everything well lubricated, so I figured I’d gotten it from my bike. I scrubbed it off as best I could. Later that day, it started to itch and burn and blister. What was going on?! I checked with a Park Ranger. I must have come in contact with the venomous trailing tentacle of a Portugese Man-o-War while swimming, and compounded it by causing secondary burns on my back from using the same washcloth! This resulted in several weeks of tending painful blisters and getting heaps of advice on how to treat it, including: steak sauce, urine, lotions, sand, heat, ice, etc. I tried various salves, but they made it worse! Finally, I found that keeping it comfortably cool and ventilated was the best treatment, so spent a lot of time unable to lean back in a chair, or lie on my back. The Portugese Man-o-War is exquisitely beautiful! It looks like small, translucent balloons of ethereal blue and purple hues with long, trailing threads several feet long, of midnight blue. We sometimes see them washed up on shore, abandoned by the sea. Yes, they are extremely poisonous to us, but not to sea gulls as I was once supremely surprised to see a gull eating one. Another year, the sea coughed up hundreds, maybe thousands of the corpses of translucent, moon jellyfish that completely littered the beach. We could hardly walk without stepping on them
and I was afraid to touch them until I saw some kids tossing them at each other. They felt like softballs. Then there was the year of tar blobs. Some sort of spill from a human error caused blobs of sticky, polluting tar all over “our” shore, and another year it was bottle caps. We got lots of exercise from bending down to pick up a seemingly endless fount of them. Our biggest find was the hull of a damaged boat, half buried in sand after a really big storm, and our most practical find was a surfer’s watch, solar powered, which is still running many years after we found it washed up on shore. “Our” beach is an important (and specialized) hatching area for Green Turtles. The Indian River Lagoon which we camp next to is an important feeding area for them as well. Partly because of demand for Turtle Soup on the menus of exotic foods in the early part of the 20th century, Green and Loggerhead turtles were on the verge of extinction for many years, but conservation efforts and education have successfully turned the tide and restored their population to a great extent. They continue to be carefully monitored and supported with new laws and programs. I feel great satisfaction in hearing this conservation success story. It is heartwarming to know that it is
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Portugese Man-O-War is beautiful but poisonous
possible to turn the tide of decimation and pollution with growing awareness and dedicated implementation of corrective measures to restore the balance of nature. And sometimes, we humans can help out when nature gets too stressful. After a particularly voracious storm of wind and cold, the camper next to us found a little owl half submerged in the waters of the river, hypothermic and too exhausted to get out. She took it to a rehabilitation center and within a few days, it was brought back, ready to resume life on its own. Each year, I paint one, great big picture on the side of our camper, making it quite pretty along with the petunias we plant which become colorful and profuse here. This painting projectis a kind of “Street Performance”,