Florida trip proves to be a difficult adventure
TONY AMOS

Tony Amos is a research fellow at The University of Texas at Austin Marine Science Institute in Port Aransas and director of the Animal Rehabilitation Keep (ARK).

It was the fall of 1965 and we were living in Manhattan (yes, the one in New York City). I drove a white Saab 93, and driving the open road in the great US of A was still (and still is) an adventure for me. I had not grown up yearning to drive, as nobody had cars in England when I was a teen, not even the parents. I learned to drive a car after I got married, with Lynn, my wife, teaching me how on our Hillman Minx station wagon on the winding roads of Bermuda.

When I moved to the USA, I secretly wanted to drive a big American convertible but was talked out of buying a powder blue Ford LTD with fins by my good friend John Bastin. We saw the Saab, outfitted for rallying, with a For Sale sign on it on a street in Boston and bought it there and then. It was the first of three Saabs we eventually owned.

I was a marine technician at the Lamont Geological Observatory of Columbia University, almost like a student, especially in the matter of pay scale. My son, Michael, had just been born (He's now 42: Gasp!). The age of electronics had just dawned in the oceanography business, and I was to attend a meeting in Miami. I elected to drive to Miami from New York and got there without incident.

The Sticker Burr'd is recovering in the Gazebo.

Then word came from home that little Michael had to go in hospital for an operation, and I decided to drive back non-stop. The Interstate was better developed by '65, but still there were many gaps. I made one mistake getting on I-75 in Florida and heading too far west, and spent a long time getting back to the coast. As the first night descended, I took a brief snooze in a lay by and then continued on. I found the dense patches of mist in lowlying areas of Florida and Georgia to be difficult to drive without slowing down considerably, and felt that other drivers, who perhaps knew the roads better than I did, were always on my tail, impatient to pass.

With the second day advancing, I began to get very tired and decided I needed someone to talk to me and keep me awake. Hitchhiking was quite common in those days, and I thought I'd chosen my passenger carefully: an aging gentleman who I found out was a traveling salesman, selling Farmer's Almanacs. He was the most boring person I'd ever met and began sending me to sleep with his babble.

A glove buried in the sand

Worse, he had no money, and I had just enough to get me through the toll roads and tunnels of New Jersey and New York. But I also wanted to cross the newly-opened Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel, an engineering marvel. That cost me the astonishing sum of $4.50, and he cost me an additional 90 cents as a passenger.

Fortunately, I told him I was going to Salisbury, Md., as I got the feeling he was about to stick to me like a leech and would have hung on to New York City had I told the truth.

Now I did not have enough for the Jersey Turnpike, but tiredness was huge as the 30th hour of the journey approached. I would try getting on that toll road and see what would happen. Unfortunately, I told the toll booth attendant that I had no money, and he made me turn around and get on the infamous truck route US 130 (I should have taken the ticket and gone all the way to the end of the NJTP where they would have given me a warning and a ticket to pay by mail later).

So here I was, heavy lidded at 1:30 in the morning, traveling with convoys of 18-wheelers along that amazing industrial corridor between Philadelphia and New York. I just had the $1 toll (in pennies I scrounged from the Saab floor) for the Holland Tunnel to get into Manhattan. I was never so happy to find our 5th floor walk up on 82nd and York Avenue, although I could not find a legitimate parking spot and got a ticket.

Michael survived, Lynn forgave, and I slept. This will be the last road story for a while, that is until I tackle the mother of them all: New York City to Valparaiso, Chile, also known as the El Pinguino Expedition.

Animals get into a variety of scrapes, and the ARK has seen most of them over the years. But then last week came "The Sticker Burr'd". This laughing gull was found in our own compound, completely immobilized by sand burrs. Removing them was not easy, as many were those champions of all sticker burrs, the ones that dig deep into your fingers, creating amazing pain for such a small thing as you try to remove them. Both the Bird Holder and the Burr Remover were attacked in this fashion. The Sticker Burr'd is recovering in the Gazebo and will need a few more burr removal sessions.

Shrimping season is well underway. One way to tell is to see the number of gloves washed ashore on Gulf beaches. I call this picture "Help!"