By Joe Wilkins
It was a touch after six this magical morning when, restless for motion, I
slipped on my sandals and stepped out for a morning walk. “Magical” because
of place, time and happenings. With apologies to my snowbound friends in the
North staring out their windows at yet another dreary day of winter weather, I
am on a Florida Key as I write this, a coral island so small it’s little more than a wide place in
the road. But that road is US 1 at a point where I can dip my toes in the calm Atlantic or walk
across the road and dip them in the even calmer Gulf of Mexico.
On this particularly mild morning I choose to dip them in the Atlantic where, walking
past the boat slips and through the palm trees and scrub vegetation I come out at the end of a
jetty to catch the faint rosy glow of the coming dawn in the east and, over my shoulder in the
west, the brilliance of a full moon still coloring the night sky.
High out over the ocean is Venus, bright with the reflection of the sun still hidden below
the horizon. From its corner of a great celestrial triangle, the sun lights up both Venus and the
full moon, filling the sky with light from three different directions. I am enchanted by the scene,
and lulled by the easy slap of water hitting the jetty. There is no light-pollution. No street lights
or neon signs or city skylines spoil the sight of the Atlantic Ocean rubbing its eyes and slowly
coming awake.
I am in this lovely place determined to finish my current work-in-progress, a personal
memoir of my work and travels during the first decade of the federal “War on Poverty”, now
fifty years old. For days I have been deep in my notes about trips to the hard-times scenes of
Appalachia, Indian Reservations, migrant camps on the West Coast and the slums of our big
cities. It is an important, if obscure, tale to tell, a matter more of a writer’s duty to record than a
thrilling adventure, something like a soldier’s recollection of lost battles in a forgotten war that
some university press may publish for some future historian to consult. There can be sadness in
such tales, but I prefer to search for the positive side of things. I am proud to have been
involved and happy to be doing the book, but a short break from work on this wonderful
morning is a welcome thing.
Out on the jetty, bemused and entranced by the romance of this morning’s scene, my
thoughts turn to a writer from a previous time, Richard Halliburton, whose “Royal Road to
Romance,” “Seven League Boots” and “Flying Carpet” filled my young boy’s head with
dreams of adventure and romance. He was a writer famed in the days between the great wars for
such ideas as sneaking into the Taj Mahal on a moonlit night to commune with its beauty; and
hiding overnight in the beautiful Parthenon atop the Acropolis in Athens to talk with the
resident goddesses.
It was an odd mix of emotions, there on the jetty. My book-in-progress covers a rough
time in America and folks caught in private worlds of electric-bill cutoffs and dead-end jobs.
And yet, deep in my notes I find long-ago interviews I did with high-school dropouts dreaming
of getting into the Navy; of teenage volunteers from upstate New York and southern Louisiana
working to inspire even younger Indian girls trapped on desperately poor reservations; of young
people across the country fighting their way up from scenes of Dickensian want. Their
determined optimism still shines from the faded pages of my old notes.
As I reached the quiet boat slips on my walk back, I heard the slow crunch of tires on the
shell-covered path and stepped into the shadow of the bushes wondering what early-rising
fisherman was on his way. But it was no fisherman. Passing by in an old golf cart were a young
couple. The driver was a tall, lean young man in jeans and sweatshirt. Snuggled up to him for
warmth and love was a beautiful young woman, the two of them heading neither for the rising
sun nor the lingering moon, but for the beckoning light of Venus, known to young lovers since
the dawn of time itself as the Goddess of Love. I am reminded it is still true that the dreams of
the young remain the strength of America.
Thinking of the young among so much morning beauty I felt my optimism coming back
and my spirits rise. Refreshed, I made my way back down the jetty’s path in the still-bright
moonlight, ready to return to pages and chapters still to be polished.
© by Joseph T. Wilkins
Joe Wilkins is a semi-retired lawyer and former municipal judge who lives in Smithville, NJ. He is the author of “The Speaker Who Locked up the House” , an acclaimed historical novel about Congress set in the Washington of 1890, and “The Skin Game and other Atlantic City Capers” , a richly comic account of the stick-up of an illegal card game as the Atlantic City casino age began.
PUBLISHED!!
Kennedy’s Recruit: Tales from the Poverty Wars – the vivid account of the great federal anti-poverty effort that sparked the social wildfires of the Sixties and Seventies across America, told by a man who was there and saw it first-hand – and the political storms it brewed, from the migrant camps of California and Southern New Jersey to the haunted poverty of the Dakota Sioux reservations; from the truck coal mines of eastern Tennessee to Dick Daley’s Chicago and Louise Day Hicks’s Boston.
To buy Joe’s books, invite him to talk to your group, or send him your comments, you can email him at wilkinsjt001@comcast.net, visit his website at www.josephtwilkins.com or catch his author’s page on Facebook.
