Catch and Release in the USA

 

Catch and Release in the USA

I grew up on Florida’s Nature Coast. When I was five, I watched a Florida Panther lap water at the edge of the Suwannee River behind our home. Never have I felt as wild as I did that day. Not when manatees swam beneath my dangling feet nor when I watched a water moccasin wind through the water where I had cannon balled moments, before.
Later, when we moved to the shores of the Withlacoochee River, I kept a pet flounder in a brackish-water aquarium on my dresser. I marveled when a giant fish fell from the sky and then an eagle dived down and caught it midair. I rode my bicycle supervised only by swooping owls, kites, and ospreys. I loved school, where one of my teachers would rise before dawn and put-put her little boat out into the Gulf of Mexico to collect squids and puffer fish and algae for us kids to inspect. I helped my mother grow cucumbers and kumquats. I had friends who never named the animals their families raised.
My daughter’s childhood in no way resembles my own. I’m raising her a thousand miles away in drought-ridden Texas. A good job has anchored us in city life where I often feel caged. It disturbs me that my five-year-old girl does not feel caged. To her, glowing screens are often more mesmerizing than fireflies and sunsets. Sometimes, I look at her, and feel like the child I was at her age is an endangered species.
And so, every year, my family migrates back to Florida along with the manatees and Sandhill Cranes. I take my daughter because the wild child inside of her is endangered, too, and I want it to survive.
It is there, along Florida’s Nature Coast, that I feel most free. It is there that I can float, paddle, or wade in comfortable silence and it’s there where that silence feels like a grateful prayer.
It is freeing to take off my watch and put away my phone. I don’t need at watch to see the morning fog swirl above the river, to hear the thunder and rain that punctuate the afternoon, to gaze at the sun as it melts into the gulf, to listen to the frogs sing love songs under the stars, and to appreciate the tide that rolls beneath a full moon.
Best of all, my daughter is free to find her natural place in the world. She helps her grandmother harvest grapefruits, tomatoes, and mint. They pluck grasshoppers from the garden, too, and run to the water’s edge where they dangle them from hooks. They use these grasshoppers to catch little fish and the little fish to catch huge ones. We eat the larger fish for supper and then, we go outside and see alligators, vultures, and mosquitoes, and know that we are not too big or important to be eaten, ourselves.
But it isn’t scary.
I wasn’t scared by the panther when I was a child, though I don’t tell that story to the people where I live now. I was respectful. In Florida, my daughter is respectful of the alligators and vultures we see, too. She is respectful, but not scared. She is not scared because endangered part of her has had a chance to breathe salty marsh air and swim in swift brown water and eat food that doesn’t come from grocery stores, but instead comes from the land and her own hands. She is not scared because she is seeing something she feels a part of, not apart from.
When work and school call us back to the city, the wild part of me is sensitive to the seasons and the changes in light and the direction the birds fly overhead. That part of me feels a stirring when it is time to migrate home, again.
Centuries ago, Native Americans carried their dead to Florida’s Nature Coast for burial. There are shell mounds by the shores, still. I hope to someday have my ashes scattered among the oyster beds and Spanish moss and sand gnats, too. It is the place I return to the earth while living and the place I want my body to return to the earth when I die. It’s the place my soul will always be free. I imagine my daughter being the one who lets me go. Until then, I must continue to fly back to the Nature Coast with my girl as often as I can. If I succeed, when she lets my ashes soar with the eagles and ospreys and float with the gators and turtles, she will be respectful, but not scared. She will be wild enough to feel the closing of a circle and the turning of the tides.

About the author: Elizabeth Parker Garcia teaches Communication Studies for the University of Texas- Pan American. No matter where she goes, she feels called back to Florida, the place she feels most free.

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