My father did not take many vacations, but when he did, we always packed a box of groceries, filled the ice chest and drove to Destin, Florida. It was a very different place in the 1960’s.
The Frangista Motel sat sandwiched in cinderblock splendor beside Highway 98, pushing hard against the oyster-shelled two-lane in the front and the squeaky, white sand fronting the Gulf of Mexico in the back. The Frangista was no five-star resort. To my elementary mind at the time, it was a ten-star resort. It was pure, undiluted summer during a time when America was straddling a netherworld between dead soldiers in black and white and Technicolor, stoned hippies.
The place smelled like coconut suntan lotion laced with sea salt and the window units blew steaming air into the walkways outside, turning the inside into my Freon romance because we didn’t have an air conditioner at home.
The Frangista was alone and far away from the tourists in Panama City or Fort Walton. Mr. Woodall ran the motel and I remember him in the tiny office next to the postcard tree. I thought he had the best job in the world. He got to live in the place that I spent 51 weeks of the year wanting to be. Into this idyllic world came the dead dolphin.
Every afternoon when the sun went to Pensacola, we walked down the beach, poking at jellyfish and bothering sand crabs. There were no condo towers then, just sea oats and sand for miles. One afternoon, my cousin and I met a couple of older girls whom we tried to impress with our fearless jellyfish and crab grabbing (they were in 7th grade, we were in the 6th). It was a big deal. These girls were from Canada, a foreign country so removed from our rural routines, they might as well have been Russians. One wore a Canadian flag on the seat of her bikini. I felt like saluting. We were working our manly mojo when the wind shifted and the smell of death chased the girls’ coconut aroma into the ocean.
Up ahead a torpedo-sized lump lay beached by the low tide. My cousin looked at me. We both knew it was something big and something not alive, perhaps a large redneck that had washed up after falling off a deep-sea fishing boat in the wake of 16 beers. If there is one thing growing up in Alabama teaches you, it is the gift of dead animal-sniffing.
It was a chance to impress these Canucks, however, with our tough, Southern upbringing. Barfing in the sugary sand was not part of the plan. Sometimes, there are things even Alabamians can’t stomach. A dead dolphin the size of a sofa is one of them.
The porpoise was putrid and swollen and tangled in mats of seaweed. Gulls had gouged chunks out of the puffy head. Hundreds of little crabs scurried around the wrecked beast. Our eyes burned. The stink was thick in our noses. The girls stood in hands-over-mouth horror. My cousin found a broken chunk of bamboo, a remnant of a fisherman’s pole, and we pushed at the engorged side of the corpse. Mistake.
An angry vileness of maggots and crabs and goo rushed out. It reminded me of my uncle after eating a pound of barbecue and drinking six Schlitz. Instant nausea. We spewed our shrimp dinners into the emerald waves. Canadians are not impressed by vomit. It was not my proudest moment.
We never saw the girls again. Their families packed in the night and drove back to sanity. My cousin and I revised the story to be that of a stranded shark we pushed back into the surf as it ungratefully chomped at us both, our queasiness turning to Cousteau-ness in the retelling.
When I see the maple leaf Canadian flag now, I think about that girl’s butt and dead dolphins.