Laura Hope-Gill

Essay:  Lessons in Mangrove

One small, stone bridge packed with crushed oyster shells and sand instead of pavement connected Mangrove Island to Siesta Key. The bridge arched over a bayou no greater than twenty feet across that circled the accumulation of sand in mangrove roots on which we and six other families lived in modest bungalows. Sand crabs clattered up the rotting supports of wooden docks. Manatee napped their passage under the barnacled hulls of neglected boats. Mullet glinted like coins flipping in moonlight. Cormorants shat from the weathered intracoastal marker and the “No Wake” sign at the bayou’s mouth then join the flock on one of the tidal islands, islands that disappeared at high tide so the birds all also shat then flew to the more permanent island in the middle of the bay. I canoed around it in the weekend mornings. I paddled Canadian-style facing the stern and leaning the canoe over to one side with my hip pressed against the gunnel as I knelt. It’s a way of paddling with minimal drag and maximum control. Motorboats rocked me. In 1992, the FBI would come for my dad, and he will have disappeared into the Caribbean and not contact any of us for three years. In 2017, he will explain to me over the phone that the mafia had taken a hit out on him, my mom, my sister, and me, and that’s why he vanished. He said, “I guess I should have told you.” I kept talking with him anyway because he would be dead soon from the amyloidosis, and because I finally had an answer. An answer like that can hold you in place, and even if the place is somewhere life-threatening and undesirable, at least it is somewhere. I accepted it much same way that Christopher Robin’s animal friends accept a stick as the North Pole after an “expotition.”

The greatest honesty I have ever known came from Mangrove Island itself. At the end of the island, about 2000 feet from our house, there was a little park, a tiny park, actually, where some Australian pines had been cleared for enough space for a picnic table that wasn’t ever there. Past the clearing, an opening between mangroves lead to a 10-foot long wooden dock with the familiar barnacles, salt-decayed wood, and dock spiders. No houses were visible from this dock, only the mangroves, the egrets and herons, the mullet, and the occasional manatee. The smell of these organisms combined reconstitutes itself in my dreams sometimes. It is a scent unique to not only the island but to that dock. It’s a scent of peace and quiet. The first time I got drunk, my friend, Juli, and I carried our in-process bottle of rum past the night-blooming cereus beside a neighbor’s mailbox, down the moonlit oyster-shell island road to that dock. I had the hardest time reconciling that the Monkees could have both a Mike and a Mickey, and insisted I must be missing something.

Our binge was motivated by my having lost the school election for Vice-President, recently failing to win another election for “Governor” at the YMCA Young-in-Legislature program, and the death of our family’s Old English Sheepdog, Heidi. My mother found us at the dock.

“Plaid,” I exclaimed to Juli when my mother appeared, home from a party to which she had worn a kilt.

Being that drunk on a dock could have proven deadly. I was far too gone to be able to swim. I was sick for days from the alcohol poisoning. The honesty of the island wasn’t its protection of me from drowning. It came from how thin the line was there between nature and human life. That little dock protruded into the bayou like an unnecessary extremity, like an appendix or the baby-toe. The clearing of trees wasn’t even convincing enough to allow for a permanent fixture, even one as transient as a picnic table. The park was a weak argument for human presence against nature’s insistence that all who dwelled on the island did so on the off-chance that sand stayed gathered in the mangrove roots. In fact, one afternoon I walked through the mangrove woods to the edge where water seeped over the roots. I jumped up and down, and I felt the shelf of sand holding me up bounce too. That was the honesty I’m telling you about: all of us were living on something that floated and that could just as easily float away or dissolve. I understood that on that afternoon. The truth was communicated very clearly. This is what Florida was. This is what everything was. It occurred to me I should warn everyone then didn’t.

After our first dinner at the mafia don’s house on Longboat Key, the more developed and wealthy of the islands off Sarasota, servants were loading every item I had politely admired and inquired about during the tour of his mansion.

“We really can’t accept these gifts,” my mother politely said.

“But your kid likes them. Of course we’ll have to have the exercise bike delivered tomorrow,” the mafioso said.

“Thank you. We cannot,” mom said.

The exterior wall of our bungalow faced a woods of melaleuca quinquenervia, or “punk trees.” These trees had a paper-like bark more rubbery than birches. Their scent is of potatoes. I can’t explain it better than that, but I am aware that when I hold a potato to my nose the scent is not exact but must come at a later stage of a potato’s story. But when the wind blew in off the bay into our little bayou, as I walked from the school bus stop, where Siesta Key’s main drag, Midnight Pass’ pavement is overtaken with oyster shells and white sand, the potato-y air sometimes was too much. Complaining about them wasn’t an option. The island wasn’t a place where you changed things. Things grew, and we would move around them. This was spoken and unspoken law. Seawalls of hardened concrete bags were the only manmade barriers to hurricanes that nonetheless poured sea life into our swimming pool. When a new neighbor took gardening shears to the black mangroves, we who knew this single written law stopped him. The mangroves were protected. They could grow to take over the whole bayou if they wanted. The way they grew by dropping new roots from branches to extend their presence mystified me like the banyans did. Every other tree relied on its single seed and root bed for survival. Mangroves and banyans had two survival strategies: grow from where you are planted, but grow again and again where you are not.

The mafia made sense to my father. He had been an internationally recognized research scientist specializing in diabetes and insulin in the 1970s. Raising a family on genius money posed too many challenges. The draw of private practice medicine won out. When the don of the Bradenton Mafia had a bad experience at the ER, he bought a building and recruited Sarasota’s top physicians to serve his every medical whim. And those of the community who sought more individualized care. The other physicians saw through the mastermind, though, and declined. My father stayed at the cost of becoming a pariah in his community. He took up windsurfing on weekends, and he bought a wetsuit. One windsurfer was not enough, and over the course of the next two years, eight more joined it, leaned against the end of the house where the punk trees covered them with the smell of potatoes and the Australian pines covered them with long, soft pine needles. My mother made my father sleep at the opposite end of the bungalow. At some point, the mafioso told my father that if he ever crossed him, he would have my father killed and the same went for my mother, my sister, and me. This was something my father never told us. I learned intuitively from the mangrove to seek a prop-root system apart from the one seed and single root-bed by extending myself out into poetry and friendships, and long canoe-paddles around islands other than mine. For the mangrove, these extensions provide stability in rough tides and enable a single mangrove to develop into a biome, something every teenage girl needs. The roots also not only slow erosion but serve to capture more mud and sand, creating islands like the one I grew up on. They provide habitat to fish and herons and are often host to oysters. Equipped with unique filtration systems, they thrive on very low oxygen. They live where other plants die. Salt crystals form on their leaves.

“What happened to you? Why didn’t you contact us? Did you think we’d all died or something and wouldn’t need you?” Visiting my father after he resurfaced on Bermuda after a three-year disappearance, I drank pina coladas like they were Slimfast and maintained polite daughter decorum for 48 hours before I demanded answers.

“To be honest, I wished you had.” I couldn’t get a flight off the island, so fortunately met Hootie and the Blowfish at Robin Hood, the largest and coolest hangout on the island, who gave me a place to stay. We snorkeled between rehearsal sessions. They were very kind.

After that, I never fully restored myself to being his daughter. It wasn’t a clean, intentional break. It was a break so deep inside me as a result of his reply that rather I felt there was no foundation there, no root bed at all anymore, no original shoot. No taproot. No source. When one’s parent expresses a wish for one’s death, a vital—in the truest sense—connection breaks that the child lives into. For the mangrove, the prop roots provide support in the continual expansion of branches and leaves to gather sunlight. The sunlight lacks the complementary access to oxygen from the soil to complete photosynthesis. Mangrove roots drown twice daily, and there’s no oxygen in the sandy mud. Pneumatophores, upward reaching root extensions, solve the problem by acting as snorkels for the submerged mangrove. These can populate the surrounding area in a meters-wide radius in a massively decentralized system of support. I saw my father three times in twenty-five years after I asked those questions on Bermuda. Once, we met on Siesta Key beach’s white sand. I had just become a mother. We walked on the beach in a wind then said good-bye as he would return to Bermuda and I to North Carolina. I visited Bermuda once more with a friend. The visit was uneventful except for a hurricane. I felt bad for not feeling any residual daughter-like feelings whatever they might be. At the last visit, he came to Asheville, where I live now. I had only fifteen minutes for him as my daughter had a birthday party to attend. It wasn’t a lie. When he went into hospice two years later on Bermuda I sent him a letter telling him I loved him and forgave him and would only write nice things about him. I expected him to die. Instead he lived. I ignored this fact for a few months and then considered there might be something to learn about forgiveness if I didn’t only use it to politely let someone die in peace. I started to phone him in his retirement home in Sedona every Sunday.

While he focused the conversation on what to him was yet the taproot, the story of the family as he had destroyed it, I strove the steer the conversation to what for a mangrove is a superior means of survival, the pneumataphores, the oxygen of new story, of what we were doing now.  He was playing golf and croquet. He had joined a Bible study group of which he felt confident he was “the best one in the class.” He read books. I was teaching at a university and had launched a program for doctors who wanted to incorporate story-work into their medical practice. Calling him felt as close to a “healing” as I would ever get. I see movies in which a full reconciliation is the most revered closure at the level of expectation. Not for me, though. A connection was enough. Connection at a safe remove. A love was still there, but it didn’t have to be a child-like love, a love consumed with trust. There could be kindness.

“I attended a conference and a young doctor recognized my last name,” I told him from my flight’s waiting area. “ The young doctor’s an endocrinologist, and he told me you were a bad ass and he bases his research on yours.”

“I was,” he replied, touched his work was still relevant fifty years later. “I was a true badass.” We talked until my flight boarded.

It was in one of these Sunday conversations that I asked him once again why he vanished. This time I’d phrased it in a less incendiary way, and his answer was similarly less fueled by shame and guilt, emotions I have decided to ascribe to his telling me he wished I were dead. “So tell me, Dad, why did you disappear?”

He told the whole story. He started with the medical practice, then the request to write prescriptions for painkillers for “patients” sent to him by the mafioso. I sat on the floor as he spoke, solid ground. He went into detail of how the system worked, the prescriptions, the samples, the street value, the endless demand that flagged the FBI’s attention and eventually brought the operation down to his losing his license but not having to serve prison time in exchange for information. He fled one night to St. Lucia where he spent time with “real medicine men” and reconnected with the roots of healing. He fathered a child of whom I am aware but have not met. He learned he could still be a doctor in Bermuda, his father’s birthplace, if he partnered with a licensed physician, and there he had found the beauty again of medical practice on the smallest of scales: an island physician with a small bungalow on the sea. What he would have been if enough had been enough twenty years before, I thought, but we were by then past the season of argument or blame or even analysis. The man had enough regrets to drown an ocean. My only interest at that point was to listen and to know what might be known of that part of my own story that had wandered so far from me it hardly even mattered.

“They were after me. I didn’t have a choice. They were after you and Mom and your sister, too. I guess I should have told you.”

I read him the final passages of You Can’t Go Home Again instead of giving a reply. I had my “answer.” I had by then grown so many of my own stories and answers that like the mangrove I no longer relied on one key source for information. My story wouldn’t be the one with the big scene of begging forgiveness or insisting “I did it all for you.” Attaching to a wish for these would lessen the value of what working with doctors and their stories has taught me: in the end you bear witness. You bear witness to the other, to yourself, and everyone else. As heavy as it is, you bear it. And as the mangrove teaches, prop-roots help hold us up and out into the world. I was vast by now. I was a biome, not a single plant. As such I could see his story as this other great thing, a tale of loss and folly, greed and ruin. Shakespeare in Florida. My dad, the tragic hero. And the only way to survive a tragedy is to become your own hero in your own play. Everyone, otherwise, like my father’s wish that afternoon in Bermuda, ends up dead.

I think about the mafia. I think about the hit they had out on me and how all the moves I did during my twenties and thirties probably made them miss. I think of the Mafiosi listening in on my conversations with my first boyfriend and all my friends. I think about the years my dad was missing and of how I’d call homicide departments in the Caribbean and Europe at random just to describe what he looked like. I think of the calls from the banks saying I owed them $875,000.00 and how I’d then go to work in the café for $7 an hour. I didn’t fly to Arizona to visit him a few months before his death. I didn’t go visit him the day before his death when I knew his death would happen. On the days surrounding his death at dawn, my emotions were a sea-storm, everywhere, even with a center like a hurricane, with an eye that would be his passing. I read Thomas Wolfe to him over the phone my sister held to his ear. I heard the breathing of the machine and mistook it for his own loud exhales. His death roar. I’d move through it as we “moved through” the storms on our island. It would move through us. It would tear at things that would have to be let go. What was supposed to remain would. I played the piano in my home for hours at a time. I painted a large painting of many, many windsurfers out at sea.