Take that, Tea Party!

Never Done: I bought a Duck Stamp and I saw ... ducks

The ball games were over (for us, not for the ball teams) and we still had a full day in the Florida sun before heading to the airport. We had intentionally chosen a hotel close to Sanibel Island, because I had gone there when I was a kid, and I remembered vast, empty white beaches covered in shells. I especially remember walking down the beach with my mom, who had brought her shell identification book (she never went anywhere without an identification book) looking for whelks and olive shells. For years -- actually until we cleaned out my parents' home after they died -- the fireplace was adorned with a giant conch shell that we had found on Sanibel.

When I told my sister I was going to Sanibel for a day, she asked me if I was going to Ding Darling Wildlife Refuge Center. I had completely forgotten the name Ding Darling, but recalled it immediately when she said it, and I remembered that we took a canoe trip through some mangrove groves, and had seen crocodiles and alligators and ibis and roseate spoonbills. My childhood memories are all vague and impressionistic, so I got excited about the chance to return (tshuve) and re-visit these places I remembered warmly.

So Mickey and I set out in the morning -- first for the beach, then for Ding Darling. We didn't have a big agenda -- just wanted to spend the day out there before having to fly back north. It was a perfect, perfect day -- clear, sunny, and 80 degrees, and as soon as we crossed the causeway to the Island, and we could see into the Gulf of Mexico, we just sat back with deep feelings of well-being and anticipation. Only as we drove onto the island, and hit the backed-up traffic of people doing the same thing we were doing, did I notice that this wasn't the same island I had vaguely and impressionistically remembered. I mean, it was the same island. It just had changed a lot in 40 years.

I did not vaguely and impressionistically remember it packed with cars, or littered with overly cute shopping plazas, for starters. And I did not vaguely and impressionistically remember a 20-minute line to feed dollar bills into the machine to pay for parking in 2-hour time slots. And I really did not vaguely and impressionistically remember a beach as packed as any North East coast beach -- blanket to blanket, umbrella to umbrella, overhearing people's conversations about celebrities, and accidentally brushing sand onto each other, because where else was it going to go? On the contrary, what I did remember was an empty beach, just me and my mom, walking for what felt like miles (but maybe an 8-year-old mile is an adult 1/4 mile) and only occasionally even seeing another person.

But I told myself, "Hey, I've changed in 40 years, and so I guess can an island." We put down towels in the middle of the crowd, and I went for a walk down the beach, looking for shells. I walked, and I didn't find anything that felt particularly special, and I started to feel a little off -- just a bit of malaise -- and started to wonder how I could feel a sense of malaise in the midst of such a beautiful place, and I realized that I wasn't really looking for shells. I was looking for a reconnection to my mom that I wasn't going to find there on a crowded beach, already picked over by shell pickers who had been there for hours before we even arrived. So I walked back to Mickey, and invited him in the water where we floated and floated and talked and floated until I felt like a prune, but a calm prune.

From there we went 1/2 mile down the road to Ding Darling, where we hoped to take a bicycle tour, but it turned out that we didn't have enough time. The retirees who volunteer there -- slightly more middle class versions of the baseball retirees -- recommended that we watch a film that would prepare us to take our own little car and walking tour. So we went into an auditorium and watched an extremely earnest video all about Ding Darling and FDR and the beginnings of the conservation movement and the creation of the Federal Duck Stamp Program (with a strong sales pitch to buy one) and, eventually, just a little bit about how to take a tour of the wildlife reserve. They even used that Margaret Mead quote that everyone uses whenever they need an inspiration quote -- Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has. Maybe it's my arrogance from working in video production, maybe it's because the volunteers knew that Mickey and I only had 1 1/2 hours in the refuge, and they effectively ate up 1/3 of our time, but by the time they got to that quote, I was biting my hand to keep from laughing aloud, and the little kid in front of us was turning around to see what was so funny.

And maybe it was the serious look in that 8-year-old's face, or maybe it was that I felt a true connection to the land and wildlife conservation movement that my father dedicated so many years of his life to, but I walked out of the auditorium, and into the book store, and for the first time ever, I bought a Duck Stamp. It felt great to support an FDR project, and to pretend we live in a climate where radical right wingers are out there trying to shut down programs like this, and to pretend I was voting with my $15, and to pretend ... oh wait, I don't have to pretend. We do live in that environment. My $15 actually does give vital support to an endangered program. Wow. Take that, Tea Party.

So we took the Duck Stamp, and we showed it to the woman at the gate of the Wildlife Drive, and she waved us in, and we drove along at 15 miles per hour, spotting egrets and eagles and ibises and herons, and then we parked got out and walked for about 45 minutes, and we spotted some salamanders and more egrets and ibises and herons and cormorants, and then a woodpecker, and then, finally a pair of mallard ducks, floating down an estuary under a canopy of mangrove trees, blissfully unaware that I was hoping for something more exotic, but still, ducks.