Eventually I found that I was wrong in thinking of Amelia as a tropical island. In fact, it was barely the tropics. Though the island was the furthest south of The Golden Isles, it was the very northern limit for the tropics. It had distinct seasons and little of that oozy steamy jungle quality except in the underbrush where leaves were the size of dinner trays and all kinds of amphibia and insects scuttled about, whirring and buzzing and resenting human intrusion.

Also, I was far from its rarest fauna. MaVynne Betsch, known as “The Beach Lady,” who had seven feet of hair, eighteen-inch nails, and a major crusading presence, was just down the road then, sleeping on a chaise on the beach. The hideouts of Captain Kidd and Blackbeard were in the woods and the Ice Age remains of mastodons and giant sloths were buried in ancient maritime forests. Peregrine falcons and other raptors circled the skies, stately pink and bone-white birds prowled the marshes. Ghost socialites danced at the off-island Ribault Club. Pirates, smugglers, and the “black beach” were here on this island, named, in its final incarnation, for a princess disappointed in love.

There was something about the island—the deep harbor, the nearby swamp where pirate galleons once hid themselves, a unique water with tannin that combined with fresh water and so would stay drinkable on the long voyage to Spain, that made the place desirable over and over again. Even unto the point of private planes with mysterious human cargo sweeping now over my head into the local airport. I felt I had to know more so one day I went to the small museum in the town jail and walked through the dioramas.

Amelia’s history was filled with giant (and, later, often crooked and prickly) figures beginning with the Timucua, who ate oysters and vegetables, grew to six-and-a- half feet tall, and lived long in their “Napoyca.” When Europeans were dying at 30 or 40, the Timucuans, primitive, tattooed and moss clad as they were, long of nail, unable to write, mostly vegetarian but with a penchant for human flesh, went on until 60 and even 80, drinking a black brew made from yaupin holly.

Even before the Pilgrims, in 1562, Jean Ribault and one hundred and fifty French Huguenots sailed in to what they called the Isle de Mai. “The place is so pleasant that melancholics would be forced to change their nature,” Captain Rene de Laudonniere wrote. But he, Ribault, and most of the Protestants were massacred by the Catholic Spanish, who conquered and renamed the island Santa Maria of La Florida.

In 1763, James Oglethorpe, who founded Georgia, found the island and called it Amelia, for a daughter of King George II. After a life of drinking and gambling, Princess Amelia died a spinster with a miniature of Frederick the Great, once her intended, pinned to her bosom.

Already, I found myself lost. Too much had gone on for me to absorb. At its heart, the island had a confusion of identity: it was French, then it was Spanish, English, Patriot, Spanish again, Green Cross of Florida, then Mexican Revolutionary, United States, and Confederate. It was run by pirates and slave traders. Assorted rogues and patriots had tried to take it back from Spain. Amelia was called “the Spanish Hussy,” “the Newport of the South”, the “back door” to the U.S., a “festering fleshpot” (James Monroe). Plantations of rice and South Sea cotton and indigo had covered the island; condos and links now covered slave graves and pruned palmetto forests; smugglers had fed the north its spices and the south its slaves; there were Franciscan missions, saloons and bordellos full of portside whores. It was twice a renegade nation ruled by two Northern politicians and a Mexican pirate. Dead slave bodies had hung from the live oaks.

The docent who took me round led me through the history –how President Madison sent out The Patriots, but disowned them and the island went back to Spain; how General Gregor McGregor took 55 men with green dog fennel in their hats, drove out the Spaniards, and briefly raised the flag of the Green Cross; how the pirate Luis Aury came to raise the Mexican rebel flag in 1820’s; how David Levy, a lawyer who knew plantation life and believed in slavery, went to Washington as a delegate for the territory of Florida.

When Florida became a state in 1845, Levy became the first Jewish U.S. Senator. Levy was the grandson of the Grand Vizier of the Emperor of Morocco and changed his name to Yulee for his Sephardic relatives. He saw Florida, steamy, vacant, and un-air-conditioned, as a state and built a railroad across it to the west. Building the railroad meant moving the whole town of Fernandina for his convenience which he did just in time for the Civil War. Unlike his grandfather, who was quartered alive and burned at the stake, Yulee went to prison for writing a treasonous letter on behalf of the South. He was called the Father of Florida and died D.L. Yulee, a Christian convert in New York.

Within the sultry exotica of this place there had always been something hidden —but well, familiar about the island. It had a Fourteenth Street and an Eighth Street and a Central Park. The town of Fernandina Beach was laid out in a grid and looked rather like Victorian Brooklyn. David Yulee had copied New York. I was living in a ghost New York, an imitation, an inversion of all the New Yorkitude I had grown up with, a kind anti- New York, low and slow and impossible to impress. All the aspirations had gone awry because there could only be one New York, and I knew it was not Southern.

The island seceded from the Union in the Civil War, but the Union forces took it back for the United States. Yankee officers returned after the war to start businesses. For a brief while, Amelia Island was the “Queen of Summer Resorts,” just as David Yulee had hoped. At the end of the century, the Cuban patriot Jose Marti lived in town and bought guns for the Cuban rebels.

In the 1930’s, American Beach was founded, a black hamlet on a white island and busloads of people arrived on weekends. Women went to the beach in white lawn dresses and to the clubs at night and great music rocked over the dunes. This island—in its middle –was alive and strutting. Then the music stopped and the buses no longer came and many people moved north at the end of the Great Migration.

 

I was slouched over the museum desk paying for a pack of note cards with assorted palm trees.

“This was a small southern backwater place,” said Charlie, the man sitting at the desk. “I’ve been here since 1945.” He told me the Ku Klux Klan, led by the sheriff, had marched down Centre Street in 1956. The high schools had not been integrated until 1966. No black people could drink at the Palace Saloon. They had to go to the Cat Crack out back and sit on the back seat of a station wagon and sleep it off in the town jail. Then Charlie’s father would bail them out, and take them to his boats where they caught porgies for fertilizer and to make Revlon lipsticks shiny. In the I-lan movie theater, they had to stand on a separate line even to buy their popcorn.

Once, there were nine fancy hotels here but they burned or were knocked down by storms and the people went further south. When Henry Flagler built his railroad to the south he bypassed Fernandina.

The shrimping industry began here in the port with canneries flourishing until the Depression. And then the two pulp mills came and ground up mountains of southern pine to make chemical cellulose and bad smelling smoke and form the tax base.

Whenever anyone asked where Amelia Island was I had to say “north of Jacksonville” for only a city would mean something to those in another city—Where do I land? What is the airport? How long does it take? Yet we had little to do with Jacksonville, The River City, the biggest city in the United States in terms of area, a city we constantly got lost in when we went there for the movies or to see Prince perform or go to the Cummer museum or my son John’s ESPN party during the Super Bowl. How far is it from New York, the capital of their world? That’s all they wanted to know. Instead of saying “the other side of the moon,” I said “It’s almost Georgia.” This was to give them the idea we were truly in Cracker Florida, not southern Florida which in spirit and mood is the north with pink birds, Cubans, Russians, South Americans, and winter heat.

One afternoon, I went into Jacksonville and saw the Treaty Oak—a great octopus of a tree with a trunk of 25 feet and a width of 70 feet, it spread and drooped all over the ground, two hundred years old and not very beautiful, kind of a freak. In an effort to save the tree and the land around it, a newsman had written an article and made up the story that Andrew Jackson had met under this tree to sign a treaty with some Indian chief.

All over Florida people were making up false stories about their land—places like the Fountain of Youth in St. Augustine which wasn’t the fountain of youth nor even the place Ponce de Leon had discovered. False Florida, needing its legends, had gone on for centuries, its dreams were in the air. Things are very seldom what they seem here, this is part of the spirit of place, part of deception- prone Dixie.

 

By the time Edward and I arrived, Amelia Island’s officially golden years had been over for a century. Out of an extremely lurid history with a vein of pure evil, a seemingly placid place had emerged. By accident, we had found a place that mirrored us, past its early glories and excitements, its power lost in history.

Edward and I had migrated from an island where we once had too much going on to a place where we had nothing going on except what we might find to do. We had little contact with the once wild sunstruck town; our world was the beach. I stayed on the rim of the rim of the island looking east to the water, apart from the historical tensions and the discouraging politics.

Despite its two factories, the island had become a resort. Did those old generals and pirates and patriots, did all the colliding Spanish and English and Mexicans and French, Protestants, Catholics, slaves and savages ever think they would be fighting for golf courses and condos and spas and women doing Down Dog?

I was one of them. I, truly twitchy and uncalm, had continued with my yoga. Soon enough, I was verspreht (lying flat, as my people say) in savasana, complete relaxation and surrender, or as close to it as I could get, being me.

Somehow we had come to live in an “amenity area,” a destination wedding, golf-club swinging resort laid down over old bones. A resort, a place to re-sort our lives. That was what went with the sea, for this was a place where people, using their children as excuses, brought their toys to play and built their forts and drip castles and burying holes, their long ago dreams, dug deep in the sand. This was an island where snowbirds pecked smooth their ruffled feathers.

We had become residents of the state of Florida. We had found a distinguished southern lawyer named “Chip” to make out our wills. It seemed Florida, without estate and capital gains taxes, was an especially good place to die.

Now the battle for the soul of the island continues, has disintegrated to a bloodless but bitter fight between the preservationists and the developers (as seen in Sunshine State, the John Sayles movie about Amelia Island). The island, once important and prized, fought over for centuries, but then abandoned perhaps because of its very nowhereness, the only place in the United States with eight flags going up and down, is in eclipse but not giving up. The vacant peach developments with their lanais and Corian countertops, as endangered as the rest, are still multiplying. The natives are still heavily tattooed. The crimes of the pirates have migrated into low-rent Hydrocodone trades, and the whorish nights of the young raw town are just a memory as far as I know.

The birds of the North American Flyway from the arctic to the Caribbean– still stop here to rest. I keep moving, twisting, warrior one, warrior two, bowing, arching, clutching various parts of my body—flowing and really bored. Everyone is OM-ing. I am silent. The island goes on and on. The spirit of place. Namaste. The spirit in me bows to the spirit in you. I had my doubts about that.