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A sleek black cormorant is on our tail. He thinks he’s clever, but we see him, popping his oily ebony head out of the green Gulf and peering at us inquisitively through a piercing, almost-translucent blue eye. In a wet second, he disappears again, and Jack Davis laughs.

“Is he… following us?” he asks.

We talk for a moment about cormorants as notorious fish thieves — many times I’ve given a too-small trout or ladyfish a new lease on life, only to watch one of these diving ducks shoot out from under my boat to steal the liberated fish.

“Did you write about these birds in your book?” I ask him.

“If I’d had this experience before I wrote the book, I would have,” comes his reply.

Kayaking the Gulf with Jack Davis

We’re kayaking back from Shell Key, and, for the moment, the ebbing tide commands all my attention as I navigate Bunce’s Pass. Davis, a Navy veteran who has gone paleo (he’ll gladly expound on the wonders such a diet has done for his cholesterol), doesn’t even break a sweat, chuckling as our new feathered friend pops up again on the port side of his kayak, then the starboard.

It’s fitting Davis seems at home on the Gulf; he’s spent over seven years researching and writing The Gulf: The Making of an American Sea.

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Kayaking fan? Have you tried paddling with your dog?

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Davis, an environmental history professor at the University of Florida, doesn’t write like an academic. He doesn’t speak like one, either: Listening to him talk about the Gulf of Mexico is listening to anyone else tell a story about their Friday night in Vegas (with, admittedly, fewer strippers). And that’s the plan: Take him kayaking on his beloved Gulf and get him telling stories. Davis tells wonderful stories.

The Gulf: A History of an American Sea

It’s not a shock, then, that his substantial book doesn’t contain dusty litanies of names and dates and places you won’t remember after you finish it; rather, Davis has allowed the Gulf to tell its own story. He starts not at the beginning but with Winslow Homer, the landscape painter who first visited and fell in love with the Gulf on the Homosassa River in January 1904.

From there, the book goes back in time to the Gulf’s early human interactions (I should note that Davis’ description of the Calusa is the only one I’ve read that didn’t bore me), then moves through time. The Gulf’s story, at least in this book, is one of time and, often, of heartbreak.

On our paddle out to Shell Key and as we walk along the Gulf of Mexico, we talk about Davis’ relationship with the Gulf. He lives near UF in Gainesville and also has a home in New Hampshire, but at heart he’s a local boy, a proud graduate of Largo High, if not a great student. He admits to skipping 30 days of school the second semester of his senior year to visit Florida icons like Homosassa Springs and Weeki Wachee.

Jack Davis, on the Gulf — and Away From It

It’s clear that Davis loves the water — he has the look so many relocated once-coastal Floridians get when they’re near or on the Gulf, a look of wistful homecoming. Does he miss living by the Gulf, I ask him?

Of course he does, he says, but surprises me when he says the distance was necessary to write the book.

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“Being away from a place allows it to settle in you,” he says. “Without the interference of the place before you, it settles in, finds a place within you from which you can draw.”

That makes sense. Living closer to the Gulf, living alongside the indignities done to it, a writer might pour so much outrage into his writing that it loses power. Living closer to the Gulf, with its nightly seduction of sunsets and waves, might tempt a writer to downplay the atrocities of the Gulf’s declining fisheries.

The Gulf: A Perils of an American Sea

As Davis teases the meaning of the Gulf’s story out of its history, he omits nothing — from Homer’s enchantment with the Homosassa to how fertilizer and paper mills are acts of violence against an enduring Gulf — I realize I’m reading not only an environmental history, but a bittersweet love story. I must stop short of calling it an elegy, because it is not. While Davis doesn’t minimize the clear and present dangers facing the Gulf — quite the opposite — he leaves readers on a hopeful note, if not for a Gulf that will triumph in our lifetime, for something more: The Gulf, Davis writes, will exist.

“The Gulf’s is an ongoing story,” he writes. “In its longer version, humans are as the dinosaurs — only passing through, minor characters making a brief appearance, almost certainly briefer and in some ways no more important than our brief predecessors. In our own eyes, we are neither insignificant or ephemeral, and perhaps that’s why we try to dominate nature, to convince ourselves that we are important and in command.”

This article appeared in print and online with Creative Loafing Tampa in May 2017.