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ONCE TERRY HANDED OVER the five one hundred dollar bills, it was a simple matter for the marine towboat with its four huge outboard engines to drag us back to deep water. The Apocalypse had not been damaged in the grounding, thanks to the extra sacrificial layers of wood and fiberglass we’d built up on the keels during construction. The towing service captain said we were lucky, and that it could have been disastrous if the shore here was rock or coral like a lot of it was farther south in the Keys. He tried to give Terry a long sales spiel about his parent company’s insurance policies that paid for statewide towing. He said everyone who boated in Florida ran aground frequently because of the shallow waters here. But Terry wasn’t buying it. He said we couldn’t afford towing insurance and the towboat guy kept saying we couldn’t afford not to have it. Finally, the man pulled away in his boat, shaking his head, saying we’d probably be aground again in the Keys in a day or two.
Terry cussed and stomped around on deck as the towboat sped away, saying that five hundred dollars for something that took twenty minutes to do amounted to fifteen hundred dollars an hour.
“That’s another reason this whole country is doomed,” he said. “They pay teachers a poverty wage like they were paying me at Calloway Junior High, and any fool with enough money to buy a boat with four big outboards can earn what I made a year in a matter of days!”
“Well, it’s not like anybody else was going to pull us off the beach,” Janie said. “Isn’t that how it works with something like that? The law of supply and demand or something? He can charge what he wants because he’s the only one here to do the job. And if we didn’t pay, we could have lost our ship in that bad weather that’s coming.”
Terry launched into her with all the reasons why it was still way too much money, saying the towboat guy could make honest wages charging a third of what he did. It seemed to me that whatever we had to pay, the most important thing was that we weren’t stuck any more. Besides, no matter how much Terry cussed about it, he always seemed to be able to find however much money he needed just by going below in cabin where he and Mom slept and getting it out. He always paid in cash too. I wondered just how much more he had down there, but I didn’t dare ask him.
With it dark out now and that frontal system approaching, the first thing we had to do was try to get somewhere that we could anchor for the night that would be protected from the wind. There wasn’t a decent option close by, especially with the situation in Marco Island, so Terry said we ought to just keep heading south to the Everglades and stay far enough off the coast so we wouldn’t have to worry about sandbars. We were all tired after the long day of tacking back and forth against the wind and then trying to get the ship ungrounded. I knew it was going to be a long night and I dreaded it, but there really wasn’t much choice except to keep on going.
Terry said we couldn’t sail near the coast in the Everglades area, because it was worse than Marco Island, as far as shoals go. He said there were lots of places where the water was just a foot or two deep and that on most of this coast there was little dry land, just mangroves growing out into the water far from the muddy shores that were there. At night, you couldn’t see a thing on the coast, not even enough to tell there was land there, because nobody lived there and there were no lights of any kind except for an occasional small powerboat going by.
To make things a lot worse, it started raining at about twenty-one hundred hours and then you could hardly see a thing past the edges of the boat. It was so dark that it was hard to tell where the water ended and the sky began, and with all that rain coming down it didn’t matter much anyway. It wasn’t my watch and I didn’t have to be up on deck, but I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep down below anyway, because I’d be too scared we were going to hit something or be run over in the dark by a ship like that one on Mobile Bay. I stayed out there in the rain with Terry, both of us wearing the plastic rain suits with hoods he’d bought for us at Walmart. Terry said there wasn’t any use in worrying about ships because he said they would either pick us up on their radar or not, and there wasn’t a damned thing we could do about it anyway.
The Walmart rain suits sucked because they were made of heavy plastic that didn’t leak, but when they were buttoned up enough to keep you dry, it was so hot inside them you couldn’t breath. It wasn’t quite as bad at night as it was in the daytime, but it had been pretty hot ever since we got to Sanibel Island and Terry said it was just about always that way in south Florida. He said even though this change in the weather was caused by a cold front moving across the continent farther north, about the only difference it would make down here was that the wind would change directions and blow out of the north for a few days. He said the cold air wouldn’t get this far south but that sometimes the fronts were strong enough to whip up dangerous seas.
It was a good thing that the wind was going to change direction and we’d finally be able to sail the way we wanted to go, but first we had to get through a stormy night. The rain was bad enough, but the change in wind direction also brought a change in wind strength. By midnight, it was blowing so hard we only had our smallest jib up on the forestay and the main was reduced to the second reef. That was about as little sail as we could have up and still be able keep the boat moving. Terry had planned on sewing storm sails too, but he just hadn’t gotten around to it yet with all the other boat projects he had to do. The seas were getting really big all of a sudden and I was starting to get scared. They weren’t big enough to flip over a catamaran the size of ours, Terry said, but they lifted the whole ship up and dropped it when they passed, making me think it might break apart or something. The ship’s motion in the waves was an abrupt fore and aft pitching caused by the narrow ends of the hulls at the bow and stern. Terry said it was a lot better than the horrible rolling of a monohull that would make you puke your guts out, but Mom and Janie were feeling pretty sick anyway.
Terry told them they’d be better off up on deck, where they could get some fresh air, but they didn’t want to come out there in the rain, and before long, they were both seasick. Janie was the first one to come up puking, and before she could make it to the aft end of the deck, she was spewing vomit everywhere in the cockpit and even got some on my feet. I screamed at her to use the toilet bucket, but it was already too late. Mom did use the bucket when she threw up, but I didn’t get sick and neither did Terry, and he said it was because we were out there topside in the fresh air the whole time. They didn’t go back below after that, and for the rest of the night the four of us sat out there in the rain, riding out the storm in those cheap plastic rain suits and hoping the waves weren’t going to break the boat apart.
They never did, but a really big one swept across the deck and tore a bunch of stuff loose that Terry had tied down, including some of the extra gas cans for the outboard and Janie’s bicycle. Terry and I hung on for all we were worth as we crawled out there and put more lashing lines on the rest of the bicycles. Janie was so seasick the bicycle was the last thing in the world she cared about. She said all she wanted was to get on dry land and if she ever did, she said she’d never set foot on a boat again.
We got through the rest of the night without losing or breaking anything else or getting hit by a ship, and when daybreak finally came, it felt like a miracle that we had survived. The wind was out of the northwest at a steady fifteen knots, and while there were still whitecaps and waves, they weren’t as big as they had been during the night. Even though we’d been tacking back and forth to stay away from the shore, when Terry checked the GPS, it showed that we had been blown a considerable distance to the south along the coast. We were just off of a place called Shark River, one of the few good anchorages shown on the charts in the Everglades. Since we were all exhausted from staying up all night, Terry said we should go in there and drop the hook to get some rest. He said the wind ought to clock on around to the north by later in the day and probably to the northeast or east by the next day, making it easy for us to sail on south and get out of the Gulf for good. A stopover here wouldn’t hurt anything and we could fix some of the things on the boat that needed fixing in a place where it was unlikely anyone would be around to bother us. It all sounded good to me, especially because we were anchoring in the Everglades and in a place named Shark River at that. I just knew I was finally going to see some full-sized alligators and maybe some sharks too! As we approached the coast under just our small jib, still making a good five knots, there was nothing in sight but dark green mangroves as far as you could see to the north and south. The green seemed to almost glow against the morning light with all that moisture from the rain still hanging in the air, and the whole place had a mysterious feel like nowhere I’d ever been before.
We entered the mouth of the Shark River following a channel marked with signposts and floating buoys. This was the first time I’d gotten a close look at all those mangroves we’d seen in the distance, and for the first time I realized how weird those trees really were. They looked almost like spiders or even something alien, with their long skinny roots branching out in all directions holding the rest of the tree up out of the water. And the way they were all tangled together reminded me of spider webs too. It was like an impenetrable wall of green, and I could not imagine trying to walk through it. Terry said you couldn’t and that the best way to get through a mangrove forest if you had to was to climb from tree to tree like a monkey. He said you didn’t have to be a monkey or Tarzan to do it either, because the branches and roots were so close together.
The seabirds seemed to love all that vegetation growing right out into the water, especially the herons that stood there in the shallows, hunting fish swimming among the roots. There were all kinds of other birds I’d never seen before too, some that Terry said never went north of this part of Florida. We saw lots of raccoons too, but even though I looked I still didn’t see an alligator. Janie said she’d seen pictures on Facebook of giant pythons in the Everglades swallowing alligators, and that maybe there weren’t any more left. Terry said that was nonsense, but it was true that pythons lived here now. He said it was just another stupid thing people did, introducing species like that where they don’t belong.
“Even though it’s supposed to be protected as a national park, and supposed to be a pristine example of a unique ecosystem, like everywhere else it’s been screwed up by greed and idiotic thinking. It won’t matter in fifty years though, because this entire part of Florida will be below sea level anyway.”
“I don’t see any land now,” Janie said, looking at the flooded roots of the mangroves that surrounded us on both sides as we motored farther up the river.
“It’s here, just farther inland. The mangroves form new land all the time, trapping sediment with the roots and making new islands, but they won’t be able to keep up with global warming. Just a few feet of sea level rise will do them in, and it’s going be a lot more than that eventually. That’s why we’ve got to go to the Pacific, where the islands are really the tops of undersea volcanoes. Those islands with mountains and plenty of elevation near the coast will be the only safe place to be.”
Terry said the Shark River was just one of hundreds of channels that flowed across the inland part of the Everglades to empty into the Gulf. It wasn’t like a regular river, like the Tombigbee or the Mobile that we’d come down. He said farther inland, the water spread out wide and thin, running through a “sea of grass,” and then narrowed back into separate channels that filtered through the mangroves at the coast, mixing with the seawater on the incoming tide. Because of that, there was just about every kind of freshwater and saltwater creature that lived in the region right there in those waters and I finally got to see my first shark. It wasn’t a big one, maybe about six feet long, but it was fast! I could see it take off in the clear water when we surprised it, and Terry said that it probably thought our big twin hulls were two bigger sharks and needed to run for its life. He said that even though a six-foot shark wasn’t all that big, it was plenty big enough to bite a chunk out of somebody or take off a hand or foot. It wouldn’t be a good idea to fall in the water here because there were probably sharks a lot bigger than that one cruising around. He said they probably didn’t just make up the name “Shark River” for no reason. I had been hoping I could go swimming ever since we got to Florida, but we never seemed to be in a good place for it. One thing I knew for sure though, was that I was not going swimming in a place named Shark River!
There weren’t any other boats or people around when we found a good place to anchor on a side channel that went off through the mangroves. The water was calm in there because the trees protected it from most of the wind that was still blowing pretty good, and the opening was just wide enough for our catamaran to fit into. Terry cut the outboard to idle and let us drift in there, after first dropping our smaller anchor off the stern and letting the rode pay out as we went. He said that way when we got ready to leave, it would be a simple matter to pull ourselves back out the main river. That was much easier than trying to back up with the motor, because we’d already found on that first day at Bay Springs Lake that the Apocalypse did not like to go backwards.
Once we were in the side channel, the mangroves were so close that Terry was able to use our long boat hook to pass a couple of mooring lines around nearby branches on either side. One branch was rubbing against the starboard topsides, so Terry got out his machete and whacked it off. It was snug and secure feeling in there, and Mom and Janie especially liked it after being out in the Gulf at night puking their guts out in rough seas. It was kind of like being in the jungle, except that there was only one kind of tree—the mangroves—and nothing else to look at except the dark, but clear water below us and the sky overhead. Fish were jumping and splashing everywhere and Terry said we ought to try and catch our dinner. Mom warned him that we’d better not, since we didn’t have a Florida fishing license and besides, this was a national park and we didn’t know what the rules were. Terry said he wasn’t worried about that because the Everglades was more than a million acres of mangroves and swamp and since we hadn’t seen a ranger or even another boat since we got here, what were the chances of one finding us now? He said what we needed to do was inflate the dinghy and go farther up this little side channel, where we’d be completely out of sight, and then we could get all the fish we wanted among the mangrove roots where they swim in big schools.
Mom and Janie didn’t want to go, but fishing sounded like an adventure to me, especially since Terry said we were going to do it with the spearguns he’d brought for underwater fishing in the islands when we got there. He said they would work fine from the surface in the shallow water among the mangroves, because the water was clear enough to see the fish we were shooting and all we had to do was tie up the dinghy and sit very still and wait. He said it was the same thing the herons did and it worked for them. We found a good spot after going around two bends in the channel up from the boat, and as soon as we tied up the dinghy, I started seeing fish. I couldn’t believe how many there were. It was like the water was alive with them. It was only about three feet deep where we were, and it looked like it was going to be easy to get all the fish we could eat. It looked to me like all you had to do was shoot a spear down there at random and you were bound to stab one, there were so many.
It wasn’t as easy as it looked though, once I tried. The spear guns used a long, metal spear that was propelled forward when you released the trigger by big tubular rubber bands like they use on slingshots. After each shot that missed, like all of mine did, you had to pull the spear out of the mud and load it back again, cocking the rubber bands. It was slow to reload and after every miss, the fish scattered and we had to wait for them to come back. I never hit one, but finally, Terry did.
“Yes!” he whispered as his spear connected. “I hope your mom’s got the skillet ready! Fresh snapper for dinner tonight!”
I was expecting something bigger when he pulled his spear out of the water from the front of the dinghy and showed me his fish. It was about the size of my hand, and didn’t look like it would be enough dinner even for Janie, and she was a picky eater who didn’t eat much anyway. Terry said it was perfect though, and that there were a lot more where that one came from. He said it was a yellowtail snapper, and that it would be delicious. I told him we would need about ten more if they were all that size and he said we would get them because he was just out of practice when we started.
We were soon quiet and still again, watching and waiting for the fish to come back while the one Terry shot flopped its tail as it lay dying on the floor of the dinghy between us. But before we got a chance to shoot at some more, the silence was interrupted by the sound of an outboard motor. It got louder and you could tell it was coming closer, but Terry said it probably was just some other fisherman going by on the Shark River and that they would never come up in this little channel. But he was wrong about that like he was about so many other things.
It turned out that the channel we were on looped around and connected back into Shark River on the other end. It had to, because before we knew what was happening, the boat we’d been listening to suddenly appeared around the bend farther up from where we were tied up in the dinghy, opposite the direction in which the Apocalypse was moored. And it wasn’t just another fisherman like Terry thought. It was an Everglades National Park ranger in a patrol boat, and he caught us red-handed sitting there in that dinghy with our spearguns pointed into the water and the punctured Yellowtail snapper on the floor between us.
There wasn’t any way to explain our way out of that one or pretend we weren’t fishing. All Terry could do was claim ignorance and say that he didn’t know it was against the law. The ranger said he didn’t care whether we knew what the law was or not. He said it was our responsibility to find out if we were going to visit the park. It turned out that fishing with the proper equipment or licenses wasn’t illegal, but doing it with a speargun sure was. It was illegal to even have spearguns in the park, much less to use them to spear game fish that we didn’t even have a Florida saltwater license to catch. The ranger immediately confiscated the two spearguns, putting them in his boat, along with Terry’s fish; then he told us he was going to have to search our main vessel as well. When Terry said that we didn’t have anything else illegal, the ranger told him to shut up or he would take us both back to the ranger station and lock us up while they sent someone else out to have a look.
I was glad Terry kept quiet after that, because I sure didn’t want to go to jail. I figured this whole mess was going to cost Terry some money, and I was right. The ranger followed us back to the Apocalypse and went through it from stem to stern, searching every locker in the cockpit, and every bin, cubbyhole and drawer in both cabins down below. He didn’t find anything else illegal though, except for a big fishing net Terry had stashed that he said we couldn’t have in the park, and he confiscated that too. The main thing I was relieved about was that he didn’t find Terry’s hidden gun compartment. I figured that if he made such a big deal out of a couple of spearguns powered by rubber bands, he would freak out over Terry’s rifles and the pistol and probably have us all sent to prison. While he was at it, he checked our safety equipment and noted the absence of the Type IV PFD that we’d already gotten so many tickets for not having. Then he saw the mangrove branch Terry had cut with his machete.
“Cutting any vegetation in a national park is illegal,” he said, glaring at Terry. “Are you not aware too that cutting mangroves anywhere in the state of Florida is illegal? Just tying your boat to them is illegal, but you had to go and cut one too! This is going to cost you more than the fines for fishing without a license and using illegal hunting weapons in a national park!”
Terry mumbled something about how it didn’t look to him like the mangroves were endangered, because they were the only trees you could see for a hundred miles up and down the coast. The ranger gave Terry and me a stern lecture about why national parks were established and how violators like us were no better than poachers out to destroy the whole ecosystem. He made me feel terrible just because I had tried to spear a fish, even though I never actually hit one. Then he started writing the tickets, although since I was underage, he said Terry was responsible for contributing to my delinquency and he would be fined double. Terry argued that we would have bought fishing licenses but we hadn’t been ashore since we’d made it to Florida because we couldn’t find any legal places to anchor or dockage that we could afford. He said fines and tickets for petty violations were breaking us and that the main reason we’d been fishing with the spears is because he didn’t see how he was going to afford to feed his family much longer at this rate.
“I’d suggest getting a job!” the ranger said. “There’s nowhere left in the world where you can live off the land or sea for free, I don’t care where you go. You sailboat dreamers are all alike and I’ve seen plenty over the years. Everybody that lives in Florida has, because the warm winters draw bums like flies. You need to go to work and make sure these kids get a decent education. Teaching your son to break the law isn’t the way to start him out in life and living on a boat is a dead end that’s just one step up from homeless in the gutter.”
Terry took the tickets and stuck them in his logbook with all the rest he’d been collecting, telling the ranger he’d be the judge of how best to raise his kids. He never mentioned that he was just a stepdad to me and Janie and went on like he’d raised us both from diapers and knew exactly what he was doing when it came to being a parent.
“When the economy in the country collapses, your wildlife and park rules aren’t going to mean a thing to the hungry hordes that are going to be starving for anything they can catch. Where do you think the millions that live in Miami are going to head when the grocery shelves are empty? Right here to your sacred Everglades, that’s where! They’ll fish these waters bare and eat everything that swims, flies or crawls, including you if you’re in their way! I’m just trying to protect my family from what’s coming by getting them the hell out of the country before it’s too late. We didn’t come here to be Florida boat bums, I can assure you of that. Tomorrow at first light we’ll be dropping this state astern and not stopping ’til we get to Belize.”
The ranger left, but not before radioing back to his base about the incident and warning us that we were going to be under close surveillance until we were out of park waters. When he was gone Terry pitched a fit about how he’d stolen our spearfishing equipment and the big seine net he’d planned to use in the islands to fish the lagoons.
“Not only do they take our money with those ridiculous fines, now they’re taking away the tools we need to make our living. It’s only going to get worse, and if we don’t get out of this country soon, they’re going to end up taking our whole ship!”
I knew Terry had no intention of paying any of the fines from the tickets and citations he’d gotten since we launched. He’d already said that since the Apocalypse was not a federally documented vessel registered with the Coast Guard, they wouldn’t be able to easily track us down to put a maritime lien on her for unpaid fines. With just a Mississippi registration number, he said they wouldn’t know where to look for us once we got out of the U.S. and other “civilized” countries. Janie said that was crazy because she said that with the Internet and computers, they could easily find us and that no one could just “disappear” like that anymore. Terry told her she didn’t know what she was talking about because her whole perception of the world up until now came from Facebook and other crap on the Internet, and she had no idea how big the real world was. He said that government agencies like the IRS wanted people to believe they had the power to know everything about everybody, but the reality was far different. He said that even with computers to help them, they didn’t have the manpower to track every single person all the time, and that if you knew a few simple tricks for keeping a low profile, you could stay off their radar even living in the States. Besides, he said, even if they did know where we were, we’d be so far away by then it would be too difficult and expensive for them to collect those fines anyway, so they wouldn’t bother.
I thought it would be better if Terry just paid them before we left, then we wouldn’t have to worry about it. After all, he seemed to have enough money for everything that came up, even though he said he didn’t. I didn’t mention this though, because I knew what his answer would be. We would have to listen to another long rant about how it was the principle of it more than the money, and how he wasn’t going to contribute to a corrupt system that already stole more money from honest citizens than it knew what to do with. I didn’t want him to get into all that again because I was tired, and all I really wanted to do now that we already had enough adventure fishing, was go to sleep. We all needed sleep after being out there on the Gulf all night, but it was not to be.
Just about the time the sun started going down, the wind quit blowing too. That frontal system that had caused the change in direction from southwest to north had blown itself out, according to Terry. You would think this would be a good thing, at least at night when we weren’t sailing and all we needed was a peaceful anchorage so we could all get a good night’s sleep. But this anchorage was on the Shark River, right in the heart of the Everglades’ mangrove coast. And what that meant was that with no wind to keep them away, we were in for mosquito and no-see-um hell.
It wasn’t like we hadn’t encountered any mosquitoes on this trip already. We had, especially on the lower Mobile River and around Ingram Bayou in Alabama where the woods were thick and swampy. But those mosquitoes had been few in number. Maybe a dozen or so buzzing around and a few bites on our arms or necks before we swiped them away or smacked them dead. Terry had some mosquito repellent that worked well on those too. It stank of chemicals, but it was better than getting bitten, at least all of us thought so except for Janie. She bitched and moaned about the mosquitoes and refused to use the repellent, instead retreating to her cabin where she shut all the port lights and was able to get away from them. But here in the Everglades, up in that river channel without the wind blowing, it was way too hot to go down below. The humidity was so bad you sweated just sitting there outside, and in the cabins the sweat just poured off in rivers. Because of this, I had been planning to sleep out on deck on one of the cockpit seat cushions until the no-see-ums and mosquitoes found us.
If you think no-see-ums are no big deal, you haven’t ever been to someplace like the Everglades. They call them no-see-ums because they are so tiny you almost can’t see them. They look like gnats, but they bite like fire and they came at us by the thousands. They get up under your clothes and in your hair and even try to get in your eyelids, ears and nose. We jumped around slapping and cussing and trying to get rid of them, but nothing worked. Terry said jumping in the water would get rid of them, but after seeing that shark I wasn’t going to. But then, when the salt-marsh mosquitoes joined the no-see-ums in their relentless attack, I wondered if it would be better to be swallowed up by a shark in one big bite than to be eaten alive by all those blood-sucking bugs.
The mosquitoes swarmed over the boat in clouds of whirring wings that sounded like a million tiny motors buzzing, and they landed on every exposed part of our skin so thick it looked like we were wearing sleeves of bugs. I swept them off my arms with frantic brushing motions, smearing their guts and my own blood as I did. Mom and Janie were screaming and Janie started crying. Terry was scooping up buckets of water and pouring them over his head to get temporary relief and we all tried it but it didn’t last but seconds before the swarms regrouped and covered us again. No matter how many we smashed or drowned, it seemed like there were a million more to replace them. We sprayed the insect repellent all over us too, but it just slowed them down a little and didn’t do much good. With the wind completely gone and night closing in, there was no hope of things getting any better. When we tried going down below, it was so hot you couldn’t breathe with the hatches closed up, and if we cracked them just a little, thousands of mosquitoes came in the gaps. We didn’t have screens for the hatch openings because making them was just another item on Terry’s long to-do list that didn’t get done before we left. With no way to protect ourselves from the swarms, it was clear that it didn’t matter how tired we were or how dark it was out on the Gulf, we had to pull up the anchor and leave Shark River immediately!