I am a water baby and the Zodiac had nothing to do with it. The nature is by place and persuasion. My mother was afraid of water. “You can drown in a thimbleful!” My daddy was a fisherman. By the time I was five, she put a life jacket on me and send me forth to accompany. “Now, take care of your daddy.” My early locales were Tangipahoa River, Lake Ponchatrain, and Manchac. An uncle had a fishing camp on Cane River: a wooden cabin one room wide with a kitchen, a long bedroom, and a bathroom. Oh, yes, a screen porch that held tables for food, games, and chairs for rocking. The sleep sounds were snuffling nightlife punctuated by a sometimes splash of a leaping fish. Black River and Toledo Bend were added to my mental knowledge. The catch your breath river is always the Mississippi that flows from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, until it slows down enough to dump silt and create a delta of note at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico. I earned a geography minor and cherish words like crevasse, levee, and jetty. Husband David vowed I would follow him anywhere just so it wasn’t more than 50 miles from the Gulf Coast.
So, is it any wonder that when a book appeared on a casual search ad that I ordered it? The Gulf, the History of An American Sea by Jack Davis. Chapters of information and research destroyed paragraphs of history that I thought covered the subject. An overview of the early exploration of the western coast of Florida which had already been occupied successfully for years required an extensive knowledge of estuaries, oyster beds, and mango groves. I had a reading and speaking acquaintance with Iberville and Bienville, but had no idea that LaSalle who stood at the mouth of the Mississippi and named a new territory Louisiana after the king of France would become so befuddled that he never found that exact spot again and tried to replace it with Matagorda Bay. More enlightenment about this sea awaits a journey to a western curve and down along a southern coast where the waters join again the Gulf Stream that New Englanders utilized to reach Europe.
Often, and truthfully, the underlying reason for a going forth is a desire for profit and wealth. Yet a most descriptive sentence in my current reading page begins this way. “If curiosity is the facilitator of exploring and charting the New World…” Curiosity to know more about your passion counts, and for true explorers, monetary success ceases to be the motivator. I learned that it takes commitment to sail into the danger of unknown waters. Humility is required to assimilate the knowledge of those who have gone before if their survival efforts were more effective than those you have tried. A journey becomes more successful when you have a good map. Three different cartography experts committed themselves to drawing inlets, bays, bayous, and sounding the notorious shallow water of the Gulf while looking constantly for natural harbors. This then is my inheritance. Knowing that a mighty river and its triibutaries water America from the Continental Divide to the Appalachian Trail, flowing downward to finally add its effluence to the American Sea: the Gulf of Mexico.
The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; surely I have a delightful inheritance.
Psalm 16:5
All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full.
Ecclesiastes 1:7
Let Me Tell Ya 