On that stretch of sand near J.D. Salinger's favorite Daytona Beach hotel

June 1966. My boss asked me why I was drilling a hole so close to the frothing ocean. High tide coming, boy. Looking for bananafish, I said, and turned the auger in the soft wet sand, digging a hole for the tourist's umbrella. What you talkin' about boy? Sir it's a perfect day for bananafish in Daytona. He grabbed the auger and told me to pick up my five dollars for a day's work and get off his damn beach. Now, he said. I dove head-first into the fresh hole. Blue-green water gave way to a murky yellow soup where dead bananafish floated. They ate too many bananas, swelled, and couldn't escape into sunlight. It was summer 1948. Salinger's Seymour tried to explain it to the kids on the beach at Daytona but they just thought him crazy, which he was, I suppose. So this is what you saw in the war, Sergeant Salinger? Bananafish floating, mutilated bananafish everywhere. That dreadful allied mistake off the English coast, bloody Normandy hedgerows, the bitter Bulge, the stink of the liberated extermination camp. Dead bananafish drove you into the asylum in Germany and you never came out, not really. You shipped out to another bigger asylum, the U.S.A., wrote about it, and we never understood. Your stories spread the alarm. We never understood. We kept looking for that one yellow bananafish who made it out into the blue-green waters. We are looking still.

Sources: Sergeant Salinger, Jerome Charyn; A Perfect Day for Bananafish, Nine Stories, J.D. Salinger.