A Brevard County Almanac
My Place - part 1 of first chapter
Some writers say that you should begin where you want to end. I’m standing at Playalinda Beach, having driven out early in the morning to watch the sunrise. This is where I’d like you, the reader, to end. To be standing in a place you’ve come to know and love, having made the effort to get out and enjoy its beauty so that you can know your place. I want to show you how to be able to understand the species and the habitats that you’re seeing as you drive or walk. I believe that if you practice some of the ideas in this book you will be transformed. That is quite a promise, but I want to make it here. If you read and apply what you have learned, you will have experiences which lift your heart, lift your mind, are good for your body, and will help you along whatever spiritual path you’re pursuing. You will learn how your place connects into your life and helps you understand, matter does matter, and it is incredibly important that matter is not the end of all things - that there’s a wider world where we can really know something beyond us and be a part of something that’s bigger than us through experiencing that matter.
I drove from our home in Titusville this morning through familiar sites. I drive past the bowling alley where I just had a nice meal with my wife and played skee ball. I drive by the areas where we park to watch rocket launches, past the local high school where our kids spent so much time, some of it enjoyable, and then turn out through the small little Main Street and onto the road leading out to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge and Playalinda Beach.
It’s early in the morning, and most of the cars heading out this way are on their way to work at NASA. It’s one of the employee entrances. Everyone’s a little annoyed with me because I’m going the speed limit. They all just want to get to work. It’s such a privilege to be able to take the time to drive in a way that provides a good look out over the bridge. To my left, I see the hospital where my wife went this morning to serve others as a nurse. She’ll spend the day there caring for people who need help, and I’m grateful that she can serve in that way. As I head out over the bridge, I can see in front of me mangrove forests. I remember times of watching horseshoe crab aggregations, working with friends who wanted to study these, counting them, measuring them, putting tags on them to understand their movement patterns.
I think of recent adventures with a former intern who’s doing their master’s on seahorse and pipefish and finding a seahorse right off Titusville Bridge. It gets irritating, the NASA people speeding by. But again, it’s such a privilege that I can be headed out to the beach rather than sitting at a desk somewhere and feeling constrained, to not need to get through this place rather than to experience it.
As I drive into Canaveral National Seashore after the turnoff to the entrance of NASA, I anticipate where I want to go. There’s a beautiful length of beach, 13 different car parks. Somehow, I decide maybe eight is the one. I travel down the beach where the land narrows and Mosquito Lagoon and the Atlantic are only separated by a few 10s of meters. I drive past car park number one and only see a couple cars. That’s hopeful. Car parks two and three don’t have any cars in them. I see a few cars here and there, very few pickups, which is typically a sign of fishers. (I confess it really irritates me. I’m not sure why you can fish in a national park, but that’s a whole other question.) So, I keep driving. Eight has a few people there, and so I go on to nine, where it’s empty.
I park and walk out to the beach. I’ve made it in time to catch the sunrise. There are clouds on the horizon. I see the top of the clouds lit, but the sun hasn’t yet peeked over them. I look to my right. I don’t see any people, only a red plastic bottle, which I’ll pick up later. I look to my left. Again, I see no people. I do see a shaving cream can and a perfume bottle. All the detritus that’s washed up on the beach. I doubt somebody’s left their shaving cream here, even though people can forget and leave plastic behind. Plastic is just a part of this place, though that’s hopefully something we can stop. I look out over the open ocean. There are no surfers either. Some weeks ago, when the hurricane passed through, there were hundreds of surfers out. It was amazing. I came out and watched my son surf, and now the waves are just a foot or two. Even so, I’m excited for the day ahead. I’m going to spend an hour or two here before I head back to the house, and sit in front of my computer focusing on other marine conservation work.
The International Coastal Cleanup is coming up next weekend, and I’m helping to organize that for countries around the world within A Rocha, the international conservation organization I work with. We’ll also have a little group here that will clean up some of these plastic bottles and detritus. We’ll do some microplastics research, citizen science work on nurdles, and spend some time in contemplation. It’s been a joy to try to integrate my faith with the study of these places and these species. I think of the mole crabs in the shorebreak.
I’ve moved into a different sort of faith, still very centered on the Christian tradition, and consider myself a follower of Christ. This place helps me to connect with God through Christ in his world, and the science helps me along that path. My story, a transformation of my faith to incorporate a much more holistic and other-than-human viewpoint about life, is chronicled in my book, Connected by Water. The book you are reading now is focused a lot more experientially. I hope you’ll use this to think about your place, about your own faith journey, whatever that is, even if it’s not at all, and to enjoy the stories of experiencing a place.
