The adventures of a Florida boy (part 4)

In the 1960s, kids ran as far and wild as their imaginations would take them

ONE OF AN OCCASIONAL SERIES: My boyhood was spent in Florida in the 1960s on an island called Coquina Key. My parents’ waterfront home overlooked a large expanse of Tampa Bay. Back then, parts of the island were undeveloped, which left plenty of room for climbing trees, digging forts in the sand, and swimming in shark-infested waters (though we didn’t give the latter much thought).

This is part 4 of a random and mostly light-hearted series that I might eventually combine into a memoir. I’m telling these stories to the best of my recollection and changing names and physical descriptions just because it seems like the right thing to do.

BY LAND AND BY SEA

I currently live in Upstate South Carolina, one of the areas of the United States that is dominated by red clay (and lots of roots and rocks). It can take me twenty torturous minutes to dig a hole two feet wide and deep just to plant a small bush. But where I grew up in Florida, red clay was nonexistent. Sand was the dominant soil type. It wasn’t only found on the beach. It was everywhere.

A couple of young boys could grab a pair of shovels and dig a square hole five feet wide and deep in about the same time it now takes me to plant a bush. And in the barren sand fields across the street from my house, we did just that. Once the hole was dug to our satisfaction, we covered it with a sheet of plywood, sprinkled sand over the plywood to hide its location, and voila! — we had a secret fort in which to hatch our devious plans. Well, our plans weren’t really devious, but we pretended like they were.

Though it was often 95 degrees outside with 95 percent humidity, the inside of our forts always felt blissfully cool. We sat in them for long stretches. Sometimes we brought our lunch. We loved it. The potential of a wall collapsing or anything else dangerous happening simply did not register in our young minds. Heck, we were used to burying ourselves in sand up to our necks at the beach. The only danger that worried us was sand spurs, the bane of a Florida boy’s barefoot existence.

Sand forts played a huge role in my boyhood. Between the ages of 8 and 15, I helped dig hundreds of them. My stepdad must have been perplexed about why his plywood kept mysteriously disappearing. (Back then, plywood was inexpensive and readily available, so everyone had a few sheets in their garage. Not so much nowadays.)

Recent research has indicated that playing in dirt has some health benefits. If so, I must have been very healthy. I was always dirty, but it was a dry, grainy kind of dirty, not a coal-miner kind of dirty. Up until seventh grade*, I only took a shower or bath about twice a week, so my bed was often filled with sand, which angered my mother and grossed out my sister, neither of whom could understand how I slept in such filth. But I didn’t care. Sand was my friend.

(* Early in seventh grade, one of the cute girls told me that I smelled funny. I showered daily after that. My mom and sister’s opinions mattered little, but cute girls mattered a lot.)

Ticks were also commonplace. It became an almost daily ritual to pluck them off with a pair of tweezers. There was no talk of Lyme disease back then. But unfortunately, the ticks seemed to especially desire a boy’s private parts. I don’t know why. Maybe the blood tasted better down there.

Though it must sound like I was a filthy animal (I guess I was, a lot of the time), I did clean up on occasion. After spending an hour sequestered in one of our forts, we would go for a swim in Tampa Bay. One of my friends had a 75-foot-long wooden dock in his backyard that extended all the way to the channel. We stripped down to our shorts (which involved taking off a T-shirt and ragged sneakers) and then ran the length of the dock screaming like madmen. Then we leaped off the end of the dock into the channel, swinging our arms and flailing our legs for what seemed like forever until we plummeted into the warm saltwater.

The current was so strong, there was no sense in fighting it. Instead, we simply let it take us on a raucous ride before it finally dumped us into a nearby canal. It was like tubing down a whitewater river and ending up in a calm eddy. Then we walked back to the dock in waist-deep water and did it again. Who knows how many times bull sharks checked us out? Or we almost stepped on stingrays? Who knows how many times any number of disasters almost occurred? We didn’t care. This was our territory. We knew it well. And we weren’t afraid.

Read Part 1

Read Part 2

Read Part 3

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