Retreat! Part One

There was no baggage to contend with and the rental agency had upgraded me from a Rio to a Rogue, an improvement of both vehicular integrity as well as totemic desirability. Gainesville was warm and swampy, with cement block homes and cypress trees spangled in Spanish moss. I played “Damn the Torpedoes” with the windows down and drove to Cedar Key.

The road to Cedar Key is straight like you don't see in New England. Route 24 had been built along the bygone Florida Railroad line, connecting the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico. After about an hour, the land thins out on either side to reveal only water surrounding the narrow road, and in early evening, the still and steely gulf mirrored a shell-colored sky. I slowed to take in the clumps of small islands standing in pools of their own reflections.

Soon the motels, restaurants, and boat rental businesses familiar from my research began to crop up on other side, and I pulled into the small roadside lot belonging to the Mermaid.

San Francisco transplants had recently purchased and gracefully renovated the Mermaid, which had been a fishing camp since the '50s. Strands of soft-glowing bulbs illuminated tropical gardens along the winding paths that defined their edges. A campfire flickered on the sloping lawn stretching down toward water where a weathered dock leaned out, kayaks tethered to its mooring poles.

A homemade billboard erected across the street from the Mermaid announced "BEST MUG SHOT,” paired with a name I recognized as one of the Mermaid's proprietors. Another sign that read "NO MERMAID PARKING EVER" began to tell a story, and after some light internet sleuthing, the arrest charge, "battery touch or strike," perhaps finished it. Curiously, elsewhere in this neighbor's lawn were peace signs, tie-dye garden gewgaws, and the word "CREATE" spelled out in a font I would name Wizard's Whimsy if given the chance.

The weather was becoming a problem. I had come south to focus and to write, to work the manuscript of my first novel away from the qualification of "first" and more toward the "novel" half of the clause, but one does not travel to Florida in January to be content with March in Rhode Island. How was I supposed to smoke cigars on the deck and appreciate the deep-sinking sun when it was so cold that frozen iguanas were falling out of trees?

Cedar Key was the latest of such solo writing expeditions. The inception of these self-imposed delusions of discipline sprouted from a desire to avoid the more traditional residency or retreat. Despite experienced writers insisting otherwise, I maintain the unfounded suspicion that writing retreats are for writerly personas who want only to groupthink things like the lyrical integrity of their ever-unfinished memoirs.

One afternoon after a morning of writing in Cedar Key, the cold rain had paused long enough to entice a stroll. I walked to an interpretive trail highlighting the typical flora and fauna of the island. The pelicans were interesting and the roseate spoonbills were animals I had not seen before. While keeping an eye out for any abnormally diurnal panthers, I became curious about the Spanish bayonet, which I had read about the night before in John Muir's Cedar Key-set “A Thousand-Mile Walk to the Gulf.”

Here's what Muir wrote:

“One of the characteristic plants of these keys is the Spanish bayonet, a species of yucca, about eight or ten feet in height, and with a trunk three or four inches in diameter when full grown...The stout leaves are very rigid, sharp-pointed and bayonet-like. By one of these leaves a man might be as seriously stabbed as by an army bayonet, and woe to the luckless wanderer who dares to urge his way through these armed gardens after dark. Vegetable cats of many species will rob him of his clothes and claw his flesh, while dwarf palmettos will saw his bones, and the bayonets will glide to his joints and marrow without the smallest consideration for Lord Man.”

Naturally I had to touch the plant. An index finger's tap on the tip of the leaf drew the spot of blood to confirm Muir's claim to the yucca's sharpness, but what Muir did not include in his prosaic admonition was that the plant was also poisonous. I hypothesized this theory an hour or so later when my heart began to hammer and my breathing became labored. The words on the laptop screen buzzed to blurry incoherence.

"Strong beer!" I thought, regarding the can I'd had with lunch.

I laid on the bed to ride out the effects and was soon struck by what I had done. I called poison control and the agent sat with me on the line while he looked up and read aloud the same pages I had already looked up and read. After about 10 minutes of this, he said "If you're still alive you're probably alright."

He wasn’t wrong.