Little Pieces of Wood

By William E. Males

Vacations can be downright brutal sometimes. Admit it. Sometimes vacations have such tight schedules with trying to get everyone up early, get them all out to see everything and do as much as possible, to make it worth all the trouble and expense which you worked so hard for, and saved for. Too often when it is over you’re almost relieved to get home and back to work so you can recuperate from the accumulated stress of the vacation. There have been trips we’ve taken where even with the finest planning still just seemed to be working contrary to us. Especially with my family and my four boys, that alone has often proven to be a sure fire recipe for the unexpected even on what one would dare to call a routine day. Plus, I can count on one hand the vacations we’ve taken over the years where we didn’t bring some of the boy’s friends along with us. When we travel we tend to be the mob others give space to.

Perhaps one of the best things I can say about having them all with us is when going on a camping trip there was always a lot of help finding wood for the fire. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why we all decided, when we visited St Andrews State Park that it was definitely going to be one of our future vacations spots seeing as they had such great camp sites. Plus, in view of the fact that we’re all fishing fanatics and avid kayakers it was easy to agree it would be a great place to mix all those pleasures together for another great getaway.

Fortunately, from a relaxing perspective, our last trip to Panama City Beach was just my two younger boys and a couple of their friends, my wife and me. We had a spectacular condo at Long Beach Resort where all the rooms had a full wall of glass overlooking the gulf. The only plans we made before we left home was simply to go and just relax. For that purpose the time of year was perfect because it was the off season and we really had everything to ourselves. The most intense thing we all did was the day we checked out several miniature golf places and had family tournaments.

A couple of days all we really did was just hang out and walked the beaches, enjoying the fact that hardly anyone else was around. See, I’ve known that Panama City Beach and the whole Emerald Coast is literally miles and miles of pure sugary white sand. I seen it from the sky and it’s a spectacular site that appears to go on forever. However, usually the place is so crowded. All the people are spread out all over the beach - some just laying around while others play Frisbee or football - running in and out of the water. A simple walk along the beach can almost be like trying to get home during rush hour traffic. Everyone’s all over the place doing their thing and you have to focus on the crowd and what they’re doing as you navigate your way through them. But, not this trip.

This time it was like the vacations we used to take, to Sanibel or Captiva Islands, when I was a kid. I used to walk the shore with mother collecting sea shells. Back then it seemed as if we owned the beach and it was all ours. That’s how it was this trip. It was a blessing as we walked together and only heard the sound of the surf and some sea birds. It was nice to be able gaze way off way into the distance. As far as you could see it seemed as if there were only a handful of people. Everyone you walked by seem to have that Sunday go to meeting smile that said there wasn’t a care in the world bothering them. I just had to stand there awhile in the cool surf as I felt it slowly undermining my feet while I slowly sunk further into the sand, wiggling my toes. Yepper, that there was one of the best foot massages I’ve had in a long time and whatever minute fiber of stress may have been lingering in me was worked out and washed somewhere out into sea.

This trip I noticed some small pieces of wood that had washed up here and there along the beach. Normally, as my mother trained me, I am looking for the perfect shell that escaped the eyes of the previous souvenir hunter. However, this time these small pieces of wood caught my attention for some reason. They weren’t big; some were maybe around the size of two or three fingers, all different shapes. I picked up a few of them and walked along thinking about them since by trade I am a contractor and woodworker.  I began to think about where they may have come from.

Since I’ve been coming here I’ve looked into the history of the area and read many of the records about the explorers, the renegade pirates, the early Indians and their carved out canoes. I even wrote an article about the steam ship SS Tarpon that sunk here in 1937. I thought to myself about the possibility of these small pieces of wood being remnants of the past. Maybe they were pieces of crates from cargos washed over in rough seas or from an old sea shanty that used to be built along the coast that was destroyed from a hurricane decades ago.

There’s no way of knowing where they came from or what they were part of, but it is clear that the wind, sea and the sifting sand had erased their past original design and reshaped each of them into smooth rounded pieces of wood. Every one of them was now a unique piece of art crafted by time itself as they were carried about the gulf only to now find their way into my hands. I held them, as I often do the tools of my father and grandfather which I now own, and thought about how the hands of others that may have once touched them. I knew I was holding a piece of hidden history pertaining to someone’s life, something they did or built that had a function and purpose.

I decided right then I was going to start a little collection of history. I put them in my pocket and looked for and collected a couple more so when I get home and dry them out I’d spray them with a bit of lacquer to place them with some of the shells we collected. I will never know the story that they have to tell, but I do know that as sure as the sea shells in my other pocket once had real life in them that these little pieces of wood also served a specific function in the past. From now on, they were going to continue as natures art pieces amongst my sea shells. I mused myself with how if one places a sea shell to their ear to hear the sound of the surf then what echo of the past these little pieces could share if only I had ears to hear.