Kidpowertool – unemployed dairy professional, lives in Key West, FL.
LeTigre – Edmund’s wife, televangelist, lives in St. Louis Park.
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Edmund Callipeaux - 14 May 2009, 10:00am
A while back, I bought this remote control Bart Simpson on a Skateboard.
I had just seen an episode of Bill Nye the Science Guy where Bill and his cohorts had shown that throwing a baseball from a moving vehicle increased the speed of the ball by the velocity of their pickup truck. They were doing this to prove something about the speed of light being a constant; that the ball thrown from the pickup truck at 30mph would hit the catcher’s glove at 30mph + the velocity that the ball was thrown: 30mph + 20mph = 50mph when it hit the catcher’s mitt. (Yet light didn’t do this – it remained at a constant speed, despite the pickup truck– it was all very interesting.)
So, I thought to myself, “I own a pickup truck.”
And then I thought, “I wonder?”
So, I went over to Killdozer and M.C. RibEye’s house so that we could have a little science experiment of our own.
The three of us drove over to an empty church parking lot. Maneuvering into position within the parking lot, we sat quietly in the front seat of my pickup truck, The General.
I looked over at Killdozer and said, “Let the science begin!”
Whereupon, Killdozer opened the passenger-side door and placed the remote control Bart Simpson on the asphalt (asphalt that instantly became Tarmac once the radio controlled Bart Simpson on a Skateboard was placed for lift off).
He closed the door to the truck as M.C. RibEye brought forth the remote control.
“All systems ready to fire?” I asked. The countdown was implemented and Science was about to be redefined.
I revved The General’s engine and M.C. RibEye thumbed the controls of the radio controlled Bart Simpson on a Skateboard: Science had begun!
I called out, “Beverages?”
“One bottle Orange Fanta.”
“One bottle Tahitian Treat.”
“One bottle Grape Crush,” replied M.C. RibEye.
“Sugar Delivery Systems adequate,” confirmed Killdozer.
“Monkey-Navigational-System?” I called out as checked Beverages off my punch-list.
“Operational,” replied Killdozer.
“5…4…3…2…1…Engage remote control device,” I said as M.C. RibEye moved the control knobs causing Bart Simpson and his skateboard to edge slowly forward.
“Engaging The General,” I confirmed as I moved the truck into first gear and began to follow the trajectory of the skateboard.
“All systems operational. Increase speed!” As I said this, I brought the clutch into second gear and Bart Simpson matched The General’s momentum.
“Approaching third gear! Brace for confirmation of science in motion! - - No wait, brace for IMPACT!” I yelled as The General’s front passenger-side tire ran over the remote control Bart Simpson on a Skateboard!
“Abort! Abort! Mission failure! Alas, defeated are we! Oh, miserable day!”
Killdozer spilt his Grape Crush as he said these words. The purple soda on the dashboard seemed to symbolize the crushing defeat we had just experienced in the eyes of the scientific community that we had so hoped to impress.
The experiment was a total failure.
“We flew a little too close to the sun by attempting third gear, boys. We’re lucky we didn’t blow up the whole church parking lot and that guy over there whose looking at us with a confused expression on his face,” I said as the General powered down and came to an abrupt halt.
No matter how fast I got The General going, it didn’t seem to affect the speed of the radio controlled Bart Simpson on a Skateboard one bit. Thereby disproving my theory that the speed of the operator would infer itself to the speed of the radio controlled Bart Simpson on a Skateboard.
“All for the sake of Science!” I said, as Killdozer rushed out of The General to see if the radio controlled Bart Simpson on a Skateboard was still intact. - EC
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Kidpowertool - 16 May 2009, Morning
The following medley of photographs - eleven photographs - represent eleven forthcoming stories currently in production from our team of contributing writers - stories concerning the life of Edmund Callipeaux. - KPT
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Reprise:
Reprinted and posted together for the first time (unabridged and still scary). - KPT
LeTigre Callipeaux
Cedar Key, parts 1 and 2
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Cedar Key, part 1
On one of our many trips to Florida to visit Kidpowertool, Eddie and I spent four days in Cedar Key. The town of Cedar Key is situated on Northern Florida’s gulf coast within a massive marine wildlife sanctuary. The town dates back to before the Civil War and many of the buildings from that era are still standing and being used. Soldiers from the Northern army had used the hotel we stayed at as an outpost during the war. It’s a quaint little town that tourism hadn’t destroyed as it has so many other coastal areas of Florida.
We arrived in town at about 8:00 p.m. on a Sunday in July of 1996. We had called ahead for reservations and were informed during our conversation with the hotel owner that as it was their down season, no one else was currently booked to stay at the hotel. In fact, the owner told us that they’ve taken to not working on Sundays and that when we arrived in town, there would be no one at the hotel to greet us. She instructed me that she would leave a key to the back door of the building in a flowerpot on the grounds. We were to let ourselves in, make ourselves at home, and someone would be by our room in the morning to check us in and see if we needed anything. I thought to myself, “Wow, this place must be in the middle of nowhere.”
We made our way into town that night, found the hotel, found the back door, found the flowerpot, and sure enough the key awaited us. Eddie and I climbed an exterior set of stairs to a second floor doorway, unlocked the door, and entered the building. The doorway opened up to a large parlor with a fireplace and couches and chairs. Doors to the individual guest rooms lined the walls of this richly decorated room. It was a beautiful, warm room with deep, intricate woodwork and soft, sepia-toned murals of the local swampy landscape covering the walls. There were bookshelves lined with books, antique lamps, and worn area rugs covering the hardwood floor. To our left was a grand staircase that led down to the main lobby of the hotel, across which was a small tavern on the first floor called The Neptune Tavern. (Eddie was especially pleased to find the Neptune Tavern the next day…it had a large portrait behind the bar of King Neptune himself, complete with trident, commanding the sea and all its creatures.)
Directly across the room from the grand staircase, and to our right, was the room we had reserved. Eddie and I stood and looked around the parlor, taking in all of its intricacies. His gaze eventually landed on the door to our room. One second after that, his gaze shifted slightly to the left and down to where it found a life-size doll that looked exactly like a four year old girl. It stood about three feet high and she had her back to the wall. It was dressed in a little pink outfit with stockings and shoes. The material that was used to make her hands and head was very realistic looking. And the expression on her face was also very natural looking. Given that dolls are usually exaggerated in some way, like having an extravagant dress, or a porcelain face, this doll lacked any kind of flamboyancy, and for all intensive purposes looked normal and somewhat plain. It was if she was a real little girl, frozen while standing right next to the door to our room. Eddie looked to me and I could tell without him making a sound that he was freaking out on the inside.
Eddie set the bags he was carrying on the floor of the parlor and said, “I don’t know about this.” He then proceeded to walk over to the doll. Crouching down, he addressed her eye to eye. “This is too much. I can’t sleep in a room knowing that this is directly on the other side of the door. What if she starts knocking on the door in the middle of the night?” We looked blankly at each other for a moment or two as I ran through my mind the layout of the town while trying to remember if I had seen any other hotels. There were none.
Reaching out both his hands toward the doll, Eddie said, “Perhaps it’d be okay if we just moved her to some other location.” He then proceeded to pick her up by her shoulders. “My god! The thing weighs as much as a girl of her age…and the weight is distributed evenly throughout her body like a real person. There’s a density to the form that isn’t soft like it would be if she were stuffed with cotton or something. This is not good.” He walked outside the door that we had entered the building from and set the doll down on the landing. He stood up, looked at the doll, looked over at me, looked again to the doll and said, “I don’t know if this works. She might get mad that we stuck her outside. What if it rains?”
Picking up the doll a second time, he moved back into the parlor and to the far end of the room…as far from our door as possible. “Hey, there’s a little nook back here that I could stick her in.” He set the doll down and stood back once again. From across the room, I watched him as the expression on his face went from mildly satisfied to worried once again. “No, this doesn’t feel right either.” Whereupon, Eddie picked up the doll for a third time and began to move her to another part of the room. I watched him go through this same exact process at about five or six other spots in the parlor.
Eventually, despite all of his attempts to move the doll to a new location away from our room, we stood a few feet apart. Eddie was still holding the doll and I was trying to hold onto my patience. Each time he set the doll somewhere, he got a little more worried that she wouldn’t be happy in that new spot, and therefore she would exact her terrible revenge upon him late that night whilst he slept. “Maybe I should just put her back where she was when we got here.” He then moved toward our door and crouched down to return her to her home. “I’ll just turn her around to face the wall though, then she’s not watching us while we’re out here.” And there the doll was left with her face toward the wall.
Our guest room was like something straight out of Gone with the Wind. It had the four-post covered bed, with mosquito netting draping down, an old-fashioned sink and washbowl, antique wooden dressers and tables. It was beautiful and extremely well maintained. There was also a door in the room that opened to a wide balcony that wrapped itself around the entire second floor of the building. After getting settled in a bit, we went out to sit and read our books on the balcony and listen to the sounds of the night. I don’t know if there where more than a couple hundred people living in Cedar Key, so it was very quite and peaceful that night. Of course Eddie wouldn’t shut up all night about the doll. I told him that he was making things worse for himself by perseverating on the matter. I don’t think that he slept much that night.
The next morning, Eddie woke up before the owners had arrived at the hotel. I awoke to see him climb out of bed and I watched as he crept toward the door. He paused at the door to listen for any sounds of life or movement within the hotel. After a moment, he opened the door slightly to see if there was anyone in the parlor. Opening the door a bit further, he bent down and with one eye he peeked out into the parlor. Immediately he stood back and closed the door quickly, but silently. “The doll is facing the stairs again! How the hell did that happen?” He stood there frozen in his underwear as he stared blankly at me. I thought back to what should be done to treat someone whose having a stroke. We then heard voices. The owners were downstairs and other people were checking into the hotel at the front desk. Across from the Neptune Tavern the noise of clinking plates and silverware emanated from the hotel dining room as they set up for breakfast. Eddie cracked the door open again and peered out. “I don’t know how we lived through the night.” Adding to his sentiment I wondered how I was going to get through the day with this madman whom I was trapped with in the middle of nowhere. – LC
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Cedar Key, part 2
We stayed three nights in Cedar Key, Florida. To this day, I don’t know why I have such great memories of that trip. Perhaps, I remember the place fondly because the phrase “terrible experience” is often replaced by the word “adventure” in one’s memory. Adventure carries connotations of exploration, bizarre encounters, and heroic behavior. It’s a word that implies a “road less traveled” sort of thing…but let’s face it, a vacation that involves taking the road less traveled usually means that when you get home, you’ll need another vacation to recover from the vacation.
As it turned out, our hotel at Cedar Key was indeed haunted. The owners told us that a woman from the time of the Civil War was still occupying the building. She had been seen several times in the hotel restaurant kitchen and was known to move furniture around at night. Eddie began to ask about the life-like little girl doll that the hotel owners had standing quietly in the parlor next to our guestroom door. But he stopped short before verbalizing the question that was paramount on his mind. In a rare display of restraint, Eddie held his tongue before his fears of what could be were replaced with the terror of knowing what was is indeed a fact. He didn’t ask them if the ghost was capable of possessing this doll.
In the movies, the implication of a specter or demon is always more scary than a detailed view of the monster. Our minds can fabricate a horror that is much more intense and real than anything that can be shown to us on film. However, in real life, thinking that a ghost might possess a doll is scary, but that is nothing compared to knowing, without a doubt in your mind, that the entire time you lay in your bed, there is a 19th century woman in a little girl’s body scampering around the parlor just outside the door to your room. She’s muttering and swearing under her cold breath as she searches for knives or pick-axes or chainsaws. Or worse, she’s in the parlor arranging all the people she’s killed over the past one hundred years on the antique chairs and couches. She then serves them tea and little cakes under the flickering glow of the fireplace and the scratchy sounds of a Joplin ragtime playing on a spooky old phonograph. What if the owners of the hotel had told us that every once in a while she likes to add a few new people to her tea party of the damned? What if these suspicions were confirmed? You only want to imagine that stuff like that is possible, as opposed to knowing that it is imminent that you will play the protagonist in a tragedy that would be acted out entirely for HER pleasure.
The town of Cedar Key had many other adventures in store for us. The hotel had a wonderful covered balcony that wrapped around the entire second floor of the building. There, Eddie and I spent many hours relaxing and reading books above the street and under the warm Florida sunshine. But we were on the Gulf Coast, and being so close to the ocean made us long for a beach to sit on to while away our days in leisure. Unfortunately, the town itself had no sandy beachfront. It was built around a port that sponge fishermen had founded long ago. And since the area was deemed to be a marine wildlife sanctuary, no development of the coast had taken place for years. Inquiring at the hotel, we were told by the manager that we could charter a boat to take us out to one of the countless islands in the bay. There, she said, we would find some of the best beaches anywhere on Earth. Intrigued, we decided to take her up on her recommendation, and we made our way to the harbor that afternoon.
Seeing the harbor and its fleet of fishing boats, I thought, “This will be exciting! Going out to some island on one of these big boats with some salty captain will be grand!” Arriving at the docks, we were greeted by a sea captain who introduced himself as Creek Runner Bill. Creek Runner Bill was salty, but he didn’t quite match the strong, chiseled features I had imagined in my Captain of the Sea. He was more of a sinewy character, with a lean build and medium height. He was wearing nothing more than a pair of shorts, a wide-brimmed hat and flip-flop sandals. His skin was tan, leathery, and tough looking due to his many years working as a fisherman under the intense Florida sunshine. He had a wide, cheerful smile, and was an instantly likeable fellow. The boat we were to charter was a skiff, or a dingy, with a little outboard motor at one end. It seemed seaworthy enough, I thought. I looked over at Eddie and I could see that we were soon to set sail in this motorboat because he was extending a ten-dollar bill to our salty captain whose grin was assuring us that we were in good hands.
We managed to get into the boat with no difficulty. And as the skiff headed out to sea, I could tell that Creek Runner Bill was at home as he piloted us through the low surf of the harbor waters. I looked out into the bay and saw what seemed like hundreds of small islands peppered about in the distance. Moving beyond the “no wake zone” of the harbor, Creek Runner Bill gunned the motor and we began to zip across the water.
As we reached the center of the bay, I looked back to shore and saw that the town had become a series of little dots on the horizon. Turning back to look off the bow of the boat, a small strip of land, far away in the distance, was pointed out as our destination. “But first,” our captain yelled, as he promptly killed the power to the outboard motor, “let’s stop for a little while here.” The boat slowed to a complete stop as I wondered what he had in mind for us out in the middle of the bay (far, far away from any land). He then said, “Hop out of the boat!”
I looked quickly over at Eddie and then together we looked at Creek Runner Bill. We found him at the helm with a mischievous look in his eye. I thought, “Oh no, this is the part where he throws us out of the boat after taking all or money!” I could just see him and our hotel manager laughing at the stupid greenhorns…laughing and high-fiving each other over their murderous and profitable scheme. The perfect crime! “Them Yankees just keep getting stupider and stupider!”
As I was about to scream, Creek Runner Bill stood up, and with the agility of a gazelle, he leapt out of the boat. He did not, however, disappear into the depths of the water, but rather, he landed on his feet in about two inches of water! He stood there for a moment, and then turning to us, he said, “We’re on a sandbar. It’s just barely covered by the water. Let’s walk around for a while…it’s a great place to find sand dollars.”
Eddie and I proceed to climb excitedly out of the skiff and onto the sandy ocean floor. The water barely covered the tops of my feet! It was surreal to walk around in the middle of the bay at least a mile from land in any direction. The glorious sunshine made the turquoise water sparkle and the 360° view was unmatched by anything I could imagine. Plus, there were indeed sand dollars all over the place. I could feel them out with my toes as they were just beneath the soft sand. I looked over to Eddie, who was about twenty-five feet from me, and he exclaimed, “Look! I’m Jesus!” He then mimed the famous story of Jesus walking on the water. From my vantage point, it did look like he was treading on the surface of the ocean. But I thought to myself, “There isn’t a cloud in the sky, but that idiot better watch what he says before the Big Man Upstairs decides to set him straight with a few lightening bolts.”
After exploring the sandbar for a while, we got back into to the boat and Creek Runner Bill shuttled us over to where our tropical island paradise awaited our arrival. As we approached, the details of its landscape began to emerge into view. The main body of the isle was formed by a thick stand of palm trees that towered into the air with a deep blue sky forming a magnificent backdrop. The white, powdery sand of the beach extended fifty feet out from these trees before it touched the water as it made a ring around the small island. A seagull soared briefly into view and then off into the distance on its search for whatever a seagull eats. The only sound in the air was that of Creek Runner Bill’s motor, and I knew that soon we would only have the slight rustling of palm fronds to serenade us. I looked to where we had come from and I could just make out a tiny sliver of land that the town of Cedar Key occupied.
“Aaaaaaah, The Grail!”
Creek Runner Bill landed the boat and we gathered up our gear. He walked us across the beach saying that we weren’t allowed to go into the brush on the island on account of it being protected land. We were to restrict ourselves to the sandy beach and the water. He saw that we had all our supplies (drinking water, lunch, beach towels, suntan lotion, etc.) and began to walk back to the boat. “I’ll be back to pick you up in three hours.” And with that said, he drove the little boat off into the distance and out of sight.
“Wow! This is amazing!” proclaimed Eddie. “We are in the middle of nowhere! I wonder if there is any pirate treasure buried anywhere along this beach? Swag!” I looked across the blue-green ocean and felt the hot sun and cool breeze on my face. The warm sand sifted between my toes and I thought to myself, “I hope that guy comes back for us.” In truth though, I was too overwhelmed by the beauty of our setting to spend any serious time dwelling on a negative thought like that. I’ve been on a lot of beaches with Eddie, but none were ever this isolated and remote. The island seemed completely untouched by human beings…there were no bottles or candy bar wrappers in the sand, no sounds of cars or some kid’s radio, no scary-looking teenagers, no freaks throwing a Frisbee around. Nothing. Nothing but the sand, the palm trees, the ocean, the sun, and occasionally a bird!
We established a base camp of beach towels midway between the palm trees and the water’s edge. We had food to snack on and a few bottles of water. I got myself comfortable with my book after applying a nice layer of suntan lotion to my exposed skin. Eddie did the same with the suntan lotion, but he decided to hit the water right away. This was just about perfect. I didn’t have a care in the world as I adjusted my sunglasses and turned the pages of my Puffy Shirt Book. A fly landed on my arm and I thought, “Aha! I have come prepared for this!” I fished a small bottle of bug juice from my bag and began to spray it around to ward off any further annoyances. Returning to the base camp, and seeing the bug spray, Eddie said, “I wouldn’t have thought to bring bug spray. You’ve got everything in that bag, LeTigre. I swear, there’s nothing you don’t come prepared for!” As he helped himself to a bottle of water, he said, “Hey, I think that there's a dolphin swimming around a little ways out.” He then ran back into the ocean, crying aloud about being Aquaman or someone.
That fly that had lit upon me flew away after I applied my bug spray. But don’t think that it was because he feared the repellant. I think that the little guy flew away to find his friends and exclaimed that there was something new and wonderful sitting on the beach. Because after a few minutes had passed, a swarm of horseflies descended upon me. It was terrible. They were huge! And they went right for me despite my efforts to swat at them! Eddie has an uncle who once told me that the mosquitoes in Northern Wisconsin were so big that they carried violin cases to hold their stingers. These horseflies looked to be carrying cello cases containing all manner of medieval stinging and biting devices! I momentarily withstood their attacks but was soon forced to abandon base camp and head for the safety of the water.
Finding Eddie knee-deep in the cool water, I told him about the horseflies. He was watching the dolphin swim back and forth in front of us about thirty feet away. I followed his unblinking gaze and said, “That’s no dolphin. That’s a shark!” He turned to address my profile, “That’s two sharks.” We both watched as the trademark dorsal fins of a large shark and a larger shark swam side-by-side just beyond where the water began to deepen. The larger shark, which we guessed to be the mommy-shark had a second tail fin emerging from the water about eight feet beyond her dorsal fin. They were tracking back and forth, back and forth, directly in front of where we stood, not coming any closer, yet not moving further out to sea. “I don’t think the water’s a good place to hang out in.” And with that said, Eddie and I began to move toward shore.
Once back on land, and safe from the sharks, the horseflies attacked us full-bore. They had recruited more of their allies and dive-bombed us from all directions. Eddie moved back out into the water a few feet. I stayed on land, determined to take a stand against the wretched flies. “Hey, the flies won’t go over the water!” Eddie stood in about three inches of water observing the lack of flies biting him. I ran over to where he was, and sure enough, no flies. The ocean was calm and there were no waves to shift the border between land and sea. Tempting the flies, I walked right up to where the water met the dry sand. They would not cross over the water’s edge! Taking one step onto the beach, the viscous flies descended upon me once again. Stepping back into the water a bit, and they were nowhere to be found. “Those little buggers will not fly over the water! That’s crazy!”
The two of us stood six inches from shore wondering why the flies wouldn’t dare journey out over the water. “Maybe they’re afraid of the sharks, like I am.” Eddie turned back to confirm that the sharks were still were still maintaining their incessant course, waiting, hoping for us to wonder out a little deeper. Looking down to gather his thoughts, Eddie put forth the next relevant question pertaining to our situation: “What is that?”
Looking down I saw what looked like a small, lightly colored grey, diamond-like-square shape. It was moving almost as if it was flying…or more accurately: it was like a taco, a prehistoric taco, that was flapping its square tortilla shell to propel itself and glide through the water. It was no more than six inches across as it flew from our right to the left, about three feet from where we stood. “That looks like a stingray. It’s got those wings, and a long tail, and it’s gliding through the water. It must be a baby. Hey, there’s another one!” I looked to the right and sure enough, there was the baby stingray’s little bother or sister. “And there’s another one! And another! And another! And another! Holy crap!”
What came to be known as StingRay HighWay turned out to be a single file line of baby stingrays following each other through the water, about eighteen inches apart. They appeared to be swimming counter-clockwise around the island. StingRay HighWay was about three and a half feet from shore and it looked like the 405 running through Los Angeles with bumper-to-bumper traffic. Eddie and I looked at each other. “Okay. I don’t know if we’ve been here twenty minutes, and we’ve got horseflies on the beach, sharks out in the water, and StingRay HighWay just off shore. We’ve got a strip of water about three feet wide that seems to be safe. When did that guy say he was coming back for us?” We stood in that spot for two and a half hours.
Watching the sharks was mesmerizing. (They probably hoped that they could hypnotize us into venturing out into deeper waters.) The stingrays glided by, the sun beat down, and occasionally that stupid bird flew overhead. We waited. I think that I’ve blanked from my memory how we passed that stretch of time. Occasionally, one of us would try the land, only to be beaten back into the water by the dreadful horseflies. And the water was only deep enough to barely cover the tops of our feet. Hundreds of stingrays paraded by us on their oceanic speedway encircling the island. After what seemed like an eternity, the sounds of Creek Runner Bill’s boat motor began to fill the air. As the vessel drew near, the sputtering coughs and gurgles of the outboard motor overwhelmed the grueling tranquility of the rustling palm fronds.
Thinking back to that situation, I have no idea what possessed us to be left on a deserted island for three hours by a guy whom we’d only just met. Hasn’t a great deal of classic literature been devoted to the subject of Man vs. Nature? And Man usually doesn’t fair too well in those books, does he? As Creek Runner Bill’s boat approached, I saw that he had two additional passengers with him. I guess he’d been ferrying people like us out to these little islands all day. Getting in the boat, I thought that they also looked a little spooked and I wondered what sort of adventure in paradise they had found that afternoon. I can only imagine that we looked completely shocked and totally out of sorts. Glad to be aboard, Eddie took his place at the bow and I sat back with the two new people toward the stern.
Creek Runner Bill idled the boat through the shallow water away from our island of terror. I told him that we had seen sharks just out from the beach. “Oh, I saw those, they’re all over the place out here. They’re only Tiger sharks though, it’s the Hammerhead’s that you’ve got to watch out for.” I noticed his alligator-like skin once more and imagined him swimming fearlessly through the ocean depths with a knife clenched between his teeth. I was daydreaming about Creek Runner Bill waging war against a giant octopus or something when he gunned the motor and up out of the water came a massive splash and a large black square, both of which blocked the sun for a moment before disappearing back into the ocean. Eddie was thrown back off his perch at the bow of the boat as he yelled, “HOLY MOTHER!”
The four of us city slickers sitting in the boat had a series of individual heart attacks while Creek Runner Bill calmly shifted the toothpick in his mouth and said, “Stingrays are all over the place out here too." As we had traveled out of the shallows, and into deeper waters, Creek Runner Bill had kicked the motor into high gear and the bow of the boat had surprised a humongous, fully-grown stingray! It reared up and breached the surface of the water not two feet from where Eddie sat! The monster must have shot five feet into the air!
We made it safely and without any further incident back to the harbor at Cedar Key. I thought Eddie looked like Ponce de León must have after the long trip across the Atlantic as he hugged and kissed the dock after we had disembarked from Creek Runner Bill’s skiff. In kindness, we thanked him for facilitating our little adventure and began to make our way back to the hotel. We rejoiced in every step as it brought us closer to the comforts of the hotel and further away from those terrible sea creatures that had unwittingly tortured us all afternoon. Arriving back at our room, I flopped down on the bed and cried, “We made it! I can’t believe we made it!”
“I’ll be in The Neptune Tavern.” Eddie said, as he moved back toward the door. I replied, “Wait for me!”
Warily, we descended the stairs to the first floor of the hotel to where the Neptune Tavern awaited our arrival. Finding two stools at the bar, Eddie asked if they had shark or stingray on the menu. “I don’t even know if they eat stingray around here.” In lieu of appetizers of cold revenge, we were given two frosty beers. We then took our seats at a table near a large picture window overlooking the bay. I could barely make out the individual islands far off in the distance, and I wondered which had been the isle that had held us captive by our own stupidity.
The sun was beginning to dip down below the horizon, and everything was turning colors of pink and amber. We watched as the setting sun wowed us with overwhelming displays of hue and color that the greatest Masters could never have hoped to emulate with paint. It was a stunning view to say the least. Stunning, but as we had learned, also deadly…stunning and deadly like a spy in one of those James Bond movies.
We sipped at our beers and watched the atmospheric ballet of color and light play out for our pleasure. Our blood pressures seemed to be normalizing as the stress of the afternoon was waning along with the sunlight. Someone played a Boz Scaggs tune on the jukebox as darkness began push the panoramic view into obscurity. With the dazzling light show almost at its end, Eddie turned to me and quietly said, “You know, from now on, I prefer my nature on the other side of a plate-glass window.” – LC
Looking north, up the beach of the Island of Terror.
An easterly view from the island showing Cedar Key in the distance.
One of the smaller palm trees in the "protected" part of the island.
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