The day was hot and the water cool against our skin as we swam through shallow waters thick with brown-green seaweed, a dark patch of color in the sandy bay. Even with the snorkel, you could taste the salt of the water, and if you ducked too far down, water would surge into the tube that was your line to the sky. It was quiet underwater despite the distant splashes and laughter. And then you spot it, there, nearly hidden — a brief flash of sapphire light among the seaweed and the silver-gray fish. There’s a still moment where you watch, transfixed by the sparkling blue dots, appearing and reappearing in the sun with the rhythm of your heartbeat, until you reach down with your gloved hand and grab the living shell, pulling open the netted bag and slipping it inside with the others. Eventually, when the bag is full and you’ve begun to stray a little too far from the rest of your family you turn back, dragging the weight of your finds behind you in the water. Your grandfather is sitting on the edge of the boat with his own bag, and, as he sees you making your way over, he grins and yells, “Look at you! You’re the queen of scalloping. You’re just finding them left and right.” The praise sinks into your skin like the rays of the sun and the salt in the water and you grin.

…

For much of my childhood summer vacations meant getting in a car with my parents and brothers, driving down until we met up with my Granddaddy and whichever aunts, uncles, or cousins were joining us this time, before driving the rest of the way to Cape San Blas, Florida. It was a small town on a peninsula on the Gulf of Mexico that was a short drive to Apalachicola and a shorter walk to the beach. In the daytime, we would spend our time on the beach, swimming and playing in the waves; in the evening we would walk along the shore with flashlights, looking for the pale white crabs that would emerge from holes in the sand.

But the highlight of the week was always the day we would rent a boat and go scalloping in the nearby St. Joseph’s bay. We’d pack our lunches and bring an extra cooler, empty except for ice. My grandfather would pilot the boat out onto the bay, expertly guiding it to the shallow patches of seaweed. He’d slow down, looking over the edge into the water. When he was finally satisfied with what he saw and stopped the boat, we would climb down the ladder into the water one by one with our mesh bags and snorkels.

Scallops are a type of clam, with the classic seashell shape and ridges. They live among seaweed, and they filter the water for nutrients by opening and closing their shell. The ones in St. Joseph’s bay were usually a dark brown or greenish-gray, blending in with the weeds. The trick to finding them was looking for their eyes — the muscle along the opening of their shell is lined with around 40 tiny blue spots that sparkle when the sunlight hits them just right.

We’d search through the water, picking up the mollusks carefully and placing them in our bags. When the bag was full, we would bring it back to the boat, where Granddaddy would take out his knife and pry them open, cutting out the small, round white meat to place into ziplock bags and then into the empty cooler of ice.

That night we’d come home tired and a little sunburnt and cook them. We’d bake them, sauté them, or fry them. It didn’t really matter to me; they were all delicious, and their tender, buttery flavor brought a small burst of pride and accomplishment in the fact that I had helped gather them myself. For a long time, scallops were the only seafood I would eat, and even now they remain my favorite. They were a sort of treat, something we would get to have just once a year. Although I occasionally asked my parents if we could have scallops at home, we almost never did. Scallops were something close to sacred, part of a family ritual. If scallops were some other food, if Granddaddy preferred, say, fly fishing to scalloping, that other food would have taken on that sacredness instead, just by virtue of being the food my extended family would gather around and prepare together, a connection as much as a meal.

Or perhaps not. Their link to my family undeniably affected my love for them, but the process of gathering scallops tapped into a part of my imagination that something like fly fishing never could. Floating in the water, gently searching for them and watching the way the weeds swayed in the invisible currents of the bay — it felt like being let in on a secret. It felt like magic.

This was a time in my life where magic was still very real to me, real in every way that mattered. I was a child who escaped to books, and found a home in fantasy worlds with magical creatures and girls who’d rather wield a sword than sit in a tower, books where the pages told stories of adventure and friendship and succeeding against all odds.

I believed in all of the mythological creatures that found their way into my books — unicorns and pegasi, dragons and griffins — but mermaids in particular fascinated me. They were so similar to people, but so far separated from our ordinary world. They were beautiful, and depending on which book you were reading, were incredibly dangerous or incredibly kind, or both. I was still holding onto the hope that I would someday turn into one, or, failing that, at least meet one. When we went scalloping, it all seemed possible.

One summer, I convinced my parents to buy me a book from one of the tourist shops in Apalachicola titled “The Secret World of Mermaids.” It was one of those books made to resemble an old tome, and it proclaimed to be the definitive guide to mermaids. It broke down the categories of mermaids (shipsavers, wishgivers, shapeshifters, weatherworkers), the species within each category, what the mermaid language looks like, their relationship to humans. It even came with little painted plastic figurines, one for each category. I would spend hours with this book, rereading it, staring, entranced by the illustrations. It captivated me, quickly becoming one of my favorite books. I found a kind of comfort in its quiet insistence that magic exists in this world beyond the pages, that mermaids were real and if you look out at the ocean at night and see a splash, you might just have spotted one.

Although all the types of mermaids were interesting, I was most interested in the wishgiver mermaids. They made their homes in freshwater, living in ponds and waterfalls and wells, and, as one might guess from the name, they granted wishes. The book described them as being filled with love and sympathy for people, but also reclusive, preferring to keep their distance. Yet their ability to see the future and change reality made them the most powerful mermaids, at least as far as magic went. I liked the idea of that — that you could be shy and still have your own might.

If you wanted your wish granted, the book suggested leaving gifts for the mermaids near their waters — shiny coins beside a waterfall, some fresh fruit on the shore of a pond, stories whispered into a well. I thought about what I would ask for all the time. My wish would change from week to week, but I always circled back around to asking if they could make me a mermaid too, giving me belonging in that underwater world full of magic and wonder, giving me freedom in a set of gills.

I don’t know for sure that, given the opportunity now, I would ask for anything different. The idea of being in a world filled with magic never really loses its appeal.

As I grew older, the trips to Cape San Blas, once the highlight of the year, became less frequent. Some years we wouldn’t go at all. In the years we did go, when we took a rented boat out into the bay and my grandfather searched the patches of seaweed for the tale-tell sign of scallops hidden in the water, we wouldn’t find any. Each year, there were fewer and fewer spots of scallops, and the season for scalloping was restricted to a shorter and shorter period of time, or even cancelled all together.

What was happening with the scallops wasn’t ever explained to me. It was just a slow disappearance, a growing sadness as we gradually stopped hoping for the scallops to appear at all when we went out onto the bay.

Only when I started writing this piece, years after the scallops seemed to vanish and our annual trips to the coast ended, did I find out what had happened to them. Unsurprisingly, the cause of the scallops’ decline was people. Although overfishing of scallops played a role, toxic algae build ups known as red tides were the primary cause. The name comes from how, when there’s enough build-up, the algae can turn the water the color of rust. For the most part, however, they’re invisible. Though they can happen naturally on a rare basis, a combination of air pollution, urban run-off, coastal development, and the rising temperatures and CO2 levels caused by climate change have all contributed to the red tide events happening more frequently, increasing algae to dangerous, catastrophic levels. Red tides are devastating for a variety of animals and sea life, but scallops and other types of shellfish are particularly vulnerable to red tides. For the scallops in St. Joseph’s Bay, it meant near eradication. For me, it meant asking when we were going scalloping, and being told “not this year, sweetie.” It meant not realizing there had been an end until long after it had passed.

That’s how it is with these things, isn’t it? You believe in mermaids with all your heart, clutching to plastic figurines and worn pages, thinking about the day you’ll get to see one yourself. And then your grip loosens, and time passes, and a year or two later, when your aunt asks if you still like mermaids, you realize you don’t believe in them anymore, not even a little bit. It hits you with surprise and pain, and you try to convince yourself that they’re real, they must be. But that battle was lost months ago, without you even noticing. There is real pain in the loss. We grieve for who we used to be, for the world that only ever existed in our minds.

As I got older the long days in the sun and water and sand, the wild wonder of discovering secret jewels under the ocean waters, faded to become another memory of childhood, along with the belief in mermaids and magic. They are all tied together for me, fixtures in my life I struggled to hold onto, that I lost to time all the same. There’s no small degree of longing for that time, the sweet innocence and joy of it all.

When I started writing this piece, I didn’t know what the state the scallops that defined my childhood summers were in. The last time we went to Florida was the summer before my senior year of high school. It was the first time I had seen my extended family and gone to Cape San Blas since early middle school, but there weren’t any scallops to be found that year. Since that last trip nearly five years ago I hadn’t heard any news about what happened with Cape San Blas and the scallops. I had to know what happened, even if that news hurt, and so I began to search online for information.

Red tides and loss were not the end of the story, after all.

Since 2016, the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission has steadily increased their scallop restoration efforts. Restricting and cancelling scallop seasons, placing tens of thousands of scallops into restoration cages that protect them from predators and encourage reproduction, introducing hatchery-raised juvenile scallops into the bay.

The best part is that these efforts — they’ve been working. The scallops have recovered. Not quickly, not without help, and the work is far from over. But the scallops are there, once again dotting the sea floor, healthy and steadily increasing in number. The first full scallop season in years was seen in 2019, with plenty of scallops remaining in the bay afterwards that continue to thrive. When I first found out, I couldn’t help but cry the happy sort of tears that come with receiving good news against all odds.

It’s not a guarantee that things are perfect or will be good forever. There could be more red tide events like the ones that collapsed the scallop population, a future that seems likely if the root causes of the problem are not addressed. And it seems unlikely that I myself will return to Cape San Blas to look for scallops, too, at least not in the near future — my grandfather is getting older and more forgetful, and money is tight as always.

Nevertheless, there’s a kind of quiet happiness in finding out that some other girl who stares into the ocean at night, looking and hoping for that distant splash, that proof of magic, will have her chance to find the living spots of sapphire among the seaweed and sand.

 

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This essay was first published in the Fine Print Literary Magazine (2020).