By Buster McNutt
I just returned from my daily drive down the beach in Saint Augustine, in my new 12-year-old 4WD F-150 pickup. We are on vacation. “We” being myself, Lady M., son Bubba, his wife “Charlene” (not her real name). Charlene is a hairdresser at one of those Clips-Ahoy places, and she called in sick this week to go to the beach and avoid the annual “Pilgrimage of the Q-Tips,” where retirement homes in the area load all the little blue-haired ladies onto school busses and bring them to the nearest Clips-Ahoy to get their annual hair dusting. They also check for head lice and such, but that’s not something you should spend too much time thinking about. Also with us was our four-year-old grandson JayBear, whose favorite beach activity was filling his Tonka dump truck with wet sand and dumping it in any temporarily abandoned beach shoes he could find. Normally this was an innocent enough boys-will-be-boys annoyance, except for the time he filled what appeared to be a size-12 woman’s shoe with wet sand, and she came back, put it on and started screaming, jumping up and down, and just generally acting as though she were at one of those religious tent revivals that are so popular in this part of the world. Oh, wait. I should probably have mentioned that this particular load of sand had a couple of recently hatched sea turtles that were simply trying to get to the sea at the time. And contrary to what you may believe, when turtles are threatened, they don’t always passively retreat into their shells — well, at least not Florida snapping sea turtles.
One morning from our balcony we saw a group of people watching a huge sea turtle heading back to the ocean after laying her eggs on the beach. This one was at least six feet long and easily that wide. Supposedly they can live to be well over 100 years old, possibly because they are in no great hurry to do anything; they mate for life and abandon their children at egg stage, thus avoiding life-shortening, stressful activities such as turtle toilet training (a very slow process), the awkward teenage turtle years (an endless demand for Clear-A-Seal), the awkward “Turtles and the Bees” conversations, and so on. Now, the daddy sea turtles really have it made. Granted, the actual mating ritual might take a little longer, but once the Momma heads to the beach to deliver, it’s off to the nearest turtle bar to celebrate and pass out “It’s an Egg Cluster!” cigars.
I had to leave the family at the beach one day to return home for a follow-up appointment with the bone doctor to check on my six-week-old broken collarbone. It’s pretty much healed, thank you, but he scheduled me for another appointment in six weeks and signed a note saying that until then I wasn’t supposed to do any heavy lifting, yard work, or any housework that involved twisting the shoulder “unnaturally,” such as loading/unloading the dishwasher/clothes washer/dryer, making beds where tight, fitted sheets were involved, and the scrubbing toilets/bathtubs was absolutely forbidden! I’m telling you, a broken collarbone is a major inconvenience.
I stopped by the house to find that Neighbor Ned had put in a new gravel driveway. This is very unusual in these parts, because the North Central Florida geologic DNA does not have a chromosome for gravel; concrete, asphalt, and certainly dirt are in great supply, while gravel has to be trucked in from areas with large concentrations of rare geologic structures known technically as “rocks” that can be crushed up to make gravel, at which time it is trucked to North Central Florida “The” Home Depot stores for sale in 40 pound bags at $4.79 a bag, unless you want the certified organic gravel, which is two dollars more. You can tell the difference because they have a sign on the bin that says so.
Well, you’d have thought Ned had opened a water park. All the neighbor kids were No. 40-grit sandpapering all the tread off their Dollar General “Tenna-Shoes,” squirting them with canola cooking spray, getting a running start, and seeing how far they could gravel surf on the new driveway. The wipeouts could be a little bloody, but the kids didn’t seem to mind (“chicks love guys with scars”), and Ned was okay with all this as long as the kids agreed to pull all the gravel out of their bleeding arms/legs before heading home. He also flossed his tires every night to be sure he didn’t inadvertently take any of the gravel out to the dirt road in front of his house.
Now, Neighbor Ned’s driveway strategy would seem to occupy a prime lot on the corners of Obsessive and Positively Weird Streets. But you have to put it in historical context. He is in the flooring-installation business, and his last four driveways were made of old carpets he had replaced in homes and businesses. His wife had been on his case about tracking dirt from the dirt driveway into their house and onto their hard to clean carpets, so Ned figured if his truck was parked on carpet this would no longer be an issue. Since he didn’t have a garage and probably would not be allowed to drive the truck directly into the house, then a carpeted driveway made perfect sense.
The first was a green shag, which looked great but got a little soggy when it rained, plus they had 13 cats, and he kept having to “bomb” the driveway for fleas. So he went to more of an industrial carpet, which was better, but still had water retention issues, so he replaced that with a carpet installed upside down, so he was parking on the backing, which seemed ideal. Then he got his property tax statement and the tax assessor assumed that if there was carpet, then this must be a taxable part of the house, which doubled his rates, and that was that. He not only graveled the driveway, but 80% of the flooring in the house as well, which reduced his property tax to almost nothing, since the “livable area” of his house was much smaller. I mean, what kind of a goober would be living on a gravel floor?
So I drove back to the beach to spend a few more days with the family. The Momma sea turtle had finally made it back to the ocean. The size-12 shoe lady had flung her shoe, and the baby turtles into the ocean. And little JayBear had taken to putting the wet sand in his swimming trunks and telling everyone he needed to potty – NOW!
Maybe the turtles are on to something about raising children … •
