As I was wondering aloud what it would be like to descend into water so deep it holds ice-age mastodon bones, Q asked if I’d actually do it. Maybe tomorrow if we have time, I said. (All marriage counselors agree that tarradiddle to a spouse is acceptable — if it’s patently obvious bunk.)
Mo had left a hand-drawn map directing our way southward a few miles along a road paralleling the Wakulla to its junction with the St. Marks River about six miles above its mouth in Apalachee Bay where, five more miles from the open water of the Gulf of Mexico, one entity after another contested the area since at least 1677: Indians, pirates, England, Spain, France, America, Confederates and Federals. That long and curving shore of upper Florida, fretted with stream outlets and heavy marsh grasses and impenetrable thickets, had until recently proved too topographically uncertain to lure big-dollar development. Yet, with the rest of the coast at last largely built-upon or being readied for draglines and dozers, the northern section had become highly vulnerable.
Some years ago, Floridians started naming their coasts: the stretch around Miami became the Gold Coast, the reach above St. Petersburg was the Nature Coast, Pensacola lay on the Emerald Coast, and — although its limits varied — the curve of the Gulf from about Cedar Key to Panama City belatedly turned into the Forgotten Coast. Just who it was who forgot it, I never learned, but it certainly wasn’t developers and speculating buyers of land. Throughout that area, realty signs sprouted in the underbrush like palmettos, and a billboard summed things up: IT’S ALL ABOUT REAL ESTATE.
At the little counter in Posey’s Oyster Bar on the St. Marks River sat my friend whom I’d not seen for so long; on one side was his wife, Celia, and on the other, Rosalie Shepherd, the watercolorist for his book. Also waiting were two bottles of beer at two empty seats for Q and me. Arriving soon after us was a bowl of fish dip, a name sounding like some piscatorial prophylaxis, a parallel to what farmers use to disinfect sheep.
I now believe mullet fish dip, a delicacy tricky to find, is deliberately unappetizingly named to conserve a limited resource. Recipes for it vary, but most begin with smoked fish pulled from the bone and then minced before adding differing ingredients: crumbled crackers, cream cheese, pickle relish, celery, mayonnaise, but always with spices remaining secret from maker to maker. Q, as she quite possibly took more than her share from the bowl, asked why I’d never told her about smoked-mullet spread. I said the classic fish dips of Old Florida, like state-champion trees, must be kept secret to protect them from excessive appreciation. (My second falsehood of the evening; in truth, Mo had just introduced me to them also, a detail raising the question why he had never before mentioned them to me.) To avoid missing out on such discoveries is another reason for traveling often to see friends, even when they live halfway across the continent. For the next several days, he and I would be looking for smoked-fish dips along the coast, comparing recipes and executions. As he talked about second-to-none amberjack spread, the rest of us were piling soda crackers with Posey’s mullet dip; I could have made a fine meal of it on saltines had not baskets of fried-snapper sandwiches and coleslaw come to the table. At moments like those, all the yellow highway stripes between Missouri and Florida seemed as nothing.
The old café, its floors showing more relief than the surrounding land, had commensurately undulating wooden walls and ceiling, the latter mostly concealed by a gray cloud of signed dollar-bills that, like an approaching storm, had begun descending earthward along support posts. At Posey’s, the custom got started years ago, explained the bartender, when a commercial fisherman flush from a sale of mullet put his name on a few bills and tacked them overhead so he’d have money for beer the next time his nets came up empty. On the night we were there, his original four dollars had multiplied into about fifteen hundred. Mo said, “The authenticity disappears once tourists start adding their autographed bills,” to which Q responded, “Maybe it’s a new authenticity beginning.”
After supper, he and I walked out back to the porch at the edge of the St. Marks River, once a haven for pirates. Buccaneers long dead, my flashlight beam revealed only dark water alive with slow gliding red dots — eyes of alligators. Did Posey’s qualify for his book? “It’s authentic and unpretentious,” he said. “And it’s aged to the point of being beat-up. The food’s local and good. The building’s right on the water, and it’s out of the way — a place you have to search for. But, like so many other places today, it’s missing a key element.” Which is? “Where are the commercial fishermen? Here instead you’ve got college students.” I said Posey’s, then, must not be a kind of Bobbie Cheryl’s Anchor Inn. He looked blank for a moment before the memory returned. “No,” he said with a smile more enigmatic than joyful. “The Anchor’s something else.”
On our return to the black lagoon, I mentioned moviemakers using the great Wakulla Spring as a stand-in for the Gill Man’s Amazon and Tarzan’s Africa. How is it visitors by the millions seek a passive voyeurism of the fake rather than an examination of the genuine? Perhaps a corner of Nebraska or Kansas could use the plasticated boost of a Magic Kingdom, but why would anyone willing to enter the once-abundant native landscape of Florida need any such falsity? Tell me, O Swami.
Swami didn’t really answer. Rather, he said, “Maybe because most of the authentic is gone. What’s left for them?” Well, I said, but he went on: “You can see how a place like Posey’s, with a water view, sits in the eye of a hurricane — one that may never hit. And now, all those places are in a more deadly eye of some developer or speculator in California or Chicago who wants to turn them into a Magic Kingdom of commercial fishermen’s taverns. Or worse, knock them down for waterside condos.”
We rode quietly through the dark and wet land. Almost inaudibly, he said, “Maybe my guidebook will help preserve, and maybe it’ll only speed up change. Maybe identifying the few places left will push them right into a developer’s portfolio.” For a mile or so he was quiet again, then, “Maybe instead of a guide I should write something that’ll leave them anonymous. Maybe I shouldn’t write it up at all.” If anonymity is necessary for survival, I said, then they’re probably doomed with or without your words.
His search, I’ll mention here, was inspired and informed by Ray Oldenburg’s 1989 book, The Great Good Place, which analyzes “happy gathering places where unrelated people relate.” Among such “third places” (after those of home and work), Panhandle Floridian Oldenburg writes about Viennese coffeehouses, German beer gardens, French cafés, Greek tavernas, English pubs, and the American country-store. Mo believed commercial fishermen’s taverns of recent years served a similar purpose in bringing watermen together as well as linking them with their community. Given a certain closeting of American life of late, abetted in no small way by electronic communications and entertainments, he feared the demise of third places, and it bothered him. He was a son of old Middle Georgia where civilization — and that includes civility — requires a proper forum. A convivium.
3
Arrows That Flieth by Day
THE NEXT MORNING Q and Celia headed south on a trip of their own, and Mo and I struck out on old U.S. 98, but we got no farther than a dozen miles before pulling into the woods to follow a sign nailed to a tree: TUPELO HONEY & MAYHAW JELLY. The makers, a couple in their late seventies, were just departing on an errand, but they paused to sell us honey. I asked what put the tupelo in it. “Our bees,” the woman said in a Panhandle lilt ever harder to hear even in Wakulla County. “In spring they visit tupelo blossoms down in here all along the river. Your mouth will tell you it’s not like other honeys.” That evening after I dribbled it over a couple of crackers, I said, echoing a phrase I’d heard two days earlier, “I knowed we shoulda boughten more.”
Motier Davis saw his thick black hair change early to titanium white, a topping that distinguishes him and befits his courtly manners, they in turn enhanced by his distinctive speech known among linguists as Plantation dialect. As if his regular features were not enough, his pronunciatio
ns — at least when he was at the University of Missouri — were a veritable magnet even to the most bronze-clad feminine hearts. (The virtual voice on his dashboard GPS hears his “I-95” as “Mighty fine.”) With his intelligence, that Plantation locution has stood him in good stead wherever he’s been. Even in Florida, people will talk to him just to hear him talk, and that he does well. Getting to know this gentle man, a Georgian Don Quixote forever tilting at the windmills of his dreams, did much to set straight my youthful misconceptions about the South. Without his friendship and counsel, although he’s a year younger, my travels in Dixie would have had a different cast.
Sagging down like a line of wet laundry, old U.S. 98 followed the curve of the Gulf about as closely as a road could, the sound of the waves sometimes overcoming the hum and thrum of auto tires. We rolled through little Panacea, its name likely coming from waters once alleged to heal ailments beyond counting; the promotion by Bostonians of that spring is a story of nineteenth-century speculators — a history begun by Ponce de León’s legendary and unfulfilled quest for his Fountain — that continues even as new remunerative “springs” of a manufactured sort come forth.
Carrabelle, a town I remembered from a couple of decades earlier, now looked more prosperous, less down-at-the-edges, less frayed, less of a commercial fishermen’s town. We saw more deck shoes than Wellingtons, more spinning reels than nets, more cruisers than shrimp trawlers. The new prosperity was much the result of Forgotten Coast marketeers realizing how marketable forgottenness can be in a state gaining forty new residents every hour. Crowding apparently improves human memory.
All of that had translated into a northern Gulf coastline of ever more housing built atop twelve-foot pilings designed, in theory, to let saltwater storm surges wash in and wash back out, leaving behind not even so much as a soggy doormat. Those places looked like spindle-shanked fat men waiting to tiptoe into the Gulf. The dwellings weren’t exactly flimsy unless you consider the meteorological forces they challenge, but aesthetically, they had the lines of matchboxes atop chopsticks. A day earlier, a man had described them to me as “unneedless hurricane bait.” The Calusa people here, prior to the arrival of the Ponce de Leóns, lived with the wind and not against it. But the Western hubris is to try to invent ways to withstand hurricanes and storm surges, the residents acting like a boxer who believes he’s too good ever to have to dodge a solid punch.
I asked Mo if he thought for most people vacationing there, whether cognizant of it or not, the best part of a day at the beach was the idea of a day at the beach. Concept over actuality.
I spoke of a friend who thinks he likes to travel, yet whenever asked whether he enjoyed his last trip to wherever, he answers unfailingly, “Not really,” and he begins to enumerate the reasons. What he enjoys isn’t travel but rather the logistics of travel, the contemplation of discoveries, the premeditation of trains leaving on time and carrying no crying babies, hotels with windows that open, restaurants free of sour waiters, roads dry and straight and uncongested, and above all a digestive tract never challenged by unaccustomed fare. He loves the architectural drawing of a journey and not the actual structure where the bubble of true plumb is always a couple of degrees askew, where two-by-sixes warp and hinges loosen, where a carpenter needs a sledgehammer as much as a tape measure. And indeed, to love the reality of the road, a traveler does well to pack a small, emotional sledge ready for frequent application.
Along old 98, I was having to beat down memories that not so much made me long for what once was there but simply left me almost sadhearted over what likely will be. As dyspepsia is to a diner, so personal nostalgia is to the traveler.
The challenge in Mo’s project was not only finding a few surviving watermen’s taverns but presenting them historically rather than nostalgically — and that’s always miry ground for a writer depicting places of what used to be. After a couple of hours on the road, he grew disappointed we’d not turned up anything remotely authentic. “Maybe I’m too late,” he said. And then, perhaps to urge his search on, “I guess every historian of any topic is always too late.”
Let me here, in my words, suggest what he was looking for: a cast of ordinary people who establish the character of a place and set a tone free of pretense and class distinctions, everything carried on in an atmosphere offering escape from the demands of jobs and family, while opening into a congeniality that sloughs off any decision beyond naming one’s potion. About the physical structure itself, I’ll say more later.
A big fist of a thundercloud rose in the southeast, the sky occluded, and at Eastpoint, a settlement as smack on the Gulf as one can get, we stopped to walk around. Propped in the window of a shut-down tavern was a card with these words: FOR IVAN — PSALMS 91. It was a reference to the last hurricane to lay low that piece of the coast. Mo said, “Between hurricanes and developers, my guidebook’s getting thinner by the day.” He nodded toward the sign. “Here’s another page that won’t be.” Later we looked up the biblical citation:
Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night, nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any plague come nigh thy dwelling; for he shall give his angels charge over thee. They shall bear thee up in their hands lest thou dash thy foot against a stone.
The tavern owner, though, must have had in mind not that King James Version but some condensed and revised bible of the American developer: “Thou shalt buildeth directly in the path of the terror by night and putteth thy life investment into the hands of angels.”
A few steps away was a place, built only an increment or two beyond sticks and straw, easily reconstructed should the next Ivan or Charley or Katrina send it flying across Franklin County. The Eastpoint Oysterhouse and Raw Bar, right beside a shucking house for Apalachicola Bay oysters, squatted under a corrugated metal roof mangled by some destruction that wasteth, the oystertorium in need of little repair beyond a tacking back down by a kid with a twelve-ounce hammer. American architecture should have a place for the deliberately, flimsily, permanently provisional.
Of several hand-lettered signs hanging on the front were two we wanted: FRESH MULLET and SMOKED FISH. On the back stoop at the edge of St. George Sound, a fellow was just about to pull amberjack from the smoker and mash it into a paste of cream cheese, mayonnaise, and freshly squeezed lemon juice. We sat at a table near him, the damp Gulf air getting damper as the rain moved in, a pelican on a piling continuing to hold out her wings, whether still trying to dry them or, having rethought the weather, trying to wash them, I couldn’t determine. Perhaps she was readying herself to be borne up in angelic hands.
The smoker-man set before us two servings of fish dip. “Amberjack,” said Mo after the first taste, “the consummate spread.” We ate, he took out his pad to make notes, and both of us felt we’d at last found a temporary survivor from the terrors by night and arrows that flieth by day, and I said so. He asked, “Are you talking about hurricanes or developers?”
The manager, Wally, a retired Ohioan, came out with two glasses of beer, and I asked him what changes he’d seen in his three decades there. “This is a last frontier that’s about gone,” he said. “They’ve found us out. Forgotten Coast? Baloney. Today, nothing in Florida with land under it is forgotten.” Pointing eastward across the sound, he said, “Out on Dog Island a few weeks back, five acres went for almost a million-and-a-quarter, and that’s for a piece of scrub-covered sandbar with no access except a landing strip or whatever shallow-draft boat you’ve got.” He sat down and said, “What do you call a piece of open land in Florida?” A memory? “No.” An oversight? “A future condo hole,” he said.
As he talked, a hard rain rattled on the metal roof and the corrugations poured off hundreds of rivulets to draw down a watery curtain. The difference between the water on the roof and the humid air under it was distinguishable largely by the noise. I asked Wally whether he s
till noticed the humidity, and he shrugged. “You know why little old ladies come here?” To find little old men? “They come here to rehydrate their skins. Get one of them good and damp, and she can shuffle off ten years. Who wants to feel a dry sponge when he can have a damp one?” He noticed me scribbling. “You’ve heard of the Southern beauty? The Miss Americas? That’s all about humid air and eating Southern vegetables and wearing sunbonnets — or it used to be, anyway. Ever been to Arizona? Have you seen those old gals out there? The short ones turn into raisins and the big ones look like prunes. No Georgia Peaches in that desert.” To slow him down, I stopped writing.
Mo and I went back onto the road to wander into what had turned to drizzle, but he found no further places for his guide. Finally, in Apalachicola, an agreeable town letting its history show to advantage, at the Seafood Grill of 1903, we hung up the day with a glass of rum and a grouper sandwich. My friend, knowing recent hurricane devastation had been worse westward, figured any promise of a watermen’s place would be greater farther south, down along the Big Bend, the heart of the Forgotten Coast.
A woman just shy of her middle years, whose eyeliner the rain had redrawn into something like black teardrops, was talking to the bartender. She spoke of a dead-end job, about domestic infelicities, about fading dreams. Without anger, she said, “I got a livin room, but in my life I got no room to live in, and that means I’m doin some wrong livin.” Mo, who’s written a couple of good country songs, perked up. I was scribbling when he whispered, “Did you get it?” I said maybe she’d been reading too much Gertrude Stein.