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A Southern Sense Of Place

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By ALLEN WHITLEY

Special to the Tribune

Published: March 1, 2009

TAMPA - How delightfully fitting that a Southerner, Mississippi's Eudora Welty, is so inextricably linked to the simple phrase "sense of place."

My own sense of place was born on a loose foundation. My father, a Honey Grove, Texas, resident until his late teens, was swept away like so many of his generation into the fires of war. He would never truly return to northern Texas, instead creating a life for himself and his family in the military.

Ultimately, his travels would take him and sometimes us, to China, Sweden, Thailand and Africa. However, it was early in his career, as a young pilot stationed at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, that he sowed the seeds that would eventually become his place.

Assigned to the Strategic Air Command, he met a local teacher and, oh what a time they had. But their fun was tempered by the quip, "One a day in Tampa Bay," as the test planes that flew above the city crashed regularly. The planes' wings couldn't always withstand the shear forces of the warm salt air. Lacking crew ejection systems, every day was a gift, a prayer said for those who didn't live to see it.

In the early '50s, the base hosted Jimmy Stewart and June Allyson as they filmed "Strategic Air Command," the movie my father lived daily. On weekends, he and that teacher would frolic along the coast in Madeira Beach, where the Bamboo Beer Garden opened six years before they were married.

Years later, on hiatus from work and school, summer vacations were spent at my maternal grandfather's house on Bayshore Court in South Tampa. With a deep front porch, arches throughout and the paint applied to create tiny whitecaps, the architecture took on a Mediterranean look.

Once or twice a week, my grandfather and I rumbled down the driveway in the early, muggy morning as we made our way to Ballast Point Pier on the edge of town. A quick stop by the bait shop, we walked with rods in hand the length of the pier, each footstep striking a splintery board, telegraphing our approach. Bare hooks prepared and lines cast into the murky bay, we would wait.

On July 20, 1969, my mother and I were with friends on Redington Beach while my father was in Vietnam. Late into the evening I was awoken to a momentous occasion. Someone named Neil Armstrong was stepping into another world and settled the race to the moon once and for all.

While most of us shut off the television and went to back to bed, my mother and her accomplice scoured the horizon and were two of three people that night who sighted a UFO. Supposedly, someone in South Florida also saw it. Upon his return from Vietnam, my father always maintained it was Old Crow rocket fuel that was the catalyst for the sighting.

One's sense of place is built not only on the living but also on those who are gone. Years later after my family's far-off travels, they returned permanently to Tampa and Madeira Beach, and their friends, the mortar that bonded them here, were waiting with open arms. So much a part of their beginning, this place became a part of their twilight.

My family and I have continued what was begun. We're drawn back yearly, sometimes more, to the sands of a small beach town. I jog the beach taking in the subtle differences that seem to change the view, but not the landscape. Sunsets, miraculous and soothing in their endless consistency, mark time and add color and warmth to this slice of Florida.

Familiar faces at Dockside Dave's and The Frog Pond, who have chosen this place as their nucleus, beckon our return. The "Texans" they call us, and we migrate each year to who and what we know, remember, and treasure. Calming and warm like Madeira's Intracoastal Waterway, their presence as much as anything brings us back.

As I watch the sun dip its orange edge in the distant horizon beyond Clearwater, I take solace in the faces of those who recognize me year in and year out and the pleasant and welcomed ghosts who crowd my sense of place.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Allen Whitley, 48, and his family reside in Austin, Texas, but romp at Madeira Beach as often as they can. Whitley's 30th high school reunion will coincide with the publication of his first novel this fall.

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