The rain started the second I had the drone up. A Gulf drizzle, the kind that blows in sideways off the water for ten minutes and quits before you've decided whether to pack up. My niece was in town. She'd brought her boyfriend, and my second nephew came along too, so the four of us stood out on the rocks at the south tip of Casey Key watching me fly a drone into weather I'd normally land it for.
Nobody wanted to leave. That's the thing about the North Jetty.
It sits at the very bottom of Casey Key, a skinny barrier island about eight miles long that runs down the coast just north of Venice. The county stacked the jetty out of rock to keep the sand from washing into Venice Inlet. A breakwater. Practical, ugly, the kind of thing nobody flies across the country to see.
Then the rock did something nobody drew up. It bends the wave energy coming off the gulf and throws it back, and the North Jetty turned into one of the only spots on this whole flat Gulf Coast where you can actually surf. They built a wall to stop the sand from moving and ended up with a wave. I think about that more than I should. You set out to fix one small problem and the world hands you back something it never occurred to you to ask for.
From two hundred feet up, the inlet goes dark green where it drops off. You can see the exact seam where the calm intracoastal water meets the chop of the open gulf, sharp as a chalk line. Two guys fished the rocks below us with cut bait. Not moving. Barely talking. A dolphin worked the inlet for a minute, then gone.
And under all of it, in the dark band of sand the low tide leaves behind, the shark teeth.
People drive here for them. Black fossilized teeth, tiger and lemon and bull, washed up from a seafloor that's been giving them up for millions of years. Find one and you're holding something older than Florida, older than the idea of Florida, older than anything around you with a name. My niece found two before the rain came. Didn't make a thing of it, just dropped them in her pocket and kept her eyes down on the sand.
The drizzle passed. The light went soft and gray instead of gold. Better that way.
We stayed until the lot emptied out. Best afternoon I've had in a while, and I didn't get one clean sunset shot to show for it.
