Animal Magnetism by Rita Mae Brown

Author:Rita Mae Brown [Brown, Rita Mae]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-51693-0
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-06-29T22:00:00+00:00

Starting in the seventh grade, I endured two years of schooling at the Naval Air Station. The famous Lost Squadron took off from Naval Air long before I attended school there. By ninth grade, Sunrise Junior High was completed. I could walk to school, whereas Naval Air was over ten miles away. There was no air-conditioning. I didn’t have air-conditioning until I was in my forties. But you don’t miss what you don’t know, so it felt completely natural to sit in those two-tiered wooden barracks sweating as our teachers droned on. A few were good, but most of them had tired of teaching young people long ago. And none of them ever displayed the slightest interest in our natural environment.

Surrounded by the natural odor of sulphur gas from some of the waters, sweet-smelling flowers, heavy salt scent from the sea, I had no one to teach me. I can’t say I loved the environment as I loved and continue to love the Mid-Atlantic, but I was fascinated.

My salvation was the local library, a small building downtown on Middle River that I believe had once been a house. It felt like a house, anyway. Mom or Dad would drop me off, or sometimes I’d walk. It was four miles away. Other times I’d take the bus. Once I was there, I read and read.

I also went out and observed the natural world firsthand, and I can still vividly recall what I found.

Swamp foxes darted about, along with many forms of wild felines, including what we called the Florida panther, a sleek, fast-moving creature that could startle you. Sand sharks swam around the canals using their tails in a manner that fascinated me. Most big fish have powerful tails, but the sand shark’s seemed extra flexible. Like their bigger brethren in the ocean, they look fearsome. Among these ocean sharks, the hammerheads stood out, never failing to startle with those strange eyes. The sand sharks left us alone, though. I never tested the ocean sharks by being in the water with them.

The creature that fascinated me most was the manatee. “Manatee” first came into the English language in 1554 according to my Oxford English Dictionary. An aquatic marine animal, this wonderful creature is sometimes called a sea cow.

I observed my first manatee on a little bridge that stretched from Fort Lauderdale into Wilton Manor on Northeast Fifteenth Street. A little curve in the water there allowed all manner of aquatic creatures to fiddle and faddle.

Manatees are large, brown, and oddly shaped, kind of like a flattened beanbag. They eat plants—no flesh—and they like shallow waters. They can dive, though, and they can move with fair speed, given their shape and size. They weigh around a thousand pounds and they have a few natural predators including sharks and alligators. But frankly, people are their main problem. Manatees can get cut up by outboard propellers. Someone not a Floridian or a person interested in nature would see one and scream bloody murder. Fortunately few of these folks owned guns or harpoons.

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