St. Augustine by Heart eBook
She told me I'd flood. She was right.
I moved down from outside Dayton three years ago and bought a little block house in Davis Shores off a video walkthrough, which my sister still brings up at Christmas. My neighbor Dot took one look and said "you'll flood, sugar." Not unkind about it. The way you'd tell somebody their trunk is open.
I flooded twice. No storm either time. Just the moon doing what the moon does, and me out in the garage at eleven at night in a pair of Crocs, moving boxes off the floor.
Nobody puts that part in the listing.
This is the book I wanted the week I got here.
Not the one they sell you on St. George Street with a picture of the bridge on it. The other one. The one where somebody actually tells you which streets go under on a king tide with nothing but a full moon out there, what the insurance letter is going to say before it comes, and why the whole county times its evening around a drawbridge that opens on the half hour and does not care about your reservation.
But it is not a stack of warnings either, because that would be a miserable way to spend a book, and this is not a miserable town.
It is 461 years old and it is made out of people who were not from here.
The Minorcans who walked seventy miles up from New Smyrna in 1777 half dead and stayed. The people who ran south out of the Carolinas to Fort Mose in 1738, toward Spanish Florida, when everybody else on this continent was running the other way. The folks in Lincolnville in 1964 who got jailed and beaten and put this place on the front page, and a few weeks later the Civil Rights Act cleared Congress. Dr. King was arrested here, the only time in the whole state, and there is a museum about it on MLK Avenue that half this town drives past every week without going in.
And the fort is made out of dead shells.
Coquina. Millions of little clam shells packed down over thousands of years and quarried right across the water on the island. Looks like it would crumble if you leaned on it wrong. The British threw everything they had at that fort and never took it, because coquina does not crack. The cannonballs went in and stopped. Sank in and sat there like a thumb pushed into bread dough.
Broken bits nobody wanted, packed in together long enough, and now there is nothing on earth that can knock it down.
That is the town. If you have lived here thirty years or three, that is you as well.
What is actually in it
Around seventy pages, written the way I would tell you over a fence.
Where I take people when the historic district is a zoo, and the specific hour that stops being true. The Castillo done properly, including what to look at that nobody looks at. Fort Mose and Lincolnville handled with the seriousness they are owed, not as a stop on a route. Menéndez and 1565 and why saying Ponce de León out loud here will earn you a lecture. The Loyalist year, the effigies in the Plaza, the three signers of the Declaration locked in that coquina fort.
The datil chapter. What Dot grows in coffee cans on her carport, what to do with them, and the chowder argument settled to my satisfaction and nobody else's.
The mover's chapter, honest. Neighborhood by neighborhood, what floods and what does not, what a wind mitigation inspection is worth, and the questions to ask before you sign anything.
The resident stuff that saves real money. The parking registration people forget about until their first November. The pass that gets you into places you have been paying full price for. The free days.
And one spot.
Seven minutes from the Plaza. First light. The water goes pink and there is not one other soul out there. Exact turn, where to leave the car, what time to be standing there.
That one is only in here. I am not putting it on Facebook, because if I did it would not be that place by Saturday.
Free updates for life. Dates move, the bridge reopens, the lights change their schedule again. Buy it once and every future version lands in your inbox at no charge.
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