Jack's Bight : Solace of an Open Place

Florida International University FIU Digital Commons FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations University Graduate School 11-17-1994 Jack's Bight : Solace of an Open Place Hamish Winthrop Ziegler Florida International University Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd Part of the Nonfiction Commons Recommended Citation Ziegler, Hamish Winthrop, "Jack's Bight : Solace of an Open Place" (1994). FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 4440. https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/4440 This work is brought to you for free and open access by the University Graduate School at FIU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of FIU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. FLORIDA INTERNATIONAL UNIVERSITY Miami, Florida JACK'S BIGHT: SOLACE OF AN OPEN PLACE A thesis submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS by Hamish Winthrop Ziegler 1994 To: Dean Arthur W. Herriott College of Arts and Sciences This thesis, written by Hamish Winthrop Ziegler, and entitled, Jack's Biaht: Solace of an Open Place, having been approved in respect to style and intellectual content, is referred to you for judgement. We have read this thesis and recommend that it be approved. Campbell McGrath Adele Newson Lyijrhe Barrett, Major Professor Date of Defense: November 17, 1994 The thesis of Hamish Winthrop Ziegler is approved. Dean»Arthur W. Herriott Collage of Arts and Sciences Dr.' Richard L. Campbell Dean of Graduate Studies Florida International University, 1994 ii I dedicate this thesis to my mother, Ann Williams McLean. Besides bringing me into this world, she introduced me to Biscayne Bay and the sea beyond, a fantastic world I might never have known without her. iii ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS JACK'S BIGHT: SOLACE OF AN OPEN PLACE by Hamish Winthrop Ziegler Florida International University, 1994 Miami, Florida Professor Lynne Barrett, Major Professor Jack's Bight: Solace of an Open Place is a non-fiction book; partly a story of place, as well as the spirit of the people I lived with for seven years aboard a houseboat in a floating community called the Anchorage, off Miami. It starts with how I came to the Anchorage and my first months aboard with my girlfriend. Character portraits follow, with a shrimping trip and a historical account of Jack's Bight. This is followed by the first of several chapters on our political struggle with Miami city government. Subsequent chapters describe living aboard in nature, the life of a liveaboard priest, cruising across the Atlantic, burning a boat, a community Chautauqua, an adventure on the Miami River, an encounter with a manatee and a dolphin, and our construction of a channel. The book ends with the first hurricane to hit Miami in decades. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE I. Waterscape.......................................... 1 II. The Piscataqua River Wherry........................ 12 III. Dogpatch............................................ 27 IV. Storms and Prairie Schooners....................... 45 V. Peter Rabit......................................... 61 VI. Big-Mouthed Dogfish................................. 75 VII. Jack's Bight........................................ 87 VIII. Sharman's Island.................................... 105 IX. You Can't Fight City Hall.......................... 127 X. The Dolphin......................................... 162 XI. The Intrepid Crew of the Andarin................... 173 XII. A Malchesedek and Blackfish........................ 200 XIII. Le Dieu Nous Garde.................................. 221 XIV. Chautauqua.......................................... 242 XV. Cold Spot........................................... 264 XVI. The Shuttle......................................... 292 XVII. Cows in the Garden.................................. 311 XVIII. Michael's Channel................................... 322 XIX. The Ivories of Chautauqua.......................... 336 XX. Swimming Through Andrew............................ 346 XXI. Ashore.............................................. 366 v 1 Waterscape I sailed my first boat when my buddies and I commandeered a flat square of construction styrofoam from the pool our school was building, jammed a stick in her, tied a sheet on, and headed out squeaking on Biscayne Bay. The bay was as wide as the Mississippi. We found a whole new world waited beyond Ransom prepschool's bayside mangrove stands, a boy's paradise of shallow, half-sunken wrecks, mysterious islands and dilapidated houseboats on which old men lived. They seemed to enjoy our visits and told us stories. One of them, Richard, put his teeth in Clorox. He told us it worked better than the stuff on TV. Our village is called Coconut Grove, named after the old Post Office. Near the mid-nineteenth century it was a tiny shack nestled among the ruins of a coconut palm plantation. Then it became a fishing settlement. When my family moved to the Grove in 1973, it had grown into an artsy village nestled in the coastal jungle, ten miles south of Miami. To a boy from Boston and Kansas City, it was an exotic place of scorpions and flying beetles. Fishing villages seem to have that allure of living by the bare hands that is so attractive to artists and hippies 1 alike. With my mother a portrait painter, we fit right in. In galleries like the Grove House, artists messily created in the back and displayed in front. Yarn wall weavings and painted plaster sculpture were popular. The annual Coconut Grove Arts Festival was a two-street affair back then. The Hare Krishnas had a compound on Kumquat street. On Sundays they held free vegetarian dinners for anyone who wanted to come. My friends and I went there often. Then we rode for candy at the Krest Five & Ten. My street was Loquat, the next street over from Kumquat, another mysterious tropical fruit. We would ride our bikes from my house through the long mango-sweet summers into town. The black asphalt shimmered under our tires as we flew over it, too hot to touch with our bare feet. We rode back and forth from the cool library with a water fountain to air-conditioned Lyle's drugstore for orange creamsicles. Then if we rode fast, we could make it down the hill to Bodenheimer's Seminole Bait Store next to the shrimp docks before the sticky orange ran down our hands. We picked juicy tangelos. They were ours for the taking in the yards we passed. Nobody seemed to mind. We played in the shade of banyan trees big enough to cover four yards. Their stringy, labyrinthine air roots draped the roads and yards and we swung from them, latching onto the thicker trunks of older vines with our legs and columning down them like paratroopers to the ground. We rode through the Black Grove where gnarled old men under wide 2 straw fedoras nodded in the shade. We knew they were from the Bahamas and imagined their grandfathers were pirates. Some weekends we'd end up at the Pagoda, an old wooden house up the hill on our Ransom School grounds. We would climb up to the veranda overlooking Biscayne Bay and lay down on our stomachs, swapping stories of forts and sailing ships. The whole shimmering expanse of the bay stretched before our eyes, all the way to the low green line of Key Biscayne and the deep, azure Gulf Stream beyond. Ransom's greying caretaker, I can't remember his name, told us the Pagoda was one of the first houses in the Grove, built in the 1890's of Dade County pine -- wood so hard it needed special nails. We pressed our noses to its unpainted porch frames, inhaling the pungent sap. It still wrinkled our noses after almost one hundred years. He told us when a hurricane would come, and he'd seen several, he would prepare the Pagoda by opening a few windows and doors on all sides to let the wind blow through. He said when you let the wind have its way a little, the house wouldn't blow over. I always remembered that part. It seemed so strange, letting the wind come in with a storm. I imagined the old three-story house in that wind, the bay growling and hissing its way up the hill toward her in a twenty-foot surge, swirling the foundations, green palm tops whipping above the waves, trunks awash, and she a great wooden whistle in a howling hurricane. 3 Before the divorce, my family lived in a large two-story brick house at 1924 Trapp Avenue in Coconut Grove. It was a nice, quiet neighborhood. Our house had two white columns, a bay window upstairs overlooking the street, deep blue, curl-your-toes shag, central air-conditioning, a big yard with a gate, and trim shrubbery. Then it all ended. My father met a woman on a business trip in Toronto. I was seventeen. It was 1977. My sister Heideloh was seven. I hadn't graduated high school. My all-consuming preoccupation was simply overcoming the fact that I was earless in a high school foundering in a sea of student Jeeps, Camaros and Olds Cutlasses. And now this. My life was upside down. In the last few weeks in the house, after the closing, my mother Ann dropped the next bomb. She came home with a man. They just stood there together in the foyer like two bashful teenagers. The man, much shorter than my mother, looked cautiously at me from under blonde, sway-shocked hair. No one said anything. Then his little dog straightened his leash, lifted his leg, and dribbled quietly on the long drapes that hung just over the thick blue carpet. "Brown Dog!" admonished the red-faced man as he pulled on the leash. "Sorry about that." My mother discretely ingored it. "Honey, I want you to meet David. David Wooster." I shook the man's hand. 4 ’’We're going to go sailing today. Would you like to come along?’’ I knew something was up, but I wasn't sure what it was.

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