The Water Keeper Read online

  I like my boat. It’s not sexy, but it is a comfort when other things are not.

  When I was a kid, I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island a dozen times. Maybe more. I loved everything about it. And although it filled many a long night, I never learned to talk about boats or ships or anything having to do with seafaring vessels the way Robert did. He owned the language of ships and boats like he lived it. I, on the other hand, did not grow up a deckhand. I simply grew up with my hand on the tiller. Boats were boats. The left side was the left side, not the port side. Right side was right side; starboard always confused me. Fore, aft, forecastle—this was all Greek to me. Later in life, I’d find comfort in some of these terms but never like Stevenson. To me, he was the captain and I was just a pretender sailing in his wake.

  Chapter 4

  I idled out the creek toward the Intracoastal—or IC. Most just call it “the ditch.” Above me, gnarled and arthritic live oak limbs formed a canopy shading my exit from land and my entrance to water. Spanish moss dangled overhead, swaying slightly. Waving. I lit the Jetboil, then sat sipping instant coffee with my feet propped on the wheel while I counted the dolphins rolling off my bow. Over the next hour, I covered only four or five miles. I had no interest in pushing the throttle forward. No real desire to get going.

  Saying yes was one thing; doing yes was another entirely. Besides, that purple urn awaited my return.

  I traveled south into the larger waters of the Mayport basin and the intersection of the St. Johns River with the IC. The Atlantic Ocean was two miles to my left. On a calm day I could exit the jetties, turn south, and arrive in Miami tomorrow. Tonight even. The end of the world the day after that. Two days and I’d be done with all this. But that’s not what Fingers would have wanted. He liked the inside, and he always took the slow way home.

  The radar on the Weather Channel on my electronics, along with the digital voice of Weather Radio, told me that a confluence of storms in the Atlantic was pushing a steady barrage of wind and water against the East Coast and would be for the better part of two or three weeks, maybe longer. Today, the average wind was thirteen knots out of the northeast. Tomorrow, it’d top twenty and then stay there a week, maxing at thirty where it would pause briefly, only to pick back up and hammer the coastline again. Those conditions would push all small-boat traffic inside the ditch. For protection. Much of the larger vessels would soon follow suit as seasickness spread. That meant everybody going north or south would be rubbing shoulders in the IC for the next several weeks.

  To my right glowed the city skyline of Jacksonville. The detour was a long way out of the way, and it’d cost me a day’s time, but Fingers would have wanted to see it. Taste the water one last time. Black Creek is some of the prettiest and purest water in Northeast Florida. He used to make me bring him here, and when we’d pass under the Black Creek Bridge, he’d walk to the bow, tie both bow lines behind his back, and then give me his best Titanic impression. Every time. Without fail. Then we’d idle upriver, tie up beneath some giant cypress tree, and he’d pop the cork on some new wine. The earth in a bottle.

  I turned right. Or, as a boat captain might say, “hard to starboard.” As a city, Jacksonville, or Cowford as it was once known, grew up on opposite banks of the same river as men brought their cows to ford at a narrowing of the river. As it grew in population, it spread out from its epicenter and became a city of bridges. While most rivers run south, the St. Johns River is an anomaly of geography and runs north—as do the Red River, the Nile, and a couple of big rivers in Russia. I ran upriver, passing beneath seven ginormous bridges of various colors and materials, including one aggravating railroad trestle, and eventually crossed the big water of the St. Johns where, at times, the breadth of the river spans nearly three miles.

  Throughout her history, the state of Florida has been home to some great writers, including some Pulitzer and Nobel Prize winners. Judy Blume, Brad Meltzer, Stuart Woods, Elmore Leonard, James Patterson, Mary Kay Andrews, Carl Hiaasen, Jack Kerouac, and Stephen King. Then there are the giants: Madeleine L’Engle, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Smith, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. Preceding all of them was the abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, who put a human face on slavery with Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

  Maybe there’s something in the water.

  South of the Buckman Bridge, the water is wide. Three miles or more in some places. Off my port side, in a little hamlet called Mandarin, Harriet Beecher Stowe lived seventeen years on a thirty-acre orange grove where the locals treated her like royalty. Prior to the Civil War, tourists rode paddleboats up this very stretch of water to the Ocklawaha River, and finally into the Silver River, which led them to Silver Springs State Park—later to be made famous by photographer Bruce Mozert. The water was so clear they developed glass-bottom boats through which they could view the “mermaids.” The park became known as Florida’s Grand Canyon and was unparalleled in popularity until a man named Walt introduced a mouse named Mickey just outside of Orlando.

  Fingers loved the history. Soaked it up. He read and reread their books, took me in this very boat to Silver Springs and pointed to the shoreline. “Mrs. Stowe lived right there.” But one of his favorite spots was a little creek known to few.

  South of Jacksonville, I throttled down at the mouth, passed under my eighth bridge, and entered Black Creek. Like the Suwannee River, St. Mary’s, or Satilla, Black Creek is dark water—but that doesn’t mean it’s bad water. It’s actually very good water. It derives its color from the tannic acid generated by decomposing organic matter such as leaves. In short, the water looks like strong iced tea. At the mouth, Black Creek drops from six or eight feet deep down to over forty. Back when fresh water supplies were transported in barrels, the captains of seagoing vessels favored Black Creek for its purity and because the tannic acid kept the water fresh longer. They would sail up the St. Johns and into Black Creek, hit depths of forty-plus feet, and then use ballast stones to sink their barrels to the bottom where the water was especially good.

  Some even claimed it tasted sweet.

  I ran up the creek as far as it would let us, letting Fingers taste the air and water from inside his orange box. When the creek narrowed, two bald eagles descended out of the trees above us and then lifted on the updraft. Maybe they’d come to say goodbye. I ate lunch beneath a rope swing where Fingers liked to swim, opened a bottle of his wine, poured two glasses, and drank them both—not wanting to let his go to waste. I swam, napped lazily, and then idled my way back to the mouth.

  When the depth finder read forty-three feet, I anchored, grabbed an empty milk jug with the top screwed on tight, and took a Peter Pan off the bow. I followed the bow line down, pressurizing my ears twice and pulling the jug with me. When I reached somewhere between thirty and forty feet deep, I screwed off the top and let the jug fill completely, then screwed back on the lid and swam to the surface where I took one sip and then stowed the jug inside the head. I’d seen Fingers do the same thing a dozen times. Every time he’d sip, swallow, and swear the water tasted sweet.

  I returned through Jacksonville at dusk, the sun setting over my shoulder. I’d started to think about a protected shoreline where I could anchor for the night. When I reached the Jacksonville landing, I noticed something swimming in the water. Something not a fish. I pulled up alongside to find a Labrador retriever making his way downriver. And when I say downriver, I don’t mean he was favoring one shoreline or the other. He wasn’t trying to make it to shore. He was trying to catch a boat long since gone. I cut the engine and came alongside, but he made no attempt to climb in. He just kept swimming.

  “You all right, boy?”

  The dog barely noticed me. I lifted him from the water and set him inside the boat, where he didn’t even take the time to shake. Finding himself no longer swimming, he immediately ran to the bow and stood sentinel-like, looking and listening downriver. He had no collar and no markings. Just a beautiful, almost white Labrador. From the looks of him, he was pretty fi
t. Teeth and strength of a young dog. I guessed him to be somewhere between two and three. I looked for any sign of a boat or somebody screaming some dog’s name, but we were alone.

  I couldn’t very well throw him back in, and I figured if someone was looking for him, they’d have a much better chance of spotting him up there versus submerged in the water. Plus, we were headed the direction he’d been swimming. If we weren’t, he never would’ve gotten in the boat. His beautiful color and regal lines, mixed with his unwavering commitment to his lookout vigil—not to mention the bright-orange box tied beneath his legs—meant if someone was looking for a dog, we’d be tough to miss.

  When I took him to shore and set him on the Riverwalk, he simply ran along the shoreline downriver until something prohibited him from running any farther—at which point he launched himself into the river and started swimming again. After doing this three times, I pulled him up in the boat and told him to sit. Surprisingly, he did.

  “Look, I can’t very well leave you in the water. You’ll drown.”

  No response.

  I pointed to the bank. “You won’t stay onshore, and I can’t follow along behind you while you swim to the ocean and die.”

  Still no response.

  “Do you have any suggestions?”

  He looked to the bow, then back to me, but didn’t move. Then he lifted his ears and tilted his head sideways.

  I pointed to the bow. “Okay, but there are a couple of rules.” He returned to the bow, pointing his butt in my direction. “No chewing on anything”—I pointed again—“especially that box beneath you, and absolutely no peeing in this boat. If you gotta go either one or two, you take it over the side.”

  If I was getting through to him, he made no admission.

  “Did you hear any of what I just said?”

  He stared downriver and wagged his tail.

  Over the next hour, whenever we passed a sailboat or motorboat, I’d hail the captain and point to the dog. “This your dog?” I asked a dozen or more times. No takers.

  The reality of the change in my condition was starting to settle on me. “I can’t very well keep calling you Dog, so you’ve got to help me with a name. What do you want me to call you until we find who you’re looking for? Or they find you?”

  Again, no response.

  “You’re not much help.”

  He sat in the bow, staring straight forward, eyes downriver.

  “How do you feel about Swimmer?” I pointed at the water. “You seem pretty good at it.” I said the name a few times to myself and figured it sounded sorta stupid. “Okay, so maybe not Swimmer. What about Whitey?” That didn’t sound too great either. His feet were pretty big, so I said, “How about Paws?”

  He looked over his shoulder, then back at the water.

  “Not so much, huh?” I scratched my head. “How about Ditch? It is where I found you.”

  His ears moved, letting me know he heard me, but he never turned.

  “Okay, so maybe that’s too close to another word, and you’re not one of those, so . . .” The thought of my island and the remains of the slaves’ tabby homes occurred to me. Oddly, the tannic acid in the water had made his white coat look almost tabby in color when I pulled him out. “What about Tabby? You do look like it—sort of. In a small way.”

  He looked over his shoulder and wagged his tail.

  “Tabby it is.”

  I idled through downtown Jacksonville as the sun disappeared behind my stern and the moon rose off my bow. When the river dumped me into the IC, I turned south and was about to put the boat on plane when I gave him a final warning. “Last chance. You want off?”

  He sat and glanced over his shoulder, acknowledging he’d heard me. Fingers’ orange box was wedged beneath his feet. Fingers would like that.

  “Okay. Suit yourself. But this is a working boat, and you’ll have to carry your weight.”

  He lay down. Facing forward. Tail wagging.

  We settled into an easy rhythm of checking off miles, one after another, while my silent friend straddled the orange box and let his ears flap in the wind. Every few minutes he’d leave his post, come to me, sniff my leg, look up, sniff the head and the door leading into it, then return to the bow. After the third time, I had a feeling he was trying to tell me something, so I pulled over at a beach on the west side of the IC. He hopped off, did his business, sniffed eight or ten crab holes, dug down into one of them, and then hopped back up on the boat.

  This was a smart dog.

  But we had one problem. His feet. “Look, dude. You can’t go digging in the mud and then just hop up here acting all brodie.” I pointed at the water. “Wash your feet first.”

  He pushed his ears forward and tilted his head. The expression on his face said, “You’re crazy.”

  I pointed again. “I’m not kidding.”

  He jumped off the bow, dog-paddled in a circle around us, then climbed up on the swim platform in the rear. He shook and waited for my invitation.

  “That’s better.”

  We ran the ditch south through Jacksonville Beach. Ponte Vedra. Marsh Landing. And the eastern edge of the Dee Dot Ranch—owned by the same people who started Winn-Dixie. The Dee Dot is a ginormous private ranch where buffalo used to roam until mosquitoes and snakes drove them insane. I passed beneath the Palm Valley Bridge and on through Guana River State Park.

  Midnight found me in the St. Augustine inlet. Not the best place to be at night, especially with a twenty-knot wind. Like all the pirates before me, I turned due west—away from the frothy Atlantic—and pointed my bow at the old fort of St. Augustine. The Castillo de San Marcos, which was the Spanish claim to the new world built somewhere around 1565. Jamestown claims to be the first colony in America, but by the time Englishmen set foot in Jamestown, the Spanish—aided by Europeans and Africans—had given birth to grandchildren in St. Augustine. If America has a birthplace, it’s here in these improbable waters and mosquito-filled shores.

  We passed beneath the Bridge of Lions and moored at the north end of the municipal marina. I was too tired to go in search of a hotel, so I spread out across the bench seat in the stern and slept five or six hours until a massive, slobbery tongue started licking my face just after sunup.

  Chapter 5

  I pushed him off me. “Dude . . . I know you’re feeling like your world’s been turned upside down, but we gotta set some boundaries here.” I stuck up one finger. “First, you can’t lick my face while I’m sleeping. That’s gross. My mouth was open and I’ve seen what you lick and . . . and I don’t want to even think about what’s squirming around inside my mouth right now.” I stuck up a second finger. “And two, we gotta get you some toothpaste.” I wiped my face on my shirtsleeve. “You could gag a maggot.”

  He sat wagging his tail. The look on his face said one word: “Breakfast?”

  I rigged a makeshift leash from an unused bow line, and Tabby and I headed for town. I needed some coffee. Walking out of the marina, I recognized a large yacht tied up on the far side, somewhat hidden from view. This time her name wasn’t covered. The Sea Tenderly sat quietly pulling against her lines without a soul on deck. Either they were sleeping it off or they’d vacated in search of the next party.

  I found coffee and bought Tabby a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, which he devoured in two bites before looking up at me, wanting more, while the egg yolk drained off his jowl. He ate four more before I put my foot down and found a grocery store where I bought him a large bag of food, a five-gallon bucket with a sealable top, a bowl, and a collar.

  He didn’t like the collar, but I sat in front of him and tried to explain. “I don’t like this any more than you, but you gotta wear it.”

  He whined.

  “I know, but . . . you just got to. It’s the law.” He sat up, regal like, and turned his head side to side, refusing to let me put it on him.

  “I’m the boat captain, right?” He wagged his tail. “Boat rules. All dogs must have a collar, and that i
ncludes you.” He whined again.

  “Come on. I’ll keep it loose.” He walked around me in a circle, licked my face, and finally lowered his head. Somebody had spent some time both training and loving on this dog. I felt sorry for whoever was looking for him.

  I tried to think like someone who’d lost a dog. I checked with newspapers and social media from Jacksonville south to Daytona and north to St. Simons, but nothing came up. Then I walked down to animal control. They thought he was beautiful, but they told me that if I left him there, his stay would be three days and then he’d take a really long nap.

  I told them he wasn’t sleepy.

  Not knowing his history, I had no idea what to do about his shots, so I asked them to bring him current without killing his liver and kidneys. They did, which he wasn’t crazy about. Especially the stool sample. He was looking a little puny when they brought him back to me.

  To make it up to him, I took him to get one of my favorite things. I can’t leave St. Augustine without it. Gelato on St. George Street from Café del Hidalgo. I ordered an extra-large, and he and I sat on the sidewalk amid the myriad of street performers and shared a cone. When finished, I brushed his teeth, which he tolerated.