Cedar Key Coda

Some things are too wondrous to survive

©2025 T. Agnew

That last year we returned to his happy place, and it was encouraging what a year had accomplished. 

This time he donned the wet suit, waded into the cold freshwater spring with his childhood friend, and attempted to snorkel, his blond hair a wired mess under his mask, his thin frame taller than last year, a trying acceptance of sorts on his face, that he would try this. 

His friend helped, coaxing him with positive 14-year-old mantras, and it got him into the water. 

Then he saw the snake. 

Curled into a lazy ball near the stairs to the spring, the snake seemed content to leering at the rowdy crowd on the shore as they laughed and pointed at it as though it were a menace.

After seeing the snake, things changed. He no longer wanted to snorkel, and now the water was too cold, even with the wet suit. 

I realized later that calling playfully from the water for him to try the other stairs into the spring, away from the snake, only escalated his trauma.

He informed me of his disapproval of calling his name — why was I doing that? And the snake, which I quickly proved was non-venomous, became an embarrassment. 

He said he was not afraid of the snake, so cease it all, please. Cease the lecture and the pointing at the park’s sign that displayed the three most prevalent, non-venomous snakes to be seen in the park. 

There was his friend, floating in the clear blue spring, not afraid of a snake or the cold water or anything. A conundrum of adolescent complexities.

Yet in the transference of time, a measurement of my son’s growth, this rumination of that last time to Cedar Key holds so many emotional chords.

Located just west of Gainesville, Florida, the tiny island city sits three miles out on the Gulf of Mexico. To get there, State Route 24 crosses four small, low bridges over salt marshes and ocean channels.

Historically known as a fishing town (population 800 — wait, 799), it’s also known as an artist colony and a one time producer of cedar pencils. Once you arrive over the last bridge, it’s as though you’ve stepped through a time vortex. 

You won’t find chain hotels or restaurants or drug stores, but the historic cottage-style houses and 19th-century buildings used to never change, other than a paint job or new roofs. That was before Helene.

One reason we loved this island so much was for its nature. Cedar Key and its nearby islands thrive as a National Wildlife Refuge, where birds and wildlife flourish under federal protection. 

On the same day, you might see bald eagles soar overhead, white pelicans glide across the bays, or ospreys plunge for fish. On our many boat excursions, we saw dolphins following our boat and white pelicans feeding on sandbars.

Depending on the tide, Cedar Key transforms into a marsh-bay chameleon, changing into an oyster bed desert you could walk across when the bay's receding tide exposes it, then the murky saltwater replenishes it in the mornings.

We spent most of our vacations and birthdays there, cruising the sleepy island on bikes or a golf cart and fishing its bays on day-long boating excursions.

Now Cedar Key is gone — in my mind, anyway. 

Helene was the third hurricane in thirteen months to strike the island. The little town tried to rebuild after the first storms, yet restored buildings — many built from the first foundations — became toothpicks after another hurricane struck.

The cottage we stayed in for decades — the Far Away Inn — floated away in pieces during Helene. After years of trying, the owners will not rebuild and the city razed the property.

Watching the storms approach the island year after year, Helene’s final blow did not surprise me. 

Perhaps, I told myself, like a precious pet dog, Cedar Key was too wondrous a place to exist indefinitely. Yet, it was a place that raised our son from a toddler to a teenager — and he will remember that place for the rest of his life. While parts of the island try to rebuild, it will never be the same.

That last year, just like every year, the velvet blanket of sea foam obscured the shore until dusk revealed its exquisitely textured sands. We woke to the childish yips of the Ospreys and the sun igniting the water like a neon painting. 

That last time, under the moon’s rise and more than a half mile on the Gulf of Mexico, on the sandbar that seemed to rise out of nowhere, we walked the shell-filled sand under the phosphorous sky and saw things that remain unseen in high tide. 

Crabs darted from hole to sandy hole, starfish helplessly twisted in incongruous knots as though doomed from the low tide, their impressions left in the sand from the last place they settled as they meandered from tide pool to tide pool, waiting for the moon to summon the tide. 

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