We took a third-floor chamber in the old Gibson Inn, a wooden-veranda place immaculately kept, a genuine and pretty piece of an earlier Florida, and I think the quarters lifted his hopes that his quest wasn’t too late. The next morning I found him in the dining room, already fed, working in his notebook, a good sign. He was again anticipating his search.
A few miles westward, we checked his assumption about damage beyond Port St. Joe, and indeed found nothing useful to him, so we turned back east, dropping south to pick up Florida 30-A which led us to Indian Pass on St. Vincent Sound, the southernmost point of the Panhandle. And there, in faded clapboard, was another qualifying place, and Mo was smiling.
4
Dead Man Stream
THE TRADING POST, a 1929 country store, sat at a T intersection between the Gulf and a large spread of pine forest, and inside the building at the oyster raw-bar lay the center of Indian Pass — not the opening to the sound but a settlement too small to be even an opolis. Among just enough canned goods and bags of pretzels and billed caps to keep the term general merchandise more or less accurate were University of Florida football mementos: helmets, pennants, and posters. Also on display was a superannuated, stuffed squirrel we were able to identify by a few bits of fur still clinging to its desiccated skin. Next to it was a little pinnace, aluminum sails full, ingeniously made of cut-up beer cans.
We sat at the short counter, within talking distance of a man shucking oysters. Mo ordered a tray of raw ones, and I asked for a dozen roasted. The shucker, watching me watch him, pulled an oyster from a bucket and said, “You want to open your own?” He tapped the shell with his oyster knife. “All you got to do is make yourself a hole between the shells, then wallow her out.” I took the thick blade and began wallowing. I stopped at a dozen, handed them to a broken-toothed man wearing a GATORS cap pulled down far enough to bend over his ears. He slid the oysters into a little oven. I asked if he was the chef. “Chef! Hell, I’m just the oyster guy.” Mo opened his dozen as he listened to the shucker who was also the manager, a youngish fellow smart enough, since he wouldn’t have time for supper, to put an occasional fresh oyster onto a cracker, sauce it, and eat it.
Intently serious, he talked of the effects of two hurricanes a couple of decades earlier. “Those storms wiped out the oystering and shrimping beds along in here for a while,” he said. “That’s when the place started turning to tourism. This building where we’re at had four feet of water in it. After that, some of those other buildings outside just got ate up by termites.” He took another oyster, aligned it on a cracker, doused it, and swallowed it down. “The oystering beds are now about ninety-five percent state owned and about five percent leased out private. It’s a different business these days, and people argue about whether state management is better or worse. But for sure, we’re now into more and more tourism, but this used to be turpentine country. From the pines. That’s all gone.”
The oysters came to us on metal beer trays, the established way to serve any Southern mollusk or crustacean, although I’m not yet entirely convinced it’s truly the tray that imparts the last bit of flavor. We seasoned them with pepper sauce and went at them slowly, but my friend, observing they were a snack and not a meal, advised against ordering another round. I countered that, while he, now a Gulf Coast Floridian, could get to a raw-bar almost anytime, I could not. What’s more, any author of a guide to watermen’s hangouts should double-test the offerings of the house; otherwise, there could be judgmental errors impairing future sale of a future book just then on his mind. Alas, my failed logic suggests that even a good and companionable friend — or an honored spouse — may prove to be something less than a foreseeing comrade of the road. As Gus Kubitzki once counseled, “A fried chicken-leg on your plate is worth two plump hens in the coop.”
We turned back eastward through the pine-and-palmetto woods punctuated by signs, not clumsy ones like we’d seen yesterday — WORMS AND BEER or YARD SALE IN BASEMENT — but elegantly painted expressions of another sort: HORSEBACK RIDES ON THE BEACH and DENTISTRY BY THE SEA and VOTE YES ON TOURIST TAX and HALF ACRE FOR SALE WILL SUB-DIVIDE. It was my third trip — the first in the ’50s — over that section of U.S. 98, and I knew, should there be a fourth, my memory then would no longer recognize the route.
When we came again to Posey’s in St. Marks, we stopped — professedly to stretch our legs, and it was only chance that a cup of mullet dip happened to be in the cooler, and when the bartender insisted it had our name on it, we had little choice but to let her set it before us. Rudeness does not benefit a traveler. I asked her, a lively woman from Pennsylvania, why there was ice in the long trough serving as the men’s urinal. She said, “That’s how we make our light beer.” On that score, our beverages were safe.
It may have been the dip that turned Mo contemplative as he began talking about the watermen’s taverns he was in search of. Were I to set down all he said, I’d infringe on his book, so I’ll only suggest a few of his notions. Such places, once commonly beginning as commercial fishermen’s depots and chandleries, are of necessity on the water, at the very source rather than removed to a shopping-center parking lot; that crucial seaside-proximity allows a patron to become, however briefly, a part of the source and to connect to something genuine and historic. The sine qua non of the taverns is that they were initially workplaces where function dominated all else. Often built quickly, cheaply, and solely with an eye on practicality, they are of wood, tar paper, sheet metal, and in their age they manifest a temporariness to remind a patron of a good reason to hoist a glass to a friend (while we can) or as thanks for a good catch. In fact, they even seem to celebrate the ephemeral by turning a derelict dinghy into shelves for bottles and glasses, or by hanging walls with tools of the trade: a harpoon warped by age, a broken oyster-rake. Dangling from the ceiling might be a chicken-wire crab trap rusted to inutility, and on a windowsill, colored-glass net floats. The critic who sees here a quest for such places only as useless nostalgia quite misses the urge in humanity to connect, to find links — in short, to belong to one more of the possible continuums that help us accept our brevity.
We drove on east, that is, inland, leaving the coast only because no continuous stretches of highway exist along it for some 160 miles southward. I’d been told the swampy terrain there had helped keep away highway engineers, but I still imagined I could hear a digital pencil scribing across a sheet of electronic drafting paper up in Tallahassee.
Beyond U.S. 98, Taylor County is mostly Southern forest, the parts of it near the Gulf a ferociously tangled undergrowth affording haven to creatures great and much less so: alligators to no-see-ums (the latter sometimes called “nature’s little-bitty bastards,” a not inelegant description to those who have encountered them). Taylor and Dixie counties, lying low between the Aucilla and Suwannee rivers, are the two least-trampled areas remaining in Florida. Even Floridians from other parts of the state find those counties to belong to, if not another place, then at least another time, so much so that recent reports of the presence there of ivory-billed woodpeckers cannot be discounted out of hand. In fact, about half of the old specimens now in museums came from the watershed of the Suwannee. Were a developer today to spot one, he’d need to shoot it on sight to keep an endangered species from putting a halt to his machinery.
Some years earlier, I’d stopped at an oyster house on the highway just outside Perry, the Taylor County seat. I had to ring a bell for someone inside to push a button to unlock the front door, as if the place were a high-rise apartment in Manhattan. When I stepped in, an old shucker cried out in a near falsetto voice, “The finest people in the world walk through our door.” I thought it a damn jolly welcome. When the next customer came in, the same greeting. And the next, and the next. By the time I left, half-crazed from the greetings, I’d noticed that all the finest people were of the same race despite the large percentage of blacks living nearby. No one would confess it, but the buzzer was a Negro filter. I’d never encountered su
ch before, and that one had survived long past the time of overt jim crow practices.
To my surprise, Deal’s Famous Oyster House was still there. We pulled in to see whether the buzzer also remained. It did not, although a little sign inside yet welcomed the finest people in the world. So early in the afternoon, the Famous Oyster House was empty of other customers, but we got assurance some of the finest people in the world were now also black. I should say here, on certain issues of sensitivity, Mo often asked the questions because his Plantation dialect didn’t immediately call forth the word Yankee.
The mullet dip wasn’t ready, the hour was too late for an oyster sandwich with a side of Deal’s swamp cabbage, those two details suggesting a lack of foresight in a particular decision about a second tray of roasted oysters at Indian Pass. We settled for colas and a little conversation. Mo talked of his quest: “This place is almost remote enough to qualify, but it’s too clean. Almost sterile. Look at this bar — it doesn’t look like any toasts have ever been spilled on it.” He ran his hand across the top as if to feel for stains. Perhaps, I suggested, his requirements were becoming a little overrefined.
In Taylor County there is only a single looping highway — although under differing numbers — that swings down into the low forest and marshes to reach the Gulf, and that’s what we followed a few miles out of Perry after a dish of ice cream to lock down any loose oysters or migrating fish-dip. Good digestion demanded it. A sense of remoteness came over us, and it increased when we came upon a large red-haired thing lying dead beside the road: a wild boar with long, bloodied tusks still in a snarl. The destruction feral hogs wreak on forest life across the country makes such a death almost cause for celebration, in spite of the animal being a more beautiful, powerful-looking creature than its domesticated forebears. What their hooves don’t crush, their snouts root out.
Several miles beyond, condo Florida reappeared at Keaton Beach, an upthrust of new, multi-storey buildings, most of them unoccupied until the snowbirds began appearing. I asked Mo how many days a year Keaton Beach had more than a busload of residents. “Maybe half the year,” he said. “Maybe less. But that’s likely to change. No — it’s certain to change.”
The road returned to the interior at the Blue Creek inlet and followed a ridge just high enough to lift us a couple of feet above the coastal swamp where again something like ancient Florida surrounded us, although the grand longleaf pines had been logged out and replaced with fast-growing slash pines of the timber plantations. As a Black Angus is to a bison, so slash pine is to longleaf, as utility is to nobility.
Just before sundown we left the forest that was destined to become sacks for toting home frozen chicken potpies and kitty litter. We came into Steinhatchee, an erstwhile commercial fishing port nestled along the river of the same name, recently spanned by a new and cleanly designed concrete-bridge arching high enough to give an excellent view extending two miles westward to Deadman Bay and the Gulf beyond. Despite the Germanic-looking first syllable (rhymes with seen), the name Steinhatchee comes from Creek Indian words loosely translated as “dead man stream.”
The village, once a turpentine camp, gains its pleasant appearance from an especial authenticity and the modest way it lies in a crook of the narrow river dividing it from Jena (usually, JEEN-ah) which was a string of waterfront and roadside buildings and several small homes along streets with names like Mullet and Shark. A few dilapidated fish-houses, where the catch used to arrive for shipment elsewhere, lined the north side of the river and gave it regional character sufficient to distinguish it from, say, a town in Iowa. But the last Steinhatchee fish-house had just gone out of business.
The place was neither quaint nor notably historic, its architecture humdrum, post–World War II stuff. Entwined higgledy-piggledy in its dozen or so streets, not all of them paved, were some diminutive seasonal bungalows admixed with house trailers, most in deplorable condition. The quirky layout of streets was a grid of short lanes often interrupted by lots overgrown or stacked with unneedless stuff, or by marsh greenage trying to return. The intersection of Center and Fourteenth streets, to name one, were it there, would sit in the middle of a pond. Beyond the riverfront, small commercial buildings — four cafés, gas station, bar, motel, boat shop — were sprinkled about so that the place with its live oaks appeared to merge seamlessly into the piney woods. Steinhatchee was unincorporated, unplanned, unpretentious, and for years unwanted by anybody other than its native residents, although two new buildings and a resort, each on the river, were evidence that the unwanting was a thing of the past.
To listen to the inhabitants, as we began doing that evening, was to learn that a few years ago — some said three years, others said four, but nobody went further back than half a generation — it was not the bay that deserved the name Deadman but Steinhatchee itself. “It was a near ghost town,” a woman in Perry had told us. “And that was just dandy with people there. Around here, all this is old-time Cracker country, especially down there, and lots of those folks wanted nothing more than to be left alone. The last thing they wanted was for condo builders to find them out.” She paused. “You’ve heard about the illegal stuff?” I must have looked blank. “No? Hang around, and sooner or later you will.”
Those words were to change the nature of our quest.
5
Road to Nowhere
THE FIRST APPEARANCE in Steinhatchee of a new economy arrived benignly enough. Just above the right angle the river makes on its last miles was Steinhatchee Landing, an upscale if small resort built in among the native trees, the houses clustered, the architecture derived from classic Cracker and Victorian styles, albeit air-conditioned and hot-tubbed. The Landing set a standard for intelligent and unobtrusive innovation. Looking like a cross between a Southern neighborhood in the era of hitching posts and a piney-woods encampment, the place fit in, even if some of its visitors perhaps did not.
In small-town America anywhere, change will draw out a few loud, wrathfully frightened voices, usually those who prefer to see a place die rather than transform, but the Landing apparently entered loosely organized Steinhatchee with at least some grudging local appreciation for its contributions to a restructured economy. And, as the woman in Perry had mysteriously added, “The money for that enterprise was legal, as far as I know.”
On our second evening in Steinhatchee, at Fiddler’s Restaurant by the river, Mo and I made a supper of oyster stew and black-beans-and-rice, and finished with a glass of rum that drew us into a reminiscence overheard by a fellow in search of conversation. Our rambling took a useful turn when he couldn’t answer a question I asked. By way of apology, he said, “I could write a book about all I don’t know. What about yourself?” I said that was how I made my living. He didn’t take me literally and began talking, talking to the point of letting a feline or two out of the bag — just what a reporter needs.
Although not a native, the fellow often came into the county to tend “accounts” of a kind he was vague about. He said, “The main use of land here is to treat it like a commodity. You know, like stock you hope to buy low and sell high. Then you take your profit and go get a yacht or you invest in building a new condo somewhere else. I’m not talking about the locals. This is about outsiders from across state or across the country. Half the property here that’s selling is going to speculators — mom-and-dad speculators mostly. They don’t want to move here. I mean, look at this place. Hey, if you don’t fish or hunt, what do you do? Read a book?” He spoke the last sentence as he might ask, “Commit suicide?”
Mo said we’d heard about differences in zoning between Steinhatchee and Jena. “I don’t know anything reliable about that, except anything goes in Jena.” He wet his whistle and ignored a question from me. “Today you can call this place Little America. They’re doing the American Agenda — profit at any price. They ought to change the name Jena to Grabola or this place to Hatchascheme. But at least it’s not on the Road to Nowhere anymore.”
For the
third time that day, mention of the “Road to Nowhere” came up. I was beginning to suspect the phrase might not be a metaphor of an old, doomed economy. Mo asked what it was. “Cross the bridge,” the man said as he headed for the door, “and take the road south. See if you can figure out why it’s there and why it’s paved.”
There being no true watermen’s taverns in Steinhatchee or Jena, my congenial way-fellow was willing, perhaps because of his abiding interest in writing a mystery, to pursue for a couple of days a different topic, one promising intrigue.
The next morning at breakfast in the Bridge End Café, I asked for his help in marking the Black-Eyed Pea Line, the northernmost extent of cafés serving as a matter of course those esteemed members of what Gus Kubitzki termed the Fraternal and Protective Order of Nature’s Little Guys: raisins, capers, olives, peppercorns. Today, it’s more useful to any traveler wanting to honor the Southern regional menu to know the demarcation of the B-EPL than the Mason-Dixon Line. I told him the Pea Line didn’t reach as far north as the Grits Line, and that was a shame, given the greater nutrient value of a legume over hominy. After requesting the waitress add black-eyed peas to my eggs and grits, I heard loudly from the kitchen, “He wants what with his eggs?” evidence the cook might be from Kankakee or Lompoc and really should not yet be entrusted with the preparation of anything Southern beyond warming a MoonPie.
Across the river, we went south until we were encompassed by alterations of marsh with low, almost impenetrable undergrowth of cord and salt-joint grasses. Yet, running through it all were twelve miles of good, wide pavement, straight as a drag strip and showing black streaks of spinning tires. The asphalt, County Route 361, paralleled the coast a bit over a mile distant, but Deadman Bay wasn’t visible until the road turned into a sand lane for a few hundred yards, then ceased altogether; from there we could see a far shoreline perforated by thousands of inlets and baffled by hundreds of islets and keys. Okay, I said, if this road isn’t for dragsters, who’s it for? What’s it for? Mo shook his head and drew his words out. “Something’s going on down in here.”