Beauty and the Beast

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In Calusa, Florida, the beaches change with the seasons. What in May might have been a wide strand of pure white sand will by November become only a narrow strip of shell, seaweed, and twisted driftwood. The hurricane season here is dreaded as much for the damage it will do to the condominiums as for the havoc it might wreak upon the precious Gulf of Mexico shoreline.

There are five keys off Calusa’s mainland, but only three of them — Stone Crab, Sabal, and Whisper — run north-south, paralleling the mainland shore. Flamingo Key and Lucy’s Key are situated like massive stepping-stones across the bay, connecting the mainland first to Sabal and then to Stone Crab — which had suffered most during autumn’s violent storms, precisely because it had the least to lose. Stone Crab is the narrowest of Calusa’s keys, its once-splendid beaches eroded for decades by water and wind. In September, Stone Crab’s two-lane blacktop road had been completely inundated, the bay on one side and the gulf on the other joining over it to prevent passage by anything but a dinghy.

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