Grayton Beach

Wilson Koewing

We flew out of SFO for Fort Walton Beach, Florida, my wife, my young daughter and me. I stepped out of the airport holding my daughter in my arms and my wife’s hand in mine. The humidity was so thick you could bite into it. It had been a long time since I’d returned to the South, and I was overwhelmed by nostalgia for my youth, when my family would pack up the minivan each Christmas and drive from our home in rural South Carolina to visit my grandparents in Venice, Florida.

Daddy, why it’s so hot? My daughter asked, squirming in my arms.

The humidity, dear, I said.

The midity? she said with exaggerated curiosity.

Basically, I said, it means there’s a lot of water in the air.

Water?

Water.

In the a-ir?

That’s right.

After much consideration, she said, I like the midity.

Our destination was Grayton Beach. Waiting in a rented beach house were my wife’s two sisters and mother. On the drive in we noticed two bars, a coffee shop and little else on the commercial front. Beach shacks passed down through generations mingled amongst wind-gnarled oaks and waterfront mansions. The smell on the breeze was that classic Florida mixture of ocean and swamp. Our place was a new build with a pool and a screen porch.

From the powdery white sand beach, two blocks away, you could see the high-rise hotels of Destin, but they felt worlds away. Trucks and Jeeps drove right out onto Grayton Beach, and a lake near the ocean leaked a shallow, serpentine inlet down to the shore that was as warm as a bathtub that time of year, alive with June grass and other algae.

Unappealing as it looked, it proved a perfect place for my daughter to play, and the color contrast when the brownish-yellow inlet met the clear gulf water was striking. The June grass was also present in the gulf shallows, but beyond that the water appeared almost neon before turning a haunting dark blue out at sea.

Wild cloud formations blossomed on the horizon, some bulbous, thick and ominous, others feathery brushstrokes high in the sky. There was a depth of field in Florida that the California valley we resided in did not provide; a near 360-degree visible flatness.

Sitting under the canopy shade drinking a 30A IPA, I found myself thinking about how amazing our planet was. How it might appear to an alien seeing it for the first time. This blue planet covered with blue water and teeming with green plant life. How everything we take for granted starts with everything we are, and maybe taking things for granted just means we figured out we could explain them.

Maybe that’s what everything was. Maybe that’s all language and writing was.

Then again, what did I know?

Not much other than that when I carried my daughter out into the ocean for the first time, and she shrieked with laughter as I lifted her up and over the waves, tears of joy welled in my eyes.

That, and how I knew how to drink, and her aunt, who hid the gallon of vodka in her room, didn’t. Or how she’d had the gastric bypass and how troubling that drinking was. Suicidal even, but still not the worst enabling my father-in-law was guilty of.

That, or how we couldn’t possibly afford California with the new baby coming. Or how I barely talked to my own parents and hadn’t even told them. That I hadn’t spoken to my brother in years. Hardly kept up with old friends.

How I’d become completely isolated in my family unit. A trio, soon to be a quartet, of data sets trapped inside the algorithm. Surrounded by connectivity while living quietly alone inside a bubble.

That’s only scratching the surface, but why dwell?

When my bladder filled, I walked out into that little inlet. By the banks, the algae bloomed thick. My daughter thought it was gross, but I liked the way it felt on my skin. In the middle, where it was deep enough, I sat down in the water to pee.

You peeing? My daughter asked.

Yes, I’m peeing.

You tooted? She asked as bubbles broke the water’s surface.

Yes, I tooted.

She laughed maniacally.

Did I know what I was doing with my life? Shit, no. But was I more in control of it than most who had it together? I’d argue yes.

You tell me how to figure that.

Nothing is up to me, you see. That’s what the other aunt taught me. She’d gotten spiritual after stealing my wife’s diamond the time she came to visit then pawning it for a tenth of its value back in Tennessee. It had been years, though, and while she still harbored some of the same tendencies, I had to admit she seemed to have changed for the better. She was more active, her logic clicked. She’d cut ties with several men whose toxicity had trickled into her bloodstream.

Not for nothing, change. Though it’s relative. If you’re an abysmal piece of shit and you become a moderately less abysmal piece of shit, that is, oddly, still change.

It’s all about levels of being awful, I suppose.

I tend to notice something awful about almost everyone, and more awful things about myself than most, which I believe makes me unique. Most can’t see the awful in themselves or choose not to.

I can pinpoint nothing awful about my daughter, though. So innocent. So wide-eyed and curious. So as-of-yet unaffected. I dream of a future for her that rolls out devoid of pain, worry or hardship. The foolish and unrealistic dreams of a father, I realize. Without trials and tribulations, we do not grow.

Or so they say.

Why must growth always be the measure of moving forward?

After dinner, to escape the din of wife and sisters and mother talking over whichever Netflix abomination they’d decided on, I retired to the front porch with my daughter. She was delirious from the long day in the sun.

It’s getting darker, dada, she said.

I held her tight. She smelled of sunscreen and her sun-kissed skin burnt warm against my cheek. I wished she would always stay this age.

The darker brings lions and tigers and dinosaurs and alligators, dada, she said. To eat me.

I laughed and took a drink of beer and watched sheet lightning splinter giant cloud formations until she was asleep on my shoulder.