How to Find a Dragon

Once upon a time, Marco Island was Isla de San Marcos, and then Collier City. One hundred years ago, pineapple farmers were tilling the ground of the Ludlow Fruit Farm and finding bits of pottery and evidence of lives from long ago.

Winter has many rhymes for weather, but limericks survive because of compelling stories, colorful history, and perhaps a little magic fueled by imagination. March might come in like a lion, and roar with wind and ferocious waves, or the month of madness might approach like a lamb but march out in a rage over the loss of another year.

The time of dragons is most certainly beyond ancient and well before the time when March was on any calendar, but the stories that become legends, and truly last, always have origins from a unique beginning.

During another era, in a faraway land, a family of farmers was exploring new ground and searching for fertile soil. After the farmers found a winding watercourse and a rich riverbank, something strange began to come out of the ground.

The family was from a nearby village, but the village was bursting and growing more crowded every year. The riverbank for farming was not close to the village and would not be an easy journey to bring in the harvest, but the plain between the mountains was flat and rich with possibilities.

When the family came and settled the new land, they built a house out of mud and straw that became bricks when they worked together by the stream. When the new house became a home, the family that was small but growing began to farm the new ground.

Every year, the farmers of the new ground worked the bank by the stream that was fast or slow, or moving toward a different course because of the storms. In time, the family and the farm grew and prospered. Every season the family worked further away from the village and their home, but always beside the stream and the water that was washing away the new ground.

One night when the sparkling heavens and all the other glowing worlds were defeated by the clouds, the fingers of God became flashing strokes in the darkness and reached deep into the earth. When the storm finally broke and the wind raged into the night, the pouring deluge brought more rain than even Grandfather had known.

When the flood and the wind stopped at sunrise, the family emerged from the safety of the sturdy bricks and began to survey the spring plantings beside the raging river that was once a stream.

The sound of the watercourse was like the rushing wind, but this was an unstoppable sound, and Grandfather had to raise his voice when he cried out over the seedlings that were lost and all the work the storm had devoured.

After Grandfather railed and cursed at the sky, and the older women tried to comfort him, the youngsters of the family saw an opportunity. The raging water had washed away the streambed and many of the seedlings, but in the fresh air after the storm, and in the morning that was clean and bright, a secret was waiting.

Well beyond the home of mud and straw bricks was a new course in the stream that was now a rushing rapid. The new curve in the watercourse was different in an unusual way. The shallow water was fast and rushing around the curve and the missing seedlings, but something was hiding and waiting to break out of the ground.

When the children, who were always eager, began to approach the new curve that was awash with the thing in the water that would not wash away, the elders in the distance began to call out a warning.

The stream that became a river raged for two days and three nights. On the morning of the third day, the family could hear the birds singing, because the water that fed the family and the farm was once again silent. Near the end of the farm and river that retreated, the stream was once again in her bed, but the new curve in the land was a scar from the rushing water.

Waiting upon the sand of the curve that was now the new riverbank was the skeleton of a creature so old and so timeless that the family stopped and stared until the children rushed in and began to climb upon the bones. The mouth of the creature was resting on the sand for all to see, and when Grandfather stood in front of the teeth that were almost like charcoal in the sun, the family on the shore knew at once that the leviathan could have eaten a house full of Grandfathers in just one bite.

When the family made the journey to the village and told the tale of the creature that the fingers of God excavated, and the storm made whole, it was a fortnight of fair weather before the most curious or perhaps the bravest came to see.

When the villagers began to arrive, it was a trickle of travelers at first, but when the tale began to travel and reach others who were living in another faraway land, the many visitors made a path from the progress of their pilgrimage. In time, another storm came in springtime, and the stream, the farm, and the dragon became a myth slain by the ages.

The remains of the first dragon might have been the remains of a dinosaur lost for millennia and then covered and lost again, but dragon tales will never erode—especially upon a land, or an island—rich with possibilities.