Pandy

Note: slight liberty taken with today’s prompt

I was going through some old stuff today and found my boyhood diary. One entry caught my eye from the July when I was 12: Went water skiing and fishing today. Also snorkeled and played with Pandy. Doug pushed me off the dock.

Wow. Pandy. I’d forgotten.

Few places were as beautiful as the Florida Keys in the 1970s. These were the Keys that Jimmy Buffet sang about: Coral reefs, palm trees, hammocks in the shade. Aqua-color water, living and dying in 3/4 time.

This was before the Keys were discovered, when there were only a few boats here and there on the horizon, when the ‘30s-era seven-mile bridge connecting Vaca Key and Little Duck Key was still there. You wore cutoffs and flip-flops and your soda had pull tabs that you made into long chains.

Every summer, we joined two other families and spent an idyllic two weeks in the Keys.We stayed at a place near Marathon called Keith’s Longhorn Lodge, a mom and pop place that straddled US-1; half was on the Gulf side and the other half was on the Atlantic side.

Keith’s was not posh, but pleasing: cinder-block efficiencies with two bedrooms, a bathroom, window-shaker air conditioners and jalousie windows.

Everything revolved around boating; we were out all day fishing, waterskiing, or snorkeling. By dusk, our parents sat on the docks, watching the sun set, cocktails flowing and voices gradually rising and becoming more animated. We had fun doing our own thing.

Anything we caught while snorkeling went into our 20-gallon tanks and it was fun watching them swim around. In addition to the common reef fish, sometimes we’d catch something really cool; once a baby octopus, another time, a seahorse. These were taken home.

Other nights we had different kinds of fun. One kid’s dad was particularly beloved; every year he’d bring a shoebox full of golf-ball size cherry bombs and tell us not to blow ourselves up.

He was not kidding. These were not the M-80s of today that make an anemic pop; these were the equivalent of a 1/4 stick of dynamite, waterproof, including the fuses, so once you lit one, you better run or throw it.

They were felt more than heard; a concussive blast that sent a geyser of water several feet in the air. If we got too close to their happy hour, one of them would give a mildly annoyed wave: Hey, take it somewhere else. It was the 1970s; We don’t need no steeken’ bike helmets. Or fingers.

Every year, the Keiths would tell us hello and goodbye. Every year, we’d return home with fresh-caught snapper, grouper, and mahi-mahi on ice as Pop played the easy listening station.

Every year, Doug and I sat in the back with our dog, sunburned, utterly content, thinking our own thoughts and gazing at the Keys out in the gulf: I wonder what’s on THAT island?

Every year was pretty much the same.

Until the summer of Pandy.

I was swimming around the docks with my face mask, snorkel and net; I’d seen a nice Beau Gregory and hadn’t caught one yet that year. Barracuda tended to hang around the docks, almost out of sight in the clear water, so I was already a little wary. I saw the Beau go under a piece of staghorn coral and dove down.

Something big hit me in the back. I whirled, expecting to see the toothy grin of a five-foot barracuda…but I was startled instead to see a nose and whiskers. What?

As I watched, it flipped and swam away with incredible speed. A seal!

I surfaced, took off my mask, and treaded water. It popped up about 30 yards away. We looked at each other for a few seconds. It showed no fear. It dove and popped up halfway across the harbor.

I ran to get the other kids, but by the time we got back, there was no sign of it. As the other kids turned and left, muttering, I sat on the dock, watching, until the last light faded.

The next morning as we putt-putted across the harbor to the gas station to fill up the tanks, I looked for it, but didn’t see it. I went into the store that sold bait and tackle. There was a guy behind the counter taking reels out of a box and putting them into a glass display. He looked up as I came in. “Good morning,” he said.

“Hi,” I said. I felt a little foolish. “I think I saw a seal yesterday. I was wondering if you’d ever seen it.”

He paused from his shelf stocking and smiled. “Sure. That’s Pandy.”

“Pandy?”

“Yeah. Belongs to the folks live over there.” He pointed through a dusty screen at some houses across the harbor. I had no idea which one he meant. I must have looked puzzled.

“Yeah, old Pandy,” he laughed. “She’s been here about a year now. I dunno where she came from, but she thinks this place belongs to her.” He started to say more but Pop was yelling from the boat.

“You here more than a day or too, you’ll see her again.” He grinned and went back to his box of reels.

That day seemed to drag by. I couldn’t wait to get back to Keith’s to see if Pandy was back.

She wasn’t that day. Or the next.

Finally on the third day, one of the dads was cleaning fish at one of the dock’s cleaning station as we were lugging the stuff from the boats to the efficiencies. Suddenly we heard a shout.

We all ran out. Standing with his back against the station, holding a fish in one hand and a filleting knife in the other, Mr. Groen looked startled, intrigued, and a little scared. In between him and us, sitting on the dock and looking at him with interest, was Pandy.

It was my first good view of her; she was beautiful. I’d seen seals before at the Seaquarium and Marine Land, but they were far away, slapping their flippers, doing tricks and barking for pieces of fish. Having a real seal on a dock ten feet away from me was something altogether different.

“COOL!” all the kids shouted in unison.

Pandy swung back to look at Mr. Groen. Mr. Groen looked uncertain.

“Feed her, Dad!” his son Jeff shouted. We all picked up the cry. “Yeah! Feed her!”

Mr. Groen picked up a chunk of snapper and threw it in front of Pandy. She gulped it down and looked for more. After she ate another six or seven pieces, she slid off the dock into the water. Someone’s mom yelled. “Don’t you kids go—“

Too late. We were already in the water, gazing with fascination through our facemasks as Pandy swam around and in between us like a black blur.

To say that Pandy was the center of attention the rest of that trip would be an understatement. Once she figured out that we were an almost inexhaustible supply of tasty fish bites, she was waiting for us on the dock each morning.

We snorkeled with her around the docks and she interestedly followed along. She gave us little rides. We did cannonballs and jackknives off the end of the dock; Pandy watched, then slid in with a splash, swam around, and waddled with us back to the end of the dock, stopping only when we did. She’d retrieve a floating pool ring that we threw out into the harbor.

Even our parents, after they saw she was gentle and intelligent, got into the act. Pandy was in heaven with all the chunks of fish and twelve pairs of hands petting her.

But before we knew it, our two weeks were up and we were loading up the cars with almost unused waterskis, fishing poles, and aquarium stuff. Pandy sat alone on the docks, watching us, as we slowly drove down the dusty coquina rock road and turned north on US-1.

We had hoped that she’d be there the next summer; but just as mysteriously as she appeared, she vanished.

We never knew where she came from; it’s possible she escaped from the nearby Keys Marine Lab, operated by Florida Institute of Oceanography. Or she maybe she was a fugitive from the Seaquarium up in Miami.

But by two summers later, one of the moms had tragically passed and the older siblings had discovering the opposite sex and dating. Nobody really wanted to go anymore.

So although the Keith’s chapter of my life came to a close, and many of those folks…and Keith’s…are gone now, I’ll never forget the summers and good times I enjoyed there.

With my family; with my friends.

And especially with Pandy. 😎

All images by author unless otherwise noted.

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