My nephew OD’d last week, and that was too much for me to handle. I needed the soft and cuddly thing, and I grew obsessed with the idea of swimming with manatees, the legal way, with animals accustomed to humans. Our prior dealings weren’t stellar moments—I needed to address that, plus I needed the world to shut the hell up for a minute. 

Allow me to begin with a universal truth. Baby manatees are adorable. Like overinflated otters or seal pups, they prove contrast is everything, bobbing around their mammoth mother, who weighs up to 3,000 pounds. Even the American bison rarely exceeds 2,000. The average manatee is only 1,200 to 1,500 pounds and 10 feet long, still the stuff of legend. Mermaids and sea monsters. 

The West Indian manatee adult is not adorable. A giant gray sweet potato, growing barnacles or algae depending on water salinity, with toenailed flippers as efficient as T-Rex arms, and an inelegant paddletail. Lumpy and sluggish may have proven irresistible to early sailors who spotted mermaids, but corrective eyewear would have gone a long way. Here in Southwest Florida, the loggerhead turtle looks more like a human head out there, swimming in open water. But big brains placed the manatee in the order Sirenia, after the Greek sirens whose tempting songs lured sailors into rocky shipwrecks, and who were affiliated with mermaids.

They are awful. And cute. And awfully cute.

Their popularity is almost universal. Who doesn’t love a manatee? Crystal River, Florida holds a huge Manatee Festival every mid-January. Twenty-five-thousand people over two days enjoy live music and many manatee mentions. The following week there’s a Manatee Festival in Orange City complete with frisbee-catching dogs. Because manatees!

***

Thirty-six years old. 

***

My first encounter with a manatee was a sound. A gasp right behind my kayak. Like a diver coming up for air. Which is exactly what it was. I was freaked out and turned in the right direction to spot the giant when it glided past like a dolphin with a pituitary condition. With no blowhole and a sluggish demeanor, the manatee is far more Snuffleupagus than dolphin. They look like their main problems are carbs and motivation. Their closest relatives are the elephant and some weird gopher, but it’s obvious who they take after. They’d be shut-ins unable to handle their own shopping, but displacement and a paddletail afford them the freedom of a mobility scooter. Add a Zenlike composure, and they practically exhibit the grace of a dancer.

That composure is not guaranteed. A different time, I was out drift fishing in the kayak, letting a slight breeze and the current ease me along at half a knot, when I floated backwards right over a manatee. We never made contact, but we didn’t have to. What happened next is not up for debate. It’s what happened. It makes no damned sense, but I watched it for almost thirty seconds.

The manatee freaked out. Pumping its tail frantically over and over, the water churned until it flew through the air like propellor wash. The top half of the manatee became visible as it rose partly out of the water, throwing up the rooster tail of a racing boat as it fled.

Sticking to the shallow trough that runs parallel to shore about fifteen feet out from the mangroves, the creature was doubtless looking for the safety of deeper water and couldn’t find it. So, the disaster kept happening. For six hundred yards, I watched half a manatee. A recent run-in with a boat or bull shark must have been to blame. Nothing else made sense, but then none of it made sense. Manatees model manatee behavior. They’re not drag-racing teenagers. That’s dolphin territory.

Realizing you’re the bad guy is horrible. I yelled, “I’m sorry,” accomplishing a lot. I felt like screaming it a million times when my only crime had been lazy fishing. The train kept wrecking. The rooster tail flew through the air. Half a manatee was still visible, almost planing across the surface, but that would be… more insane than what was happening. Not by much.

They are said to be able to reach speeds of fifteen miles per hour in short bursts. Six-hundred yards was no short burst, but it finally ended, and the waters calmed, although I didn’t. Having somehow terrorized an innocent creature, I’d forfeited any right to be in their world, and I paddled back to the car, ashamed. 

Afterward, I got the unexpected bonus that nobody believed me, which was perfect. What could I possibly stand to gain by lying about panicking a manatee to the point that it became a speedboat on the verge of a nervous breakdown? The whole scene was horrifying. There’s the trauma to the animal, first and foremost, which felt unforgivable. Not to mention the acres of turtle grass, eel grass, and shoal grass necessary to replenish all those burned calories.  Manatees don’t discriminate, but on a normal day they need up to 200–300 pounds of grass. Abnormal days were ahead. Ten years later, the event still eats at me, but it happened, and it was so abnormal that it feels wrong not to mention it.

***

My nephew was short but weighed three hundred pounds when he wasn’t going through a power lifting phase. He’d lose weight, get in shape, get injured, and get huge again. He had a great sense of humor before becoming a MAGA troll, capable of playing that single note. During that phase of peppering me with hateful memes, he insisted that nobody was ever going to read my writing. Given the mammoth rejection wave I was riding at the time, my fragile writer’s ego needed some distance from that shit—ongoing rejection being hard enough from strangers. He and I hadn’t corresponded in over a year, but I assumed he was watching the atrocities and waking up to them, and that we’d have plenty of time to patch things over when that time came.

That time is gone. 

***

Another manatee encounter of note came while fishing one perfect spring day when nothing was biting. I spotted a silvery redfish tight up against an island of crushed white shell, facing out from shore. An impossible cast away in clear, skinny water, and I’d only get one cast, which was bound to spook the fish. Instead, I paddled all the way around to the other side of the island with the idea of walking back across and casting from shore, behind the fish. I beached and tied on an eighth-ounce Johnson Silver Minnow in gold with a short trailer. 

Bushwacking through dense underbrush took longer than expected. But the lush island was breathtaking—mounds of white shell surrounded by shallow, clear water on a blue sky, eighty-degree day. I straddled a fallen tree beside a huge sandstone boulder and heard wings ruffle, followed by fifty other sets of wings. Black vultures filled the dead tree branches overhead, and I’d stumbled right into their meeting. Like inching through a dark room thought to be empty, only to hear fifty people clear their throats at once. 

The winds had been pushing warm air out of the south, but they shifted easterly at that moment. I have never witnessed a mass grave, but the overpowering stench forced images of Pol Pot’s killing fields. 

“Nature isn’t all butterflies, sunshine and healing,” warns author James Rebanks. Agreed.

The sandstone boulder was mottled, more of a black and tan. Giant. Likely washed up during one of the strong storms that winter, the boulder was an inch of blubber covering half a ton of muscle and a massive intestinal tract all rotting in a cloud that assaulted everything at once. My knees buckled, and I retched.

It didn’t help. I got up and hustled back to the kayak, paddled hard out to open water and jumped in, nearly losing the kayak to the breeze. That smell still haunted me for days, trapped in my nostrils, even transferring to my car’s upholstery. There was no getting away. Time was the only answer. And more showers than I’ve ever known.

***

People ask which substance, like that was the problem, when nothing could have mattered less. It also wasn’t time to expect a clarifying answer from his mother, whose son was dead, and there was only that. 

***

South of Fort Myers Beach there’s an area where the manatees come right up to the bank and filter the mud in search of some nutrient they lack. There aren’t any grasses there. I’ve watched those animals eat dirt far too many times to think they’re making a mistake. It’s a thing they do. I stop whenever possible to watch them self-treat their mineral deficiency, and if there’s not a manatee around, there soon will be. So, not all our encounters have been disasters. Far from it. Still, when I thought about them, only our worst moments came to mind. I had a sudden, urgent need to address that. 

North of Tampa, Crystal River is the place to go if you want to swim with manatees. Unlike our often cloudy estuary waters, Crystal River is self-explanatory. Year-round seventy-two-degree spring water is home to a permanent manatee population which balloons in winter months. The $70.00 diving tour package made for an easy pill to swallow. After a long drive through the dark, our morning officially got underway with a wet suit fitting and safety video (Never initiate contact with a manatee, ever). A van shuttled us to our pontoon boat, and we had just gotten underway when we passed a ‘No Wake: Manatee Zone’ channel marker mostly obscured by the sloppy pile of an osprey’s nest.

Our guides told us how Florida manatee numbers hit a low of just a few hundred in the 1960’s, but stricter environmental standards and an increase in power plants discharging warm water in the winter raised their numbers to a high of 9,000 in 2016. Since then, the trend is declining again. The sugar cane industry’s overuse of fertilizer has killed sea grasses all over Florida, and East Coast manatees in particular are starving to death. In 2021, nearly 1,100 died, according to Florida Fish and Wildlife. And a species that only gives birth every two to three years does not bounce back quickly. 

Within twenty minutes we joined a pod of manatees in the water. They mostly grazed along the bottom, and I didn’t initiate any contact but one drifted right up to me, pressing its whiskered snout against my mask, nudging my face. The guides went over the moon, calling it kissing, but even I’m not that stupid. They say all kinds of junk. They say that staring into the eye of a blue whale is like looking into the eye of God. I don’t know who they are exactly, or what they have in mind, but they need to tone it down.

Anyway, staring into the eye of a manatee is like looking at a butthole. No way around it. My nephew would have agreed. And laughed. I just felt awkward looking for an eyeball, which is so small and so deep in that wrinkly socket, that, yeah. Butthole Eyes. Someone more generous or poetic might say wrinkly bellybuttons—two deep navels guiding them along life’s journey. I know what I saw.

They also reminded me of giant dogs. With their big round nostrils and split upper lip, their snout suggests a chunky basset hound or chill, pudgy bulldog who won’t get out of the pool for any reason, even with algae growing on its back. Just keeps swimming and eating up to three-hundred-fifty pounds of underwater lawn every single day. That’s how humanity resorts to calling you “sea cow” when you already have a name.

At a clearer, shallow spring with fewer people around, the world almost shut up when I dove, although some muffled voices remained. A manatee serenely drifted past while releasing a grassy deuce, which usually floated, we’d been warned. This byproduct sank to the bottom, where two smaller manatees rushed in and fought over it, sending a funky mustard cloud of poop billowing my way. Turns out, they are one of many species exhibiting such eating behavior, along with rabbits, gorillas, dogs, and elephants. They are truly awful, I thought, as the giant poop cloud enveloped me. I sat with the moment and felt my nephew cheering.   

The dive ended at about the right time. Back onboard, a mug of hot cocoa in my hands brought a moment of reflection, but I thought how swimming with manatees is a thrill and peaceful and a bit gross, and you need a shower afterward, like good sex, which was ridiculous. I’m not linking manatees with sex. Don’t even jump in the water to ride them. That choice gets you arrested. The first would get you shanked in jail, you’d die in disgrace and deserve it.

I didn’t see the face of God or my nephew swimming out there, nor was I expecting to. I saw manatees. One even nuzzled my facemask. Not the cinematic moment of forgiveness some part of me sought, but that animal came as close as possible to me without fear, which mattered a great deal. She booped me on the nose. Plus, meeting the giants in their element, underwater and calm, is so… different. As soft and cuddly as seventy-two-degree water will allow. One fellow traveler acknowledging another, with neither in any rush. But swimming with manatees will never explain why my nephew had to die.

There won’t be a next time for us. No next encounter, where we can try again, drop all pretense and just love each other. We left things unresolved, although there are always unresolved things. I’ve forgiven him his shortcomings and hope to one day forgive myself. 

On the drive back south towards heavy, dark clouds, the old Motown group The Five Stairsteps came on, reassuring, “Ooh-ooh, child, things are gonna get easier, O-o-h, child, things’ll get brighter,” and I drove into the downpour, started bawling, and the wipers couldn’t keep up. Why hadn’t that message reached my nephew? My own stubbornness? What was my level of responsibility? Things are gonna get easier.

I missed his laugh. Every stupid joke, and there were so many. How many laughs had we shared? Hard to believe there was a finite number. He used to send Frog of the Day videos and he’s the only person I know who would have laughed at “Hey, You Manatee.” 

The sun poked back out, and the dark clouds over the Gulf were stamped with a double rainbow—one vibrant arch and a dimmer echo. I tried to record while driving, which resulted in a single blurred photo of an empty passenger seat. 

“Nature isn’t all butterflies, sunshine and healing.” 

Of course not. Except for the times it conspires to be just that.