A free day at the people's beach

MELONE E-mail: Click here Archive

By MARY JO MELONE

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 4, 2000

As the sun reached its noon high on Monday at Fort De Soto Park, 20 members of one St. Petersburg family, the Phandaras, were finishing lunch under one of those picnic shelters that resemble a UFO after it touches down in the desert.

The Phandaras come from China, Laos and Vietnam, and the only part of their meal that was ordinarily American was the barbecue chicken and pork. This was their July Fourth celebration, held a day early to beat the crowds.

Their picnic blanket was a traditional woven Laotian mat that they put on the floor of the shelter. The food was spread out across the mat. With the barbecue came papaya salad and a dessert of sweet purplish rice, followed by more hours of the grown-ups chasing after the Phandara children, who were drawn to the water like moths to light.

Their shouts were like music, a counterpoint to the cries of the gulls over the glistening water.

A couple stood at the shoreline and debated whether they should leave, because they were expecting waves -- as if Fort De Soto were the Jersey shore. Yet another man, with a belly big as all outdoors, sat at the water's edge in complete contentment.

He dug up the sand with a garden spade, dumped the sand into a colander, and then put the colander in the water, which flushed out the sand. Only then was his prospector's find revealed -- a mass of tiny coquinas and other shells, broken flecks of peach, pearl, silver, black.

When I waded in, schools of baitfish skittered off, frightened by the motion of my feet. Their bodies were nearly transparent against the bottom, but their heads were yellow as parrots. I walked farther, and the water got deep enough for me to dunk my head. When I came up, my lips tasted of salt. You know what salt tastes like at dinner. But at the beach, salt on your lips always tastes of freedom.

Yes, it was a grand day at Fort De Soto. The beach held just enough humanity, no more.

Today, when everybody but the lifeguards and park rangers are off from work, will likely be another story. As many as 20,000 visitors are expected to celebrate July Fourth.

If you go, bring bags to take some of your garbage home with you, please.

Last Memorial Day weekend, the park set a record for trash left behind -- nearly 20 tons. That's about two-thirds of a pound of bones, soda cans, napkins, bread crusts, potato chip bags, cigarette butts, Styrofoam boxes and watermelon rinds per person.

What else can be expected? Fort De Soto is the people's beach.

You pay only a 35-cent toll as you drive in, and there are no dollar-an-hour meters, taking quarters only, to feed. This park is one of the few public places in Pinellas County where whites and blacks gather together and don't mind it. There is certainly no expectation that if you look lumpy and unfashionable in a swimsuit, you should go elsewhere. Lumpiness is welcome here. Lumpiness, like daydreams, is part of the human condition.

You forget how silly you look nearly naked, and how tangled your thoughts are, during a day at Fort De Soto. Here you tiptoe around sea turtle nests. A crab claw in the grass strikes you as oddly precious. Your nose is full of the coconutty smell of suntan lotion. A day here explains why the bay area often fails to take its civic problems as seriously as we should. How bad can things be if we still have places like this?

If you've never visited Fort De Soto, I feel sorry for you. Then you live without knowing that it also has a century-old fort that never saw a battle, that it is made up of no less than five keys that man and nature have mostly joined together, and that it was opened almost 40 years ago with grand camp and pomp by Henry Fonda and Guy Lombardo. That last is useless knowledge, and Fort De Soto is for aimless days -- days like today, when we are not required to answer to anybody except our unfettered selves.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.