-designers shopping street, where you can drop a few thousand on a dress or a million on artwork if you have a mind to.

Zipping by a typical Palm Beach house.  All the mansions were lit at night, but most lit only by landscape lighting. Where is everybody?

I nearly forgot.  On Palm Beach island you will find (if it's a weekend) our Stable Genius, our "Least Racist Person Ever" (oh, the irony!) at Mar-a-Lago.  We drove by.  No more need be said.

While I was in the south, the weather in the north and south seemed to have converged.  It was cool and windy in Florida the first few days, while up north it was windy and supernaturally warm (in comparison: 68 degrees where it's supposed to be hot feels chilly; 58 degrees where it's supposed to be chilly feels ridiculously warm).  I had left Boston after a blizzard with degrees below zero, and arrived in Florida practically shivering for the first day, until I got used to the idea that 68 degrees was actually warm.  So confusing.

Freakish:  Green grass, like Florida. Fifteen below zero to 58 above.
Did the muskrats tunnels survive their flooded tunnels?

But it's cold again in Vermont.  Snow and wind have attracted birds to the feeder en masse.

Birds of a feather, mostly finches, lining up in great numbers for their turn at the bird feeder a few feet away.

In the beauty of my own public park, along the old road behind my house that continues to the place where the ram carcass was left and beyond, sections of flowing melt water have formed into crystals.

Crystals forming at the edge of a small rivulet of melding snow

Crystals at the edge of a small puddle

Remains of a coral reef

The snow crystals will soon be gone, melted away or covered by more snow.  Or rain, maybe, given that the weather could continue to careen in either direction.  What is the history of what was once a coral reef on the Florida beach?  How long ago did it disintegrate?  How long will it be before the Florida beaches disintegrate beneath rising seas?  New hotels are under construction on some beaches where there are signs of sand replenishment to replace what has been washed away.  Talk about optimism.  Or blindness.  Substandial buildings sit shockingly close to breaking waves. The mansions of Palm Beach were built on a barrier island, an island larger than Singer Island, but a barrier island nonetheless.

A message on the sand might well read SOS.  Ask the mice; maybe their word for SOS. is E-K.