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May 23, 2004 Anybody who frequents the beaches in South Florida will find out about the man-o-war. At first glance, they look like blue balloons. Some are hardly bigger than the bubbles in a bubble bath. Others are the size of party balloons. They all have long, purple threads attached to their underbellies. These threads contain venom that causes instant pain and that, in large amounts, can kill a person. Some people are more sensitive to the venom than others. I am one of the sensitive types. Miami can be hard on sensitive people like me. The man-o-war blows in on the winds that develop over the Gulf Stream when weather conditions are just right. The blue balloons float, and they travel as the wind pushes them. Beneath the blue balloons hang the purple threads, sometimes several meters long, waiting to snare any critter that happens to cross their path. On two occasions, I had the misfortune of being that type of critter. I like to swim in the smooth waters off Miami Beach and Key Biscayne. When I swim freestyle, using the mini-dunes on the bottom as navigational aids to maintain a course parallel to shore, I cannot see what is in front of me. Now and then I pop my head up to be sure there are no jet skis or other big hazards up ahead, but the little blue balloons are too small to see. My initiation occurred during a swim at Bill Baggs State Park (which I used to call Bilbo Baggins) on a tranquil day in May. It was not the sort of day associated with man-o-war blow-ins. They come in swarms. You can spot them on the beach tangled up with seaweed, and take their presence as a warning. I saw none of them on shore. But it only takes one. I jumped in the water, started to swim out, and cruised headlong into the purple threads of the beast. There was a nerve alarm such as I would expect if I ran into white-hot wires. I got it all over the shoulders. I stood up in the waist-deep water, saw the purple threads all over my upper body, and let out a string of profanities that elicited whoops of exultation from the dark apostles in their kingdom at the center of the Earth. I scrambled from the water and headed for the lifeguard stand. I did not bother to pull the purple threads off of my shoulders. This negligence might have had something to do with the series of grapefruit screwdrivers I had imbibed earlier to enhance the ambience of the day. Quick! Do you have any ammonia water? I asked the lifeguard, who could not have been more than seventeen years old. Ammonia water is a well-known antidote for the poison of the man-o-war. The lifeguard had nothing. I emitted another series of curses, so virulent that sparks enveloped me as in a cheap old movie. Again the devils in hell roared with glee. Come on down! We love ya! I had taken an ocean lifeguard course upstate some years before, and I knew what was coming. Now I will have to take the full force of the poison, you idiot, I said. At about that moment the muscle spasms must have commenced, for the surface of the beach was no longer horizontal beneath my feet, but vertical upside my face. I ate sand. The lifeguard ran around in circles with his arms in the air and shouted, Dios mio! Dios mio! I thought I might depart this Earth right then in Bilbo Baggins State Park. For half an hour I writhed and moaned, my abdomen and back in total spasm, hardly able to breathe, snot hanging out of my nose like a huge worm. Finally the assault was over, and the paramedics, who had been called because of the scene I made, departed. There was pain for a couple of days, agony that even booze could not dull. For a week after that, I broke out in a rash every time I went outside in daylight. In Miami, you have to look out for yourself, because nobody else will look out for you. From that day on, every time I went to the beach, I took a bottle of ammonia mixed with water one-to-one. Not just a little jar, and not diluted four-to-one like the experts recommend, but a liter bottle, 100 proof. Near-death experiences have a way of hanging around in resident memory. It was a decade until I needed that stuff, but when the time came, it was there. It was another perfect South Florida day, this time in October, with smooth water again, not the sort of day anybody would expect man-o-war. No blue balloons on the sand. No warning signs on the lifeguard shacks. Again the instant burning, like a blowtorch. I was more than a hundred meters offshore, and the water was over my head. I looked up and saw two big blue balloons in my face. I backed off, and the purple threads wrapped around my legs. I cursed, but only once, quietly, so Lucifer and his lot could not hear. Then I swam back toward shore, fortunate in that I had not strayed far from my backpack. There, waiting for me patiently, after all these years, was a full bottle of ammonia water. In addition to this, I was sober. But this time the extent of the stings was much greater than it had been at Bilbo Baggins, and I recalled how that strike had nearly carried me off. This time I was completely shrouded with the tentacles. Uh-oh. I pulled the threads off, ignoring the pain (the possibility of imminent death is a great pain killer) and shut my eyes and held my nose and poured the ammonia water all over my body. I must have generated quite a sight and a smell, but this was on South Beach in the early 1990s, and nobody looked twice at anything short of a landing by alien spacecraft. There were a couple of women nearby. I asked them to find a lifeguard to oversee the situation, and told them that the upcoming sequence of events was not going to be pretty. Soon a lifeguard came ambling along, asked me to come with him, and I went down to his shack and lay on the sand, reeking of ammonia and steeling myself for an assault by that old guy in the black robe who has no skin and no head. You know, the one who points at you with that bony finger and carries this weird garden hoe. The lifeguard said, If you have trouble breathing, I have a tank of oxygen you can suck on. Cool, I said. I had a portable headset stereo. I tuned it to a hard rock station and advanced the audio gain, watched the clouds drift by, and dared the poison to do its best. I did not want to die right then because I had things to do. But then again, I figured that if I expired, it would solve a lot of problems. Ten minutes passed. Twenty. Thirty. Nothing. The reaper did not appear. I got up and told the lifeguard, If nothing has happened by now, I guess nothing is going to happen. You okay? he asked. Yeah, I said, but is there anything I can do about this pain? Not really. Okay. The lifeguard said, I was here for the only shark attack that has ever taken place on South Beach. Wow, I said. In all these years there has been only one shark attack on this beach, I said. See you tomorrow, I said. Take care, the life guard said. Fear does not work in Miami. You draw your cards and you play the game. ------------ About the author: Stan Gibilisco has authored dozens of books about electronics, computers, mathematics, and science. He has authored several books in McGraw-Hill's popular 'Demystified' tutorial and home-schooling series. His work has gained reading audiences in several languages throughout the world. He lives in the Black Hills of South Dakota. His Web site is http://www.sciencewriter.net Email: sciencewriter@rushmore.com Tell a friend about this site! ------------ |
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