On this beach
In this pre-catastrophic era leading to what may be known as the Big Trouble when climate change locks itself in for a millennium or so, I wonder how many kinds of people have set foot on the beach at Lands End where I work.
Before the Spanish arrived in 1528, and later the English descended upon now called Sunset Beach at Treasure Island, the land was inhabited by the Timucuan Indians. Not much is known of these peoples except by writings by the white occupiers and what archeological efforts have found as the tribe was extinct by the beginning of the 18th century. Disease, warfare, and slavery decimated the 35 Timucua chiefdoms of Florida and Georgia. My guess is that I walk a beach that members of the Uzita tribe of the Timucua once walked, maybe dragging their dugouts ashore after hunting manatees and alligators.
Some 300 years later the visitors and inhabitants of Sunset Beach aren't so homogenous. Politics has seen to that. At my station at the entrance gate at Lands End Americans from the Eastern Seaboard, Mid-Atlantic and Upper Midwest have spent the money to walk the beach. Others come as far as Eastern Europe, Russia, and South America. Cheaper than Miami some have told me.
Beauty remains at Lands End condo complex though not so luscious as when the Uzita lived here. "It's so green," some of the new visitors like to say. Yet many fail to notice many birds overhead and creatures in the underbrush that frequent the surroundings of their expensive quarters. I do, and such encounters help me withstand the unknowing of my fellow species.
Still ignorance and bias bear itself at times. Like when the n-word slips out of a fellow worker's mouth or another brags that there are no Blacks or Mexicans in the neighborhood where he lives. Perhaps the worse is when a condo owner calls the front gate to complain about marijuana smoke and noise coming from another unit in the same building, asking me to tell them to hold it down. Then, when the door opens a woman with two kids stands there as her Black husband bellows, "I knew this would happen!" There was no noise, no marijuana smoking just a mixed-race couple on vacation with their children. I beg off, call back the complainer who does not answer.
It's not hard to conclude that climate change will bring Gulf waters to wash over Lands End giving more of a home to animals of the sea. If anything remains to be remembered then, I don't know. For now, I praise the Nature that remains and silently condemn a homosapien evolution that still contain the gene of stupidity.