One morning I came up from the beach, opened the local newspaper and read about a crime in Mandarin, a section of Jacksonville. A nine-year-old boy had been locked in his room for three years with spy cameras on him every minute. He had never been to school. He had no friends. He was allowed out only to make his own breakfast and dinner and use the bathroom once a day. Otherwise he had to pee in a bottle. He had no books or toys. The windows were boarded and the light switches taped over. The police found him sitting in his underpants watching Nascar races. They locked up both his parents on aggravated child abuse and told him he was free. Wild with joy, he ran outside and raced around the yard.

“I have to pinch myself,” he said.

“Days like this only come once in a lifetime.”

I could not stop thinking about this. Could anything be sweeter than his words. The boy lived down one of those dirt roads I had seen on my first day on the island, those dirt roads that say dead end without the sign. And the wild dogs bark, and quickly you look for another way around, a way out.

Is there any better day than the day you are set free, the day you are given another chance. The bolt lock on the prison door opens, you blink in the sunlight or drizzle and you stumble out and there is the car or bus to take you into a second life (where things may or may not work out). You are rescued. The dark is light. You race across the field into freedom and there are no slavering dogs tracking you. You are back from the stroke or heart attack or cancer or unwise criminal act. The snail, alive in the brilliant shell, gets thrown back into the sea, the fish is unhooked. The injured gull is picked up in a blanket and taken to the nature sanctuary. Whatever horrible things happen in the rest of life, and they will, you have had this day once in your lifetime. You can put it in storage.

Even now, years later, as I write this I am afraid to know if the boy in case was damaged beyond repair and his new uncaged life didn’t work out. I was tempted to ask our FBI friends to investigate what had happened. I almost wanted to write a journal of his captivity, but I had already tried to write the stories of people taken away and out of their lives. Maybe I had gone away to live my theme. I let it go for now, but I kept his words: Days like this only come once in a lifetime. Maybe a cop made up his words—so what. It was a true thing to say at the dead end of a Florida road, the end of a bad life, and the first day of another.

I could say it every morning as I came out of the pool, or went down to the beach. I could say it on the autumn beach. The boy and his rescuers had broken the grip of the rip and, instead of drowning, had made it to shore.

I stood and stared at the Riptide sign:

 

 

Though I had passed it many times before, I now saw that it said everything I needed to know about living on the beach. The moment I ceased to struggle, the moment I stopped thrashing, I found my way. There was no point in fighting the ocean, let it carry you out and then swim out of the rip, parallel to the shore, and finally back. The water wants to return to the sea, the swimmer wants to return to the shore. Those who fight will drown. So this meant acceptance, surrender, waiting it out, trust, adaptation.

This is something that the old Floridian Janet Reno, the former U. S. Attorney General, learned long ago. Once when she was a young girl, she walked alone 104 miles up the coast of Florida and wrote:

“It might be that some day I shall be drowned by the sea or die of pneumonia from sleeping out at night, or be robbed or strangled by strangers. These things happen. Even so, I shall be ahead because of trusting the beach, the night and strangers.”

Maybe it is easier to think like this if you were raised in old Florida, in a house on a pine ridge near the Everglades with a mother who wrestled alligators and a father who won the Pulitzer Prize for exposing illegal gambling. Janet Reno’s mother built the house herself, and kept a yard full of feral creatures and peacocks all named Horace. This was kind of core Florida, a bit peculiar maybe, but without sham. It’s strange that a woman who would have every reason to be cynical and wary was raised to set forth and surrender to what the beach, the stranger, the night gives you. Like Travis McGee, she would defend the vanquished and vanishing Florida.

I had a long way to swim to get out of the rip. I had a heritage of city wariness, snobbishness, sophistication, arrogance, and protectiveness from many years in the North.

Everything changed one day on Scott Road, the canopy road where I had first seen the peacocks. That day, I got out of the slough, the pocket of deep water rushing back to the sea. Again there was a peacock crossing, an enormous fellow with a tail that stretched the entire width of the road. I screeched to a stop and was about to hit the horn—my hand was raised– when the bird looked at me. How dare you! What’s your rush! Stop and look how beautiful I am. Relax. Linger. Break the grip of the rip. And so I did. I would have to wait him out. I would wait the island out. I would brake for peacocks.

I would look down the dirt roads for another lost boy. What had been that nine- year–old boy’s crime? The parents said he was “hyperactive” (which used to be called “high strung” on all my school reports), that he was a night wanderer, out in the “wee hours.”

 

The back window in Edward’s Audi TT convertible had separated from the fabric top and he was trying to tape a garbage bag over the gap. We would be back in New York for seven weeks and he didn’t want the wind and rain to ruin his baseball-glove leather upholstery. A neighbor saw him struggling and offered his garage. When we returned, we gave him a book and four bottles of expensive wine and he invited us to dinner. This was our first invitation to someone’s house in four years.

There was a picture of Jesus above the table and we bowed our heads to say grace—three couples, two Baptist, an Iranian born Muslim and his wife, two Jews– thanking one of the gods (it wasn’t ours) for food. I hadn’t said grace ever at a New York dinner, in fact not since our daughter’s summer camp. This led to friendships– the Persian surgeon, Fero Sadeghian, climbed mountains and read Proust–if not to a taste of our wine for our hosts did not drink. At all.

And now, finally, we moved into the slipstream of the island. In every new place there must be someone to open the doors; they were our new doormen.

As it took time to forage for food and learn housekeeping, it took time to find people and they were indeed people we would not have known in New York. Our hosts were a retired health/ phys-ed teacher and his wife, a speech teacher, from the Midwest. They were not media people, they would not know or especially want to know even the looming figures of our old world. Edward could tell stories that no one here had heard and I would not have to sit with that deja vu: Did we tell them this before?

I found I was not shy here, I was speaking aloud to other people. I lived in a place where there was no before, not only for me, but for all who had come from other places, away from friends and family and other lives more than half lived. I lived where time was different and I was forced to live with greater patience.

People came to dinner exactly on time here, there was no such thing as the obligatory New York half an hour late. They brought little gifts aside from the magnificence of their crafted presence.

Could we, would we go back? I knew Edward could put out a very good magazine or a fine newspaper tomorrow, but he could not make himself care enough to do it. And I knew how, on our returns, as we sat in the clatter of expensive restaurants with our friends’ eyes snapping around to see who else was there, that we had little to bring to their table. We were not doing anything in their terms. As we fumbled to explain, often our old friends would change the subject.

“You have outgrown your old life,” said the surgeon. He had stopped operating one day at 61 when his eyes were still good and his hands did not wobble and he left as president of his hospital, in charge of two thousand doctors.

We were all on pelican time. I learned from the birds—flap, flap, flap and then glide, float on the wind. Dive and soar and, at the end, sit in the surf and wait for the inevitable.

In front of us, the beach grew dark. In front of the window, beyond the dunes, was the vast abyss of beach and sea and sky, empty despite the dots—the ships on the horizon, the birds, the few last families on the sand, each its own planet, each a moving island, the islands within the island.

Later, I would go out onto the terrace and below would be the night beach, above a shower of meteors, Perseid meteors in the middle of August, Leonid meteors in November. If I went down to the water, past the gurgling lapping pool, the sand would be cold and sea creatures glowing with bioluminescence in the ocean. I could look back at the windows of the sleepless up and down the beach and in a few rooms of the hotel, a clear sky full of stars, a waxing or waning moon and the sound of the sea, louder at night because all else is silent.

“Days like this only come once in a lifetime,” the boy had said.

The nights they are here forever.