Forgotten Coast: A Dream

Milwaukee of Florida's Forgotten Coast

Fog. Light fog and 58F. A hundred yards off my balcony, the red channel marker light is two stacked lights. But it’s reflection, the river is totally smooth flat. Two lights, smooth flat, pitch black dark. Not a sound.

What brings on an anxiety dream? Not a Navy situation, church again this time. Sunday morning, early service. Rector hasn’t arrived, hasn’t called. Where is he? Try to call him, no answer. Organist is playing the prelude. Hurry to the vesting room to vest, what will I preach about, it was the rector’s day to preach, think fast. My vestments are not in the closet. Think, think fast. Oh, that’s right, I took them home to be laundered. Well, I’ll wear white. My white vestment isn’t here, where is it? Prelude is finished, the organist is starting the opening hymn, why is he doing that when he can see that neither the rector nor I are ready yet? Think fast, think. 

Somebody please bring me a bulletin so I can see what the Readings are? Oh, here’s my extra cassock and surplice, I’ll put them on. OMG, what’s wrong here, the cassock is buttoned crooked, and the surplice is buttoned up in it at the bottom. Oh, I put the surplice on first, no wonder, take it all off and start over. This bulletin doesn’t have the Readings in it, I need one with the Readings. Very quiet out there, they’re waiting for the service to start and there’s no celebrant. Where’s Father Kirk, and why is this now the Pennsylvania church, what the hell am I doing here? I go in from the front, wearing a strange white vestment, all buttoned wrong, nearly a half hour late and a large group of people are trying to conduct the service, but the church is all outside in the woods, and there’s a huge crowd -- waiting. Look, you brought me last week’s bulletin, these aren’t the Readings for today. The people are scattered all over the woods. Dispersing the group who had taken over, and they are furious, I get the entire congregation to one spot, stunned that there are several hundred people lined up two or three people deep here in the front pews, a crowd so wide I can’t see the end of it, and another mob over to my right shouting that I should officiate them, not the other crowd. Let’s start over with the opening hymn, OMG, the organist has left, well, let’s choose an easier hymn and sing it a capella. Oh sunflower, I forgot to put on the microphone to the sound system. Do I have time to go put it on? Nevermind, where’s a hymnal, where’s a gardenia hymnal? No? Where’s that rector, he hasn’t called or showed. Maybe I should go in the back and put on my mike so they can hear me. Thumbing through a hymnal looking for a suitable hymn and unable to find one, I wake up, realize it’s a dream but can’t get awake enough to escape from the dream, can’t get out of it, can’t get out of this crowd of worshipers here in the woods, the dream keeps on and on and on until I finally throw off the covers and rush to the bathroom, maybe that was the problem all along.

What brought all that on? It’s hard to tell what brings on an anxiety dream.

“Oyster City” signs are all over. And art show signs. Art show signs and signs about the annual home and garden tour. The Lounge that for years was the local bar has construction going on. Inside, enormous new stainless steel equipment. Sign on the window, “Oyster City Brewing Company.” I pray it’s a success, because this is what I saw yesterday. Tagged green mesh sacks of oysters being unloaded from a refrigerated van at a seafood restaurant. From Texas or Louisiana, those are not Apalachicola oysters. Not yet: they will become “Apalachicola oysters” on the menu. And this is what I saw: an oyster boat with the restaurant’s name on the side chugged by my balcony and docked, totally empty. Totally empty, no oysters. Why? So that when I ask, “Do you serve Apalachicola oysters, are these Apalachicola oysters?” the waiter can truthfully say, “Sir, our boat goes out every day.”

The BP Oil Spill ruined the Bay. BP and fools. There are no oysters here. Did the oil spill come into the Bay? I don’t know. What I have been told by a man I trust is that the authorities, figuring that BP oil would flood in and ruin the Bay forever, authorized the total harvesting of everything, and the Bay is now empty. You have to have oysters on the Bay bottom in order for more oysters to grow, and there is nothing. A friend who used to get forty bags and be home by two o’clock in the afternoon told me that the last time he went out he could hardly get one bag all day.

Swarming with tourists, Oyster City is now a quaint boutique shop town wild with construction to make itself quainter and cuter, where soon you will be able to chug an Oyster City brew. I just hope it’s properly bitter. All my lifetime this was a fishing village. But it wasn’t always, it has been other. A hundred years earlier, when cotton was brought down the Apalachicola River on paddlewheel steamboats and offloaded into the old brick cotton warehouses, from here to be shipped all over the world, this was the third largest seaport on the Gulf of Mexico. And the lumber era, when mansions were built. And Trinity Church, which during our walk around town yesterday was locked, we couldn’t get in, so we sat on the bench out front. 

George Chapel and I shopped and selected that new porch light twenty-five years ago.

No dream. 

TW