I had gotten up before the sun and watched it creep from the water. A pink moon hung over the Intracoastal Waterway on the other side of the building. The moon was a flat shell in the sky as the sun rose. Red sun, pink moon both at once in the sky.

I walked down the cement staircase, which was open to the air. A palm tree four stories high poked through the opening and tickled my arm. A frown of red sun lay on the horizon surrounded by one of these streaky yellow, mauve, and umber displays that lure people here to live out their lives.

The swimming pool, lit, shimmered with winter waves. Was Richard Widmark watching me walk to the beach? As a selling point dropped into the conversation, Marcy Mock had mentioned that he lived in one of the three buildings. So, as I crossed the long wooden boardwalk, I thought, Richard Widmark is watching me– he is looking at my behind. He is standing on his balcony looking at me with all his old menace and glamour, that smirk he used before he pushed the old lady in the wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death. Maybe he will fall in love with me and take me away from all this. But I had just come to all this. The moving van was still on the road, stalled by our storm. Then I thought this was not the kind of attitude to bring to the beach. This was New York name/fame-is-everything thinking, a refusal to rid myself of myself and surrender to the birds and shells and sea. I still had my New York eyes.

A long-ago English major, I had always preferred Emerson to Thoreau and had skipped or nodded over long portions of Walden. But I had memorized the beginning: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” Thoreau needed the “tonic of wildness.” I knew I had lived in the world– the question now was whether I could live outside it in this different place with the wildness.

That first morning, the ocean was warm and dark and rough, the sand corrugated, with rivulets running into tidal pools like a desert landscape seen from a low-flying plane. The winter beach would teach us: When the people leave, the birds arrive.

There were hundreds of gulls and sandpipers and royal terns in clumps all cooing and squeaking and hooting and peep-peeping away. Skimmers rested flat on their stomachs or lined up facing the wind to keep warm air between their feathers and skin. I would come to learn their names. I would learn to walk close to them, but not so close as to scatter and disturb them. Hunting went on all around me, inside the sea, with the diving birds. The gulls took off, legs dangling, flapping for a moment before they tucked them under, the pelicans folded their wings and slammed into the tarnished-silver water. I walked too close and caused the dainty rush of the sandpipers. The sea smoke rose from my ankles to my knees.

A few winter tourists were walking along with their paper cups looking down into the piles of shells as though they had lost something valuable. I had to beat them out for the best shells. I was still competing.

I always had a good eye for shells, the instinct to rush to the lump in the surf that was the one unbroken whelk. Of course, I did not know their names then. I would teach myself the shell names and bird names as I’d learned the tribes and habits of a segment of New York when I wrote the social column, “Mr. Peepers,” for New York Magazine. Just as my people, smiles on, had rushed towards me and my notepad, the birds puffed their feathers, piped a warning to each other, and scooted or flew away. The little creatures dug themselves deeper into the sand.

The shells themselves taught me. Any mollusk could distinguish itself, for every shell of a species, while alike in form, was ultimately a completely individual creation. Calcium in the mollusk’s blood had made the shell or it borrowed that of another creature. These were empty houses now, abandoned of life. When I found a shell that was whole and perfect and brightly colored it meant the creature inside was alive. Should I keep the perfect and hard-to-find shell or throw it back into the ocean and let it live? I picked up the shell and the slimy thing came half out, spit a little water as a last plea, then went further back inside to hide. Even a mollusk had the instinct to live. I might walk days and miles to find a shell this rare and pretty. The beach tested me right away and would continue. I hesitated, but threw the shell back.

Salvador Dali, my friend when I was a young woman, once told me he saw a large razor shaving a beach, revealing where it shaved, a heap of colored jewels. This was the beach I found here. But I am getting ahead of myself. The moving van has not even arrived. Before it did, I was determined to make a decent lunch. After four days of Denny’s and Hardee’s, I had something more ambitious in mind, so I drove down the road to get food.

It might have been an illusion, a fantasy of the cracked windshield, but there was a peacock in the middle of the road. In full blown-display, the glistening tail feathers fanned, the little tiara of crown feathers trembling indignantly at my presence on its street. All the hundred iridescent eyes on its tail seemed to be pondering me. And there were eight other peacocks—which happen to be symbols of resurrection and protection—on the roof and porch of a little tumbledown shack. What a strange place this was. Since the peacock was not moving, I looked around.

Next to the shack, redolent of tropical rot and neglect, a fancy peach villa was under construction. On the corner, an old white Florida mansion hung over a small still pond. The road branched off into dirt paths with houses with trucks on giant wheels in their yards. Here, too, were the developments Sea Walk and Ocean Walk and Ocean Forest—with unfinished Mediterranean villas bringing the columns and courtyards and red tile roofs of Old Spain into the mix. Next door to the empty new orange villas, raw and still, small ramshackle houses sagged into the vegetation.

It looked like the whole history of the island had been dumped here. Within a single road the island lapsed back from the new false Florida into the ancient places. The Spaniards were here and the pirates, the slaves who escaped, the English who had given the island the name that lasted, and always the Indians, the tall vegetarian Timucuans under the trees, deep in the ground. Displacement was all around me, frantic tropical religions, nuances I could not begin to understand.

A glaze of threat seemed to hang over everything. In the mood I was in, I saw a hand going through the beveled glass doors of the villa, the peacocks pecking through the rubble and the house slowly reverting to ruin with lizards running over the dusty marble floors. Here the two Floridas struggled. One was old and Southern, violent and unknowable. The other a built-up façade, the endgame hopeful dream of people from elsewhere—intent on defying death. The old Florida sought to remain as the new peach villas pushed through. Perhaps I was wrong, though. Down the dark dusty road might be redemption, faith, charity, goodness, even fun. I did not know. I was as strange here as the peacock and almost as exotic.

It had been my plan to recreate the exact lunch that Iris Murdoch had described in The Sea The Sea: “anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, then baked beans and kidney beans with chopped celery, tomatoes, lemon juice and olive oil…bananas and cream with white sugar…”–the bananas sliced, not mashed, and the cream thin—“Then hard water- biscuits with New Zealand butter and Wensleydale cheese…” This feast accompanied by “most of a bottle of Muscadet.” Alas, drawing on the reserves of the Harris Teeeter market, this lunch was not to be.