MICHAEL GIVANT
Contributing Columnist
givant@lbknews.com
As my wife and I start the walk to Beer Can Island, my heart is noticeably beating and 
memories come flooding back. There’s the spot where I unearthed a large, almost undamaged lightning whelk that now sits on a bookshelf in our home in New York. There’s a partial makeshift path behind the mangroves where we sometimes walked when the tide was high. There are large mangroves jutting out near it, which we don’t remember, that make this spot look like a foreign country.
We come to the familiar upturned root systems of fallen trees lying on the sand and in the water. Here the landscape changes dramatically. Those roots systems, once trees’ arteries now dried and pitted from seawater, stand like works of art. They are wide enough to be measured in yards. The root systems aren’t decorated with shells as they used to be, but one has a thick rope