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Complete FLORIDA TODAY coverage delivered to your door. Subscribe now. 2001.11.27 19:27:04 Following Cathie Katz's debut for Sierra Club Books last year, it
appeared Nature a Day at a Time: An Uncommon Look at Common Wildlife was
simply a preview of things to come.
At age 52, after considerable trial and error, the much-traveled "Sea
Bean Lady" from Melbourne Beach had found her voice, and she regarded the
enticing prospects like a kid with a nose pressed to the glass of a candy
store. "I'm using creative visualization," she said then, "and I can
picture myself as a 90-year-old woman signing books about sea beans."
Like the annual Sea Bean Symposium she founded five years earlier, or
her tri-annual Drifting Seed newsletter with an audience in 20 countries,
or her four meticulously illustrated, self-published books with
environmental themes, the hooks and bends in the river of Cathie Katz's
life had converged into eloquent currents of cogent observation. Her work
navigated the natural world and its order, at once unforgiving and
reaffirming. From the conjugation of parasitic microbes to swift endings
amid raptors' talons, Katz wove the fabric of life and death into a
tapestry of eerie mirrors on the human experience, without pretension or
proselytizing. She delivered an edgy point of view, cushioned with the
smarts of a dispassionate veneer.
So maybe, in retrospect, it was fitting that an environmentalist who
mined revelations from the seemingly ordinary and insignificant found
herself struggling with end-stage cancer at the doorway to broader
commercial success. She had been to the brink before, in her 20s, when she
was nearly killed in a car wreck on the German autobahn.
"She told me she was living on borrowed time from that moment on,"
recalls Ed Perry, a state park ranger at Sebastian Inlet. "She said every
day she got after that was a gift from God."
This from the daughter of a Jewish father and an atheist mother, her
world view shaped by Quaker tutelage through her senior year in high
school. Katz's pursuit of traction drew her to jobs in the disparate
worlds of Germany and Israel (to mention just two), and there were no
shortcuts through the forests of familiar painkillers. What surprised her,
at the end of the search, was the primordial simplicity that confronted
her along the shoreline of her final sanctuary -- the beach.
The story she liked to share was her epiphany during a sea turtle
encounter. For the first time in her life, Katz tuned in to an exhausted
reptile as it completed its journey of uncounted miles to the scene of its
birth under shadow of night. Instead of resting, the creature merely
hoisted its bulk against an impossible slope, planted its seeds in the
sand, and vanished into the ocean, the source of life on Earth. Katz
wasn't the same after that.
"When you read her nature books, you feel like you're walking side by
side with your best friend," says Perry, who was recommending her work to
tourists long before he met Katz six years ago. "She was this really neat
person who talked about bird poop and guts, and knew how to bring the
importance of ecology together in a way that the average person could
relate to. Good interpretation does that -- it takes you beyond the
obvious and changes your way of thinking."
If Katz envisioned Nature a Day at a Time as the first in a series of
books, she also knew nature obeyed its own cycles. Still, she resisted.
Perry says she eased up last Tuesday after being assured that her friends
would carry on with her newsletter and the Sea Bean convention.
Consequently, her passage on Thanksgiving can only be attributed to
coincidence.
Memorial Services are scheduled today for 4 p.m. at Brownlie-Maxwell
Chapel in Melbourne.
What Cathie Katz leaves behind is a box full of 3-by-5 note cards from
her unfinished book. She called it Beaches and Beyond. She introduced it
this way:
"When I lost my ability to walk on the beach because of cancer, my
world expanded when my friends gave me beach reports. I saw the universe
through their eyes, another dimension which I've included in this book,
too.
"Could I trust that the words would come? I wasn't sure what needed to
be said, but I know I had to hurry. I loved the urgency. I loved the
compelling nature of the days. I was luckier than anyone deserved. To have
this joy of living fully, for the first time, day after day, without
knowing how many days were left, made each one the biggest, best and
brightest I'd ever experienced."
For those who knew Cathie Katz, or for those who enjoyed her books,
regular updates will be posted at low tide.
Billy Cox's column runs every Wednesday. He can be reached at 242-3774,
or Florida Today, P.O. Box 419000, Melbourne, FL 32941-9000.
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Florida Today 11-28-2001 ALL web pages © www.seabean.com --- All rights reserved. ALL photos © www.seabean.com or other photographers individually credited. Use of ANY photo without written permission is prohibited! |