After listening to threats from the trespasser, Kinnard alerted his own witness to observe closely. Then, for us, just as he did that night, he took two slow steps backward and reached inside his shirt to demonstrate how he’d drawn his .22-caliber pistol and shot the man in the shoulder. Kinnard said, “The fool yelled out to his goon, ‘Goddamnit! He shot me!’ He couldn’t believe it.”
The police showed up, filled out some reports, and that was about it, except for one officer saying, “We ought to arrest you for poor marksmanship.” No further investigation, no prosecution. The trespasser’s body-mass took the bullet and saved him, but — even had the man died — Kinnard knew his own safety was secure within his new legal right. (Ah, the American pistol! That old righter-of-wrongs now become a wronger-of-rights, such as the right to judicial process.)
Looking at Q, Kinnard added, “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. Wouldn’t you now?” While still pulling at the back of my shirt, she said it was time for supper.
8
Playground for the Rich and Famous
ON MY LAST DAY IN STEINHATCHEE, I wanted to ask somebody with expertise whether the new money from realty transactions, much of it coming from outside speculators, was likely to imperil the long-established ways of life there. With no shortage of real-estate offices in the hamlet, I picked one at random and walked in. I’ll not describe the people of this encounter for a reason that will be obvious; perhaps their words will let you see them.
A woman, a former Californian, greeted me warmly and lessened her warmth only slightly when I said I wasn’t looking for property, but I did have a few questions. “Okay,” she said. I asked when the realty boom around Steinhatchee began, and she considered: “No more than about five years ago, I think.” Not wishing to spend time with a man who wasn’t going to be a customer, her responses became shorter, so I tried priming the pump with a debatable observation. I said it seemed to me that recent history along the river had been shaped, for better or worse, by the No-Name Storm and — avoiding the word smuggling — illicit importations, and lately, overwhelmingly, by rapid real-estate development. The woman shook her head. “I haven’t been here that long.” It was one more dodge.
Another agent, a native, a woman with a pleasant face but a fully charged load of suppressed anger behind it, interrupted forcefully from across the small office. “Look,” she said, “Steinhatchee’s going to become the playground for the rich and famous. Clearwater, Miami — they’re used up. Where are they going to go now?” She stopped abruptly. “I can’t talk about it. I’ve got work to do.”
Trying a more oblique approach, I turned again to the first woman to ask whether there were density regulations in Taylor County. Her answers were perfunctory but polite. “Yes.” Were there city limits? “No.” Was there a formal town council? “There’s a project board with regular meetings.” What about incorporation? “It’s inevitable.”
The other agent, perhaps further inflamed by my honoring her wish not to talk about it, cried out, “Hey!” as she rose from her chair. “Somebody’s going to make the money! Somebody’s got to sell it! I grew up here! Who’s got a better right?” She sat down again. “I don’t have time for this.”
There I was, angering people in “stand your ground” gun-law territory. Were such questions provocation enough to plug me? In a somewhat theatrical way, I picked up my things to leave and said I was just trying to understand a place I found quite interesting, especially its history. The agent who had no time launched into a topic that had not come up. She said, again with more volume than required for a small room, “We can make an X, you know! We can sign our names! We’re not hicks! You know, we’re proud! People from outside —” She caught herself and stopped. She looked directly at me. Her interior serpent was coiled and ready to strike. “You go talking about changes,” she said. “I can tell you what changed things here.” She waited for me to ask, and I did. “The net ban,” she seethed. “The net ban is what changed everything! Those people will be the end of us! The end!”
“Those people” were not smugglers, realty speculators, or develop-at-any-cost builders. They were not snowbirds or the guy who bulldozes a lot into the forest for a rental house-trailer having a septic system made from a fifty-gallon oil barrel with holes punched in it. “Those people” were the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.
A decade earlier, a constitutional amendment to modify certain outdated fishing practices — ones clearly shown to be destructive to the sustainability of the resource and, eventually, to people whose livelihoods depended on fishing — was put to a statewide vote. Although the measure didn’t win in Steinhatchee, nearly seventy percent of the rest of Florida approved it.
The agent rolled on so furiously I couldn’t take down her words fast enough, but the argument was this: the net ban had made earning a living from fishing impossible, and that was forcing natives to sell their land to outsiders. The whole thing was a scheme by various government entities that didn’t care a hoot about protecting fish or fishermen. No, their secret plan was to take away private property. But she didn’t want to talk about it.
9
In There Own Sweat
THE REAL-ESTATE AGENT’S ALLEGATIONS sent me to a telephone to call a field office of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission up in Perry to ask for an interview with an agent or two. The next day Q and I drove to the edge of Perry where the Commission had quarters in a trailer and a couple of outbuildings. We talked first with Karen Parker, retired from the Army and now the Public Information Coordinator, before she introduced us to Lieutenant Bruce Cooper, the patrol supervisor, a graduate of Auburn University and a former outfielder on its baseball team. Both of the agents, in their early middle-years, were personable, calm, and open to any questions I had.
Among Parker’s duties was assisting people affected by the modified fishing regulations (widely but inaccurately called the “net ban”), then more than a decade old. She listened closely before responding to my questions, weighed her replies, and was unafraid to admit when she didn’t have an answer but always added she would try to find it. The changes in regulations not only had been voted in by a significant margin but had been upheld later by the Florida Supreme Court. Parker, speaking of the earlier, looser regulation of nets, said, “A lot of Floridians thought outdated fishing-regulations were killing Florida. This is the fishing capital of the world. Most people could see what was happening to a key resource.”
The new measures prohibited only certain kinds of nets, mainly ones that entangle fish. Such nets, some of them the length of six football fields, are quite effective at ensnaring not just mullet — the targeted fish — but also a couple of dozen other species, even game fish like grouper, pompano, or sea trout. Mullet, sleek-bodied vegetarians, migrate in enormous schools and thereby become highly vulnerable to massive commercial nets — that is to say, vulnerable to harvesting in numbers beyond their rate of reproduction. With the earlier gill and trammel nets, sustainability was rapidly declining, as became evident from what already had happened on up the Atlantic coast at least as far as North Carolina: over the last several decades, the number of mullet and species preying upon them had so decreased that commercial fisheries dependent on mullet were collapsing.
Texas was the first Gulf Coast state to outlaw old-style entangling nets, then Florida. At the time of our conversation, Alabama, not often known for its environmental foresight, was about to make a similar change because of the demonstrable evidence that modified nets help increase the number of mullet — once the staple fish of Florida — and species dependent on them.
Cooper said, “This spring I saw the largest school of mullet I’ve ever seen, and it’s due to the new nets. And that increase has happened even with some illegal fishing still going on.” He nodded toward a fenced area. “Right now, over there, we’ve got two illegal nets we picked up just recently. The technology we have
today to apprehend outlaw fishing has surpassed the capacity to harvest illegally. Without governmental enforcement, certain fish would be seriously reduced and others of them would be gone.”
He took us inside the fenced area and showed us two big rolls of entangling nets. I asked who still used such things. “Mostly older men going out at night,” Cooper said. “When we come up to their boats, they tell us the fish jumped into the boat because those guys know courts require evidence of an illegal net being used. Just having possession of the fish isn’t illegal.”
Despite the misleading name, the new regulation did not ban nets, but it did require reduced size of both the total area of a net and the openings in the mesh, and it limited the use of nets to only two at a time. Those changes necessitated more hand casts, a bodily demanding task that made some fishermen no longer want to expend the effort, while others simply resented having to change their old ways.
An opinion I’d heard the day before now made sense: a man who once used the old netting method told me he thought the young were too soft to go after mullet and the old were now too down in the back for it. His words seemed to reflect what I’d encountered that morning at Pouncey’s Restaurant in Perry where a woman supervising several teenagers on an outing wore a T-shirt embossed with:
WORK HARD!
NO ONE EVER DROWN
IN THERE OWN SWEAT
Karen Parker said of the coastal town forty miles south of Steinhatchee, “People in Cedar Key have switched to clamming with some success. And the University of Florida offers a course in developing commercial clamming-beds that can produce a harvest in eighteen months. It’s a renewable resource. They call it Clamalot. But I haven’t heard yet of anyone in Steinhatchee taking part.”
Cedar Key — once a port on an early cross-Florida railroad and a center for the manufacture of wooden pencils — has an economic and cultural history quite different from the more isolated and insulated Steinhatchee from whence much of the timber for pencils came. (Many an American learned to write with a stick of Steinhatchee forest in hand.)
“The talk today in Cedar Key isn’t about a net ban,” Parker said. “People there are more concerned about preventing pollutants from wiping out the economic advances they’ve made with clamming. They see their situation much differently today.” She paused to phrase her words. “When people have to start changing established ways, it’s difficult anywhere, and some communities resist it — maybe I should say feel it — more than others. But when it comes to the new fishing regulations, there’s help all around to make the transition easier.”
Resistance to transition in Steinhatchee cropped up one night a couple of years earlier when a conservation agent, out of uniform, went into the local lounge, a place where, during the day, I’d seen elderly women playing Scrabble. Recognized, the agent caught a barrage of hostility and was soon dragged into the parking lot and beaten before he could break free and cross the road to the river. He leaped in and swam to the other side. There, a young woman saw the battered man and, in apparent sympathy, offered him a lift. She promptly returned him to the parking lot where he was battered again. He recovered, and the new regulations remained unchanged, but he’d provided an evening’s diversion for men who preferred altercation to alteration.
Various agencies created several programs to assist commercial fishermen affected by the new provisions, including a standing offer to buy their old, illegal nets, as well as unemployment benefits and job retraining in both aquaculture and agriculture. People elsewhere around the Gulf who shifted to clamming or crabbing could bring in good pay, and so could those fishing for mullet with redesigned nets, but they were people who believed “no one ever drown in there own sweat.”
Still, at night in Deadman Bay, violators were going out in their bird-dog boats, a number of them motivated as much by the thrill of risk as by a quest for money. After all, when darkness comes down in the Steinhatchee country, some people can’t come up with much to amuse themselves, and a game of cat-and-mouse on the water or a fox-and-hound high-speed chase over dirt roads through the timber plantations can provide stories for several evenings at the lounge. It was almost as good as beating up a conservation agent. And, in a fashion similar to Appalachian moonshiners of another era, law versus outlaw was a contest where a hot-blooded fellow could try to make himself into a local legend.
The Steinhatchee story, as I came to see it, was of a village being changed not by a misnamed “net ban” but by a juggernaut of increasing human population and the refusal of people both there and elsewhere to set and follow reasonable guidelines for realty development. The true enemy of Steinhatchee was not some governmental agency imagined to be after private land; it was blind stubbornness and — even more — greed. In those ways, many of the residents themselves were active participants in a full-momentum — if doomed — pursuit of the quick-and-easy.
My guess is that Steinhatchee and Jena were headed toward a new order — one initially more prosperous, at least for outside investors — but one that would soon enough further impoverish their lives emotionally and spiritually, because the forces they were embracing rarely accommodate native traditions and values like those developed locally over generations. But if anger, hopeless resignation, anomie, and unconsidered acceptance of the steamrollers of contemporary Florida could be replaced by common sense, imagination, and wise leadership, a seemingly implacable new American economy might be turned to serve the people.
But first they would have to show a resilience capable of forming a future rather than being flattened by one. Instead of simply reviling aquaculture, how about trying it? Instead of living beyond the law, how about finding the benefits of living within it? And what about considering the implications of Steinhatchee Landing where native traditions of northern Florida Cracker architecture had been reinterpreted sympathetically along the river to create new jobs and a sound pillar in the local economy?
The right choice in Steinhatchee, I concluded, was not to continue fighting to resurrect doomed ways but to shape a future to honor and enhance the most salubrious aspects of their past where lay innovative avenues rather than roads to nowhere. The choice at Deadman Bay, as across the nation, was whether to comprehend and reshape history or to continue the current course and become history.
Maybe it was even beginning to happen. In Perry, I picked up a leaflet with the headline
JUST SAY NO!
NO BOMBING RANGE
NO MISSILES ON OUR NATURE COAST
Below was this: “Save our health, the environment, our homes, and our property values!” The sheet was a response to a plan to move the bombing range at Eglin Air Force Base east of Pensacola (one of the largest forested military bases in the world) a couple of hundred miles southeast to the timberlands north of Steinhatchee. The leaflet said, “We have a new developer in Taylor County who stands to get rich quick if he can pull off a land-swap deal with the military. We get the bombs and he gets the beach.”
10
The Truth About Bobbie Cheryl
A COUPLE OF DAYS EARLIER, on our last evening together in Steinhatchee, I asked Mo before he headed home whether his quest for watermen’s taverns was succeeding. I said we hadn’t come upon any in Steinhatchee, and the most likely spot for one there was a lounge where ladies played Scrabble in the afternoon and conservation agents got thrashed at night. “I think we hit Steinhatchee too late,” he said. “We missed out on the fish-houses and the whole culture connected to them. Maybe I’ll just write a book called Too Late. That should about cover it all.”
I suggested his revised title was a reminder we’d better get ourselves up to North Carolina before we’d be saying the same about Bobbie Cheryl’s Anchor Inn. Hadn’t the dream of that Great Good Place helped us through those sorry days of Phuddom? We owed it an honorary visit. After all, Miss Bobbie Cheryl wasn’t going to live forever.
“Miss?” he said, surprised. “Bobby Sherrill’s no miss. He’s a guy.” Mo looked at me as if I’d j
ust popped out with something about Shakespeare’s latest novel. He spoke kindly, taking his time to let me down gently. “Didn’t you ever catch on? We needed a dream, an escape. Bobby Sherrill’s Anchor Inn was my invention. I concocted it to save us. It was an anchor for a couple of guys adrift on a sea of near insanity.” He put his hand on my shoulder, as he does from time to time. “And it worked, at least for you,” he said, “because it was mythical.” He paused again. “Even if it really did exist, would you want to find it?”
III.
Into the Southwest
Into the Southwest
On a Ring of Light
1. Apologia to Camerado Reader
2. That Batch from Down Behind Otis
3. In the Light of Ghosts
4. A Poetical History of Satan
5. Gladiator Without a Sword
6. God Help the Jury
7. A Triangle Becomes a Polygon
8. Though Dead, He Speaks
9. Dance of the Hobs
10. How Tadpoles Become Serpents
11. Last Train Out of Land’s End
12. A Quest for Querques
13. One-Hundred-Seventeen Square Feet
14. After the Fuse Blows
On a Ring of Light
The next day the Indian told me their name for this light — Artoosoqu’ — and on my inquiring concerning the will-o’-the-wisp, and the like phenomena, he said that his “folks” sometimes saw fires passing along at various heights, even as high as the trees, and making a noise. I was prepared after this to hear of the most startling and unimagined phenomena witnessed by “his folks”; they are abroad at all hours and seasons in scenes so unfrequented by white men. Nature must have made a thousand revelations to them which are still secrets to us.