On Useppa

"He saw it first when it jumped in the air, true gold in the last of the sun and bending and flapping wildly in the air. It jumped again and again the acrobatics of its fear and he worked his way back to the stern and crouching and holding the big line with his right hand and arm, he pulled the dolphin in with his left hand, stepping on the gained line each time with his left bare left food." Old Man and the Sea





There would have been a time in the Ten Thousand Islands that, despite some inter tribal warfare, the aquatic world in which the Calusa Indians lived and dominated would have seemed like

something of a blue paradise.  At this time, the only evidence of the lowering of the water to reveal the islands, would have been nothing more than a far-fetched story around a beach fire by a great grandfather.  Just now, at the time of European contact, as it has been called for most of the Americas, the mother ocean, so blue and abundant that it would have been believed the great god herself, a bounty of pin fish, oysters – the occasional dolphin – and the raw timber of untamed forests, would have served the Calusa well enough these people would have perceived themselves as both a dominant force and, most importantly for ancient times, looked down upon with the grace of gods.  The women spent their days toiling over the fine mesh nets made of Spanish moss, cabbage palms and

saw palmetto.  These were strung together by the men who would then tie the ends to cypress or willow trees.  It was not, for those halcyon years, a terrible or tedious chore to haul the nets into knee high water in order to stake the timber into the soft pulsing sand.  Children might be seen following for as long as they could reach the sand with their small toes.  You could sea gulls stirring like passing clouds overhead awaiting the free meal of a soon to be flapping pinfish.  Occasionally, a young child, bobbing himself along at the soft lumber of the blue water, might see the broad back of a sea turtle and claim it his own, only for the prehistoric creature to just as quickly dip back down unseen.  If the great schools of fish were not cooperating that particular day at the shallow coastline, the men would paddle in tandem inside cypress dugouts, which were burnt in their midsections then chiseled away at by the sharp end of a whelk axe, out into the deeper pools where the nets might be slung then sunk down fifteen feet to the bottom.  And then one day, perhaps out of the corner of one fisherman's eye, slanting out from the bay of three islands to the east, what would one day be called a Spanish galleon...