It was one of those gloriously bright, extremely windy and slightly brisk days that feels like Fall up north, and feels rare and magical in Southwest Florida. As we hustled to the boardwalk leading to the beach, long strands of my curly hair got stuck in my lip gloss, which felt simultaneously annoying and glamorous. I’d had my hair cropped short since 2001, and only grew it out due to COVID; at first, because I wasn’t comfortable going into a salon, and then, to see how far I could go with it. I now have a love-hate relationship with it — lightweight but curly and apt to tangle, a product of the Italian roots I only recently learned existed, and possibly the 3% Afro-Caribbean ancestry, according to one DNA test. I was wearing sunblock on my face, because my fair skin is apt to burn when it’s been shielded from sun exposure chronically, as it has these last two years. My husband never wears sunblock, relying on his ample supply of natural melanin to protect him, passed down from his Nigerian, Cameroonian and Kenyan ancestors. We both wore jackets; it was a chilly 52 degrees in January. This was why we’d come to the beach on this day; the cold, which we’d expected and hoped would drive away other people.

It was our first wedding anniversary. Both being nature-lovers and especially enamored with the ocean, it felt right to go there to celebrate our first year together as husband and wife. The cold weather was the perfect opportunity to do that in peace, without the inevitable hardened stares of small-town white people — Florida natives and transplants from the Midwest and North. Homogenous in style, generally over age 50, and dripping with the markers of their politics and ideology — Trump 2020 bumper stickers, “assault life” decals on their cars, fishing shirts and weathered faces, perpetually sour and angry. The cold weather would drive away those people, who invariably come with the hostile body language, the disapproval and visceral disgust showing through their tightly pressed mouths when they see us. They wouldn’t be there. That was our expectation.

Laws banning interracial marriage, specifically between Black and white people, date back to the 1600s. It wasn’t until the 1967 case of Loving vs. Virginia that the US Supreme Court deemed “anti-miscegenation” laws unconstitutional. Mr. Loving was a white man who married a Black woman from their small, unusually heterogeneous community. If you watched the documentary The Loving Story, you know that they didn’t get together in order to make a statement on social justice, they weren’t activists, they didn’t seek each other out in order to rebel against societal expectations. They were two people who shared a community, connected, and fell in love. I don’t know anything about whether the Lovings ventured out into natural environments for recreation, what steps they may have taken to protect themselves when doing so, or what they may have been met with.

What I do know is that outdoor spaces — especially in natural wilderness areas — have largely been reserved for white people. This isn’t news, and efforts to diversify and encourage Black and brown use of outdoor spaces have been ongoing and more and more prevalent. As a woman, I’ve always been careful going to isolated wilderness spaces, because a woman alone is never totally safe from the potential predatory behavior of men; the ubiquitous vigilance we feel around that is generally in response to the risk of being raped and/or killed by some loner, misogynist attacker. The stuff of Law & Order SVU, and while my whiteness doesn’t protect me from this risk, it doesn’t increase it either. Although I’m often mistaken for Latina and people tend to tell me I appear ethnically ambiguous, my white skin is generally a sort of “passport.” Alone, my presence in outdoor spaces in Southwest Florida is probably unremarkable to the majority of people I might encounter, even if I am the only woman without straightened, bleached hair in a 5-mile radius.

But together, with my husband, it’s a different story. I watch them, behind my shades, as they size us up, invariably. Sometimes openly hostile, other times determined to behave as if we are invisible, and rarely, over-eager to be friendly, as if to let us know that our relationship is acceptable. This last one, I feel ashamed to appreciate. Disgusted with the need for the safety of their acceptance, at the same time that I’m grateful for a human’s inclination to send a message — albeit one we shouldn’t need to receive — that we belong. What rarely happens is that they treat us like “everyone else.”

On this day, our first anniversary, we expected that we wouldn’t have to deal with any of that. It was so windy, in fact, that we assumed the sand might produce an assault on the skin, which would surely drive away beach-goers. We were to be safe. There was no one at the entrance, and only a few cars in the parking lot. No people on the boardwalk leading out to the beach. The sea air was wet and pungent, blowing ahead of the storm set to come over the next few days. It felt blissful.

Our feet met the cold, damp sand and we looked around; we were almost right. Except for two people far down the beach walking, the coastline was empty. My spirits lifted further, knowing we were in a human-free, judgment-free zone. Just us, the Gulf, the sand and the sky. We trekked over to a spot slightly to the south of the entrance. We planted our feet in the sand wide, stood relaxed, hands held, and let the wind and sun wash over us. I rolled up my pants and ran into the chilly shallows, giggling. We watched the surface of the water for wildlife, pointing at wave caps and hoping they were dolphins. We basked.

All the while, the two people who had been far down the beach were making their way toward us. As they got closer, they began to take shape. A white man, resembling a large egg, wearing a veteran’s hat. Red flag. Note: I appreciate veterans deeply, and their sacrifices and service. I recently learned that my biological father and grandfather were both veterans, the latter having fought against the Nazis in World War II for five years in Europe, which made me incredibly proud. Notwithstanding that fact, I have observed a close association between those who wear their veteran status on their bodies and cars, and virulent, unmasked racism. This has been my experience, and I learn from my experience. The egg-shaped man had a metal detector, and was sweeping the sand in front of him while he glared at us. He was accompanied by a younger white man wearing an oversized, worn and dirty hoodie and a slack jaw. Both hands were hidden in the front pocket of the hoodie. His eyes were aimed in our direction as well.

We stood about halfway up the beach between the lapping waves and the exit. The men had been swiping the sand close to the water during their entire slow progress toward us. We were roughly 30 feet away from their path, had they continued the same trajectory. But they didn’t.

The egg-shaped man made a sharp left and began ambling toward us, his face alternately tipped down to his feet to see where he was going, and up to look at us. I noticed his coat was oversized, bulky. It was Florida. It was not unlikely that he had a firearm on him. I noticed his legs protruding out of the bottom of his long shorts. Like sausage, yellowed, swollen. Diabetes, maybe. As he got closer, I could see the redness of his nose. Alcoholic, possibly. My husband and I stood more erect, inched closer to each other. I glanced at my husband, the man I love, my best friend, who was giggling with me just minutes ago, out of the corner of my eye. His face was fixed on the ocean, tense. The younger man had followed the egg-shaped man to a point, then stood in place, staring at us. Watching as his father-uncle-boss-whoever continued walking closer, and closer, and closer to us.

The whole beach. There was a whole beach around us, and here this man was, in the age of COVID, approaching the only other people on the beach, for no apparent reason. He was now maybe 10 feet away, within the distance that IF, by chance, he had been approaching us for a legitimate reason — perhaps to ask the time or a question about the surrounding area — he would have said something by now. So it wasn’t that. My head began to draw back on my neck, my head tilting to the side, my brow furrowed as he came within 8 feet. What the hell was he doing? 6 feet. 4 feet. I looked at the other man, who was watching the scene unfold intently, with that mouth still hanging open. His hands were still inside the front pocket of his hoodie. Two firearms, possibly. Or a hunting knife. Those were big here too.