"The whole extent of the South Seas is a desert of ships; more especially that part where we now sail. No post runs in these lands; communication is by accident; where you may have designed to go one thing, where you shall be able to arrive another." – Robert Louis Stevenson, from In the South Seas



And so this was the thirty-third consecutive year that the old man had come to South Seas at Captiva Island, Florida.  Here, the water had maintained its aqua green coloration; its filmy green lining that seemed to hover above the horizon of the surface of the water in the distance; the sand, at spots, fluffy and near white; at others, as you walked down further toward where the water meets, all ripples of mixed shaped shells and one had to be somewhat watchful of each step.  He learned to wear tight fitting sandals many years ago as he experimented with wading in the water more and more often and those sandals came in more than a little handy, made him much less fearful of the cold and the common shards of shells that every tourist stumbles on as they bathe and frolic in the Gulf of Mexico.  This would not be his last trip, but it might be the very last that his granddaughter, Lily, might be along.  His oldest grandson, Thomas, had already grown up, lived now, temporarily, in the south of France as wine distributor.  How could he contend with such a place as Aix en Provence, of the Luberon?  Lily was not as old as that, but she had kayaked and sailed virtually every inch of these nearby islands of Cabbage Key, Useppa, Caya Costa.  The old man used to tell stories of pirates and privateers as they would make their heated dash from the main island at Captiva over to the Caya, drifting through the partial mangos, and past the lumbering manattees underwater.  There had been

much adventure then; he could easily remember the day that they stopped as they were paddling over what was then called fisherman's slough, set a simple anchor, and challenged one another to flip in the water directly over the hull of the kayak to snorkel.  There would have been no understandable way to predict what they found there a mere five feet down in the water, through the clutter of shell, and the hazy clouds of sand stirred up...