Beach Bum in Training

I grew up in a house at the corner of Cary's Lane and Bayshore Drive in Warrington, now West Pensacola, Florida. Pensacola Bay was only a couple of hundred yards away.

For all my boyhood years, I had full run of the beach and the adjoining woods. I was Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn all in one. No one lived between me and the water except one man and his wife in one house, and he didn't care.

I had a dozen different ways through the woods and to the water, and I knew a few dozen trails and paths within.

The best and biggest blackberries in Pensacola grew in a huge tangle just a few yards from the water's edge. Mullet jumped and the occasional porpoise rolled. Huge mahogany logs would break free of the rafts of logs being towed from ships at anchor to the lumber company which lay off the Bayou Chico.

My paper route lay by the water, and the last paper I delivered each morning was to the man who tended the drawbridge over the Bayou. The bridge is now gone, as is the railroad bridge which used to allow the train to go out to the Pensacola Naval Air Station once a day.

When last I was in Pensacola, there were wall-to-wall homes on the beach, and the woods were gone. My boyhood home has been remodeled, and a high fence prevents me from even seeing the window of what used to be my bedroom.

All my friends are gone and the beaches all have high-rises on them. I cannot even find the spot at the Santa Rosa Island end of the bridge over the sound where my father hung his cast net on a sunken boat.

Yet, I still long to wander. The army sent me to Europe and across the country. My job as a truck driver allowed me to cross and criss-cross the country many times. For the moment, I am tied to a reality, but someday, I will walk the beach again, if only in my mind, and ride the trees in the eye of the hurricane.