Thorn was just tying off his skiff to the dock cleats when the girl appeared.  The girl who would force him to reconsider every moment of the last twenty years.

It had been a gloomy summer with an unceasing string of tropical storms lined up from Africa to the Keys like a succession of armadas steaming off to war. 

Between the rainfall and relentless wind, the fishing business had been dead through July and August—not a single buyer for his custom merchandise appeared at his dock, and now his tackle box, brimming over with freshly tied flies, was shut, and gathering summer dust. 

At first, to pass the vacant hours, he experimented with new designs, scraps of fur he’d scavenged from roadkill, squirrels, possums, and a host of unidentifiable pelts.  He added snips of osprey and owl feathers he collected from his yard and others that washed up on the shoreline. 

To fill the squally days he settled into a chair to reread some old favorite sea stories from his shelves.  But one by one he managed only a few pages before setting each aside.  Books had never failed him before.  Never once had the prose of a favorite author turned to blurry mush as his eyes travelled the lines of text. 

Normally he would have taken breaks to drive down US 1 to Sugarman’s PI office.  Shoot the shit, catch up on island news or Sugar’s latest case, plan an evening out to one of the local joints, Snappers, Lorelei, Sundowners.  But Sugar was off on a cross-country trek with his twin daughters.  Their postcards arrived once a week. 

For Thorn’s amusement, the girls selected cards featuring the most freakish roadside attractions they stumbled on:  The World’s Largest Ball of Paint in backwoods Georgia, a life-sized Triceratops splashed with dayglo colors, a chainsaw the size of an eighteen-wheeler, a six- story elephant looming over an Alabama tourist shop, a pod of blue whales swimming across an empty field in Tennessee advertising nothing but hillbilly eccentricity.  Each postcard had the same scrawled message, “Having boatloads of fun, wish you were here, love you, Thorn.” 

Each gave him a twinge of pleasure and afterwards he stashed the postcards in a drawer of his rolltop and returned to them when he needed a boost. 

All his guide buddies had fled the island for summer fishing gigs.  A few were snagging salmon in Alaska, one was taking well-heeled parties to the rivers of Mongolia in search of Taimen, the monster-trout, and a couple had gone up to Ucluelet, British Columbia and Lake Ontario, looking for walleyes, big bass and hammer-handle pike.  No silly postcards from those hard-boiled hombres.

He hated to admit it, but he was lonely.  As a confirmed hermit, he’d always prided himself on being immune to loneliness.  But this long, empty summer was exposing his hubris.

Even the local Key Largo nightlife had gone sour.  The bar music was too loud, the laughter too raucous and it only took a few seconds for the ladies who wandered over to chat with Thorn to recoil at the flinty light in his eyes or his surly smile. 

He was rotten company even for himself.

The only positive in those weeks of stormy weather was that the building project next door was dormant.  Just twenty yards beyond the hardwood hammock where a dense stand of tamarind, West Indian mahogany, gumbo-limbo, boxwood, cocoplum and a dozen other native trees and shrubs lined the northern border of his property and had given Thorn decades of privacy from the next-door neighbor, a development had been okayed by the Monroe County Commission.  A Margaritaville Bar and Grille was planned for the adjoining six acres—seating capacity two hundred, rum drinks and late-night reggae and a marina to accommodate boat traffic and jet skis.  Thorn’s worst nightmare.

He’d showed up at the zoning board meetings along with a few dozen other locals and they’d aired their grievances and made their righteous arguments and the board members had listened without comment.  It was a lost cause.  One more in a long string of lost causes in the Florida Keys where one side was fueled by a passion to preserve their ramshackle sanctuary, the other side fueled by barrels of cash.  After the decision, a collection of local environmental groups hired an attorney to fight the development, but Thorn had seen that approach fail too many times to hold out hope.  He’d been toying with idea of selling his land and drifting down the Keys.  Search out a spot so secluded even Jimmy Buffett couldn’t find it.