News

‘So it has come to this,” I thought when my spouse proposed a trip to Florida in merciless February. Were those metal walkers and a retirement condo that I saw lurching toward us? In fact, my husband, Roger, was his usual prescient self. Now that the children had moved out — more or less — we were no longer tied to their school schedules. For the first time in eons, we could take advantage of reading week at the university where Roger teaches, and go south, unencumbered by offspring and unfettered by anxiety about what they might be doing home alone.

But where could two Disney-phobes go in Florida? He had an answer for that as well: Sanibel and Captiva, two of the barrier islands off the state's Gulf Coast, are an easy drive across a five-kilometre causeway from the mainland at Fort Myers. The islands, which are linked by a bridge, promised a respite from fast food and faster living. They also offered low-stress activities such as shell-collecting, birding and bicycling for non-golfers who hate staking themselves out on a towel to soak up rays.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh tried to make sense of her calamitous life by writing A Gift From the Sea on Captiva in 1955, a meditation that became an international bestseller in the pre-Betty Friedan era. “The sea does not reward those who are too anxious, too greedy, or too impatient,” Lindbergh wrote. “One should lie empty, open, choiceless as a beach — waiting for a gift from the sea.”

It sounded good — as a respite if not a lifestyle. So I signed on, especially after Roger promised to book the flights and rent the car.

We arrived in Fort Myers on a Friday night, ravenous after a Spartan Air Canada flight from Toronto, and headed straight to the Sanibel-Palm Steakhouse, a restaurant that offers enough grilled beef in a single serving to feed a nuclear family.

No half-measures for us: We waddled out of the restaurant and drove to the Barbara B. Mann Center at Edison College to catch The Temptations. The Motown group is more aged even than our 30-year relationship, but the members can still groove to ancient hits such as My Girl and How Sweet It Is.

There were lots of sheepish men grabbing their armrests in the audience as their wives wriggled and shrieked in the aisles as the Temps flaunted their moves and grooves from the stage. But the crowd wasn't all boomers creakily revisiting their salad days. Two twentysomething girls in skimpy outfits in the row ahead looked like they were auditioning to be back-up singers. They knew all the words to songs that were popular long before they were born.

As for the Temptations, they were amazingly agile, considering one of them — Otis Williams, aged 66 — was a member of the original quintet when it formed back in 1961.

Exhausted just by watching Otis gyrate, we arrived at the Sanibel Inn in the dark and sank wearily into bed, forgoing the opportunity to displace the falsettos replaying in our heads with a live jazz beat emanating from Ellington's, the hotel's dining room and bar.

The sound of lapping waves woke us, and we got our first glimpse of the beach. The islands' spectacular white sands are encrusted with shells washed around the Gulf of Mexico and swept up on shore. Searching for them is such a preoccupation that the local stores sell small mesh containers on long sticks (rather like upside-down butterfly nets), and residents often succumb to the “Sanibel Stoop” from walking bent over, avidly searching for a Junonia or a banded tulip to add to their collections.

We spent a couple of hours at the Bailey Matthews Shell Museum one morning, becoming instant experts on the differences between bivalve and gastropod mollusks and how to distinguish a pear whelk from an apple murex. The late Canadian actor Raymond Burr was a collector and an early benefactor of the museum. The well-labelled display cases and a simple yet absorbing film threatened to send me back to the beach in search of my own treasures — that is, until Roger distracted me with promises of fresh shrimp and drinks before lunch.

Sanibel could have turned into a developer's haven like much of southwestern Florida. But isolation initially helped deter real-estate speculation: The causeway didn't connect Sanibel to the mainland until 1963, and the nearest international airport in Fort Myers moved to a new, much larger terminal just last year.

What really mattered, though, was a series of deliberate decisions by local residents to protect the environment and to hobble commercial development. By law, buildings can't be taller than the tree line. And there are almost no fast-food chains on Sanibel and Captiva, so visitors who need a morning jolt will look in vain for a Starbucks. The slowpoke service at Sanibel Beans, the local equivalent, made me surprisingly nostalgic for the green and white logo. There are no stoplights on Periwinkle Way, the main drag, so traffic congestion is unsnarled the old fashioned way — by a real human being wearing an iridescent vest standing in the middle of the road and waving his arms about.

More than 2,400 hectares of mangrove forest, marsh and seagrass beds on Sanibel have been given over to a wildlife refuge named after Jay Norwood (Ding) Darling, an editorial cartoonist and environmentalist. It provides a nesting habitat for more than 220 species of birds, fish and mammals, including the elusive West Indian manatee. We took an open tram ride through the park and spotted lots of wildlife, from tadpoles to a preening anhinga, white ibis, blush-coloured roseate spoonbills nesting in a mangrove swamp and even an elusive otter.

We also took a day cruise from Captiva to Cabbage Key, stopping for lunch at the former home of the prolific crime fiction and romance writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, author of Miss Pinkerton and the Tish series. Her house is now a restaurant where tourists eat burgers or fried shrimp and indulge in the quaint tradition of pasting dollar bills to the ceiling. The custom originated with fisherman who arrived flush from selling a hefty catch. They signed their names to dollar bills and stuck them on the wall, but pulled them down to pay for a meal and a drink if they weren't so lucky after the next day's fishing.

Although some travellers arrive on Sanibel and Captiva and stay put, we are much too restless for that kind of holiday. We ventured back across the causeway to explore Fort Myers, where inventors and friends Thomas Alva Edison and Henry Ford wintered in the early 1900s. Their adjoining oceanfront estates offer an arboretum (including a banyon tree big enough to shade half the guests at a good-sized wedding), and a museum full of gadgets, motorized vehicles and biographical artifacts.

The biographical film on Edison was really informative about the man, his life and his work. It left us with only one question: If he was so smart, why didn't he ever try to invent a hearing aid to compensate for his increasing deafness?

That was a thought to ponder as we drove back to our island sanctuary and our late-afternoon ritual of sitting on our balcony to watch the sunset with only the sounds of pages turning and waves lapping to disturb the companionable silence.