Along the center stretch of Florida's panhandle, right on the coast, cuddled up beside a dark and warm lake, is a tiny beach town that has existed, in one form or another, since the turn of the century. I have known this stretch of the earth for 41 years, since almost the day I came yawning into the world. And while I've lived in many cities, towns and neighborhoods, this little stretch of pine, sand and lazy memories is the closest thing I've ever known to Home. I've always been just another onlooker along this beautiful beach, no flashy character, clever Romeo, or crafty artist who could paint well enough so that it seemed, when you caught the painting at first glance, or from the corner of your eye, that you could see in the painting the deep aqua-marine colors of the Gulf of Mexico, or the foamy sea-spray crashing onto brilliant white sand. No, I added very little to the beauty and history of this place. The tracks I made through the back dunes were always quickly filled in with Gulf-blown sand, and the few fish I managed to catch there were easily replaced by larger and smarter specimens. I left along these shores only a few parts of my fragile and impressionable heart, a possession less substantial than a footstep. But I took with me from those dunes and streams such a deep feeling for the flow of the earth and sea that occasionally, when I'm half-dreaming, or distracted suddenly by a warm breeze whispering through some half-opened window, I can still smell the sour odor of mullet under my fingernails and salt water drying in my hair.
A few hearty settlers first cut out a yard in these thick forests just before the turn of the century. Major Charles T. Gray built the first structure in Grayton Beach that amounted to anything (the Washaway Hotel, so named because it was nearly washed away during a hurricane) and provided the community with a name. Billy Bowlegs, the Pirate, was supposed to have visited the area and the older locals, those who could tell you the truth about when to eat oysters safely, board up for a storm, or where to drop a trap for blue crabs; well they'd tell you, if you could pry it out of them on a warm cricket-filled night, all about the secrets of Billy Bowlegs and the buried treasure; but they were taciturn folk and suspicious, and prying a secret from their lips was more difficult than prying open a fresh Western Lake oyster with a thumbnail. Recently Grayton Beach, Florida has been touted by some Professor at Maryland (who's supposed to know about such things) as the most beautiful beach in America. I haven't kicked a single broken shell on any of the other beaches on his list, nor watched the moon rise like a mirror over their distant fog-shrouded tarns, and so I can't tell you what the Professor really knows about such things. I can only try to tell you how it was for me to be in this stretch of the sand and sun, growing up, learning about love, adventure and beauty from one of nature's finest teachers.
