Adam sat at the edge of the ocean the day after the storm, holding a notebook wrapped in a floral cloth sheath. The trees near the shore were wind-torn and weary, though restful now. He appreciated their adaptability. Always had. 

He glanced out over the water, momentarily trapped in a stare. “The sea is not boiling hot,” he said aloud to no one but a small skittering crab. “Though one day, about five billion years hence, it will be.” He dug his toes deep into the cool sand and scanned the sky for birds. None were to be found. There was a group of seagulls congregated on the beach. 43 of them, to be exact. But they were quiet. Eerily so. This was most certainly the calm after the storm – the calm that nobody ever talked about. 

“Whew! That was one for the books,” Clem had said early that morning when he came upon Adam on the old town road going into Fernandina. Clem owned and ran the bait and tackle store on the island. Everything about him reminded Adam of leather. His skin, his scent, even his voice somehow. Clem couldn’t have been a better fit for the role of ‘old guy who runs a bait and tackle store’ had central casting sent him. “Don’t reckon we’ve had a storm around these parts like that since ’99.” 

“That’s what I hear,” Adam had responded. A new transplant to Amelia Island, he’d already been privy to plenty of talk about the tropical storm that hit near Tampa back in 1899. “Sank a schooner right off Fernandina Beach,” they’d all say with the same downward tilt of their heads as though it were island-issued. The old-timers at the diner spoke of it often enough that one would think it happened recently rather than 53 years ago. Then again, they did that with a wide array of topics really; perhaps in a vain attempt to resurrect their youth.  

Whatever the case, Amelia Island and its residents suited Adam. So too did its birds. An ornithologist by trade, he had recently fled his place of birth (or breeding grounds, as he called them) for parts unknown. He lacked wanderlust in any true sense of the word though. Thus, he settled a mere two days later on this quirky little island south of his former home in Savannah. It was far enough away that he felt liberated from the disapproving glances of his classmates and colleagues who now deemed him a reprobate. It wasn’t far enough to skirt his father’s admonishments though. He’d hoped by now his father’s disappointment would have met the same fate as the elephant bird; extinction. It had not.

He sighed.  

It wasn’t that Andrew ‘Buzz’ Flora was a bad father. He was certainly a misguided one. No crime there. Like many a father, Buzz had had big plans for his son. It’s just that they didn’t include… well, his son. A respected engineer in Savannah, Buzz assumed that Adam would follow in his rather gargantuan footprints. “That’s just what you do, son.”

Never mind that his mother also had a successful career. And as an obstetrician, no less – a rare breed in 1952. His mother had never pushed him toward medicine though. She understood Adam’s love of science; believed he’d inherited it from her. And she encouraged his bird-watching; sometimes sitting with him in the woods behind their house while he pointed out birds with funny names like Brown Thrashers, Tufted Titmice, and Blue-gray Gnatcatchers. 

He recalled one afternoon, swatting at mosquitoes while watching a Turkey Vulture circle gracefully overhead. He thought it magical that such an ugly bird on land could be so beautiful in the sky. “It’s like he defies gravity,” he’d said.

“It is,” she’d responded in a dreamy voice that belied her usually logical demeanor. “You know, I believe that if you work hard enough, opportunities for defying gravity open up everywhere.” He wasn’t sure what that meant, but it felt correct.

As he grew progressively more distant from his father, Adam’s conversations with his mother moored him. With her, he could happily share, with painstaking detail, the lengthy mating dance of the red-capped manakin. And she would explain, with the same startling attention to minutiae, the drawback of the human’s big brain and how it made childbirth exceptionally difficult and painful. In his mother’s orbit, there were no drawing boards, no brainstorming engineers, no wind tunnels testing prototypes or scaled-down models. There was just them. She loved and celebrated his gentle and sensitive nature. 

The very things that made his father squirm. 

Adam finished writing his ornithological observations in his journal, scant as they were for the day. At the bottom of the page, he wrote A. Flora, as he always had – the same name on his father’s business cards. And in that moment, it dawned on him. His father’s disappointment may go extinct, but it would never be gone. Not completely. It was forever embedded in his heart like the remains of the elephant birds. 

So he carefully tucked the book back into its fabric sheath, gathered himself, and headed toward town. That night, after a rather animated conversation with Clem, he would have fried chicken and a milk shake at the diner, banter with the beleaguered waitress whose name was Alice, and devise new ways to rise above. To defy gravity, as it were.  

***(Sentences taken from Flights of Fancy, by Richard Dawkins)***