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A small band of day-trippers assembled on a humble rustic dock behind a tourist beach gift shop for the pleasure of a ride to a southern US east-coast barrier island in a flat bottom skiff for the handsome sum of 25$ a piece. Gingerly, the sightseers stepped down from the aging pier into the boat, swinging their picnic lunches, kites, bird scopes, and backpacks in ahead of themselves. 

They were the usual suspects. A thirty-something schoolteacher wearing a t-shirt with her elementary school’s name emboldened on the chest. She was pretty in the face and thick in the thigh, quick to take charge, and confident in her authority; she was the first one in the boat. 

A plump forty-something woman with mean eyes accompanied by two stout early-teen boys making snarky comments to one another were next. There was no accompanying man in sight. She was quick to sneer at the other day visitors. She looked with a scrunched face at a young man of indeterminant foreign dark-skinned origin who spoke with a thick accent. It was unclear if her disdain was for something in particular she found objectionable or if she was simply xenophobic. When a pretty woman sat down beside him and placed her hand on his knee, she looked appalled. Again, it was unclear if she was repulsed by something specific about the striking woman or that the glamorous gal was drawn to the swarthy immigrant.  

When the female half of a twenty-something couple climbed in the boat, sat down, and pulled off her sweatpants, the boy’s mother looked disgusted at the girl’s unshaven legs, as if they were covered in manure. The female’s other half exceeded her furry physique with a wild mound of curly hair and beard circling his face in wool. 

An elderly woman was assisted aboard by the boat’s captain and owner. He stood in the middle of the vessel’s deck, directing traffic. When the older woman sat down, she eagerly told the hairy lass that the schoolteacher was her daughter. 

Coming late was a sixty-something husband and wife swaddled in pale linen and wide-brimmed hats and coated in suntan lotion that turned their faces white; the man carried a birding scope mounted on a tripod on his shoulder. After they boarded, the boat captain suddenly greeted the gentleman, reaching out to shake his hand and saying, “I didn’t recognize you.” 

The man responded, “Skin cancer.” 

And the captain acknowledged, “It happens.”   

After helping the passengers aboard and making sure everyone was seated, the ship’s captain then stepped behind the steering wheel at the back of the boat and maneuvered the motor-powered craft around the harbored sailboats and catamarans, past the ferryboat landing, and out into the inlet, across which lay the nature preserve that promised a day of shelling, birdwatching, and sunbathing.