In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  And the territories remained loyal to King George throughout the American Revolution. That’s why you never hear East or West Florida mentioned with the original thirteen colonies. When they sent delegates to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia, the Floridas declined. When the other colonies rallied around John Hancock and Sam Adams, Floridians in St. Augustine burned effigies of the two patriots. When fighting broke out in earnest, British Loyalists fled north to Canada—and south to Florida.

  Which made for awkward times when Florida was returned to Spain after the war. Rather than submit to the Spanish, many Loyalists relocated to Jamaica or the Bahamas. For those who remained, it was as if the intervening decades of British rule had never happened. Florida once again regressed into a semilawless haven for brigands and freebooters. Runaway slaves took up the Spanish on their offer of freedom in exchange for conversion to Catholicism and service in the militia. Indian raids launched from Florida into U.S. territory became more frequent and brazen.

  In 1821, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams purchased Florida from Spain for $5 million. The United States simply wanted Spain—and the gangrenous stench of her moribund empire—the hell off the continent. Practically no American official thought this territory would ever amount to much. There were only three towns of significance in Florida at the time: Pensacola, St. Augustine, and Key West. And statehood was not exactly a priority for these few Floridians, since the federal government picked up almost all of the territory’s administrative costs. Joining the union as a full member would mean a greater voice in government…but ehhhhhh it’d also mean higher taxes.

  The Indian wars of the 1800s brought more settlers to Florida. They also left roads and a communications network in their wake. The hastily built forts? Foundations for new cities. The blank spots on the map? Finally filling in. Make no mistake, though: Florida was frontier, no less wild than the West. In 1843, one visitor wrote that Florida “is the tip of the top for rascality and knavery. Nowhere this side of Texas can you find so many rascals who live by their wits.”

  In 1845, Florida became our twenty-seventh state. It would be a long time yet before it resembled anything more than a quaggy offshoot of the western frontier spliced onto the South. “More than any other force, the frontier shaped Florida for most of its history,” the historian Gary Mormino has written. “Frontier values—fierce individualism, gun violence, a weak state government, and rapacious attitudes toward the environment—defined and continue to define Florida.”

  Indeed, from the granting of statehood till the mid-twentieth century, Florida was a national afterthought. Nothing much going on beyond some land booms and hurricanes. In spite of herself, Florida had escaped the fate of a Caribbean sugar colony; she’d also dodged the “curse of cotton” that continues to plague her Dixie neighbors. Florida was just…there. It was as if the Peter Principle had been applied to geography.

  Then, in the second half of the American Century, while the populations of California and Texas were tripling—Florida’s increased sixfold. All of a sudden that green vacuum became very enticing. Air-conditioned tabula rasa for those who’d been scarred by the Great Depression and forged by the Good War. They came not in Conestoga wagons but in coupes and tin-can trailers. Millions of individual migrations: factory workers leaving Detroit, Akron, and Toledo; old Jews fleeing New York winters; retirees uprooting themselves from Rust Belt ethnic enclaves; Canadians trekking south and Central Americans trekking north. Franchisees brought McDonald’s and Holiday Inns to new markets. Their accountants and bankruptcy lawyers followed them. Cubans fled Castro. Jamaicans came to cut the sugarcane. Space-age engineers and other white-collar functionaries relocated because the boss preferred the tax breaks in sunny F-L-A.

  For these people, Florida held the promise of dignified endings and new beginnings. It appeared to be that much nearer to the fabled “state of nature,” that condition of absolute liberty in which the autonomous self can achieve its desires without obstacle. No longer need anyone be constrained by the restrictive traditions of “back home.” Anything that felt unchosen or inegalitarian could be sloughed off like snakeskin. Here, social and familial bonds could be made anew. All relationships—permanently revisable. Here, there’d be nothing immutable, no impositions from without. There’d be nothing to endure here—not even the heat.

  Noah nudged me out of my reverie. “I learned this shit in college,” he said. “C’mon. Before the FSU kids come in here to fuck.”

  “Yeah,” I said distractedly, once more thumbing a button that flooded a diorama Everglades.

  —

  FADE IN

  EXT. U.S. ROUTE 27—AFTERNOON

  GLENN

  What we should’ve done is alert every local newspaper and tell them that three strapping lads were redoing Lawton. Then people would’ve come out of the woodwork. We could’ve gotten our characters that way.

  NOAH

  They would’ve all been seventy-five years old.

  KENT

  That, or insane.

  NOAH

  Yeah, I don’t know how I’d feel about people being able to track us. Knowing the area where we’re camping at night.

  KENT

  (to Glenn)

  God, Jim was boring. Maybe next you want to fall in with some mall walkers?

  GLENN

  (carefully)

  Trying to collaborate with you is like trying to collaborate with the little girl from The Exorcist. Everything gets the bile.

  KENT

  It’s constructive criticism.

  GLENN

  I need to call my wife and tell her that being around you guys only makes me love her more.

  FADE OUT

  —

  MILE 312 — PERRY

  WEATHER THE STORM YOU CAN’T AVOID,

  AND AVOID THE STORM YOU CAN’T WEATHER

  Three days straight we walked the sinuous hills surrounding Tallahassee. After lunching at one convenience store, we were offered some advice by the attendant on duty: “Avoid small towns…and also big cities. Just, avoid everywhere, if you can manage it. The rednecks are gonna wanna play with you.” From him we purchased a fritzy Bluetooth speaker so we could listen to the news. We received so many election updates that the catchwords of freedom, corruption, and middle class abstracted into a fine mist. Later, the radio briefed us on the Mean Season: a hurricane watch had been issued for the northeast coast of Florida. Hooking like an uppercut toward us was Matthew, a storm that had killed a hundred people in Haiti and was expected to intensify into a Category 4 before making landfall somewhere between Cape Canaveral and Jacksonville.

  “Cross Jacksonville off the list, then,” Glenn said.

  “Christ Jesus hallelujah,” Noah rejoined.

  The sky bore no trace of the coming blow; it was the threadbare blue of cotton work clothes scrubbed too often. That evening, we were turned away from a horse breeder’s gate via video intercom. (“Mr. Glenn. Mr. Glenn. There have been a series of horse butcheries lately, and I would like you to move on.”) Following that failure, we resorted to SOP when in desperate need of a place to rest our heads: We checked Google Maps for nearby churches. We called one located deep in the woods off the highway. They said fine.

  A thing you should know about Google Maps, friend, is that for whatever reason, when you’re out in the bumblefuck boonies, Google Maps will occasionally toss up digital mirages. A hair salon actually located in Pensacola will appear in the dark heart of the scrubland. A down-home restaurant established generations ago in Panacea will pop up along a stretch of weeds hundreds of miles away. Or, in this case, a “primitive Baptist” church will appear to be here, when in fact it is quite far away in the opposite direction.

  Which matters a lot when you are walking! When you are walking beside the highway! Long after the sun had set, w
e slipped into our reflector vests and pressed on, eventually turning off the main drag onto a network of winding dirt paths. We searched for the phantom church.

  I don’t know that I can communicate to you the totality of the blackness. Among the trees, it was as if a fire blanket had been thrown over us. Now and then, we passed under a gap in the branches, and there we glimpsed faraway stars glistening like larvae in pitch. We kindled our cell phone flashlights. Shallowly, they punctured the dark.

  “White guys!” Glenn said. “We have no natural predators. So, go climb a mountain. Walk a thousand miles through inimical infrastructure. Fly blind into some thirsty vigilante’s electrified fence.”

  “Ah, jeez,” I muttered. My beam had alighted on a ghostly Confederate flag staked in a circle of worm-eaten driftwood.

  Headlights appeared a few dozen feet behind us. “I think we should prepare to get played with,” Noah whispered. We drew together until our shoulders abutted. Even so, we touched fingers to one another’s elbows, for the small reassurance.

  A Crown Vic with illegally tinted windows pulled up. It idled. It dusted us with grit as it accelerated down the path.

  “I know we keep making Heart of Darkness jokes,” Glenn said hurriedly in a low voice, “but I’d much rather be traveling up the Congo River right now.”

  At our approach, all sounds flattened like wrinkles under an iron. The loudest thing going was the squeak of my pram’s springs, which pinged our location as regularly as sonar. We came to the spot on our phones where the church was purported to be. We walked past it, then back. Then past it, then back. We leaned against a low fence. We squinted into the nullity. A square of light appeared. Out of it poured many hounds, barking wetly as they raced for us.

  So we ran. We reeled off-road, we crashed through the brush. The pines seemed to part and leer, like a crowd making way. “Oh, Christ,” Glenn hissed. “Oh, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.” Our phones’ beams stirred the dark.

  That’s when a thick shaft of high candlepower lit us up. Hackneyed as it sounds, we froze like deer. Panting, we tried to shield our eyes. “Ah, hello?” Glenn called out. “Sorry, hello?”

  No response but for the sound of twigs snapping nearer. Without lifting his own feet, Noah shimmied into a ready position. He patted himself for the retractable baton, couldn’t find it, and so held his fists loosely in a low boxer’s guard. Glenn, flooded with fearlessness or the profoundest ignorance, took a few steps toward the light.

  Below it, a nickel-plated revolver was thrust.

  This time, I made no mention of brotherly love. I raised my hands with Glenn and Noah.

  Whoever it was at the other end of the gun—we were on his property. And in Florida, that meant he was well within his rights to shoot us dead. He could Stand His Ground. We were about to get Stand Your Grounded.

  I shrieked “No!” Perhaps because adrenaline was swamping my brain? Perhaps because my lizard self had ticked the “fight” box? “Nono!” I repeated. I lowered my hands. “Hey!” I said. “No!”

  I advanced a few paces with my pram. Perhaps because I was being courageous? If only. Courage is acting rightly in the face of fear. It is understanding and fearing the threat of death even as you disdain it. If you do not feel fear, however—are you being courageous? Are you not being, in fact, a dumbshit? An insouciant who, were there any justice in this life, was about to be thrust into the truth of the Panhandle? If not the truth of this world as it is experienced by anyone other than a white male dumbshit?

  “We’re just looking for a goddamned church!” I cried, as if affronted. “Come on!” I implored, as though appealing to our right to go where we pleased.

  The spotlight and firearm were lowered. We saw the stranger for what he was: a wizened old man, his posture curling him into a question mark. Behind his Coke-bottle lenses, his pupils were obscured by a gauzy pallor, as if spiders had spun webs across his eyes. “You thought my house was the church?” he asked in a wavering voice. “Y’all just walkin’?”

  “Yes!” I roared, bug-eyed and heaving.

  “Y’all thought it said on your machines this was the church?”

  “Yes!” again.

  “Oh, that explains it.” The old man tucked his pistol into his waistband. “C’mon, this ain’t the church.” He brought us to the front of his property, where a large pickup truck was parked in the driveway of a decrepit house.

  “You can just throw your barrow in back there,” the man said. “Y’all hiking the Florida Trail?”

  “…Yes,” I said, hollowed by the comedown. Noah helped me secure our gear in the tool-crowded truck bed.

  “Happens all the time. People hiking that trail, they look on their phones when they’re in between sections, they think this here’s a spot to camp. You know, I ’bout shot y’all for prowlers,” the man said.

  “We know,” Noah said.

  Noah hunkered in the bed of the truck. Glenn and I squeezed into the cab. “My name’s A.C.,” the man said. “Russell. A. C. Russell.” He proffered his right hand while simultaneously turning over the ignition with his left.

  “Hey,” I replied. “I’m a Russell too.”

  “The Lord—He works in mysterious ways,” A.C. said. He pulled onto the unlighted dirt road. “I don’t know but that you might be kin to me. Y’all are kin to me regardless. Now, I just got done driving back from Arcadia, where I was working a job. But this church y’all’s looking for is only four miles the other way.”

  “Well, we just wanted to say, for one, thank you for not defending your property,” Glenn said. “And, number two, for taking us to the church. We were on our last legs back there.”

  “Hey, y’all are kin to me. I was born, raised, and I lived my life within five miles of the church we’re going to. My grandson got baptized there not too long ago. Church was formed by my ancestors in 1850, before the war. Why I ’bout shot you back there is we had a lot of break-ins in this area recently. Kind of a situation we never had before. Caught a couple of ’em a few weeks back—young fellas stealing guns and prescription pills out of trailers. On drugs, I figure.”

  “Yeesh,” Glenn said, modulating himself. “I wouldn’t have blamed you.”

  “I could give you a ride into Perry tomorrow, if you wanted. I like picking up the hitchhikers sometimes. One of ’em, kid from Miami, he says to me, ‘You know, you gotta be more careful.’ I says to him, ‘Oh really?’ Then I showed him this—”

  With a flick of his wrist, A.C. snapped open a straight razor. “I said, ‘Son, the Lord is with me. I’ll be all right!’ ”

  A.C. steered us onto the misty lawn of a wooden church bookended by a couple dozen tombstones. He cranked the parking brake, turned with seriousness to Glenn and me. He slid open the cab’s rear window so Noah could hear. He asked the three of us: “Now, y’all love the Lord, don’t you?”

  “Yessir,” we said.

  “And you know where you’re going when you die?”

  “Yessir,” we said.

  “God bless you boys,” A.C. said. “If I had a half a mind, I’d go with you.”

  A.C. then demanded that we take down his home phone number and his mailing address. He made us promise that we’d contact him should we ever find ourselves in a jam. Whatever we needed, he’d get it to us. “It’s important that y’all keep doing what y’all are doing,” A.C. said.

  He didn’t belabor the point. But he didn’t need to. We’ve received similar sentiments from others along the way. They’ll pull over to take selfies with us, or they’ll want simply to shake our hands. They’ll tell us they’re happy that somebody is fool enough to do this. Or they’ll tell us what A.C. told us—that this is their dream. They want desperately to walk out the front door and just keep going. To abdicate all responsibilities and sacrifice their privilege in the most extravagantly useless manner possible, like a libation poured out to pl
acate a god.

  We disembarked. We waved. A light rain began to fall, a harbinger of Hurricane Matthew. Sullen wafts of mist rolled our way over the graves. Glenn and I worked quickly to pop our tent. Noah did likewise. That is when a different pickup skidded onto the churchyard, chewing up turf.

  “What y’all doing here?” a camo-hatted young man asked through the driver’s-side window. His left arm was hanging out of the cab; his right was hurriedly doing some unseen thing.

  “Camping,” Glenn said vacantly. “We talked to Pastor Williams…are just…camping.”

  “Pastor Williams,” I agreed.

  “Oh! Pastor Williams,” the man said. “Well, y’all are OK then. Just wanted to check you out. Because some tweakers’d stolen the sound system out of this church the other week.”

  “Tweakers,” Noah said. “Of course.”

  “I’ll tell Pastor Williams y’all are OK,” the man said, revving his engine.

  “Pastor Williams,” I said.

  And with that, the playing ceased. The next day would be our last in the old man-killing parishes of the Panhandle, where we’d come to feel lost, unhappy, and at home.

  * * *

  —

  By midmorning, a hurricane warning had been put into effect from northern Miami-Dade County to the Altamaha Sound between Jacksonville and Savannah. Governor Rick Scott told the east coast of Florida to prepare for a “catastrophic” strike. “You need to leave,” he said. “Evacuate, evacuate, evacuate.” Our phones sang with alerts from news outlets estimating that two million evacuees were now headed west, fleeing the first major hurricane to make landfall in Florida since 2005.