The Pleiadeans

 The Pleiadeans

    Riley's cell phone rings, he opens it. 

A man's voice says, "This is Wilfred Longshore returning Riley Strange's call from earlier this morning."

    "Speaking," Riley says.

    "You met Rhonda?"

    "Yes, she said we should meet you and Agnes."

    "We're home, the house is at the very end of No Name Drive."

    "We're staying at the fish camp, we can be there in a few minutes, if that's convenient."

    "Come on. Beep your horn when you get to the front gate and we'll open it for you."

    "Okay."

    Across No Name Key Bridge, the main road becomes County 4. Along the side of the road are several key deer, clearly looking for handouts. Weakened and half-tamed by handouts, they will lose their vitality, their offspring will not be as vigorous, in time they will become domesticated, and unless taken care of, they will become extinct.

    Riley turns left on Key Deer Blvd and drives to the end and sees the Longshores' octagon house on about 10 foot stilts. He beeps the horn and in a few moments a short balding man of maybe 60 comes down the steps from the house and walks down the driveway to the gate and opens it and waves Riley and Willa Sue in. He walks beside their car until it reaches a parking area for several cars- guests. 

    A Ranger Rover is parked under the house. Also under the house are two huge pale green water storage tanks with a pipe running down from the roof gutters into the top of the cisterns. Between the cisterns is an about 12x12 foot closed space. Switchback wooden stairs rise up the right side of the house. The roof is white aluminum, to deflect sunlight. On the roof facing southeast, south and southwest are solar panel arrays. Behind the house is a canal with a dock and a sailboat maybe 35 feet long. Sails down. And a skiff with a Yamaha outboard motor, hanging from a davit.  

   Winfred shows them an array of batteries on shelves in the enclosed space. On shelves, hoping a hurricane tidal surge won't get that high. They walk to the dock and look toward the Gulf of Mexico. Magnificent view. Mangrove snapper forage around the pier's pilings with an immature barracuda and an osprey overhead diving for dinner. A 4-point buck and a doe key deer forage off to the right. Buzzards circle high overhead. Winfred points at them, says, "They come down her in the cool months, then head north for summer. When there's no wind for them to use to stay aloft, they land anywhere they can, including on boats out to sea." 

    Also soaring aloft are dark birds with forked tails and somewhat bat-shaped wings. "Those are man o' war birds, also called frigate birds. They are fishing and will dive at surprisingly fast speed if they see something. Those pelicans sitting over there in the mangroves with the white birds, egrets, they are diving birds, too. Clumsy as hell, but proficient. The egrets wade shallow water and use their long beaks kinda like spears, and their necks uncoil and spring kinda like a snake strikes."

    Riley says, "I have seen egrets in Alabama and the Florida Panhandle, but more  great blue herons. I have seen ospreys on Alabama river era and lakes. I have read they are all over America. And, I have read they hate and chase eagles."

    "That's true, I have seen ospreys chase bald eagles here many times, and usually the eagles just leave. But once I saw an osprey get about and dive on an eagle passing through, and the eagle rolled over on its back and showed it's lovely talons, and the osprey veered off and the eagle did a 180 and headed pronto back in the direction it had come from. Speaking of snakes, we have the southern diamondback over there on Big Pine. I never saw one on No Name."

    Wilfred motions for them to go into the house and they leave the dock and walk up the stairs. All east, south and west-facing windows have awnings, to keep the sun from coming through the windows, and all the windows have storm shutters. 

    Agnes is in the kitchen. She's about the same height and size as Wilfred. She smiles, says, "Welcome to our paradise get-a-way. Your reputation precedes you. Rhonda told us about seeing you on Oprah. We don't have television."

    Willa Sue says, "Stealthy Rhonda, she didn't say anything about seeing us on Oprah."

    Agnes says, "I imagine most people on No Name and Big Pine heard on the local coconut telegraph, that is, grapevine, that you are here. In fact, there is a public Internet forum called 'The Coconut Telegraph' - bigpinekey.com. A fellow who calls himself "Deer Ed" runs it. You want to find out what's going on around here and all over the Keys, read "The Coconut Telegraph."

    Riley nods, says, "Thanks for the tip, and for the heads up."

    Agnes says, "Ronda told us she's going to splash you  on The Coconut Telegraph."

    Willa Sue looks at Riley, who looks at her. This ain't what they had in mind, at least not just yet. 

    Willa Sue says, "Your home is cool inside, and it's pretty warm outside. How is that so?

    Wilfred says, "We use vents in the floor around the house and reverse ceiling fans and vents in the eves to draw cooler air under the house up into the house."

    "ingenious," Rileys says.

    "Ancient peoples knew about that," Agnes says.

    Riley asks, "What do you do with your batteries after they wear out?"

    "We load them into the Range Rover and drive them to a place in Homestead that recycles them," Wilfred says.

    "Willa Sue says, "I don't see a laundry. How do you wash your clothes?"

    "In the shower, when we bathe, then we hang the clothes over the deck railing to dry in the sun and wind," Agnes says.

     "We cook with propane," Winfred says. "And, we don't have a generator for backup. We use flashlights, candles and lanterns, if the batteries get low."

    "You drink the rainwater you collect?" Willa Sue asks.

    "Yes, and we've done it for years and never had any problem. We have wire mesh over the gutter rails, to keep debris out of the water we collect. We learned our vegetable plants much prefer rainwater to public water. They put bromine in the public water here, instead of chlorine."

    "Bromine?" Riley asks."

    "Yep. Don't need as much bromine as you need chlorine. They pull the water out of aquifers near Florida City and run it through a processing plant and a desaline plant they built to process brackish water. Then, they mix the two kinds of water together and send it down here through a pipe attached to the bridges. They installed a bigger pipe in the 1980s, and they widened some roads and built some new bridges, and that's when development took off down here. Before the bigger waterline, no new construction could tap on. So, there was no real estate development. Well, there were no new buildings. They knew the bigger waterline was coming and developers bought land and dug canals and subdivided and sold lots. The silt from the canal digging and road grading went into the water and out to the reef and made it harder for the sun to get into the water, and algae that rely on photosynthesis, which corals fed on, died and the reef nearly all died. Don't suppose it helped the reef for all the homes using cess pits to start with, then septic systems.' 

   "Key West pumped its raw sewerage through a pipe out into the ocean. The Ocean Reef Club dumped its raw sewage into its saltwater creek on outgoing tides. A fellow named Captain "Eco" Ed Davidson, former navy carrier pilot in Vietnam, filed a lawsuit in federal court. The judge fined Ocean Reef $60,000 a day until it stopped dumping human shit into the saltwater creek. All the divers and medical doctors down here know the ocean is full of MRSA flesh-eating bacteria, MRSA is a kind of staphylococcus that resists antibiotics, and if you go into the water with a nick or scratch on your skin, you will be fighting for your life. You'll never hear about it from the Chambers of Commerce and the Tourist Development Council and the real estate developers and the county commissioners."

    "We have a compost toilet. Our septic tank only handles kitchen and bathroom water. We feed our food wastes to Mother Nature, and we recycle our paper and plastic wastes."

    "And you call this Paradise?" Riley asks.

    "It's as close to paradise as we can find," Winfred says.

    Riley looks at Willa Sue, who looks at him, as they think, What in the fuck are we doing here? This place ain't no paradise. We been to paradise. Dominica in the Caribbean. This place is a wannabe.

    Willa sue says, "So, people are the invasive species here, messing up paradise."

    Agnes says,"Most people are. We don't hurt paradise." 

    Willa Sue says, "Well, you bought a house on that canal outside, and somebody dug it out and sent all that silt into the ocean and killed corals."

    Agnes says, "The canal was dug before we moved here."

    Willa Sue says, "Wonder how Mother Nature sees that? Wonder if she will say enough is enough, and send monster hurricanes and sweep the invasive species into the ocean?"

    Winfred says, "To tell the truth, we feel the same. We would really miss living here, but you are right. Mother Nature is a lot more important than people. We just nest here. This is her home."

    Anges says, "Mother Nature's first line of defense here in mosquitoes. The freshwater mosquitoes here have been known to carry yellow fever, zika, dengue, chikungunya and West Nile virus. The Mosquito Control Board keeps the freshwater mosquitoes knocked way back. We think a lot less people would live in the Keys, if there were no Mosquito Control Board. We also have saltwater breeding mosquitoes, they are smaller than the freshwater breeders. The salties bite like hell, but as far as we know, they don't carry those diseases.'

    Riley says, "Hmmm, did MRSA become Mother Nature's first line of defense after Mosquito Control got rid of most of the freshwater breeders?

    Wilfreds says, "That's a really good question. Reminds me of the old saying, 'Don't mess with Mother Nature'."    

    Willa Sue says, "Rhonda said you folks say you are from the Pleiades."

    "That's what we believe, Agnes says."

    "How'd you come to believe that?"

    "A channel in Santa Fe told us that. And then we read "Bringers of the Dawn, by Barbara Marciniac, who channeled the Pleiadeans. And then we started dreaming about Pleiadeans and their ships. And then we saw a Pleiadean ship in Oregon. It was hovering parked beside a cloud about 100 times its size. We were with other people who, like us, were mental health professionals. We told them to look up, but they didn't look up. We kept telling them to look up, and they didn't look up. The ship darted behind the cloud. Then, the cloud started being stretched across the sky like a really wide vapor trail. We kept telling the others what we were seeing and for them to look up, but they didn't look up. We figured then that we needed to live somewhere else and do something else, and that's why we moved here."

    Riley asks, "Have you seen that spaceship since then? Or another ship?"

    "No."

    "You read about those people in California, a cult, who drank poison to go be with extraterrestrials?

    "Yes. There are all kinds of fanatics."

    "Do you two belong to "Stop The Bulldozers?"

    "No."

    Riley looks at Willa Sue, she nods slightly, says, "We really appreciate you folks showing us your nice off the grid home. We imagine Mother Nature likes off the grid homes a lot more than she likes regular homes. We got some more exploring to do, so we better get on with that. Maybe you can persuade the Pleiadeans to help paradise shake off some of its fleas? But then, we've been hoping Archangel Michael will shake off some other kind of fleas we've been having dealings with, and so far, Michael keeps telling us to do our own fumigating."

    Wilfred laughs.

    Willa Sue smiles wanly.