Chapter 4 Sneaking Out

Copyright David A. Kearns

June 1981 Melbourne Beach, Florida- So the night of the big swell that Tom spoke of, Ryan and I both snuck out for a peek at the break to see if perhaps a dawn patrol was in order.
The moon had only a sliver cropped off of it as though a big toe-nail clipper had given it a trim. Otherwise it was full, bright and lit up the white beach like a giant silver flare. The waves were building, you could see that but, owing to the wind direction, coming straight off the ocean, they were very choppy. The moonlight gleamed off the wrinkled surface of the water which was sending out a roar since the wind speed had climbed to more than fifteen miles per hour. There was so much moonlight, the sky was very nearly blue. Puffy white clouds skudded in from the sea and crossed over the island within a couple of minutes.
“Sure would be a nice night to have Trish O’Connell out here to hug onto,” I said to Ryan.
“Why don’t you either get over her or ask her to go steady, man. I’m getting tired of hearing about it,” Ryan said. “Besides Brittany actually has a crush on you, dude. That’s the way I would go, if I were you.”
“Why don’t you ask Brittany?” I said.
“Brittany? She don’t want me, slim. She wants you,” he said.
“Now if only the wind would die down,” I said, looking at the chop.
“Or change direction,” he added.
“There he is,” Ryan said looking south toward the Breakers Condominiums. Sure enough a tall, lone form was seen in silhouette with his arms folded looking out to sea. I hadn’t noticed him earlier.
“Have you talked to him?”
“Just that one time. He said he lives in the dunes across the street from the Seven Eleven but I think that’s bullshit,” Ryan said.
“You think he’s dangerous?”
“Sure. He said his name is Red Dancing Bear and he’s 157 years old, the last of the Seminole-Ais Indians. What do you think? Does that sound dangerous to you?”
“Dude, no way,” I said.
“Way….way, way. The guy’s nuts.”
“What the hell is he doing, Rye? I don’t see a pole or nothin’? He’s not fishing,” I said.
“Yeah, well this is what he does when it happens,” Ryan said.
“You mean the lights?”
“Yeah, just watch,” he said.
We wordlessly focused on the break and nothing happened for what seemed the longest time. Pretty soon the tension of trying to focus on shapes and lights created a knot above my eyes.
“Dude, I’m getting a headache,” I said
“You have to let go. Don’t focus your eyes so hard, try to un-focus them,” he said.
Soon the waves became a texture, more than solid three-dimensional forms. The shimmering patterns of the moon were seen to be in motion on the faces of those crumbling peaks. But then it seemed they were being chased by other glowing forms. At first these forms seemed nothing more than ghostly wisps of imagination, as though they weren’t really there, but they grew more substantial and, after a while, one could definitely detect that they had motion independent of the waves, current, and wind.
There went one knifing back toward the direction of the incoming swell, then another, and another. We were standing perfectly still as it unfolded.
“There’s one,” Ryan said.
“Yep. I seen that one,” I replied.
“Whoa, there’s a big one.. and another,” he chimed.
“Yeah, I see them, Rye!”
We watched them for the better part of ten minutes, fascinated by their incredible speed and fluidity. The motions were those of glowing dolphins, only much faster and they were definitely after something, hunting in the shallows.
“Oh my God, Tim. Look out there man!”
I gazed out toward the horizon. They stood like sentinels: three intense balls of blue light about a football field apart and a mile offshore on the surface of the water, slightly to our south. One second they hadn’t been there, the next, there they were.The lights were almost too blue and too intense to look at. Each dot felt as though someone were prickling your retinas with a tiny, blue icicle.
I turned to the south and the Indian was in the water up to his thighs dragging something heavy through the surf and onto the sand, apparently ignoring the bright lights off shore.
“You see them now, Tim? I’m not going crazy, right?” he said.
“I see them, Rye. But what’s Charlie Indian over here doing?” I asked.


June 30, 2011 Florence SC, – I woke with the sound of a crash coming from the kitchen. But Blazer wasn’t in there, hadn’t been either. The headache was fierce but manageable.
I dropped Blazer off at a neighbor’s house, packed my golf clubs in the Explorer just in case, and of course the old long-board and the Wave Needle on the surf racks.
The Needler wouldn’t be used for surfing, in all likelihood, unless a huge swell came in. In that I now weighed about two-hundred and thirty pounds, it really is more like a giant slalom ski to this body of mine.
In Ryan’s honor I popped in some U2, which could be followed by the Police, AC/DC, or Van Halen. Near Jacksonville I would begin with the alternative scene from our college years, The Cure, Devo, Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, Depeche Mode, stuff like that. I had even managed to find one of my old Black Flag cassettes.
People always say things like “I can’t believe he’s gone” when someone dies. But by the morning of the second day since being told of his death, my feelings had changed. That morning my mind seemed clearer. I again thought suicide was probably as good an explanation as any. Gone was the uncertainty from the previous day as to whether he had done this to himself or there was something more sinister afoot. And what angered me, also, was the fact those who should have known him best, his wife and his mother, apparently had no clue. From them there was a tone of blame toward Ryan, that he was being selfish.
Well, that was partially true. Suicide is incredibly selfish if it is indeed suicide. The most selfish act there is, I guess. “Look at me how dramatic I am, watch me kill myself.”
But I thought about Ryan as the pine forests of South Carolina blurred by on either side of the interstate. He wasn’t selfish, if it indeed had been suicide, he was hunted for his entire life, and he just got tired of it. Or so I imagined anyway.
His mother and his wife, Debra, knew nothing of his suffering. And I didn’t know who to be more pissed off at, Ryan for not explaining things to them, in his typical macho pattern, or them for not reaching out to him. Just how bad does it have to get before you reach out to your son and ask him what the hell is wrong? I know that’s not an emotion Thea is capable of and there was a strong feeling of blame in my heart for her.But would Ryan want that? Did I know the whole story? I’d have to ask his little brother Sean, if they could bring him back from the battle region for Ryan’s funeral.
It was hard to picture Sean as a decorated U.S. Marine now, still over there. Things were heating up with the draw down, and he might get sent elsewhere in the battle region, we had heard, before his twenty years were up. Sean was everyone’s little brother. All the sunshine that had escaped Ryan’s dark life went into Sean’s. You could only hope and pray that his good fortune held through the remainder of his tour.
My cell came to life with a whirr. I checked the ID and it read “WKTZ Radio Orlando.” It was Talk Monster, no doubt calling during a break in his morning drive-time show .
“Talk!” I said.
“Heyyyyyy, Timmy. How are you man?”
“Good, bro, with the exception of the present circumstance. How you been?”
“Excellent, excellent. Listen man this is a real bitch about Ryan. My wife gave me your info last night. I’ve been digging like hell to find out anything I can, and I got bupkiss. This is really weird, Tim. This doesn’t make sense. We need to talk,” he said.
“So?”
“Let’s do Bunky’s Raw Bar this evening sometime. Can you make that?”
“Is that place still standing?”
“Yeah, the one on A1A is, I think,” he said.
We agreed. He said Jay Malone and his little brother Gary might be able to make it. Jay, more likely than Gary. Gary’s Second Chance Boys’ Ranch operation was way down the state near Everglades City. Odds were he’d get into town later than I would, even coming from South Carolina.
This was going to be fun, I thought with a measure of guilt. The only guys missing would be Ryan and Sean. Well, they and Russ; but who knew where the hell Smokey Lank was.
I pulled out the U2 and put in AC/DC’s Back in Black. And as the miles whizzed by, the years rolled away and I was warped into a memory full of laughter.


June 1981
“God damn it, Timmy! Turn that shit off! I can’t hear myself think!”
AC/DC was a sure way to get my dad’s blood up. I hadn’t known he was in the garage much less that the music had made it through the walls.
Mike Stanton stood in the living room with a handsaw, covered in sweat, shaking as though he were about to use it.
“…Nobody’s putting up a fight
I got my bell I’m gonna take you to hell!
…Hells Bells!”
He had been making another what-cha-ma-call-it; likely a bird feeder or a go-cart for one of the kids down the street. He loved his woodworking. It was Saturday morning, time off from the post office, and this was his chance to relax with his little projects.
I had been swaying back and forth holding my air-microphone doing my best impression of lead singer Brian Johnson. Ryan of course always insisted on being Angus Young on lead guitar. Talk Monster Tom was sitting on a foot stool pretending to be drummer Phil Rudd and Smokey Lank, AKA Russ Bridges rounded out the group on rhythm air guitar as Malcolm Young.
When my dad burst in through the front door, Ryan was still stomping his feet with his eyes closed, and bucking his teeth with his hair flying to and fro as though suffering a seizure. The music was so loud, and Ryan had been standing so close to the speakers, he hadn’t heard my old man.
All of us watched, Dad included, as Ryan continue to spas-ma-cize to the music. It was hilarious but there was no way we were going to start laughing just yet because Dad still had that damned saw in his right hand.
“Wouldn’t your mother just love to see you now, Tim,” Dad yelled. “Wouldn’t she be proud of her boy? Jesus,” he said walking over to the stereo fumbling with the needle and knobs as Angus Young, the real one, continued his assault on my father’s ears and Brian Johnson launched into another demonic lyric.
“Satan’s talking to you. HELL”S BELLS! He’s bringing the news HELL’S…(scratch….scrape!)”
Ryan finally opened his eyes and stopped hitting the high notes on his air-guitar.
“Now, I want all you little hellions, to go back outside, pick up your surfboards from the front yard, and go do something productive. Do you boys understand me?” Dad said very calmly but visibly shaking.
“You look like a passel of damned monkeys bouncing off the wall!” he said.
My father later told me he thought that when he heard the sound of the bell at the beginning of the album, he was having some sort of psychotic flashback to his Catholic school days. As though he were being called to task finally for something evil he had done overseas in the Navy.
Halfway down the street the smiles started, turning to bursts of laughter.
Tom imitated Ryan doing his impression of Angus Young complete with the astonished drooping jaw when he had been busted in the middle of it by my dad.
That, indeed, had been funny, although the comment about my mother- a woman I had never met - really stung.
Well, I guessed I deserved it. My mother, Margaret McDermott Stanton died owing to complications from my birth. My sister Katie and I were good Catholics, or we were supposed to be. We shouldn’t be listening to that stuff. But I couldn’t help myself. The thundering drums, the power chords, I couldn’t get enough of it. If anything, I had been told my mother was a free spirit and would have appreciated the humor of what happened that day.
“They say Bon Scott choked on his own vomit, dude,” Tom said suddenly, “Which is why Brian Johnson was hired.”
“I heard it different,” Ryan said gravely.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah, Tom. The true story is Bon Scott came back from the dead. Didn’t you read the lyrics to song Back in Black. That’s him! They did tests on his voice. NASA found out. It’s the same dude!”
There was a pause while Tom factored that in for a second. He finally said it; “No way Ryan, you’re so full of it.”
Ryan cracked a smile. “Duh! You think, Tommy? Jesus, you’re so easy,” he said.
We walked down to Spessard Holland for our second surf session. Waves in the morning had been decent and clean at about four feet. The afternoon swell would likely be ride-able as well, although by this time in the day, the northeast breeze might get on it; chopping it up a bit.
“At least I was right about the swell,” Tom said as he walked south on the shoulder of A1A.
“The trouble is Tommy, you’re so full of it most times, even when you’re right about something people don’t believe you,” Ryan said and we laughed.
Ryan could be merciless that way and he was especially so with Talk Monster Tommy, whom he still had not fully accepted into our little crew at that point.
We paddled out into the blue water as the long-shore current tugged us toward the south. I tried not to think about what Ryan and I had found the previous night.
We had taken the steps down onto the beach, and walked down the shore toward what we believed to be the Indian, but he had obviously seen us, or so I thought, because by the time we got to the bottom of the stairs he was gone.
We ran down the beach anyway to get a better look at the lights but down on the beach they were either blocked by the incoming swell or they had merely blinked out for some reason.
Yet there was something dark lying on the sand that had been hauled up by the Indian. At first I thought it was the body of a man but it wasn’t.
It was a dead Loggerhead sea turtle and it wasn’t a shark that killed it either. Something, or someone, had taken a perfectly square bite out of the back end of it. The tail, the anus, all the reproductive organs were gone. We shined the flashlight on the thing: it was as if someone had cut the turtle with a scalpel that also burned as it cut. There was an odor of burned flesh where they tail and other assorted gizzards had been.
“Who the hell could have done something like this to a dumb ole turtle?” I asked.
Ryan had just looked out to sea. No more lights.
We surfed that next day with wild abandon; only Ryan and I privy to the strange events of the previous evening.
Around 5 p.m. or so, the wind died down and it started glassing off like no one’s business: gorgeous, bluish and lime-green swells on an incoming tide, peeling perfectly in either direction. The more the tide came in, the more critical and steep the break became and the closer to shore it fell.
There’s a sound that the ocean makes when it’s pumping. It must be a high-frequency hum like a dog whistle that causes surfers who are “in-tune” to cock their heads sideways and sniff the air.
Then that Scoobee Doo voice in their head says “RRR-Off Shore? Rrrr-Off shore?” and they soon find themselves wandering down to the beach. Before you know it, everyone’s in the water.
Russ was seriously tearing it up, floaters, off the lips, spinners. Some older guys pulled up in a battered pick-up truck and put on The Police on their stereo cassette player. Two speakers, likely brought from a home system and powered by a dash booster, were set atop the cab.
I was jamming on it. I loved Regatta de Blanc.
Russ, though, paddled in and promised these guys he knew someone with some weed, if they would only put AC/DC’s Back in Black on instead. In 1981 literally everyone, it seemed, had a copy of this album at home as well as a cassette in their cars. Everyone, of course, accept my dad.
So they did just what Russ asked as it sounded like an excellent idea, mix surfing and that particular music. Russ even loaned them some wax for their paddle out, something he never did.
Pretty soon it was like we were living inside one of those radical surf movies set to hardcore music.
By the time “Have a Drink on Me” played I was shaking from the amperage of perfect waves and some of our favorite tunes thundering off the walls of water.
“This beats the hell out of my living room, don’t you think, Rye?” I said, just as Ryan tucked inside a perfect barrel going left and rode all the way into the impact zone.
I looked out to sea and saw the waves jack up another notch. Russ came screaming down the face of a six-foot section and began skipping across it like a stone thrown on a smooth lake.
Myles Neiderman and his brother Hank showed up shortly after that. His brother sat on the hood in his camo-jacket and watched while Myles paddled out on a giant, single fin longboard on his knees, Hawaiian style.
Hank Neiderman was a mess, the original boomerang child, but, he had seen war somewhere, it was rumored, and it changed him for the worse. He was prone to rages and bouts of drinking that in our vicious teenage minds, labeled him “alka-Hank” but of course never to his face, or to Myles who did his best as Hank’s devoted younger brother.
“Cain’t let you peckerwoods get all these waves,” Myles said to me as he passed.
“Go for it, man.”
His long-board was an ancient thing, yellowed to brown. The fin itself was squared off, flush with the box tail covered with a million coats of marine epoxy from just as many cracks. The floating artifact must have weighed fifty pounds.
But, even in pair of cut-off jean shorts, Myles knew what the hell he was doing. In a jiff he was well outside of all of us waiting. And he was soon rewarded.
Myles sat on the tail, and like a good horse obeying commands of his master the board pirouetted around in a flash. Myles dug only once with both hands on the face of the rising wave and soon the board was sliding smoothly, evenly across it. He stood and carefully cross-stepped up the monstrous board, switched stance and faced the wave riding left, inched up slightly, and in another second he was standing on the nose with his toes curling over the edge. It all happened in the space of five seconds; from lying prone to up and gone, in the opposite direction.
“Surfs pretty damned good for a redneck on an old board,” Ryan said in admiration as he paddled by me. On the inside, Myles hit a chop and was flung into the sky with a smile on his face as the wave exploded. The aircraft carrier plowed shoreward, but Myles managed to swim in, grab her and head back out rather adroitly.
I looked back toward his brother sitting on the hood of their El Camino in a camouflage jacket. The young man wasn’t looking at his little brother. He held his hands to his head as if fighting to clear his eyes of some new horror, then leaned back on the hot glass windshield. I found out later he had been tripping on mushrooms that day.
A few minutes later the Malones showed up on bicycles. They had been sailing in the Indian River when the wind died and their “Scoobee Doo” moment came. Gary slapped his board over the shore-break and was followed by Jay.
Someone flipped the tape over again and “Shoot to Thrill” played and Gary and Jay dropped in on the same six-foot wave.
“Gary, I got it! Get off,” screamed Jay.
“No way! I called it,” said Gary who had dropped in on him.
The wave pitched over covering them both. Gary popped out on the shoulder, but Jay didn’t. He came up in the slurry of sand and whitewater, tugging on his leash.
“You little asshole!” Jay screamed at his brother.
“Haha!” laughed Gary in victory.
“Jesus! Look at Tom! I’ve never seen him on a wave that big!” Ryan yelled
We both looked out to sea and sure enough it was getting bigger by the minute. The wave Tom chose was very nice, between four to six feet already and waaaay outside. He slid down it nervously made the bottom turn to the right, barely missing Myles Neiderman who was paddling back out again.
But then the wave started to back off. The white-water crumbled to a hiss, leaving Tom out on the right shoulder which threatened to smooth out so much he missed the inside section.
“Get it, Tom,” I screamed. “Keep pumping it!”
“Betcha he won’t,” said Ryan. “Five bucks says he chickens out.”
“No way, we’re all watching him. He has to go for it.”
“Look how far out he is, man that thing’s going to be a meat grinder on the inside here,” Ryan said.
Tom kept bouncing up and down on his twin-fin until his speed matched that of the rising wave again. You could see he was terrified but, I knew my guy. He couldn’t back down. The shit he would get from Ryan would be brutal.
Wisely he had cut to the left to catch the wave where the remainder of its energy was stored. Knowing now he was running for the shoulder and his health, Tom skip-slapped the board down the face trying to get as much distance on the building wall as he could.
Tommy screamed as he became covered. Sitting on the shoulder I was the last to see him totally encased down there in the tube with his eyes as wide as silver dollars. But the wave walled up completely and exploded with a bang and a hiss into the sand.Tom was pummeled in the shore-break and washed clean up onto the beach nearly under the wooden pilings of the walkover.
Everyone was hooting and howling with laughter.
“You gotta admit!” I said.
“Took some goddamned balls that’s for sure,” Ryan said.
Tommy got up, leaned over and puked, then wiped his hand under his nose, revealing blood and sand in a slurry that was tossed away with a flick of his wrist.
He was smiling but I could tell he was in pain, cradling his left hand which, given the violence of the wipe-out was probably twisted, sprained, jammed or all of the above.
“He probably landed on it,” I said.
“Had to hurt,” admitted Ryan.
The stretch of Melbourne Beach south to Wabasso Beach, in Indian River County, I would learn later that week, is the most productive nesting beach in the world for loggerhead sea turtles, perhaps one of the most productive beaches in the world for green sea turtles and one of the only beaches in the world, where the nearly extinct leatherback sea turtle does its thing.
The turtles have sex in the surf right off shore. Hell, they were probably at it, while we surfed around them that day. That’s what nesting season is all about.
The females come in, a week or so later with a clutch of eggs in their bellies, dig neat little holes with their tails and lay as many as one hundred eighty eggs in the dunes in a two-hour period.
The idea that the mystery lights off shore and the dead sea turtle had something to do with each other began to weigh on me, almost as much as the thought of the lights themselves.
It was only as we were walking home that night that I discovered Ryan had been feeling the same way.
He was angered by what he saw done to the loggerhead.
“Dude, can I come over to your house tonight? I got some stuff to show you,” Ryan said.
“Sure man. After kick-the-can, maybe? You can stay over and sleep out in the tents. Then we can sneak out. I’ll do it too. I’ll call Trisha. We can meet over the pavilion on Ocean Ave.”
“That sounds good Tim. Right after kick the can,” he said.

#
Sure enough, Ryan was holding something in his hands wrapped in a towel when he arrived. We went back to my room. My sister Kate, was on the phone in her room. She had one of the windows open also. You could smell the marijuana too. I pictured her sitting on the window ledge the way she did, blowing the smoke out into the back yard. Yeah, right: as if dad couldn’t smell it either, or figure out what she was up to.
She would likely be wrapped in two towels, one on her body, the other on her head like the Sultan of Brunei. She was probably also putting nail polish on her toes. Kate always could do eleven things at one time.
Ryan was in love with my sister. He confided to me more than once. She was in the tenth grade and I couldn’t see what had him all shook up about her; her braces, the way she laughed it sounded like a wood stork choking on a fish that wouldn’t give up the ghost. She did have a pretty face, but I thought she was a little on the chubby side, and I never spared the chance to tell her that whenever we got into it. Ryan, on the other hand, turned to gelatinous goo whenever she deigned to look at him and batted those pretty violet-blue eyes of hers. She was on his wavelength and I suspect she thought he was cute too, for a thirteen-year old.
In three days she was going to see her first concert. She, her senior boyfriend and basketball star, Danny McNamara, and few of their friends would see Rush play the Lakeland Civic Center. She convinced my father that, unlike the stuff I was into, Rush were not devil worshipers. Of course, I tried to nix the whole deal by showing dad the album cover of the naked man in front of the pentagram holding his hands out toward it as though it were posted on the front of an on-rushing train from hell, and about to run his soul over, but somehow Katie talked her way around that.
Rush was the only thing she talked about for the previous three weeks; there were no other subjects of interest. Rush was what she was talking about to her buddy Linda Saunders who was also going to the concert. Rush was playing on her boom box as Ryan and I walked by the room, Red Barchetta to be precise; one of many tunes from Rush I would only appreciate later in life.
But this night Ryan didn’t even ask for a chance to lay down in the hallway and peek through the crack below the door; a huge departure for him, letting me know right away he had serious business to discuss.
When we got into my room he took out the item he had secreted from his house.
“I’ve been reading this, man. I think it might explain a few things about the stuff I’ve been seeing,” he said.
It was a hardbound, first edition the Charles Berlitz’s book, The Bermuda Triangle published by Doubleday in 1974. Looking back on it, I could probably get a pretty penny for that copy off of eBay, now.
“I found this with some other stuff of my dad’s. He had all kinds of stuff in the garage that I’ve been digging into man, but this book explains what might be happening,” Ryan said with hushed reverence. “Look, dude. Go ahead and read the passages I’ve marked out. Starting on page 95, go ahead and read it,” he said.
In all the time I had known him, I never knew Ryan to be this animated about anything inside a book. A new world had opened up to him, clearly.
The book showed an area of electromagnetic disturbance off Florida as well as several other areas on the globe; also marked in his book were pictures of what were reportedly sunken statues in the Yucatan and a whole section on UFOs.
“This has something to do with all this stuff, man. Atlantis, UFOs all that stuff, I would bet you,” he said.
“C’mon Rye, no way, man. They said all that stuff was bunk. We didn’t see UFOs what we saw was floating on the water,” I said.
“And swimming in the water. Who’s to say UFOs can’t go under water, Tim? Does it say somewhere they can’t do that? Is there some kind of rule?” he said, adding, “Maybe that’s where they come from in the first place.”
“I don’t know man,” I said.
“And what about the turtle? What kind of knife does what we saw to that turtle?” he said.
“You know Russ’s dad is a wildlife photographer. He might know something about it,” I said, hoping to get Smokey involved. We needed an objective ear here. Ryan, was starting to lose his marbles at this point. After all what had we seen? Some lights? Big whoop. And the dead turtle? Maybe the Indian hacked it up and burned out the insides with a lighter. Who knows why? Why was the crazy bastard out there in the first place? Maybe the Indian didn’t have anything to do with the turtle at all.
“You don’t believe me,” he said dejectedly.
“That’s not it, Rye. I just don’t know what to make of it. Besides, what would they want with a turtle? What did that turtle ever do to them?” I said.
“I don’t know, man. We eat turtles, or at least we used to until they were put on that whatcha-ma-call it list!”
“The Endangered Species list. Yeah, you can’t go after the eggs or they throw your ass in jail. You can’t hassle the turtles when they’re out doing their thing,” I said.
“Well, seems to me killing a turtle and hacking off his nuts would be against the law and they did it, whoever they are. And we’re not talking about any turtle, man, they came to our beach and fucked up one of our turtles,” he said. “Are we just gonna take that shit?”
I said nothing.
“What happened last summer when those punks from Wabasso came all the way up here to spray graffiti on our walkovers, what did we do?”
“We went all the way down there and sprayed the same garbage on their beach access and the lifeguard stand. Then two weeks later we got into a fist fight at Sebastian Inlet.
“Oh yeah, Rye, incase you forgot, then it all was written up in the newspaper, we got called gang-hooligans, and the sheriffs made our lives a miserable hell by making phone calls to our parents, and I never want to go through that again. My ass still stings from the whooping my dad gave me for that,” I said.
“Chicken shit. Were we right for getting them back?” he asked.
I said nothing.
“Were we right? Would you do that again tomorrow because this is our beach, our sand, our chicks, our surf… or what?!”
“Right…Go home,” I said unenthusiastically because I knew where this was going but, he had me, see? There was one correct answer to the lines from that old song by Black Flag and it went, “Our surf, our chicks, our beach, our sand” followed by “GO HOME!” There was no other acceptable response.
The logic pervaded how we looked at the kids from Wabasso. We constantly were squabbling with them at Sebastian Inlet which was geographically between our communities. They considered the inlet – especially first peak - theirs, and we considered it ours. There was no middle ground.
Back in ‘81, if you didn’t act that way, all tough like you were ready to throw down, you got shoved out of position real quick and told to move on down the beach to second peak. If you wanted the best waves there you had to be prepared to go to the fists on the beach when some kook disrespected you, and that’s just how it was. Adults could talk all day that “let’s play nice” nonsense but they didn’t have to deal with the pecking order at the inlet.
They didn’t have to suffer the fear of getting jumped at the showers just because you happened to be there at the park without all your pals and same-said kook happened to bring all his buddies from Wabasso, Vero Beach and Sebastian, that day. Looking back, adults could be so blind and naïve when it came to the politics of surfing, or any aspect of being a kid. As in “just be nice and they’ll be nice.” Right. What a load of crap that was.
“Fucking A’ Go home!” Ryan hissed reminding me of the rules by which surfers lived. But did that really apply here? To Ryan it did. These lights, he had seen them more than once. He had strange dreams afterwards, which obviously were their fault. The turtle to him was evidence that whoever they were, those they behind the lights, were up to no good. They had scared Ryan, made him lose sleep, made his life a little more fearful. And all of our lives changed immeasurably because of this, because of surfer’s logic.
He wanted to put them in the same category as those little bastards from down the road. If he could do that, he could deal with them. To him they were just as bad as those kids from Wabasso, because deep down in his adolescent mind there was one way you dealt with someone who scared or intimidated you – you beat the shit out of them, so that they didn’t scare you anymore.
He was serious about this. I could tell in his eyes. His wheels were spinning. He wanted to do something about these creatures no matter whoever, or whatever they were.
“Do you think anyone found it?” I asked.
“The turtle? Naw, not where we buried it,” he said with a smile.
Our genius plan had been to root under the chain link fence of the beachside Air Force tracking station telescope grounds and bury it there. The observatory was only manned a few days up to and during the launches of Delta rockets, and of course it would be used heavily during the first space shuttle launch, which was due to go off in the fall as everyone knew. The neat trick about this was, no one would find it. It might stink like thunder by morning, but no one would look on Air Force turf at first.
“We have to dig it up,” I said.
“Yep.” I said unenthusiastically. Newly-deceased, cut up turtle hardly gave off a daisy’s aroma; what would day-and-half old buried dead sea turtle smell like, I wondered?
“What else do you have?” I asked him.
“I got boxes and boxes of stuff from my dad’s old job, dude. I never knew this Tim: my dad used to study these things for the Air Force.”
“What things?”
“UFOs man!”
“No way.”
“Way! That’s why they put him out to pasture down here at the cape, man. They wanted him to shut his mouth about them, and he wouldn’t do it,” he said with awe in his voice.
Finally, after thirteen years on this earth, he had found one slim reason to admire his father, as a clearer picture of the man named Douglas Cogswell was beginning to develop in Ryan’s mind.

June 2011. St. Johns River and I - 295, Jacksonville, Florida.
My cell rang, breaking me out of my reverie just as I was crossing over the Saint John’s River. I snapped it open.
“Yeah?”
“Do you know who this is?” came a voice I hadn’t heard in years.
“Smokey? Holy shit, man. Is that you?”
“The one, the only,” he said on the downbeat.
“Dude, where are you?”
“LAX, putting my stuff through customs, hoping like hell I can make my connection to Orlando, man.”
“Where you been?” I asked.
“Indo, Peru, Mexico, well, those were the last three places. Peru was going off, Tim. Huge swell right now,” he said.
“Too bad about, Ryan,” I said.
“Yeah…” he said. I knew there was more he wanted to say, but Russ was like that. The blatantly sentimental stuff, he had absolutely no stomach for it. He felt the loss of Ryan just as acutely as I did, but Smokey wouldn’t allow himself the feminine trait of expressing it.
“I’m going to be getting to Orlando at around 10 p.m. from there it should be another hour out to Mel Beach. Where are you staying?”
“You mean where are most of us staying?” I asked.
“Okay, I give up, where?”
“Jay Malone wants to show off his beach house, man. He wants all of us to stay out there. His wife and the kids will be gone until Sunday. Just north of Spessard Holland Golf Course, on the water. The place is huge, Russ. Jay sent me some pictures last night,” I said.
“Is it okay if I crash there too?”
“Jay asked me specifically to give you the address if I managed to get in contact with you,” I said. I gave Russ the address and we said our goodbyes.

June 1981
My thoughts returned to the night Ryan and I camped out in my backyard. Ryan continued reading his copy of “The Bermuda Triangle” into the late evening hours.
“You know it says there was a guy in Virginia Beach who did these psychic readings, Tim, and he said Atlantis would be discovered in the Bahamas: and look here, on the Grand Bahamas Bank, see? It says that in 1968 they found what used to be a roadway of some kind. They also found similar structures at a place called Cay Lobos, north of Cuba and near Andros Island,” he thrilled while his flashlight lit up the tent.
“What the hell does this have to do with us, Ryan?” I begged in an exaggerated gasp.
“Don’t you see? This could be Atlantis! It says here, fifteen thousand years ago, the Bahamian Banks were totally above water during the ice age, but then, when the ice caps melted, they went under water,” he said.
“Fascinating, Captain Kirk,” I answered. “Now can you just go to sleep?”
“Tim, maybe those lights are like, aliens, or something, coming back, looking for Atlantis right? But see, they can’t find it because it’s under water. Wouldn’t that be cool?”
I was going to say something but his jaws went jaywalking right over me.
“Then see, they think we’re the Atlanteans. So, they, like, come up and are all, like, “have you completed the sacred mission?” or whatever, and we’re like: “dude, what the hell are you talking about, man?” Wouldn’t that be cool?”
He laughed at his little joke and I carried it further.
“Or maybe they go; “Hey bro? What the hell are you little grommets doing here? Where the hell have the Atlanteans gone? What have you done with them? Then they whip out their little ray guns or whatever and blast us, zzzzzzzzz!” I
“All my mom finds are our bones, dude, wrapped in our baggies and concert T’s. ha-ha!” Ryan said.
We laughed and Ryan kept reading.
“Dude you’re never going to believe some of this stuff,” he said.
“Probably not,” I agreed.
“Say’s here there was this one guy named Jessup who had a theory that magnetic fields could transport matter from one dimension to another. And they found this guy dead in parked car in Miami. He hooked a hose from his tail pipe to run the exhaust into the car to off himself,” Ryan said.
“What?” I asked incredulously.
“Yeah, but then there’s some who think what actually happened was, the Air Force or whoever, wanted to shut him up so they staged it,” Ryan said.
“There’s a whole section here on underwater UFOs, Tim. Remember me asking you about that, like what’s wrong with having underwater UFOs too? Well, it turns out they’ve seen them, man! Says here the Navy tracked one off Puerto Rico moving at well over sixty miles per hour, way down deep! Look at all this stuff!” he said.
Indeed the little book was loaded with grainy photos and schematic drawings of the Atlantic seafloor which, if you believed the text, showed the Bahamian banks to be above water at the end of the last ice age.
“There was a whole country out there, Tim. The book says all these disappearances of aircraft and whatnot can be attributed…”
“What’s attributed mean?”
“Caused by, dumb-ass! Blamed on!”
“Blamed on what?”
“Some kind of super-power crystal or something out there that ran the whole works for them, sunk with the country after some huge earthquake or whatever. Just think of it man?”
“Again Rye, what’s that got to do with our dead turtle out there?” I asked.
“I don’t know, dude. But I mean to find out,” he said.
So in the predawn hours, me and Ryan, suffering ill effects of less than three hours sleep, dug up the dead sea turtle.
It took until just after dawn and it was not pleasant. It stunk horrendously and had lost some of its color. There was a pasty sort of yellow-orange fluid coming out of its mouth we had to be careful of. It really was sad to see one of those magnificent reptiles in such a state.
Smokey pulled up on his bicycle soon after that, as we had tapped on his window and told him what we could before making our way out to the tracking station where we had buried “Charlie” as we began calling him, or her.
Charlie was what we deemed unknown people or things: we might look at some kook on line at the Supermarket for a while until we couldn’t take it anymore and Ryan would pop off with “Hey look, it’s Charlie Vibrator!” while looking directly at the guy. Who knew precisely what it meant. Who cared? Things were sometimes labeled Charlie and that was that.
“Man, you guys are nuts,” was the first thing Smokey had to say about our find, but when we showed him the razor-neat section scorched out of Charlie Turtle’s abdomen, he wasn’t laughing anymore.
Within an hour Smokey had told his father all about it, and soon the thirty-something wildlife photographer had pulled up to the Spessard Holland walkover with his pick-up truck.
I always liked Smokey’s dad, Ray. He seemed like an out-of-work rock star or something. He was always home since his dark room was in the house and he worked freelance. He had the best stories to tell.
Ray drove all of us in the back of his pick-up, Charlie included, to their house on Third Avenue where he laid a large tarp down, set up some lights and photographed the turtle with his 35 mm Nikonos.
“I’ll admit boys, I’ve never seen anything like that. It looks like someone took a laser to the turtle’s reproductive stuff,” he said.
“His what?” I asked.
“ His gear. The jewel box,” Ray surmised.
“You know, Tim. His nuts,” Ryan said.
“Tim don’t have nuts yet, Rye. That’s why he doesn’t know about ‘em,” Smokey said.
“Screw you, man,” I shot back.
“Nuts, or eggs, boys,” Ray said. “We might be looking at someone having cut this turtle open to take the eggs before she could get to shore to plant them. With all this stuff missing, I can’t tell whether your Charlie’s a boy or a girl,” Ray added.
“Whatever happened, I’d say it was pretty clear someone broke the law. These turtles are protected by Endangered Species statutes,” Ray said.
“There was this big ole’ Indian guy on the beach that night, right Ryan, hauling it to shore?” I asked.
Ryan seemed very skittish about mentioning the Indian. He obviously didn’t want to say anything about the lights either.
“…just seems strange that anyone would go to the trouble to cauterize the flesh. You say you saw this Indian?” Ray asked.
“Ryan spoke with him a night before last. He said he was something called an Ais Indian, right Ryan?” I said.
Ryan said nothing.
“There haven’t been any Ais Indians around here since the 1700s, boys. Someone’s pulling your leg. You know they consider turtle eggs a delicacy in parts of Cuba and Central America,” Ray continued with a smile. “Did the guy look like he could speak Spanish?”
“How would we know that, Mr. Bridges?” I asked innocently.
“You know, was he brown-skinned, straight black hair? Did he speak with a funny accent?” Ray Bridges asked.
We all looked at Ryan.
“I guess so,” Ryan said finally.
“Could be someone from Miami. Folks come up here all the time, dig up the eggs then haul ‘em back to Miami, sell them to bodegas in Hialeah,” Ray summed.
“But you said so yourself, Mr. Bridges. This looks like this was cut with a laser or something. Does that sound like some guy from Miami to you?” Ryan asked.
Ray Bridges was stumped by a thirteen-year-old, not for the first time in his life. And yet, the look on his face said it all; he was deeply disturbed by what he was seeing.
“I know what, boys. There’s an expert in sea turtle biology right down the beach. Let’s go talk to him. We can call the wildlife officers from there,” he said.
As we rode in the back of the old Ford F-150 pickup, with the deceased turtle covered in the same canvass tarp used in the photo-shoot, I asked Ryan why he didn’t tell Smokey’s father about the lights.
“Yeah, that’ll work, Tim. Have the whole neighborhood calling us whackos or something,” Ryan said.
“What makes you think they’ll do that?” I asked.
“Remind me to show you some of the stuff I dug up in my dad’s old junk from his Air Force job when we get back,” was all Ryan said to this. He seemed very uneasy this morning, as though he wished we hadn’t brought up the carcass of the dead turtle in the first place. Things were getting away from him, I could tell. He wanted to keep as much of this secret as possible. I knew also, that Ryan had no idea why his first instinct was to keep these events secret other than pure instinct and whatever he had found in his dad’s closet full of junk in their garage. The thought of which was also unsettling.
Stanfield Lansing, looked to be one thousand years old but he wasn’t. He was, however, nearly one-tenth that age. The old man counted turtle nests for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service under contract. Every day during the summer he walked a five-mile strand of South Melbourne Beach, which back then, was the most remote section of sand south of Cape Canaveral. He counted the turtle nests, and false crawls, noting their location on a map.
The nests where areas at the end of the crawl where the female had made up her mind to go for it, carried herself up into the dunes, dug down with her back flippers and made her deposit of eggs. In six weeks the hatchlings would sprout from the sand, brave the open stretch of beach, and paddle toward the rising sun. Then they would ride the oceanic gyre, a swirling mass of water that went like a two year merry-go-round, on the outskirts of the Sargasso Sea. They would feed on jellyfish and seaweed fattening themselves up. The females would step off the merry go round, come to these waters, mate, and crawl right up on this very beach again to lay their eggs, sometimes within ten yards of where they were born.
Stan Lansing could tell from the size of the nests, she shape and spacing of the flipper marks, and where in the dune-line they were placed, what type of turtle had laid them; whether it had been a Leatherback, Loggerhead or Green sea turtle. After his dawn hike he rode a bicycle back to his house on a protected stretch of barrier island scrub facing the Indian River and watched over his clam farm and hatchery operation. In the evening, he drove his pickup with the bicycle in the bed, back to its prearranged spot in the palmettos near a dune marker, went home and turned in. He lived on the same spot of barrier-island, between the sea and the intra-coastal waterway, for more than sixty-five years, an idyllic existence the like of which will never be seen again on this continent.
When I met him that morning he was a busy, if lonely ninety-two year old with bright blue eyes, a gizzard neck and long limbs. His clothes looked like they came from the 1933 Sears and Roebuck catalogue and they just might have. The old man spoke with a scratchy Florida cracker accent that you just knew came from the county’s original settlers.
“What ya got there, Ray?” said the man walking out onto his porch as we pulled up.
Ray uncovered the turtle for him and showed him where the chunk had been taken out of it.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Stan said, holding his withered boney hands on his hips.
“You’ve seen this before,” Ray said.
“Yep, I seen this before,” he said disappointedly. “Why don’t y’all come on in?”
He poured Ray some coffee, as we boys wandered through his den marveling at pieces of driftwood, shells, fossils and other littoral goodies all around the room.
I picked up a long, sharp white object made out of bone.
“What’s this?”
“That’s from the skull of a saber tooth cat. It washed up on the beach,” he said.
“What was it doing in the ocean?” I asked.
“Well the cat who owned it, died somewhere between here and twelve miles out to sea,” he said.
“What was he doing out there?”
“Chasing prey,” the old man said obstinately. “See, back in the late Pleistocene, the beach was twelve miles east of here, and everything between here and there was dry land.”
He let that sink in and thrilled at the reaction on my face. I think this was the moment I decided I wanted to become a science teacher. I wanted to fascinate someone else the way he had just fascinated me. There was a lot of power in that and I wanted it.
“Pleistocene?” I said, stuck on the word.
“Son, that’s a fancy way of saying back when the ice age was happening. See all that ice took up a lot of water, and when that happened, a lot of what is continental shelf was dry land. So, your big ole kitty cat there, wandered out after his dinner one day, got into a scrape maybe with a giant ground sloth, ended up the worse for it, died, and got covered up with dirt. Then his bones were uncovered by waves from a hurricane, rolled to shore and here he is. Well, part of him anyway,” the old man said.
“Giant ground sloth?” I asked sheepishly, wondering just how much new information this old man had in him.
“Giant ground sloth. He stood about twelve feet high on his back legs. Big ole harry fella. He could eat all the leaves off of one of your oak trees in the space of a day and leave a dung pile that would fill up the back of your dad’s pick up truck,” he said looking at Russ.
We all laughed at this but I still wasn’t convinced.
“No way,” I said.
“Don’t believe me?” the old man said. I nodded no.
The old man set down Ray’s coffee and said, “then son, follow me.”
We followed him out to his porch, where, beneath an empty aquarium in a dusty old hutch was a towel covering something hard and bony. The old man removed the towel to reveal a giant, hideous skull. We oooed and ahhhd for a moment gazing in wonder at the grotesqueness of it; its massive jaws. The brown, boney ancientness of the thing thrilled me.
“You found that on the beach?” Russ said.
“No, this here was found inside a sand mine over in Micco in about thirty feet of water. The dredge got into a layer of hard, boney stuff. God knows what other wonders they destroyed with the dredge before they shut it off, dove down for a look see. But they did bring this up careful-like, along with some mastodon bones and whatnot.”
“Wow,” I sighed in reverence stooping down and gazing into its long-dead eye sockets.
“The point is, there are more wonders in this world than can be found in all your philosophies, Horatio,” he said paraphrasing Shakespeare, although back in the day the Surf Road crew and I wouldn’t have known Shakespeare from the ice cream man.
“Who’s Horatio?” I asked.
“Just full of questions, ain’t ye? That’s good. Aristotle said having more questions than answers is the true sign of wisdom,” the old man said.
“Who’s Aristotle?” I asked. He looked down and rubbed my head with a boney hand, and looked over at Ray through the sliding-glass door.
“Ray, what do you suppose they’s teaching these youngins’ over at that school?” he said.
“I’m tellin’ ya,” Ray said with a smile shaking his head.
“Now it’s time for one of you to answer a question or two from me,” he said. “Back to that turtle. Which one of y’all found it?”
Ryan and I raised our hands instinctively. Russ looked at us like he wanted to pound our heads in: we weren’t in school, what the hell were we doing? We put our hands down but the old man had his answer.
“Tell me how you found it, and I mean all of it, and don’t leave nothin’ out,” he said.





June 2011 Daytona Beach,
The cell phone rang again popping the bubble on my little childhood memory. Again it came from “unknown name, unknown number.”
I knew it wasn’t Smokey this time since, well, he and I had just spoken an hour ago. Sheila hadn’t called me yet but I knew she would sometime this evening, likely. I had left a message with her mother. She was obviously still furious with me but, with Ryan being dead, I knew she also would have to call me to express some sympathy. Sheila adored Ryan as much as I did. She was one of the few people on planet earth who understood him.
I decided to pull off the road for something to eat. I chose a local Denny’s; someplace where I could sit down with a meal in a quiet booth with a cup of coffee to go with it. As I exited the interstate I noticed a black Crown Victoria behind me, right on my bumper.
“What the …?”
The man’s face was set like stone concealed beneath a navy baseball cap with a New York Yankees logo over a pair of cobalt-dark sunglasses.
“What is this prick’s problem?” I wondered aloud.
I looked in the rear view and he was obviously staring back at me so I laid the bird finger on the side of my cheek. The face staring back at me was emotionless and rock hard. A thought came into my head in a flash.
I fucking hate the New York Yankees!
The man edged his Crown-bitch closer to the back of my Ford and something about the effrontery of his manner set me the hell off.
I slammed the car in park praying for him to hit me which he did, just barely tapping my bumper. I got out walked around and stared at him.
The man wasn’t getting out. He knew as well as I did that slight tap hadn’t even resulted in the slightest scrape to my bumper. But he wasn’t going to dignify me with even a raised hand saying he was sorry. He just sat there impassive as a brick.
“What the hell is your problem, douche bag?” I screamed at him.
He said nothing to this.
“By the way why don’t you get a real team, jackass?” I bellowed, not knowing why I had said all this but it sure felt good.
The man merely edged his car around my Ford scooted through the red light and sped off. He had New York plates but, I couldn’t get a number.
I stood there in the off ramp of Interstate 95 watching him speed west on the state road. He had no idea where the hell he was going. He was no more from New York than I was. He had been tailing me.