Alligator Point: Florida Man and the Voice in the Trellis

A Gulf fable · Alligator Point.

The singer outside Veda's bedroom had held the same note for so long that Florida Man began to feel concerned for her lungs.

He stood on the porch with a rolled rug under one arm. Beyond the steps, the side garden lay black between the house and a wall of climbing leaves. The note rose through it, thin at first, then full and oddly human. It changed without becoming a tune.

“There,” Veda said.

“I hear it.”

“That's an improvement on the last person.”

The sound faded. A hard breeze rattled the leaves, lifted the corner of her welcome mat and went on toward the road.

Florida Man put the rug indoors. Veda had received the keys to the Alligator Point house that morning. Her kettle occupied the only clear patch of kitchen counter. Her bed was made, although reaching it required taking a position on which boxes could be stepped over.

At five in the morning she would leave for work. Tonight she wanted to sleep in the house she had spent the day moving into.

The sound returned beside the bedroom window.

“I can stay at my sister's,” she said. “She's offered. But I've just carried my toothbrush here.”

Florida Man looked into the garden. He could see no person. He had no intention of proving that by pushing blindly through somebody's plants.

“Who was the last person?”

“Ron. Next door. He came round with a loaf. It had stopped by then.”

“A difficult witness.”

“The loaf was very definite.”

She had already checked her phone, the little radio and the house appliances she knew how to switch off. The note had continued with all of them quiet. Florida Man asked her to leave the bedroom window open while they listened from the porch.

It came again, a high hollow vowel with a rough edge beneath it. He could have made a word of it if he had wanted badly enough. He preferred not to give the evening that much assistance.

Veda pointed to the dark leaves.

“That frame is his. He asked whether I'd mind the flowers coming over.”

“Do you?”

“I thought I'd acquired flowers.”

She went to the fence and called Ron. A light came on behind the neighboring house. Presently he appeared with a flashlight, wearing a shirt he had buttoned one place too high.

“It's doing it now?” he asked.

The garden remained quiet.

Veda folded her arms, then unfolded them.

“It was.”

Ron looked at Florida Man. “I sat here ten minutes earlier.”

“I've heard it twice,” Florida Man said. “Stay for the next breeze.”

Ron shone his light along the vine frame. Its wooden uprights stood in his garden. A bare support wire braced the frame from an old fastening on Veda's porch rail. Part of the run crossed a gap at knee height, clear of the flowering growth.

“I should have moved that fastening before you came,” he said. “I've been meaning to give the frame its own brace.”

Veda looked at the wire. “I wasn't asking you to take everything down.”

“I know. It looks more established than it is.”

Florida Man looked at the thick leaves and the small white flowers showing in Ron's beam. They looked thoroughly established. He let Ron finish.

“I can cut it back.”

“Let's hear what we're cutting back first,” Florida Man said.

They waited. Somewhere beyond the houses, water broke with a sound larger than anything they could see. Veda leaned against her new porch post. Ron kept the light pointed into his own plants.

The breeze reached them from the open side of the yard.

The note rose.

Ron lifted his head. Florida Man saw him hear it properly: the small turn toward the bedroom, then toward the garden, his mouth open around a question he had not yet chosen.

“That,” Veda said.

Ron nodded.

The sound seemed strongest beneath the porch roof. Florida Man walked along the boards, stopping beside each wooden member. At the rail nearest the bedroom, it had a buzz underneath it. He rested his fingers on the wood and felt a fine trembling.

Ron came beside him. Florida Man moved his hand so Ron could touch the same place.

Ron's expression changed again.

“That's coming through here.”

“It sounds farther away from my window,” Veda said.

“It would,” Ron answered, looking at the rail. He sounded less certain of the garden and more certain of her.

Before touching the wire, Florida Man asked Ron to show him its whole run. Ron followed it with the light from the porch hook to the frame and its tied end. It was his plain garden support. Nothing joined it except wood and vine ties.

Veda went inside to listen from her bedroom. Her face appeared at the open window while Ron remained beside the porch post.

At the outer upright, the bare wire passed just clear of a horizontal wooden piece. Florida Man crouched and rested his fingers against it there, gently, without pulling it sideways.

The note stopped.

The leaves kept rattling. A dry flower brushed his wrist.

He released his hand. For a moment there was only the garden. Then the high sound gathered again.

Ron looked at the exposed span.

“My flowers have learned to sing.”

“They've engaged an accompaniment,” Florida Man said.

He rested his hand against the wire once more. The sound dwindled beneath it.

Veda left the window and came down the steps. She stood beside them in the moving leaves, watching his hand.

“Can we keep that part?” she asked.

“My hand?”

“The stopping.”

Ron went for his cutters.

“Wait,” she said.

He stopped at the fence.

“I don't want the flowers gone. I want to sleep.”

Florida Man changed hands. The wire had begun to print a thin line into his palm. Beneath the porch, a loose corner of packing paper flapped against a box with a sound he found positively reassuring.

“There's wood right here,” he said. “We might hold something soft against it instead of holding me.”

Ron considered the small gap between wire and crosspiece. He fetched two short lengths of garden tie. Veda went inside and returned with a folded kitchen cloth.

“Not one of your good ones,” Ron said.

She held it under his light. A faded tomato occupied most of its middle.

“This one's been working for years.”

Florida Man kept the frame steady while Ron folded the cloth into a thick pad. He fitted it between the known wire and the fixed crosspiece, then tied it snugly to the wood so it pressed against the wire. The first fastening merely softened the note. Ron paused, listened, and added the second tie around the pad's far end, keeping the soft contact firm.

Florida Man took both hands away.

They stood clear of the frame.

The breeze pushed through again. Leaves turned their pale undersides toward the porch. The packing paper flapped. No high note rose with them.

Veda went up the steps and into her bedroom. Florida Man heard her set something down. Then her face appeared at the open window.

“Still out there?” she asked.

“All of us,” Ron said.

They waited through another gust. The flowers shook against the lattice. The house stayed quiet.

Veda rested her elbows on the sill.

“I'm staying,” she said.

Ron looked toward the folded tomato, held firmly in its small new job.

“I'll bring a proper pad tomorrow evening. Then I'll arrange that separate brace.”

“After six tomorrow evening,” Veda said. “I'll be home then.”

He agreed at once.

Florida Man carried the last box indoors. Veda cleared a path to the kettle and cut Ron's loaf. They ate standing up, because every chair had been put somewhere sensible and could no longer be found.

At the door, Florida Man looked back along the dark garden. He knew where the voice had come from now. In the moving leaves, the wire was almost invisible.

Veda closed her front door. The bedroom window stayed open.

The next evening Ron arrived after six with a small pad and his shirt correctly buttoned. Veda brought out the cloth when they had changed it over and listened together in the breeze.

“Was it a good night?” he asked.

“Very ordinary,” she said.

She handed him half the remaining loaf.

The real Alligator Point and a wind-played wire

Bald Point State Park stands on Alligator Point at the meeting of Ochlockonee Bay and Apalachee Bay. Its coastal marsh, pine flatwoods and oak thickets give this stretch of the north Florida coast several kinds of habitat close together. Florida State Parks also describes autumn movements of raptors and monarch butterflies through the area.

Wind-driven wire sounds have a physical explanation. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute describes how regularly shed air vortices can excite a suspended wire when their timing matches its natural vibration. The University of Houston discusses the different overtones of an aeolian harp and the problem of damping unwanted wire vibration. The pitch and strength depend on the wire and airflow; every windy garden does not become a musical instrument.