The Best American Travel Writing 2019 by Jason Wilson

Author:Jason Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HMH Books

The Big Finish

So, quiet and tired, everyone caravans to the Sake Café, a sushi place a couple of neighborhoods over, eating what they speared, now set out on two long tables full of hand rolls and sashimi, chopsticks and wasabi and cold beer. The kitchen bustles, but the place isn’t crowded. It’s early yet, even for Sunday dinner in Pensacola. At the head of the longest table Andy’s wearing that enigmatic smile, that sidewise Andy smile, but Barry is the one who stands to speak.

He thanks everyone for their hard work and for their excellent spearfishing skills and for fighting this good fight. He thanks the event sponsors for their contributions and the restaurant for making dinner. He talks about what all this means to the environment and to Florida and to him. When he talks about the camaraderie of the divers and the friendship and yes, the love, he surprises himself by choking up. He gathers himself and goes on just a little longer.

“You gotta eat ’em to beat ’em,” he says at the end.

And everyone applauds.

Dolly back, roll credits, that’s the last scene in your Hollywood movie.

But if you’re writing a magazine story, maybe you don’t end it there. Not like that. Not with sushi and a speech. Too upbeat. Too certain.

Nor can your story end with that unremarkable wind steady off the bay, not with the striking of the tents and boxing of the leftover brochures, not with the loading of the vans or the vendors rolling up their banners or emptying their grills, and not with the stragglers wandering back to the parking lot under a Sunday sky as flat and gray as gunmetal.

What you want is something to remember them all, a way to think of Florida and that crazy light and that water and those men and those women and those fish.

So maybe you’ll look back, no matter where you go or what you do, and see them all forever at the dock that Friday night, the whole wrung-out, laughing, groaning boatload, Andy and Allie and Barry and John and Carl and Alex and those scientists gathered around those big boxes of fish, those big coolers filled with ice and fins and Japanese fans, the sun faltering in the west, tangled in the trees, shadows long on the ground and the sky a low flame up there in the spreaders and the shrouds. One of the marine biologists leans down into the cooler and gingerly plucks up another lionfish. “I’ve got you now,” she says to herself and for a second you don’t know if she means one fish or the whole species and anyway you can barely hear her because Andy’s got the stereo cranked on the boat and Van Halen is playing “Hot for Teacher.” It’s all a trick of the light, sure, too sentimental and too droll, but it’s also true and that’s the beauty of it.

It’s a long fight. And maybe the lionfish win.

Maybe that’s your ending.

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