Shells

 Even though I lived on Fort Myers Beach early in my life, I've never been particularly interested in shells. That got me in trouble in the 4th grade, when we moved, and I changed schools. Miss Owens, my teacher, said something about making shell collections, which I interpreted as an optional activity.

So I didn't bother, and that bothered Miss Owens. A lot. During my public shaming before the class, I muttered something to the effect that I didn't have many shells. She wasn't having any of it, saying something like, "Here's a girl from Fort Myers Beach who claims she doesn't have a shell collection."

My defense was at least partly true. I suspect most of the stuff my siblings and I collected from the beach stayed behind when we moved. And I had been more intrigued with the highly polished stone-like shell fragments I found on the beach in Miami than the actual shells at home.

But after I got home that day my mother and I shuffled through various boxes and tin cans until we found enough shells to make an acceptable collection, and Miss Owens was placated.

Big life lesson learned: A suggestion from somebody who is ahead of you in the pecking order is never optional.

Banded Tulip 
A Subtly Beautiful, Predatory Marine Snail

Actually I owe a good bit to Miss Owens. She was a birding fanatic, and enrolled the entire class in the Junior Audubon Society. When we weren't chanting multiplication tables or reading our primers, we drew birds, we looked at pictures of birds, and learned the rudiments of identifying birds. What I know about birds, I learned mainly from Miss Owens, and I thank her for it. 

Miss Owens also discovered that I did not know how to tell time, and pointed out that scandalous fact to my mother, who passed the job to my father. With the help of a broken windup alarm clock, he taught me the basics of quarters and halves. I hate digital clocks because now I can't "see" those concepts.

 Last fall (2022) flooding from Hurricane Ian turned me and my husband into refugees. After several months with relatives we arranged to buy a small condo while we got in line for home repairs. The seller, realizing that we were in a bind, moved quickly, and probably left more things behind than she otherwise would have, among them boxes and boxes of shells. There also were glass globes filled with shells, vases filled with shells, trays filled with shells, and a smattering of shell craft. Fortunately, the local shell club was delighted to take all, but before I donated the swag, I saved a biggish box for myself.

My rationale was that they were for drawing, since I couldn't go to the devastated yard for botanical specimens. But the reality was that I got seduced by the myriad shapes, patterns and colors. And I discovered that shells are fascinating on many levels. 

They  also are hard to draw well. They are stringently symmetrical, and can't be faked very convincingly. Trying the figure out the degree of curve either by measuring or by "eyeballing" can be maddening, because it doesn't always work out. Some of my inaccurate sketches possess a certain charm, despite their lack of accuracy. But apart from a few happy accidents, wonkiness with shells doesn't cut it with me. I want my drawings to be perfect. Fat chance of that happening anytime soon!

Old Conch? Whelk? with Barnacles
Semi-Blind Contour Drawing

On some level I  "knew" that mollusks are not like hermit crabs, seeking ever larger vacant shells for shelter as they grow. But I'd never  really thought about their growth process either, until I read Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells by marine biologist Helen Scales.

It  turns out that shapes, proportions, and growth patterns of many natural things can be expressed mathematically. Indeed, these proportions and their relation to each other and the whole form the "golden mean," the backbone of ethics and esthetics in both Eastern and Western civilizations. This ratio is also sometimes called a logarithmic spiral, or the Fibonacci sequence. It is particularly obvious in pine cones and pineapples, and the cross-section of a chambered nautilus.

 Scales devotes an entire chapter of her highly readable and informative book to the astounding mathematical principles determining shell forms. You don't need to confront Blake's burning bright tiger to be overwhelmed by the "fearful symmetry" in nature. Though Blake's poem explored the dichotomy of good and evil, beauty and horror, there is still something breathtakingly awesome, even fearful, when we break through the surface and perceive order in the form of natural things. One quickly enters a realm in which esthetics, biology, mathematics and metaphysics merge.

I don't know what I thought they ate, but before I started reading about marine mollusks, I had no idea how fiercely predatory they can be. The "moon snail," or "shark eye," is a good example. This mollusk extrudes its mouth-containing foot (hence the term Gastropod) like the blob to cover its prey, often another moon snail. It then drills a perfect hole in the victim's shell with a barbed, tongue-like structure called a "radula," and starts digesting. It often preys on members of its own species. The shell on the far right shows a drill hole. They occur in browns, beiges and grays.

Shark-eye or Moon Snail

The cone snail uses its radula to inflict a painful sting to the unwary predadtor or human trying to collect it, and some species in the South Pacific  have a toxin powerful enough to kill an adult male. They like sandy bottoms in shallow waters, and several occur in the Gulf of Mexico. The alphabet cone is so named because its markings resemble hieroglyphics, and in some individuals, actual letters of the Roman alphabet. Though our local species eat mainly marine worms and other mollusks, some Pacific Ocean cones use their radula like a harpoon to catch fish (Helen Scales).

Florida Cone Snails
2nd Row: Florida Cone
Top and Bottom : Alphabet Cone
Third Row: Drill Hole in Top of Shell

Because they are so fragile, finding an intact fig shell is a rare event. They live in the Atlantic, Gulf of Mexico around SW Florida,  and Caribbean Sea. Other species occur in Indonesia and Singapore. Our fig shells are mostly a pale beige, with a cross-hatched or linen-like texture. I haven't been able to ascertain whether local fig snails are carnivores.

Atlantic Fig Snail

So far I've only scratched the surface when it comes to drawing the contents of my shell box. Scallops, whelks, conchs, murexes, and others still tempt me. In spite of my less-than-stellar beginnings, I'm just as hooked on drawing them as I am on botanical subjects. I don't know that I'll ever master nature drawing to my satisfaction. But that is why this blog is about a sketchbook, not a gallery.

Some Sources:

Bailey-Matthews National Shell Museum. shellmuseum.org. Click on "Shells & Science" tab.

"Central and South Florida Gastropod Seashell Identification Guide." libguides.nova.edu.

 Helen Scales. Spirals in Time: The Secret Life and Curious Afterlife of Seashells. Bloomsbury Sigma. 2015. 

What Happened

 Months after Hurricane Ian's storm surge covered it with a couple of feet of brackish/salt water, slimy gray silt, and no doubt sewage and other pollutants, my Florida backyard is still there, but it's not a place you'd like to visit. 

Other than shoveling debris out of the way of the doors, cleaning up in the yard had to wait for the more urgent job of removing sodden carpet, books, sheetrock, furniture, and ruined appliances. I'd still be standing in the middle of a mess were it not for family and neighbors who did yeoman's service. 

 With no air conditioning, the black mold didn't wait to make its appearance. I lost most of my sketchbooks, journals and nature studies. Piling them up on the side of the road for the claw trucks to remove hurt. Perhaps they could have been salvaged, but there was no time for that. 

It was clear that I either was going to spend a good part of my remaining years trying to reclaim what was lost, or start living anew. I chose the latter, but it's not easy. The past keeps tugging at you, especially as memory fails and there are no photos or diaries to jog it.

Temporarily homeless and carless, we lived first with one sister, and then another, a good hour-and-one-half commute over I-75. There were no rentals or sales of either cars or apartments. Eventually we found a car, and then bought a small condo - a little over 800 square feet plus a reasonable screened patio. This space has become more and more like home, but I want to  move back into the house if and when it is habitable.

A host of problems starting roughly around 2020, and steadily worsening, already had interfered both with my engagement with the natural world, and consequently, my blogging. The frequency of my blog posts diminished from slow to a trickle. I lost the rejuvenation that regular interaction with nature can bring, along with the physical benefits of active gardening. I was doing very little, yet was always pressed for time, and bad went to worse. 

Then Ian hit, and that was that. I have been consciencious about packing and evacuating since we've lived here, and we've been hit by 2 major storms - Wilma in 2005 and Irma in 2017. Irma should have been a wakeup call, because several homes on our street flooded, and the debris line left by the surge came disturbingly close to our back door. But then Ian didn't seem to be headed our way initially, and already feeling half-defeated I did nothing to prepare, and we made the potentially fatal mistake of riding it out. 

Fortunately, a neighbor with a two-story house took us in, so we didn't get wet. Had we stayed, our lives wouldn't have been threatened because the water didn't rise high enough to drown us, but it would have been an extremely ugly experience, and in other worse-hit areas people who stayed died or had very close calls. As it was, looking at the rising water from the safety of a 2nd floor window was bad enough.

Streets and canals disappeared. All was just a gray sea, with the houses and vehicles poking up from it. Yet compared with the destruction experienced by Fort Myers Beach, Sanibel and Matlacha, we got off easy.

As for the yard, the native shrubs and small trees scarcely missed a beat, since we got very little wind, but the herbacious material was all killed to the ground. The bromeliads won't come back, because they have no underground parts or seed banks to regenerate. We didn't even get that much rain with Ian, and this winter has been exceptionally dry, with no flushing rains at all, so some plants, the bougainvilleas for instance, have had a hard time recovering. 

Other than removing debris like a stray recycling bin, various bottles of toxic cleaning solutions and fuel additives, a 5-gallon gas can with a mixture of gas and water, and even most of a pizza, I've done little with the yard. An initial cleanup was followed by a regrowth of weeds, and now the front is also littered with construction debris. At least the drought means that the weeds are not as robust as they will be in a few months, assuming seasonal rains resume. 

Even with all the work of rebuilding and living out of boxes, I've had time to sketch, but not the will. Now and again I get a little burst of energy, and scribble a little in my sketchbook. Sometimes I've tried to force it, with predictable ininspired results. 

I sit with the window open tonight, listening to the chuck-will's-widow calling from the mangroves. Even though we live in a large complex, there are glimpses of the natural world to be had. Alligators swim in the small bay outside, and the oak and mahogany trees lining the streets host a wealth of native tillandsias. Resurrection fern flourishes in the hedges, and I've even seen a good-sized black racer. The winter warblers have gone back north. The swallow-tailed kites, coming from South America, delighted us with their aeronautical skills. These magnificent birds epitomize grace, strength and beauty. Now they have headed back too. We don't see many, but throughout the day and early evening we see wading birds, anhingas, frigatebirds, ospreys and both black and turkey vultures. 

The bird's song in the stillness of the night is comforting. Here in Florida we have done, and continue to do our best to wipe out the natural ecosystem. But pockets still resist, and in spots even thrive. We haven't destroyed everything yet. And maybe I will take out my sketchbook tomorrow.