Stay Off the Grass

To paraphrase Rikki-tikki-tavi, the heroic mongoose in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book excerpt, “What price an egg? What price a king cobra egg?”

             

These were the words that ran through my mind while vacationing recently in Orange Beach, Alabama.  Granted, as far as I know there are no wild king cobras in Alabama, or mongooses, but there were plenty of eggs.  Thousands of them, in fact, pockmarked the white sands along the beach as part of the annual Florabama Easter Egg Hunt.

             

Florabama, as you might guess, is a popular attraction in Orange Beach located near the Florida/Alabama state line.  Each Easter weekend areas of the beach just beyond its multiple decks are sectioned off with orange plastic tape.  Countless eggs are then “hidden” in one of three separate areas:  the toddler zone, the preschool zone, and one for school children who should know better than to eat candy before swimming.

Our daughter had just turned four, and so we found a spot amongst the preschool crowd.  Literally hundreds of children and their handlers, Easter baskets in tow, huddled around the various starting spots.  Anxious, sweating, toes crusted with sand, nearly all of the children waited patiently next to the orange border, which was to be removed at high noon.  To their credit, most of the adults followed suit.

            

As is generally the case, however, whenever people congregate, everyone wants to get a picture.  Because it was difficult to get a good angle, many of the more creative vacationers decided to find their own vantage spot amongst the clearly identified patch of “beach grass.”

            

“Beach grass” is the area of rough vegetation found between the beach and the resort.  Its purpose is to provide a natural buffer to combat erosion during tropical storms and to also serve as a natural habitat for the various animals unwise enough to live so close to shirtless humans.  No one is supposed to stand in the beach grass area.  Many people, though, when forced into making the difficult choice between respecting nature and getting a great picture, choose the later.  This is why most specimens of beach grass will be extinct before you read this column.  Fortunately, thousands of great pictures of those plants will live on until someone deletes them upon realization that they have thousands of pictures of grass.

            

Continuing, at approximately 12:03, the ten-second countdown to noon began.  By the number “seven” the gentle voice of the grade school girl in charge of the orange tape had been swallowed up by the rising chorus of eager egg snatchers.  By “four” even this joyful noise had succumbed to the sounds of preschool desperation.  No one even heard the number “two.”  The lines had been breached.

            

 If you could combine, somehow, the intense, large scale battle scenes from one of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit movies with the intense cuteness of Sesame Street, you might begin to visualize what took place.  Because of my unwillingness to destroy pristine beach habitat, I had no real chance at a good picture.  I simply held my camera aloft like some kind of first-day paparazzi and just starting snapping

            

 I can identify my daughter in three out of the nearly two dozen pictures documenting the chaos.  The rest is just a collage of sprinting pastels. 

            

The visuals are not what sticks with me, though.  It’s the sounds.  The screaming.  The terrible, terrible sobbing of the boy who, merely overwhelmed by the humanity of it all, just collapsed upon the beach with his bucket upon his head.  I still have nightmares of the drill-sergeant staccato of imperatives barked by parents determined that their child “grab the golden egg, Brock!  That’s the one with the good stuff!  The GOLDEN EGG!”

            

In the end, our daughter made out all right.  Despite being closely related to me, she can be rather nimble at times, particular when there is chocolate involved.  Her bucket filled, her eyes wide with adrenaline, she found her nearby mother and smiled.  A few feet to her right, however, the crying boy continued to sob while his mother tried to console him. 

            

“Why is he crying?”  Our daughter asked.

            

“I don’t think he found any golden eggs.”  My wife replied.  “Do you have enough to share?”

             

She looked in her basket, seriously doing the math.  “I think so.”

            

 She quickly walked over and handed him a prized egg, then continued with her day.  That picture I took.  It wasn’t your average Easter snapshot, but it will work, and in a day where we witnessed a man dressed as a giant rabbit parachute onto the beach in front of us, it was actually one of the more normal scenes of our vacation.

            

So, what price an egg?  What price a plastic Easter egg? 

Dead grass?  Boorish behavior?

What price a coveted golden egg? 

A sobbing preschooler? 

What price a plastic egg filled with mostly melted chocolate?  That depends on how much it costs to get the candy stains out of the backseat of our car.