Nature write at its absolute best

The Living Dock at Panacea
by Jack Rudloe

Sad as any tale of Florida offshore life, but strangely optimistic at the end--whatever man can create, hurricane can obliterate.

It's a gorgeous voyage of a book, ranging in distance from as close as a walk down to the floating dock to ten miles out in the Gulf of Mexico, but ranging in depth from millimeters to miles. I'll let him tell the story of his living dock himself, shortly (although there's much more to say):

When the bay was swollen during a spring tide or a storm, they stood floating like battleships high up on the waves, and I could step from the stationary dock onto the floating Styrofoam dock with no trouble at all. But when the moon was full and all the waters were sucked out of the bay, or the powerful north wind pushed the waters out, exposing the mud flats, the floating dock sank far below the oyster and barnacle zones on the pilings. In fact, there were times when the winter wind shoved all the water out of the bay except for a narrow channel, and the floating dock sat squarely on the bottom like some sort of stranded sea monster bearded with huge amounts of tufted oysters, barnacles, and other fouling growths.

After the introduction to his dock, the book goes on and into the depths and shallows of the bay, and the results are delightful.

...you never know what you're going to find in a mud-flat pool left by low tides. Often there are long waving clusters of filamentous algae that are strangely beautiful and look like a woman's hair. And sometimes there are oyster shells overgrown with red and yellow sponges that stand out starkly from the dark brownish black bottom. The real surprises come when you find five or six frilled sea hares, grayish green little blobs of life spewing out long strings of eggs. Sometimes a flounder is stranded in the pools, or a sea robin, and once I found a blazing red and brown scorpion fish with bristling spines.

It's not all peaceful meditation and beauty. It's an ocean, after all. There's death and life and high drama at sea--

"Will you get the hell off the air!" I hurriedly interjected. "We're caught out here in a storm. Emergency!"

"Well...I never..." came back the voice. "some people are just plain rude."

Deep, shallow, thoughtful, frivolous...I'm running out of adjectives. Just read it; you'll understand.