Fla. Panhandle: It's Always Something

Ronnie Mapes agrees. He's manned the Sky Pirates Parasailing tent on Miramar Beach for 12 years, just a quarter-mile from where the fatal attack occurred on June 25. Many of his customers return from their flights amazed at the number of big creatures they see swimming among the swimmers. Business has picked back up after the attack, "but not many of them want to be dipped anymore," he says, referring to the practice of lowering parasailers into the water like teabags.

Continuing east along the beach at Seaside, the famous urbanist planned community, the parking lots are full of high-end SUVs from around the Southeast. At the pastel village ice cream shop, Cheira Belguellaoui and Sophie Romeuf eat cones at an outdoor table.

"It's a bit of a bummer not to be able to swim out as far as I'd like," says Belguellaoui. She's a water lover from the South of France who's working on her doctorate in film studies at Florida State University. "It is still very beautiful here, though."

Like most of this coastline, the beach at Seaside has been profoundly eroded by storm seasons that have turned the Panhandle into a Weather Channel highlights reel. Several sets of wooden steps from the 20-foot-high bluffs lie piled on the beach. A steep ramp of sand has been bulldozed into place to give bathers a way down. A chair attendant points out where the sand replenishment built up after Ivan was washed blithely away by Dennis. In some patches, the Panhandle's signature sugar white sand has been stripped down to brown mud.

Panama City feels perhaps the most fully recovered of this necklace of beach towns along the gulf. It's the biggest, and the busiest, with miles of beach and one new high-rise condo after another rising up in a wall along the sea.

On Thomas Avenue, Malcolm Bolden is happily sticking his daughter into the mouth of a Great White. The massive, toothy mockup of a shark head is the entrance to Jaws, a cavernous sundry shop. Bolden and his family, just in from Birmingham, Ala., have stopped to buy a couple of new bathing suits before heading to beach. "We have mixed feelings about swimming" after the shark attacks, he said. "We'll go in, but we'll have it in mind."

On the main drag, the traffic builds with the muffler roars and the Harley rumbles that mark Saturday night in beach towns everywhere. There's still plenty of daylight, but down by the County Pier, a spleen-shivering clap of thunder calls an abrupt end to the day on the beach.

"Okay, that's it," said Amanda Robertson of Nashville as the first sluggish drops of rain drill little pits in the sand. She and her husband gather up towels and flip-flops and assign loads to kids still wet from the surf. There's something almost reassuring -- at a time when the weather goes berserk a bit too often around here -- about an ordinary summer squall.

"I can handle thunderstorms," says Robertson. "That's just part of being at the beach. We'll be back out in the morning."