Summer scent of coconut oil,
Coppertone and burgers. Pool bars seemed to be doing a booming business for hurricane season. The Marco Island Hotel had a big buffet going on, reggae band playing for several dozen men and women wearing name tags as they mingled around the pool. We were that close.
Then we cut north into Caxambas Pass; followed it inland through No Wake Zones where ranch-style houses, Spray-Creted white, sat in rows on irrigated lawns fronted by seawalls.
'That must be it,' Chung said, meaning Swamp Angel Ways. She was matching the chart to the mangrove maze ahead and off to the right.
I could see the dome of gumbo limbos that are always indicative of mounds.
'Does the chart show any water?'
'There's a little cove this side, a little cove on the east side. Not much water in either one, so it doesn't much matter.'
It mattered to me.
I wanted to take a look at both coves before wading ashore. Make certain someone wasn't already there.
It comes from old habit. I don't like surprises.
The mound islands of Florida's Gulf coast have a distinctive odor, a mixture of decomposing wood, skunk leaf and lime, dampened by rain and photosynthetic density, incubated by white shells that absorb sunlight then radiate heat.
I'd chosen the cove on the eastern side, shielded from the boat traffic of Barfield Bay. I poled my skiff in through the shallows, anchored off the stern and tied the bow to the limb of a black mangrove.
'Gosh almighty, do you hear them coming?'
I didn't know what she meant at first, but then I did. It was an electronic hum, like a wave of miniature bombers approaching.
Mosquitoes. A pewter cloud of them above the tree canopy.
Then they were on us, glittering mobiles orbiting around our heads, creating a cobweb feeling on nose and ears, collecting on my bare forearms and legs as if I'd been doused with black pepper.
'We should have brought some bug spray!'
I said, 'You ever wear a bug jacket?'
'A what?'
From beneath the console, I took two Ziploc bags. In each was a hooded jacket made of wide cotton mesh, not unlike fish netting. I'd saturated the mesh with citronella oil; kept the jackets in bags so the oil wouldn't evaporate.
Nora opened one of the bags and made a face. 'Smells like crushed-up orange rinds. Or really cheap perfume. You come home with this stuff all over you, what do the ladies say?'
I was buttoning my jacket. The mosquitoes continued their satellite pattern around my face, but didn't land. I told her, 'Lately, they haven't been saying too much.'
Nora told me, 'Fifteen years ago, back when the Tallahassee group surveyed the island, this looters' pit was already here. Same as most of the ones we've already passed, too.
They took pictures; made a little map. The archaeologists from back then, they kept good notes.'
There were dozens of looter pits. They reminded me of bomb craters, but were actually holes dug by men sweating over their shovels, miserable in the heat but determined to find treasure. What they'd found was what they created-a hole in which to throw their beer cans when they'd finally given up.
She was standing in one of the pits now. It was a square-sided trench that was chin-deep, the walls a mosaic of shells: whelks, and conchs and fist-sized tulips. Big shells that were bleached as white as the little grave markers back on Marco.
The entire island was like that, surface and substructure. Shells everywhere you walked. The shells had a resonance when weight was applied, hard and hollow, calcium carbonate grinding, so it was like walking on bone.
Now Nora was standing in one of the holes, studying the layers of shell. She had a sheath of papers in her hand and was comparing the old survey notes and diagrams to patterns of the shell wall.
'You see the sequence of sedimentation? The different layers, I'm talking about. See where there's a stratum of shell, then a layer of organic material beneath it, then another stratum of shell? It shows how the sea level's changed. This low stratum, I think it's related to the Holocene rise in sea level.'
I was standing on the edge of the hole, looking through the trees, seeing nothing but jungle, glancing at her every minute or two to show she had my attention. 'You lost me.'
'I was talking about the Holocene. That's… well, it describes a period of time. The Pleistocene, the Holocene? They were right on the boundary of the Ice Age. It was toward the end of the Pleistocene that glaciers lowered the sea enough to create a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska. You see signs of it in this shell wall. That was fifteen, maybe twenty, thousand years ago.'
'Which is when humans first came to North America.'
'That's what most people believe; they migrated across and worked their way from north to south. But there's another theory.'
I said, 'I hope you're not talking about visitors from space.'
Her expression told me she wasn't going to dignify that with a reply.
She had her notebook out, writing with the stub of a pencil as she said, 'Some believe that a separate group of people came to the Americas at about the same time as the Siberian crossing, but a different way. That a small, advanced tribe island-hopped across the Pacific and worked their way north. They became the Inca, the Maya and the Aztec. All brilliant, all very violent, with similar religious ceremonies. A much different people than the woodland and western Indians. Some weirdos think the Calusa were a part of that group.'
'All pyramid builders.'
'Uh-huh. Not necessarily that they came from across the Pacific, but that they worked their way up from the Bahamas, moving south to north.'
I told her I'd heard rumors of that before. I'd also heard that the Calusa had traded with the Maya.
'That's not what I'm saying. There may have been some occasional contact between the two groups. A thousand years ago, some restless kid gets in a canoe, starts paddling the coast and ends up in the land of stone pyramids. Or vice versa, ends up in the land of shell pyramids. Sure. That could've happened. But a few visits don't constitute a relationship.'
I was looking down into the hole, when she pulled what looked to be a flat brown rock from the wall and studied it closely for several seconds. 'I wouldn't have touched this, by the way, if the looters hadn't already made such a mess.'
'What is it?'
'Pottery. You can see one side is black from being fired. Pottery's not my specialty, but it looks like it could be from the Glades Plain Period, or maybe Glades Tooled. There's not enough to say. It would date back a thousand years, maybe more. Here'-she handed the pottery to me-'the last person to touch that probably believed exactly what Dr. Tomlinson said. That she had three souls. That inanimate objects absorb energy. That's why, when she was done with this pot, she intentionally broke it to free her own spirit. These mounds are littered with pottery.'
I was still looking at the shard. It was reddish-brown with a hint of a rim. 'You and Tomlinson will have lots and lots in common.'
'Oh boy, there's that tone again. Okay, most people think, hey, that's stupid. Objects don't have a spirit- bowls and rocks, metal and things. But stop to think about Saint Christopher medals and crosses, Rosary beads, Stars of David. Those are the obvious ones. They're not just symbols. People believe they have power. Tattoos and piercings? Same thing. The Nike swoosh mark-check out the ghetto gangs. Power objects.'
'Animism.'
'Yes, animism, you bet. It's the most consistent connection between religions.'
She took the potsherd and fitted it back into the shell wall exacdy where she'd found it. 'Connective religions, that's my specialty. I also happen to be one of those people who believes that the Calusa came from the Bahamas. Maybe South America. There's not a bit of artifactual evidence, but I think we'll find it.'
