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Guest column

I live here

For him, a beach isn't an obligatory extra, like a decorative fireplace. Instead, he appreciates the beach for all it brings.

By BRUCE KULA
Published January 22, 2006

INDIAN ROCKS BEACH - When I moved to Indian Rocks Beach in 1984, I think I barely knew what a condominium was, much less how fraught with baggage the word was.

To Florida old-timers, a condo was a towering blight that blocked one's view of some body of water; to me, it was the way the not-rich might enjoy the same view as the rich.

The allure of a gulf view is readily explained. Out my back windows is a view of the most densely populated county in Florida, full of ungraceful sights and the irritating sounds and smells of too many machines. Out my front windows is wilderness.

Granted, the city side has its compensations. That's where the jobs are, and all those restaurants that know how to cook a fish. But it's the gulf beach that I came for.

I'll excitedly point out to anyone handy a lone dolphin passing by, and a pod of dolphins fishing may hold me at my balcony railing for as long as it takes them to eat their fill.

I've squinted into thousands of sunsets hoping for a green flash. I go to sleep to the repeated rush and retreat of the surf, and I am sometimes awakened by a bright moonset shattered in the waves. When time and the weather permit - often - I walk the beach, scanning the shoreline for shark teeth and enjoying deep breaths of heavy salt air.

It's there, at ground level, that I find the difference between my beach and much of the rest of Sand Key. In Indian Rocks, the beach is busy with tourists and neighbors. Fathers build sand castles while their children idle. Teenagers defy gravity on short boards. Joggers pant. Bikinis and blankets abound.

But stroll by the mansions of Belleair Shore, then Belleair Beach, finally up to Clearwater where the really big condos are, and you'll usually encounter only the odd lonely fisherman or another ambitious hiker.

To some, a beach is an amenity little different from a decorative fireplace: it is obligatory; it needn't be used.

Now that I am becoming a Florida old-timer who has read his Marjory Stoneman Douglas and John D. MacDonald, I feel the occasional twinge of guilt that I am here in this condo on this beach at all.

I fight it with the knowledge that at least I have the good sense to appreciate it.

[Last modified January 22, 2006, 01:02:19]