The House on Stilts

My grandfather’s house on Sanibel Island was constructed from a bizarre mixture of poured concrete, coquina shell, and solid cypress timber, elevated twelve feet above the sand on thick wooden pilings. He was an amateur architect who believed that the only way to live safely on a barrier island was to let the ocean pass under you when a storm arrived. As children, my cousins and I played in the dark, cool space beneath the floorboards, where he stored his hurricane supplies, dry tackle boxes, and brass barometers. The constant clicking of the land crabs on the concrete pilings was the soundtrack to our humid summer afternoons.

From the living room upstairs, the view of the Gulf of Mexico was wide and uninterrupted, a blue horizon that seemed both beautiful and vaguely threatening. During the late nineteen-seventies, before the island was connected to the mainland by a modern bridge, the beach was wilder, covered in thick layers of olive shells, sea oats, and dead sea grapes. We spent our mornings combing the shallows for rare shells, returning with buckets of calico scallops and horseshoe crab armor. My grandfather would examine our treasures with a magnifying glass, explaining how each shell was designed to withstand the crushing pressure of the sea.

That house survived three major storms before it was sold to a real estate developer from Fort Myers in the late nineties. It was eventually demolished to make room for a massive, multi-story beach mansion with manicured lawns and a swimming pool that sits perilously close to the dune line. When I visit the island now, the natural geometry of salt and sand has been replaced by the artificial symmetry of luxury landscaping. Yet, in my dreams, I am still sitting in the dark shade beneath those cypress pilings, listening to the tide creep closer and feeling the house sway with the wind.