Sitting far from the coast at my dorm room in Fort Worth, Texas, all I have to do is
close my eyes and into my mind rushes a cascade of memories from past summers spent
at my grandmother's on Mobile Bay.
The sound of the surf, the raucous squabbling of
seagulls, the sunrises and sunsets... watching squalls come in across the water, feeling
the sun beat down on me... With no trouble at all I remember the slimy feel of a
flounder flipping in my hand, the unnerving sensation of a school of fish brushing past
my legs underwater, the coolness of the calm water on my sun-baked skin when I waded
in to swim. I can bring to mind the smells that drifted through the air, a dead fish lying
on the beach, a salty northeast wind as opposed to a dry southerly one, a heavy rain on
the way, the coconut smell of Coppertone 8.
The best times at the beach though, the ones
everyone hoped for and talked about excitedly, were the evenings between early June and
late August. Then, if we were lucky, the wind started to blow from the northeast and the
night air got a little cooler than the average hot, sultry summer one. The water would get
unusually low as the tide was swept out to meet the horizon. Most importantly, the
normally brackish bay water turned as salty as the gulf.
All these signs pointed towards a
possible jubilee, a natural phenomenon in which the bay denizens, some of which
normally live hundreds of feet from the beach, travel to the shallow waters at the shore to
escape a suffocating death by the salty, oxygen-depleted water. Most succeed in making
it to shore, but many of them don't escape death.
For me, the best jubilees are the ones that start at one or two in the morning and last
until midday. By that time the sun has risen high and the process of photosynthesis in the
shallow waters has provided enough oxygen to allow the creatures to move back into
deeper water. I remember trying to go to sleep during the nights when I had recognized
the signs of a potential jubilee, but it was hard because I was anxiously waiting to find
out if anything would come of it. If I did manage to fall asleep and woke up to the sound
of the telephone ringing when it was still dark, I knew what it was.
My sister and I would
jump out of bed, throwing on our bathing suits that we'd left out the night before, just in
case, grab some clothes, and race to the car. It takes twenty minutes to get from our
house to our grandmother's on the bay, and the drive down the dark, almost deserted
roads was torture. I always thought to myself that if we'd been allowed to spend the
night we'd already be there.
As soon as the car stopped I would leap out and make a mad
dash for the “tilly room,” where I would snatch up a crab net, and fight my sister for
rights to a gig. Racing back upstairs, I always waited impatiently for someone to get a
floundering light. We had to screw on the propane tank first, then tie on the mantles.
Then the gas valve would be opened. The gas would rush out with a sibilant
shhhhhhhhh, and the smell of it filled the air until someone held a match to the
mantles. Once lit, the mantles cast a large arc of blinding light. Thus equipped, I flew
down the front steps and over the path to the beach.
My feet passed over soft pine
needles and were pricked by the spiny edges of spent pine cones. Once I finally got to
the wet sand at the tide line I bent down and tasted the water to see how salty it was,
being careful to avoid any crab claws. Yes, this was IT! I could look out over the calm,
clear water to see how the jubilee was progressing. If a jubilee had just started there
would be fish and crabs and flounders and stingrays and every other kind of bay animal
swimming to shore. It takes skill to deduce what kind of animal is “coming in,
particularly in the dark of night.”
Of course I liked to think that I was a pro at it. The
flounder swimming in are fairly easy to spot. They leave wakes of telltale v's as they
swim on top of the water. The crabs are a little harder to detect. The greenish-blue color
of their shells blends in perfectly with the bay water. It was fun to watch the crabs swim
because rather than swimming face forward they swim sideways, using their backmost
legs, or “swimmers” as they're called colloquially, as paddles to propel themselves.
