Everything old is new again
With no other reasonable thing to do, Cedar Key kept on living.
Luke and Kinsey were married on the one-year anniversary of the flash across the bay when Cedar Key's horizon, like so many around the world, became an instant irradiated blur.
Death had swept across the Wacassassa Bay, taking first the clam boat captains and crews working on the water that cold February morning, then casting her gaze upon the elderly and infirm all around the island. For most of that first year, she was never far away, waiting always to pull others into her embrace. She had stoked the fire of conflict between the islanders and the mainland community of Sumner just across the Number Four Bridge, grinned as she spun up the once-a-millennia hurricane that took Jonah and so many others, warmed herself by the great fire that came for the Baptist Church and a third of the buildings in town, then grew bored and drifted away.
There were two hundred and fifty islanders left, down from an old-world population of just under eight hundred. Almost all of them were on the little beach in the city park, blanketed in the soft pastels of an approaching Gulf of Mexico sunset, to witness the young couple exchange their vows. The lukewarm entanglement of marriage in the modern age seemed as far away from them now as the Civil War. When they promised to love, honor, and protect each other, they were committing to action in a dangerous world. There would be sickness, and care would be required. Forsaking all others would be the easy part; they were wild in love.
Hayes David had been the mayor of Cedar Key for most of his adult life, running the ship of state for the island town in the same hyper-competent, squared-away manner as his obsessively tidy clam boat. He was fussy, fit, discerning, a tireless advocate for the island, and a respected waterman with a deep knowledge of the Gulf. His best friend Thomas Buck was his opposite in almost all ways—an impractical, grandiose-thinking writer and clam farmer who had only avoided the same fate as the other captains because his boat's poorly maintained motor had failed to start on the morning of the flash. Both men were delighted to witness Luke marrying the girl from Sumner, but even in the midst of the celebration, they were preoccupied with the Colonel's return from the sky.
“He barely looks like the same man,” Hayes said.
"It is him, though," Thomas replied. "There's that same cockeyed twinkle in his eye he had waving from the plane before he took off."
“How did he survive that long out there?”
Thomas grinned. “Because we sent the right man. I learned a long time ago not to bet against him. That guy’s a killer.”
“What did he see?” Hayes asked impatiently. “And what took him so long to get back?”
“He’ll tell us soon enough. He’s only been back a few hours. Geoff and Melinda Beth deserve a little time with him first.”
Hayes and Thomas had stayed with the McClouds after the Colonel disappeared into the gray sky those many mornings ago, heading south on a mission to see what remained of the outside world. The islanders had heard almost nothing from the mainland in the weeks since the smokestacks across the Waccasassa Bay were enveloped in a microsecond of piercing light and then simply vanished. While they cared for the clam boat captains and crews caught on the water and overwhelmed with radiation, they could only assume the worst. With so many more strategic targets at the military bases around the state, a bomb for the civilian power plant fifty miles south in Crystal River almost certainly meant an all-out attack—the nightmare total war scenario that had seemed so unthinkable until it hadn’t.
The plant's twin hyperbolic cooling towers were never torn down or imploded after its nuclear reactor was taken offline in 2009. It was water vapor, not smoke, that rose from them and blended into the clouds each day, but even when told this fact, people still called them smokestacks. They had dominated Cedar Key's view across the water for more than a half-century. When they disappeared, more than a thousand people living and working near the plant seared into instant inexistence along with them. Slower processes of dying began with the watermen and women working on the clam leases and then, eventually, all across the island and everywhere else.
A year later, the empty stretch of water past the barrier island of Atsena Otie remained a grim reminder of the day the world's forward progress, heretofore undeterred for several hundred years, began its backward march.
There had been enough fuel in the Colonel’s Piper Archer that day for a 5-hour reconnaissance flight. By hour six, the quiet, empty sky begot panic. A few hours more brought resignation and sorrow. Most of the crowd that was assembled to watch his return gave up and returned to their homes. When the sun set at the end of the little runaway, little hope remained that the Colonel would ever return. He had understood the possibility of encountering deadly radiation if the big cities had fallen, but he hadn’t hesitated to accept the mission. He knew that without some information about the wider world, the island could not hope to make the best decisions for its survival. The Marine Corps pilot, now in his seventies, had flown a Sea Knight helicopter throughout his time in-country during the Vietnam War, distinguishing himself with valor in one firefight after another during the Tet Offensive. His island needed the military pilot to fly into harm’s way once more, and he had answered a call that seemed, until just hours before the wedding on the beach, to have killed him.
"Hey, Dad, you gonna dance or just stand there yapping?"
Thomas smiled at his son. “Sorry, Luke… be right there.”
“Best listen to the boy,” Hayes said.
“Alright, Mr. Mayor, you too. The Colonel can wait till morning. My son just got married!”
Hayes and Thomas shifted their focus and joined the party on the beach. Jim Walcox played his old Gibson archtop while Mark David, the mayor’s dad, fried shrimp in a giant pot over a fire made from cedar and driftwood.
It was here in the park, many months prior, that the islanders had met for the first joyful gathering since the smokestacks fell. Nearby off Dog Island, Luke Buck discovered the annual arrival of the white shrimp in the waters around Cedar Key. They came every year in huge numbers, but months of gray had cast the Gulf in such a pallor that it hardly seemed to be alive at all. The flits and swirls disturbing the surface of the water had sent a charge through Luke, who used his cast net to fill a kayak full of the enormous, nearly translucent shrimp. When he pushed it across the bay, wading through chest-deep water back to the shore, he was met on the beach by an excited crowd. Word spread across the island, and by sundown, everyone arrived ready to celebrate, dressed in their Sunday best.
So much of the energy and effort those first several months had been required just to stay alive. The shrimp fry in the park was the first bit of real living the islanders had enjoyed since the old world ended. Rogue beams of moonlight found their way through the gray sky for momentary illumination of dancers on the beach. They danced in defiance of a world set against them. They danced because their bellies were full, and their hearts unburdened. They danced for people they lost and those who were saved.
They danced for each other.
A year into the new world, they were dancing again for the lanky, wild-eyed Luke, a few weeks removed from his twenty-third birthday, and the girl from Sumner he had first met hunting in the scrub across the channel with his buddy Ryland. Her avalanche of red hair had given her away in the woods moments after she killed a deer the boys had been stalking. Luke was smitten even before the pools of dark buck blood had cooled in the sugar sand and crisp October air.
Kinsey was related in a distant way to Little Don Meade, the Sumner outlaw who ordered the pre-dawn raid that killed Folksy, the island’s Episcopal minister. The islanders had put down the invaders with no additional losses on their side, then mounted a retaliatory strike on the mainland that left Little Don in a pile of bodies and a sickness in their own hearts that time had tempered but not healed. That whole first year was shrouded in difficulty and death.
The wedding on the beach was a reason to hope that maybe this year would be better than the last.
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“Just a little while longer.” Melinda Beth’s tone was loving and instructive in equal measure.
The Colonel smiled warmly at his wife, whose youthful face belied her years. To him, she would always be the girl who cheered for him on the basketball court in high school. The Cedar Key School was the smallest public school in Florida, with senior classes that regularly contained a handful more or less than ten students. With so few kids from which to field sports teams, and despite a rowdy island fan base that packed the school's gym to cheer on their hometown Sharks, there were few victories to celebrate. Robert McCloud had an above-average jump shot and stellar hand-eye coordination that would serve him later in life as a Marine Corps pilot, but it wasn't enough to overcome the numbers advantage of the always larger schools they faced. Even when the other team was running up the score, there was always Melinda Beth, smiling at him from the stands.
She was smiling at him again, overcome with the joy of his unexpected return, unwilling to turn loose of him even in service of the island they loved so much, even to let him deliver the message to Hayes that was filling him with such urgency and unease.
The Colonel indulged the warmth of her arms and the smell of her hair on his face for a few minutes more before pulling himself from her and onto his feet. "I'll be right back, I promise."
"The last time you told me that, I lost you for nearly a year. What could be so important, Robert? Tell me."
The old pilot rubbed his face in his hands and looked away. "By my figuring, we've got a day or two before they get here, but we should start making plans now."
“Plans for what?” his bride asked worriedly.
“Maybe you and Geoff should come with me. Everyone should hear it together.”
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Cedar Key is a southern town. It lies at the western terminus of State Road 24, at its confluence with the Gulf of Mexico in rural Levy County, sixty miles due west from Gainesville and the University of Florida. Until the islanders blew it up to hamper invaders from across the channel, the Number Four Bridge spanned from the mainland to the thirteen-island archipelago first described by Spanish cartographers in 1542 as Las Isla Sabines or Cedar Islands. Most of the actual town of Cedar Key is situated on Way Key, with the remaining barrier islands like Atsena Otie, North Key, Snake Key, and Seahorse Key having no meaningful development.
When a 1994 constitutional amendment banned the most common type of commercial net fishing in Florida waters, a generational way of life in Cedar Key abruptly ended. Displaced commercial fishermen, keen to keep working on the water, turned to a new government-funded program to develop clam farming in the area. In the thirty-odd years between the net ban and the fall of the smokestacks, Cedar Key became one of the largest producers of farm-raised clams in North America. Most days of the year, a fleet of distinctive bird dog boats could be seen planting and harvesting out on the clam leases.
So it was that awful February morning when first the shockwave, then the heat, and finally the haunted wind overwhelmed the boats on the water. In all, 27 men and two women were cut down together that first day. Dozens more on the island would follow over the coming months, for reasons mundane and tragic, until a grim equilibrium was reached and a difficult but predictable rhythm of life in the new world set it.
They reopened the school and held a candlelit prom. There was a 4th of July parade, and gardens were planted in front yards all around the island. Wood gasifiers, solar panels, and a water tower brought miraculously back to life created a tenuous foothold of stability that would have seemed impossible to the Colonel on the day of his fateful flight. So agitated was he by the information he now carried for Hayes and the others, Melinda Beth’s excited stories about all they had accomplished while he was away had failed to make an impression. The McClouds now walked briskly toward the celebration on the beach, the Colonel moving with remarkable fluidity for a septuagenarian who just hours before had crashed a plane into the bay.
“Colonel!” Luke called across the beach when he saw the McClouds approaching. He let go of his bride’s hand and ran to meet them. “I heard you were back and was hoping you’d come. Did you bring your mandolin?”
"Sorry, Luke, not this time. But we'll play together soon. The piano at your dad's house still in good shape?"
"Yes, sir. I have to tune it by ear, and my ear's not that good. Maybe we could look at it together."
The Colonel smiled at his young friend, wanting to lean into the comforts of the home he had fought so hard to get back to—knowing he would never tell them everything he had seen and done—then grabbed Luke by the shirt and pulled him close, the hug lingering long enough that even the dancers took notice. The music faded. The Colonel let go.
“Soon, Luke. I promise.”
For the next half hour, he did lean in—deciding he was unwilling to ruin Luke and Kinsey's day—though in the revelry, his mind raced with calculations about distance, speed, and time.
Cedar Key sunsets seldom disappoint. The western horizon between Deadman’s Key and North Key features unobstructed open water all the way to Playa Escondido on the eastern shore of Mexico. In the old world, weekenders and locals alike would line G Street in front of the Beachfront Motel to watch the sun boil down into the Gulf each evening, hoping to catch a glimpse of the elusive green flash of light so loaded with lore and mystery. The flash is so rare and difficult to see that many dismiss it as legend, but NASA has confirmed it to be a real occurrence, explaining away the mystery by noting that two optical phenomena converge—a mirage and the dispersion of sunlight through the Earth’s atmosphere like a prism. Folklore has assigned the green flash a variety of meanings, from a good omen about matters of love to a soul returning back to this world from the dead.
There was no green flash on the horizon that day as the Colonel danced close to Melinda Beth, but in the waning twilight came an even more fantastic sight; enormous, unfurled sails began to fill the Wacassassa Bay.
The Colonel’s calculations were wrong.
