Kingfisher

Indian Pass elegy

Have you seen the kingfisher? Blue like the water, grey like the clouds, belted in red, diving for fish? They inhabit those raw and beautiful spaces at the edge of water and sunlight. The places Wallace Holley loved. 

Several times a week – on my way to work, or on my way home – I saw him fishing at the bridges that cross little inlets to the Gulf, at Money Bayou Bridge, or the bridge at Indian Pass. As far as I could tell, he carried few things on these excursions, but he was never without a fishing pole and a cast net. He wasn’t the only one to fish from these bridges, but he was the only one that showed up so regularly, as if compelled. We all knew him, though most of us never knew his name. 

You might think he was poor, and compelled to fish for sustenance or bait fish to sell, but you’d be wrong. He fished for the sheer love of it. Fishing was in his blood. He was Gulf County personified. The old Gulf County. 

While some men wind their retiring years down into the recliner and the television set, this one refused to wind down, even when the cancer stalked him. He cast and he reeled. And boy, could he pull them in. 

He knew these little roadside bridges arc over abundant nurseries of fish and shellfish. You can catch red snapper and speckled trout here; you can gig flounder, and frogs. And you can haul in more mullet than you know what to do with, if you know what you are doing. And he did. 

He shared what he caught with friends and family. And, like the “fisher among men” you learned about in Sunday School, he shared what he caught with men who were strangers only a moment before. 

His full name was Perry Wallace Holley, but I called him the Kingfisher, because I often saw them together. 

Like Wallace, the belted kingfisher is no visitor to Gulf County. No, the belted kingfisher is lucky to make his home here all year long. Unlike the kingfisher – listed in federal registers as “of least concern,” meaning not threatened or endangered – Wallace was the last of a vanishing breed. A Gulf County original, born and raised in Wewahitchka. A brother, a veteran, a friend, a father; a beekeeper and a fisherman. His riches were not of an earthly kind, but he shared them generously, anyway. He was an ordinary, extraordinary man. A fisher among men. 

Have you seen the kingfisher? He never strays far from the water. The belted kingfisher is often seen perched high on trees, posts, or utility lines close to water before plunging in, in a dramatic headlong plunge after its fish prey. 

Wallace inhabited these places, fishing from the same bridges; making his home near the same riverbanks.

In the communities of Money Bayou Beach and Indian Pass, locals knew him, respected him. He was one of us, though most us never knew his name. We didn’t have to. He was just the Kingfisher: another one of us who came here to get away, to find peace in nature. To fish. 

Until two weeks ago. 

On Aug. 7, Wallace Holley was fatally struck by a distracted driver at the Indian Pass bridge. He died there, despite the heroic efforts of first responders to save him. 

There is a Southern legend that the cardinal – the redbird – is a harbinger of a lost loved one. I know his family will find his spirit in places close to home; I also know that his spirit will be here. Some days they will see the redbird come home, and some days we will see the Kingfisher, fishing on Indian Pass. Some days, we won’t see anything but blue skies and wetlands. To remind us of why we came here, and why we stay. 

Sometimes there will be a rainbow in that place. There’s just something about it – it’s a rainbow kind of place. A sacred place – the Indian Lagoon- at the edge of sunlight and water, where men are still free to fish, and to dream. Or remember. Wallace Holley knew that. That’s where his spirit flew. At the Indian Lagoon. 

His funeral was one in which there was as much time spent sharing fish stories as there was preaching. One where the assembled sang the old gospel hymn, “I’ll Fly Away.” A funeral where the children wore cowboy boots. 

After the service, his daughter-in-law told me she had gone out fishing on the Chipola River with her husband, Wallace’s son. To get away, she said. That’s when they saw the kingfisher. 

Do you see now what the kingfisher sees? What Wallace saw? 

Change is coming. Faster than we planned for. Faster than we can see. 

The residents of Indian Pass have already erected two crosses at the bridge in his memory. One includes a piece of cast net, the other, a crab net. In memory of Wallace Holley, a Gulf County original. 

Wallace Holley will not be forgotten. But what about the coast he loved? 

The next time you cross that old bridge at Indian Pass and catch a glimpse of the rainbow, or mullet jumping, flashing silver against the grey-green wetlands that create the peninsula there, remember Wallace. Remember the Kingfisher. 

I will. 

Mimi Minnick is a seventh generation Floridian. She plans to live happily ever after in her 1938 cottage on Indian Pass.