Emerald City

Author Cassandra King reflects on picnicking on the sand, riding the waves, and coming of age in a magical Florida beach town.

- Cassandra King

AH, PANAMA CITY, the enchanted kingdom on the Gulf of Mexico, its beaches with emerald green waves rolling in on white sand as fine as sugar! The land of sunny skies and sandpipers, sea oats waving in the warm breezes, gulls crying their dissonant song! Truly a magical place, unequaled in its tropical lushness, the South’s end of the rainbow, our Land of Oz.

This was the place I loved as a child. Growing up in L.A. (Lower Alabama) in the ’50s, I thought that Panama City was in our backyard, although we lived 90 miles and a state away. Because my mother, a native Floridian, had grown up near the coast, salt water flowed in her veins. To her, it was nothing to pack a picnic and take my sisters and me to the beach for the day. Dressed in our swimsuits, we’d leave early, stash our basket and cooler on a table in either Wayside or St. Andrews parks, and head to the beach toting towels, inner tubes, and little tin buckets.