Travels with my Family (2 page)

The next morning, the sun was shining weakly. My brother woke me up. I had fallen asleep in the chair. I opened my eyes and saw Miro on my lap.

“Hey, what happened? Didn't Hurricane Bob get us?”

Miro jumped off my lap. He walked over to his bowl and started eating breakfast. I could hear him purring. Everything was normal again.

We went outside. The ocean had gone back to where it was supposed to be.

Then we went around to the side of the house.

“There's something wrong with our tree,” my brother said.

He was right. The pine tree closest to the house looked as though it had been turned inside out by the wind, like a giant umbrella.

Then I saw what had made the noise during the night.

Hurricane Bob had knocked over the enormous pine tree in front of our neighbors' cottage. Its roots were hanging in the air. The tree had crashed through the porch and flattened the front of their house. It looked like a bunch of pick-up sticks.

“What if that had been us?” my brother wondered.

“Well, it wasn't,” I said. “We made it! We survived the hurricane.”

“And without duck tape!”

I started making quacking noises in his ear. He pinched his nose with his fingers and shouted, “Hurricane Bob! Hurricane Bob!” Then he chased me across the wet field.

I guess a hurricane isn't so bad, as long as the trees don't fall on you. It helps to have good luck if you want to have adventures — that's what I learned that night.

I liked Maine, Hurricane Bob and all, but there was only one problem. The water was so cold there were practically icebergs floating in it. We decided to drive south, where the water is as warm as a bathtub, and where we could go swimming every day.

“I don't think Miro could take the trip,” my father said. “Going to Maine was bad enough.”

“He can stay at your grandmother's,” my mother told my brother and me. “You'll see, he'll love it there. He can chase the squirrels around the backyard.”

So Miro would have his own vacation, without us. We drove him back to my grandmother's house. We promised to send him lots of postcards, and my brother nearly hugged him to death. But when we left, Miro was already sniffing around my grandmother's kitchen, with a smile on his face.

I wondered what my parents were going to dream up for this trip. You have to admit, a front-row seat at a hurricane is pretty hard to beat. But when we left the land behind and started driving across the water, I knew we were in for something special.

The road went on for miles and miles with nothing but the sea on all sides, and just a few lonely telephone poles stringing electrical wires over the water.

“This has got to be the longest bridge in the world!” my little brother said.

“It's called a causeway,” my father told us.

My brother crossed his arms and sat back on the seat. “It looks like a bridge to me.”

“It looks like a silver ribbon floating on the ocean,” my mother sighed happily. “It's beautiful.”

“It's a bridge,” said my brother, sticking his lower lip out.

That's the way we are in my family sometimes. Everybody has to be right.

The sky was bright blue, and the water was as calm as Miro when he's asleep. Then I remembered Hurricane Bob. If ever a few strong waves rose up, the road would disappear in no time.

But that was the chance we had to take to get to the house we had rented on Tybee Island, in the state of Georgia. A wooden house that stood on stilts with a few palm trees around it, and miles and miles of beaches.

It turned out to be a great summer for needlefish ice cream cones. They're real easy to make. You need a sandy beach, and a lot of those tiny fish with sharp, pointy noses like miniature swordfish. You grab a fish by its tail, stick its nose into a mudball and — presto! — you have a needlefish ice-cream cone.

Then, of course, you walk around and pretend to lick it. You should see the looks you get from grownups!

And it doesn't hurt the fish because they're already dead, caught in the fishermen's nets along with the mudballs.

We also made jellyfish porcupines. You need one dead jellyfish lying on the beach, and a handful of sticks.

We had lots of work that summer, my little brother and I, taking the needlefish out of the fishermen's nets.

“You got them itty-bitty fingers,” the fishermen told us. “You kids can slip them fingers of yours right in between the loops of them nets and pull them critters right out.”

My brother stared at the fishermen with their big blunt fingers and their sunburnt faces and their tattoos. He didn't know what to think. But I did. I knew that a critter was an animal, and that we had just gotten ourselves a vacation job. We got paid a nickel a needlefish, and pretty soon my brother and I had enough to buy real ice cream cones. Pecan was my favorite flavor.

One day my father went fishing for crabs with some men he had met on the beach. I wanted to go, too, but he said there was no room in the boat for me. But how much room do I take up? I guess he wanted to have his own adventure without me. So I was left behind with my brother and my mother.

I was pretty mad, and pretty bored. I went down to the beach by myself. I wished Miro was there. He could have kept me entertained by chasing the little transparent crabs that disappeared into holes in the sand when I got too close to them. I read all the notices on the notice board at the edge of the beach. There were ads for nature walks at sunset with a guide. Who needed a guide just to walk along the beach? Then there was a notice for a lost dog. “Lost: one fat beagle,” it said. “Name: Ninny. Place: Oceanville Cemetery.” I couldn't believe that anyone would name his dog Ninny, and admit in public that it was fat. And anyway, how does a dog get lost in a cemetery? Unless it got kidnapped by a ghost?

I saw dolphins jumping out of the water, so close to the shore that you could hear the noises they made. People say that dolphins sing beautiful songs, but they sounded more like old men blowing their noses to me. But maybe they sounded that way because I was mad about not being able to go fishing.

Then I saw Mr. Sandcastle at his usual spot. Not too many grownups build sandcastles unless they have kids, but Mr. Sandcastle was different. He was a very big man with small, delicate hands, and he was famous for his castles. They were huge, with turrets, drawbridges and moats. You could almost picture the tiny sand-colored knights riding out of the castle, off on a quest. Mr. Sandcastle even spray-painted the walls and turrets with colors from aerosol cans, and he didn't seem to care that the waves swept the castles away after he'd finished building them.

I was poking at a washed-up jellyfish with a piece of driftwood when suddenly I heard my mother screaming all the way from the porch of our house. She was standing on a chair and slapping at her hair and arms and legs. That was nothing special. She screamed every time a palmetto bug fell off the roof and landed on her.

I think palmetto bugs are cool. They look like gigantic cockroaches wearing black, shiny helmets. My brother and I were always trying to catch one. We built traps with driftwood and seaweed. We wanted to train them to do tricks, like jumping through hoops or tightrope-walking. But the bugs were much too fast.

After she calmed down, my mother told my brother and me that we were going to go on a sand-dollar hunt. My brother was excited. Maybe he thought that sand dollars were real money. But I knew better.

Pretty soon we were wading through the warm water over to Little Tybee Island. It's the kind of island that disappears when the tide is high. But when the tide is low, it comes back out of the water, like magic. Actually, Little Tybee Island is the bottom of the sea when the tide goes out.

If my father had been there, he would have explained all about how the tides worked. But not my mother. She wandered around the island, daydreaming and looking at the pelicans flying low over the water, collecting shells and bits of driftwood, and probably getting ideas for the drawings she does. Meanwhile, I was working hard as usual, gathering up sand dollars and putting them in a plastic bag with holes in it for the water to run out, My brother splashed in the warm tidal pools like a baby seal.

A little while later, I looked up. All around us, Little Tybee Island was starting to shrink. The water was gobbling up the sand. We were the only ones out there now. Meanwhile, my mother was still daydreaming.

But I saw what was happening. Our little island of sand was being cut off from the beach by a deep channel of rushing water, and it was growing deeper by the minute. Soon the whole Atlantic Ocean would separate us from our house. And my little brother didn't know how to swim.

“Hey, Mom,” I called, and I pointed to the water all around us.

Her dreamy face changed in a hurry. She dropped all her shells.

“Everybody stay calm!” she screamed. “We have to head back — right now!”

We had to get back across the channel. Quickly, my mother decided that she would hold my brother under one arm and swim with the other. I was supposed to hang on to her back and kick my legs as hard as I could.

First, I stuffed my bag of sand dollars into my bathing suit. Then I grabbed her shoulder. The next thing I knew, we were fighting our way through the rushing current of the channel. Soon, the water was way over our heads.

For every stroke we took to move forward, the current pushed us two strokes to the side. At that rate, I figured we'd end up in South America. Silver mullets flew past us, chased by the dolphins. My brother's eyes were wide as saucers and luckily, for once, he kept his mouth shut. I pumped my legs up and down, and held on tight to my mother. The ferocious current crashed around our ears. But inch by inch, we moved closer to the shore.

Finally, we made it. All three of us flopped on the beach, panting like exhausted starfish. I shook the water out of my eyes and looked up. There was my father. On the sand next to him was a big basket of blue, crawly crabs.

“You look like something the cat dragged in!” he said.

My father's really clueless sometimes.

“While you three were relaxing on the beach, I was working hard for our supper,” he added with a proud smile.

My mother and I just rolled our eyes.

“Not crabs again,” my brother said. “I want hot dogs!”

I wanted to show my father my sand dollar collection. I fished in my bathing suit, but the current had swept them away, bag and all.

Oh, well. At least I'd saved my mother and my brother. And I'd had a real adventure of my own, too.