UTOPIAN DYSTOPIA
On Memorial Day, 2020, I spent the afternoon staked out on an ocean-side flat looking for tarpon with my guide, Albert Ponzoa. It’s the same drill we have shared for twenty-eight previous Memorial Days.
In some years the palolo worms have already gone off and the tarpon are bloated and bitchy. Other years we hit the hatch on the head and they’re feeding like bears in September. That significant unknown, along with the weather, are the only variables in this gig. Otherwise, you can pretty much count on the heat, the traffic on US-1, the packed RV lots, the sandbar dance parties, and the cruise ships birthing hordes of doughy people targeting a particular price point. That’s Memorial Day in the Florida Keys: neo-tropical bedlam with some tarpon stirred in. Most years.
While poling the beachfront at Bahia Honda, Albert laughed about a previous incident at that spot when a massive hooked tarpon turned toward the beach and began towing his skiff into hundreds of sun revelers bobbing in the shallows.
“Wa-choo got,
