Acts of Nature

the GPS and dipped an oar, catching a back current and spinning us north.
    “That’s not going to be a problem at the Snows’ place, I promise,” I said, changing the mood. “We’re about an hour and a half out.”
    Maybe having a specific time to the journey’s end challenged the athlete in her, but Sherry began to dig her paddle in earnest and I tried to keep pace. We made the fishing camp in sixty-eight minutes.
    Now here was Eden. The low buildings, three in all, were joined together by a dock, wide porch, and walkways. One building held a great room with a fold-out couch that made up into a full bed facing big windows and a freestanding fireplace. The kitchen was against one wall; the cooking and living spaces were separated by a standing island. The next building was a sort of bunkhouse for guests with bathrooms attached. The third was a small equipment shack for the generator and water storage and tools and such for on-site repairs. Most of the encampments out here were so constructed, Jeff told me, so that if a lightning strike or other accidental fire started, the flames would not automatically take out everything at once. This place had only been built in the last few years and the honey blond glow of the new wood in the late sun made it look warm, inviting, and almost magical sitting the midst of the low grasses and shimmering water.
    “Wow,” Sherry said as we got close. I was pleased to have brought her on a venture that coaxed such pleasure from her twice in one day.
    We were about fifty yards out when we both saw the resident horned owl appear from his nesting spot under the bunkhouse eaves and soar out over the Glades with our interruption of his personal space.
    “Look. We chased the mousetrap away,” Sherry said. She had not been pleased after spotting a mouse in my riverside shack but I had promised that there were no such mammals out here. Too wet. Too lacking in food source. The animals in the Glades, even on the isolated land islands, lived a curious existence out here where a totally different environment shaped them. During a visit to an island on the edge of the Glades in Florida Bay, a friend showed me the knee-high osprey nests that the legendary fishing birds had built in wide- open fields. “They don’t build them in trees out there because there aren’t any four- or two-legged carnivores to threaten them.”
    Sherry was quiet for a few beats when I finished the story. Maybe she thought I was making it up to mollify her. Then she turned, interrupting her stroke.
    “But he’ll be back, right? The owl?”
    “Yeah. It’s close to hunting time for him anyway. He’ll be back by morning.”
    With the high water we were able to paddle right up to the dock and tied off. I used the Snows’ hidden key and opened the great room and unloaded our gear and the cooler and food. I showed Sherry the gravity shower and she didn’t hesitate. While she was busy I made up a dinner of cheese and stone wheat bread with sweet butter and sliced tomato we’d brought and then stole a bottle of wine from the Snows’ counter collection and chilled it in our iced cooler.
    By the time I’d taken my own shower Sherry was sitting back in one of the Adirondack chairs on the open deck. Jeff had set up a half-dozen chairs in a semicircle facing west. There is no theater like it and the falling sun was already spreading crimson rays into the tops of the far sawgrass and into Sherry’s blond hair.
    “Is that Wally out there?” she said to me and nodded out to the east. The question threw me and I looked out in search of a boat or a plane or anything that might contain a man.
    “There. On that mound.”
    I looked again and in the low light could make out the hump and curled tail of a good-size alligator taking in the last warmth of the day. Sherry then quietly whistled the opening stanzas of a television cartoon from both our childhoods I recognized as Wally Gator, “the swingin’est alligator in the swamp. See ya later, Wally Gator.”
    “You do have a memory, girl,” I said.
    “For frivolity.”
    “No. Not always.”
    “Then sit with me here, Max, and we’ll get serious,” she said, and in her voice was more than just an invitation for sitting.
    While the sky turned shades of pink and then deepened to orange and finally a purple shade of plush velvet, we sat and ate and let the wine leak into our abused backs and sun-soaked heads and when the air finally started to chill I got out the