The dog days of summer are upon us. I've been spending the afternoons cloud swimming. My friend, the great running coach, Fred Maas, got my attention when he started sending me photographs of him training for the Pike's Peak Marathon. Fred runs, literally, into the clouds. He's at over fourteen thousand feet. Running. Fred's 63 years old. The old boy can still outpace a deer on a mountain top and he can go for hours doing this at altitude.

He's got me beat, Fred does. But I've taken his logo, Cloud runner, to heart. I am in clouds up to my chin -- in my pond. I swim through them like a newt. Fred eats clouds; I drink them. And I come out of the water grateful to be alive, thankful for taking the weight off my feet, proud that I am still a swimmer, a paddler, a poker of noses into the water lilies. You gotta love it. You're weightless. Incorporeal. Bodiless. Fish come and go. Turtles breeze by. Clouds make a tapestry through which your body arcs like a whipped cream diver. You surface with a lily pad on your head.

A man said the other day, "Aren't you scared of gators?"

"No," I answered.

"Why not?"

I said, "One time I was on the Loop Road in the Everglades and there was a Miccosukee family, a mom and dad, and they were bathing their baby, and there were two alligators cruising right around them. Never bothered them."

"Well, I think you should be afraid of alligators," the man said, and left it at that. He wanted me to be afraid, had a vested interest in it.

To myself, I said, "Cloud swimmers don't die from gator bites. They just melt away at a good old age."

At least, I hope so.

I have been in New Mexico for the past ten days. My wife Lorry is from there, my brother Sid and cousin Peter live there and I was a New Mexico boy for twenty-some years. Going back is coming home. And waking to coyotes in the early morning, hearing them spill their sad, mad delirious song into the fading stars, and then to be fully awake and to smell the juniper and the pinon in the cool high desert air of Tesuque where we once built an adobe house and raised two children, all this is more than coming home -- it's being born again in heaven.

And it gets even better because here we are, all these years later, with grandchildren running around the chamisa bushes and looking for horned toads. They don't find any. Instead, walking in the dark, we run into a bear who starts coughing. Bears cough, the Navajos say, because, well, it's a bear's nature to cough. They brought coughs into the world, the storytellers tell us. Nuthatch, sweet little ash-winged bird, brought gray hair -- another Navajo belief.

Well, Nuthatch must've been working overtime on me because when I lived in New Mexico my hair was brown and now it's nuthatch gray for sure. You learn so many things in New Mexico. Doesn't matter how seldom, or how often, you visit the place either. You learn. I always thought ponderosa pines smelled piney but my relative and life-long friend Alice said, "Smell the bark, it smells like vanilla." Then someone else chimed in, "Ponderosa smells like rootbeer." I sniffed the bark of one towering tree and it actually smelled like a rootbeer float with vanilla ice cream. "What if rootbeer bears were looking for vanilla shakes, would they scratch their backs on this bark?" I asked my seven-year-old grandson Taj. His eyes darted around trying to think of an answer and then he saw my cousin Peter wearing a pair of shorts. Peter rarely wears shorts because he says his legs are too pale. Taj studied Peter's legs for a full minute. Finally, he asked, "How come you're having half-white legs?"

We all laughed at that one.

Later Taj said to me, "Rootbears drink rootbeers?"

We took the family to the Santa Fe Plaza to visit our dear friend, Ross LewAllen. Around the corner from LewAllen & LewAllen Gallery there is a shady spot where children and adults are invited to sit at an easel and draw pictures with felt-tipped pens. Taj sat right down and drew a great blue mammoth with a comet crashing through the sky above him and an armadillo digging a hole below him. He signed the picture and just then Ross LewAllen, storyteller in silver and one of the best watercolorists in the world saw Taj's work of art and began to praise it. Ross' daughter Laura, the other LewAllen of LewAllen & LewAllen and a great jeweler in her own right, was there and she also praised Taj's work.

Soon Ross and Taj were making a deal, a trade of sorts. Ross disappeared in his upstairs studio and came back with a red mastadon painting he'd done and he traded it with Taj for the blue mammoth, and both of them smiled. I could see, however, that Taj's sister Anais was a little jealous. Ross was going to hang Taj's artwork in his upstairs studio and post it on his website and Anais, who is Taj's twin was left out of all this magnificence. We went upstairs with Ross, Taj, Mariah (our eldest daughter and twins mom), and Shai, Mariah's eldest daughter. Lorry and I followed.

And now we witnessed another of those little miracles that sweeten life and it was all in the nature of good fun and friends and relations and, best of all, love. Ross is a very generous man, a spiritual being. He gave Taj a rust-colored mastadon bone, a piece of tusk and a fang that looked like it was busted off a T-Rex but was probably taken from a javelina or wild pig. Taj smiled like an allosaurus. But Anais's face got longer and longer and sadder and sadder until Ross said, "Here, Anais, this is for you -- a shell phone!"

What it was -- a conch shell to which Ross had attached a cell phone antenna. Anais grabbed it like a purse snatcher and latched it to her ear and started babbling like crazy. I leaned near so I could hear what she said and it went like this --"Hello? Yes. Good. Yes, good. Okay, I gotta go now. Yes, good to hear from you." Anais, shell phone cupped to her ear, listened. Then she said in a loud voice, "Stop talking to me, Ocean, I gotta go."

And so we did, off into the bright New Mexican sun and the desert land that was once, yes, Ocean.

"Silence slithered back and forth between the line" is from Trent Zelazny's soon-to-be published novel Unknown Destination. He's a terrific writer, like his father but different. I couldn't get his book, or his slithery line out of my mind last night because we were having another one of those storms that makes living in Bokeelia interesting. The slithering started at midday.

I saw a black racer weaving its way between the palm trunks, picked it up and let it slide through my fingers. In the olden days here on the Gulf when farmers wanted rain, they killed a snake and hung it in a tree. We are still in a drought, the weather experts say. I let the shiny black racer slither back and forth between my fingers for a moment or two and then released it. Walking into the house, I looked to my left -- another black racer! The second snake was lying straight as a black marking pen on a palmetto trunk. I could've sworn it was smiling at me. But snakes do that anyway -- smile, I mean. Cats do too. Both permanent smilers. I smiled back at the racer.

What did the serpent smile mean?

Heavens, it meant rain. And it wasn't long before the scowling skies dropped some heavy leaden drops. All through the night our Great Dane Zora, a Katrina survivor, moaned and trembled over the lightning which lit up the entire night white as a Russian steppe. I trembled too -- once -- as a thunderblast rattled every door and window in the house. I swear, hurricanes are not as bad as these great Midgard thunderstorms that sit over your house for hours on end spitting lightning through forked tongues. Midgard, remember, is the Norse deity that encircles the earth and is, well, you guessed it, a big snake. Big snake indeed.

Zora starts knocking books off shelves when it thunders. She tries to crawl into the two foot space between the fridge and the kitchen counter. This is not an impossible task for a Great Dane because they are double-jointed. One of our large Great Danes, Zeb (we like Z words) squeezed, or rather, slithered (thanks, Trent) through a cracked truck window once, without breaking it and with no injury to himself. I am talking about maybe a foot-and-a-half space.

Zora is happiest during a storm when Lorry and I are sitting on the couch in front of the TV. She noses the set until we turn on the Sirius music station and find some contrapuntal music by Bach. If Bach's not available, she'll listen to Scarlatti. While the harpsichord is running up and down invisible stairs, Zora backs up and parks her huge butt on my lap. Then you're supposed to do the "Tellington T Touch." That's Linda Tellington Jones's almost-sleep-inducing, hypnotic style of doggy backrub, or horsy, or froggy -- hey, it works on anything that's alive. Look her up, Linda's an amazing lady, a whisperer. Met her once in New Mexico and she showed me the T Touch and I've been doing it ever since. It works on Zora.

Oh, I forgot to mention, Lorry gave Zora six Stress Tabs, too. All natural ingredients like carrot powder, ascorbic acid, beef liver, citrus bioflavanoid complex, heperidin, ginseng and vitamin P. (What's vitamin P?) Mystic stuff that works, that calms this doggy down.

In a few minutes, Zora, the trembler, stopped trembling. My left foot fell asleep. As well as my left thigh. Have you ever had a 150 pound Great Dane put all of her weight on your foot and thigh?

I limped back to bed at 3 AM. Zora was already on our bed, head on pillow, asleep.

And that's the last time I smile at a snake on a cloudy day.

Every summer it happens. I think continually of my friend Roger Zelazny. It's hard to believe that I haven't seen him in the flesh for fourteen years. He has been gone from this earth since June 14, 1995. We moved to Florida one year before that and so the last time I saw Roger was in Santa Fe in the fall of 1994. The dates are not important -- the man and the writing are everything. The man even more than the writing -- to me. But the writing, ah, the writing, too.

I loved the way Roger spun a phrase and I viewed him more as a poet than a novelist although novelist he surely was and to the world a great master of fantasy. It nettles me when I visit middle schools and meet student enthusiasts of fantasy who don't know the Amber novels, Roger's unrivaled span of visonary castle tales. The kids are reading Tolkien and Riordan and Pullman, all fine writers but no one's finer than Roger when it comes to the perfect line of poetry laid alongside casual phrase --

"The princess lies dead on the floor of my cave, amid the strewn bones of centuries of heroes, wizards, princes, princesses, dwarfs, and elves, and the fragments of nine broken swords committed to their task -- another possible reign of sweetness and joy I've clipped before its bud might unfold."

I remember the last time I talked with him on the phone. This was shortly before he died in 1995. I was looking out at the lanai and he was talking about his trip to New Zealand and a Maori rite that he thought I'd find interesting. Shortly after that conversation, he was gone. I was looking out at the lanai again on the day I heard the news. Each time, a white frog was crawling on the screen and the screen was glittering with rain pearls, a scene from one of Roger's stories.

Roger spoke often about reincarnation to me, our conversations were full of afterlife thoughts, out of body experiences and that easiest of elementary exercises, for him, ESP. He did it all the time. Even now when I open one of his books and find a personal message he scrawled inside (never telling me, he wrote these little lines, one or two at a time when he came to visit) I feel a buzz, a bit of kinetic Roger, a spark trailing through the blue coil of eternity.

And that brings me to this . . .

I see Roger in dreams. He is the same as he was in life. I am the one who's different, I suppose, a dreamer moving weightless through his music-filled dreamworld. There he is -- typing on his small manual typewriter which sits on his lap. His concentration is greater than my ability to summon him. I watch him type. The punctilious keys hammering a tune. It's a symphony not meant to be read but to be heard. Roger always did love music and now he is composing it. Typing notes -- that's something he liked too, double entendre.

Roger's rhythms remind me of the Pocomania churches of Jamaica. As I think of the Poco drums in the Blue Mountains, the dream takes me there with Roger at my side. No longer typing, he is standing on a bluff overlooking the twinkling twilit city of Kingston, which is glowing in the mists over Mavis Bank. We have climbed the Jacob's Ladder cut into the clay cliffs and we have supped on cheeseberries sparkling like mini-oranges that nonetheless taste cheesy. The grass at our feet is littered with cheeseberries. We have drunk from running rivulets under a roof of lavender orchids, and now the wind blown grasses of 7400 feet flap against our ankles. The wind seems to want to sweep us up and away and over the bluff like john crows, the dark undertaker birds that carve the skies of the Jamaican heights and lowlands.

Roger turns to me and says, "I always wanted to come here with you."

I add, "And now we're here, what's next?"

"You don't know?"

I shake my head. "I don't."

He says, "Well, it's all coffee from here on." Roger's hand sweeps the lower elevations where the coffee trees spread out like a vast, caffeinated carpet of tree upon tree. Both of us are inveterate coffee drinkers. The sight is very refreshing.

"Got any Scottish scones?" I ask him.

"I've written a new chapter," he tells me. "No scones, no coffee scenes. Just this thin blue air and the Blue Mountains of Jamaica," and saying this, he lifts off.

I hesitate only for a second. Then I join him. The air is bouyant, or maybe we are more bouyant than air. At any rate flying is easier when dreaming. Flying is thinking. You don't do it so much as it does you, and you have only to think of a direction and you are there.

And so we circle the Blue Mountains until the twilight glow is gone and the city of Kingston is all diamonds. Higher and higher, we float. We lose one another. Roger goes so high I can no longer see him. He's up there in the star-spread universe, jack of shadows, jack of diamonds, jack of emptiness. I feel his love. And then it too is gone. I fall to earth, unhurt. I am back where the wind is in my ear. An earthling with eyes jeweled and wet, a body pulsing, a mind born of gravity. I wake.

Whenever Lorry and I get antsy here on Pine Island, we get off the island. But we never get very far. Yesterday we got as far as Matlacha, a neighborhing island. That's a distance of about six miles from our doorstep, if you're driving, which we were. But if you were paddling a canoe, it would only be a lot less. You'd cross Indian Fields and follow the mangroves until you got to "The Fishingest Bridge in the World."

Fifteen years ago my neighbor, Dick Newman gave me a T-shirt he created. In bold black letters it asks -- Where the Hell is Bokeelia? On the back, it resolves the problem -- "It's ten miles northwest of Matlacha." I love dearly love this T-shirt but it's getting holes in it and Dick doesn't have any more, not holes, T's.

So I'm wearing my T-shirt and Lorry and I stop in at The Old Fish House Marina where a very smiley lady chef named Jesse serves the best fried mullet you could ever eat. We ordered some, then went out back. It feels like you're under the bridge. The pelicans get as close as they can to the dining area. The palms are wind-battered and beautiful and the canal seeps through Matlacha, greenly and darkly on its way out to the sailboat-sunken Sound. The smell is salty and mangrovy and lowtide lovely, if that's the way you like it.

The mullet comes golden brown and so pretty you could eat them. Lorry and I share the basket. There are two brown crabcakes and three hushpuppies the way grandma used to make 'em. The fries are good too. Anyway, the first bite of that mullet and you know why you're here and not somewhere else. And the conversation -- that's something else. Two old salts are talking low about -- not fish -- but their latest songwriting contracts! They're dipping in and out of musical bylaws and gigs and the best and the worst guitar strings when the guy next to us says in a loud voice, "You see all them dead fish last winter?"

The talk moves from musical enterprise to how these guys really make their living, as fishermen. Algal blooms, redtides, they discuss it all including the fresh water releases from Lake Okeechobee, the Big O, and how this water affects our estuaries, and that sidelong talk between tables brings the subject to, well, what we were anticipating -- mullet.

How DO you cook mullet and get it gold as Goldilock's curls? I've cooked it many ways. Steamed it. Grilled it. Fried it. You ask most cooks how to fry a mullet, they'll shrug. "Few minutes on a side, hot oil." You can't draw them out any more than this, but I managed to corner Jesse and I looked right into her pretty blue eyes and asked, "How many minutes? Exactly."

She said, very crisply, "Three and a half. No more."

"So that's it?"

Jesse's face clouded for a second.

A secret, I'm thinking. And I would be right.

"You can't fry a mullet properly unless you roll them in this." She walked over to a big glass-front fridge and brought out a nice one pound bag of Bob's Red Mill Organic 100% Stone Ground Whole Grain Corn Flour.

Well, I never. "That's the trick?"

Jesse looks a trifle dreamy and then says, "Yes, that's about it."

"And the three-and-a-half each side?"

"In about one inches of hot, very hot, but not smoking, oil."

"Any kind of oil?" I ask.

"Any kind," Jesse replies.

"Where do I buy Bob's Red Mill?"

"You got one in your hand." She smiles.

"Well, thank you very, very much."

She met my eyes again, this time with real serious intent. "You know," she said, "mullet has the highest percentage of Omega fatty acid of any fish there is, except maybe anchovy, but we don't care much about them. And the mullet, as you know, is an estuary fish, lives in the fresh mostly but also in the salt, and it is a vegetarian, too, so you don't have to worry about the mercury content because there is none to be had in mullet."

I nodded with each fact, my appreciation rising.

"The fact is," I told her, "we just love to cook them and eat them."

"You say that after you just ate a big old fish basket full of mullet and crabcakes?" she said with a laugh.

"I'm still hungry for mullet," I told her. And because Old Fish House Marina sells freshly caught mullet, as well as other fish, Jesse was only too happy to sell me my dinner, two fine large mullet fillets.

As we left Jesse said, "One more thing. I know I said three-and-a-half minutes on each side, but that's here in my fryer. I don't know what you have."

"Big black Dutch oven," I told her.

"Love those," Jesse said. "Used to have one. Well, for one of those, maybe a little more time."

"How much more?" I asked.

She looked away. "Until they're golden brown," she said.

She wasn't going to say more. So I took my Corn Flour and my mullet and, after thanking her again, I turned to leave.

Jesse said, "Ever eat the gizzards?"

"Mullet has a gizzard?"

"Best part."

I shook my head. There's always something new you can learn. I guess you haven't lived until you've had a plate full of mullet gizzards by the bridge with the pelicans almost underfoot.

So we went home and I fried the fillets just right. Bob's Red Mill Corn Flour is, as they say, good enough to eat. Four minutes on a side, folks. They were golden brown.

I'll tell you the rest when I have the gizzards next week.




[ [