By Anonymous
I grew up running between the pines and oaks, sifting through the marsh to find arrowheads in the wide expanse of the bay shores. I went to church with many of the founding families of this area and their descendants, neighbors with the community veterinarian, the local dentist and the fishermen who took their boats out at 4 a.m. to fish the world’s luckiest fishing village.
Never once did I see any of them stand on the ecological phenomenon of our white sands, face the Gulf with hands outstretched and say, “This part is mine.” Not one person. We ate together, went to school together, got baptized in the surf together and waited excitedly at the docks for the day’s catch together. We walked at sunrise, exploring the shape-shifting dunes that were never quite in the same place as the day before.
Every stroll down to the Gulf presented a new discovery of shallow little pools, sand dollars scattered at the second sandbar, seaweed or jellyfish washed ashore and the occasional curled stick of driftwood. Often, there was not another human for miles. Often, it was just the breathing ebb and flow of the waves onto the ever-changing shoreline, glistening pink and orange in the dissolving light of sunset.
Many, many people have moved here since that time long ago, before the village became a city and our secret little paradise was discovered. Many of the people who moved here have made this little village by the sea a better place to live. They have started businesses, donated to charities and given their lives to making the community a better place for everyone to live. They have become neighbors, friends, family and caretakers of our ecological treasures. Never once did I see any of those people stand on the sand with arms outstretched and say, “This part is mine.”
It wasn’t until a poor boy from Arkansas showed up a few years back that anyone publicly and legally tried to claim, “This part is mine.”
It remains incomprehensible.
We are still that same, tightknit community we have always been. We are there for our neighbors when they need us, when they are celebrating or mourning, whenever they are in need. You may win your fight and your lonely grains of sand, but you will never prove John Donne wrong:
No man is an island, entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.
We are woven together pieces of this continent as part of the main, the community we have built around the vastness of the Gulf and its mysteries. In spite of everything, I continue to believe in the goodness of humanity, especially those around me. As long as I have breath, I will continue to stand on the ecological phenomenon of our white sands, face the Gulf with hands outstretched to those beside me and say, “This part is ours.”
