LENORE MYKA’s work has appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, New England Review, and other publications. The recipient of numerous awards, including a National Endowment for the Arts literature fellowship, she is currently at work on a memoir.
The first sign is posted in the window of the empty ranger station and written in the style of a ransom note: w-A-R-n-i-N-g. The second flashes on a giant electronic sign just below the largest American flag I have ever known—alternating between park closure dates and announcements for an upcoming triathlon: warning. The third is fastened to a wooden stake stabbed into the edge of the dunes, its sides curling scroll-like in the morning wind:
Red tide present.
May cause eye, throat, or skin irritation.
May cause coughing or sneezing.
Avoid the beach if you have asthma or a respiratory condition.
Onshore winds and rough surf worsen its effects.
Can kill fish and other sea animals.
Do not swim near dead fish or touch them.
Wear shoes to prevent injuries from stepping on bones of dead fish.
Keep pets away from the water, sea foam, and dead fish.
Red tide is caused by naturally occurring algae.
Today, my dog, Arrow, and I are the only ones on this Tampa Bay beach. Everyone else has either heeded the warnings or flown back north, spring breakers and snowbirds having taken their fill of Florida sunshine. Things quiet down around here in midspring, just before Easter and its season of rebirth.
As I watch from the shore for bottlenose dolphins, I contemplate the use of bold type on the third warning sign. If the sign were a poem submitted in one of the classes I teach, I might chastise the author for being seduced by the siren call of a lazy typeface over the arduous but satisfying work that good prose requires. While my students’ eyes stray to the screens of their phones, I might ramble on about the perils of underestimating their readers’ intelligence. I would remind them that the point isn’t, in fact, about naturally occurring red tide. The fault, I would say, is that the bold highlights the wrong information, misguiding readers, leading us down the wrong path.
The earliest records of red tide on Florida’s west coast have been widely misattributed to the 16th-century Spanish conquistador Álvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, one of four survivors of a 600-person crew that attempted, but failed, to colonize the region. Led by Pánfilo de Narváez, the venture was beset by gross miscalculations, shipwrecks, mutinies, indigenous attacks, and disease. In a firsthand account of the event and the subsequent eight years he spent traversing the New World, Cabeza de Vaca writes of the Indigenous peoples he has come to know as it is officially known, has been reliably recorded in Florida only since the 1840s, a time that, the older I get, I realize is not so very long ago.
