Roads to Quoz

by William Least Heat-Moon

  References to the “Road to Nowhere” were as numerous as ones to the “No-Name Storm,” so we tried to hook the two together. The big blow of 1993 wasn’t a hurricane, not technically anyway, but it was, a carpenter told us, “one mother of a tropical storm and tidal surge that plastered all of the Big Bend of the Gulf.” In Steinhatchee, it hammered many of the older buildings and sent them downriver or flying off into the woods and quite literally became the high-water mark in current Steinhatchee history and a central reference point in most citizens’ memories. Stories were set BS or AS — Before Storm or After. To eliminate it from their past would produce a different Steinhatchee, perhaps one less able to face the flux of new people arriving, because in a way, the storm prepared the village for change as a bulldozer does a construction site.

  But what did violent weather have to do with a road wandering off into the middle of a sea marsh?

  Up on the main highway through Dixie County, we went into Cross City, the courthouse town on the edge of the coastal swamp. There, in the library, a former store in a homely shopping center, Mo sat down at a computer to search while I talked to a librarian, a sad-faced woman four or five steps away from the back-half of a hearse. Where, I asked, could we find material of any sort on the Road to Nowhere or on Steinhatchee or Jena? Although the hamlets were only fourteen direct miles west, their isolation made them appear, even to up-county natives, somehow remote, and the mere mention of the names seemed to make people edgy. The librarian said in surprise as if I’d asked about Yachats, Oregon, or Slapout, Oklahoma, “Why, I lived in Steinhatchee for a while!” Then she seemed to catch herself. “But I never learned much about it. My memory wouldn’t be trustworthy anymore.” She did a charade of trying to recollect some innocent tid-bit to toss to me so I’d go away. “I do remember we were so poor then. Everyone was so poor. I just don’t know what to suggest to you.”

  Mo also found nothing. I told him the librarian knew more than she was willing to share. We were beginning to notice how a conversation would tumble merrily along until we’d bring up the Road to Nowhere. Abruptly, it would be time to get back to work, to pick up the kid, to open the mail. I mentioned to Mo three movies where a stranger rides into town, asks a couple of wrong questions, and never rides out again. He said, “That puts me right at ease here on the edge of Deadman Bay.”

  At the Dixie County Courthouse, we again came up empty. Then we drove on to the Taylor County Courthouse in Perry where, at last, somebody admitted knowing something about the Road to Nowhere. A clerk took us into a side room and pulled down two large criminal dockets. In them we found just enough clues to improve our questions and to lead us to the right places to ask them: a used bookstore, a certain bar, a particular café. Out came an item here, a document there, a recollection, a dodged question, a paragraph in a newspaper, a magazine article. Slowly, ever so slowly, the story of the Road to Nowhere began to emerge. It was a tale of two counties.

  6

  Bales of Square Mullet

  SOMETIME IN THE EARLY 1970s, memories varied on the year, Steinhatchee became an entry point and entrepôt for large bales of Colombian marijuana smuggled in from the Gulf to be trucked to cities all over the East. The residents called it “pot hauling” or simply “hauling.” Although Steinhatchee wasn’t the only coastal community thereabouts so engaged, its isolation, river access, myriad coastal inlets, and position between two county jurisdictions gave it advantages.

  Because the “trade” was spread throughout a community of linked families, it became difficult for anyone in Steinhatchee not to know about it and dangerous to talk about it. The safest course was to pretend it wasn’t happening, and in that way smuggling bore resemblance to moonshining in the southern Appalachians during Prohibition, where snitching could be more dangerous than involvement. In a nutshell, the setup was this: so-called bird-dog boats motored out to a mother ship offshore to pick up bales of marijuana and haul them up the Steinhatchee River to a waiting truck.

  Many residents figured the dope was going to city people who deserved what their excessive incomes could buy, those urbanites who were responsible for the quaaludes reaching Steinhatchee teenagers. (Parents considered ludes the real evil.) What’s more, native inhabitants saw the trade as giving them at last their fair measure of American prosperity which for so long had eluded the two remote villages. In the late ’60s, a fisherman might earn ten-thousand dollars a year for the laborious and often dangerous work of pulling in nets of mullet and other fish, an income he (males worked virtually all the boats) could match or exceed with a single good night of moving dope in the ’70s. Truckers could collect twice that with a load, and men at the next level made even more.

  Instead of a load of wet, slimy, cold fish pulled up into a skiff, now the catch was dry bales known as “square mullet” that could be stacked and transported as easily as packets of twenty-dollar bills. After all, this was an economically depressed area open to desperate measures. In the late ’60s, the Cross City school-board was suspected of burning down its high school to collect the insurance and selling the salvage for its own personal compensation. And there was a billing of insurance companies for rebuilding after a hurricane, reconstruction never undertaken; when a grand jury was impaneled to investigate, it sought instead to disband itself. And what about the brother of a county commissioner who shot down a deputy sheriff to keep from being arrested for drunkenness, only to be acquitted? These were crimes by white men, but a black man found guilty of selling ten grams of marijuana for twenty-five dollars drew a sentence of five years in prison. One of the stories Mo and I turned up, this one in a 1983 Harper’s article by John Rothchild, said, “The judge . . . remarked that a person who peddles small amounts is, in a way, worse than someone who hauls it by the ton.” It was such logic, in an isolated terrain ideal for clandestine undertakings, that allowed the trade to flourish. But increasing brazenness eventually drew the attention of state and federal agents, and pressure on local lawmen intensified enough for them at last to arrest a hauler. He was from Kansas.

  Before long, the smugglers found it more efficient to bring the cannabis to shore not by little bird-dog boats but by airplane. The Dixie County Commission at first leased the airport to known smugglers and then built a wide and straight highway through a marshy remoteness toward a coastline (the Road to Nowhere) it never reached. It was a landing strip for light planes bearing loads of square mullet, a name no longer particularly accurate, unless somewhere there were winged mullet.

  With the addition of cocaine to shipments, the packages began to change. But, over time, it was another innovation that became fractious, and it led to trouble: Cubans and other Hispanics became increasingly involved and created rifts among Floridians living in an area never known for ethnic tolerance. When the haulers began hiding bales of dope in the swamp as insurance they would be paid, the Cubans responded by cutting off the cash altogether and making the stashed bales the entire payment, and the former fishermen countered by setting aside yet more bales.

  As wealth grew, so with it did envy. Boats, for whatever purpose, got bigger and fancier, ratty house-trailers turned into new double-wides or real houses, and money filled some pockets fuller than others. One defendant later explained in court the source of his $125,000 in cash by saying, “Like, when I go home at night, I throw my change into a glass-jar-type thing, and it accumulates over the years.”

  A man, who as a boy had cleaned real mullet on the docks of a group later deeply involved in the smuggling, finally agreed to put on a drug agent’s wire to gain for himself and his brother immunity from prosecution. Soon after informing, he moved — escaped — to Texas and opened a restaurant. Apparently no one knows exactly how many tons of marijuana came into the United States through Taylor and Dixie counties in those years, but it’s certain there will be readers of this sentence, living far distant from Deadman Bay, who have toked Steinhatchee stash. (One may ask how such blatant activity could operate so long beyond the scope
of the law.)

  In the Taylor County Courthouse, Mo and I read in only two of the criminal-court ledgers more than a hundred names of men charged with some phase of smuggling or trafficking. About half the names were Hispanic; many of the rest were local people, including one county commissioner who was convicted and served forty-two months in prison only to be released, whereupon, shortly before we arrived, he had run again for office but was defeated.

  Eventually, the trials became so numerous they had to be held in a half-dozen out-county towns, and the convictions for a spell put a noticeable drain on Steinhatchee males. A clerk in Perry said, “I don’t think much of the drug money did any lasting good down there, but it sure helped some lawyers up in this end of Taylor.”

  7

  A Taste of Manatee

  ONE MORNING, Mo and I followed our usual practice of going to a café for breakfast and letting a chance conversation with whoever turned up to direct our day. In a village, things can assemble rather quickly like that.

  On my travels, especially ones I write about, I’m forever aware of the difficulty of learning enough to report accurately in a limited time. Being an outsider keeps me away from some stories but also lets me in on others when a native sees his anecdote will soon leave town with the stranger. For this reason, I ask people appearing in my books to check the accuracy of what I’ve written about them before it goes into print. (Once in a while, though, that isn’t feasible; in those instances, I may change a name but only with full admission to you, the vigilant reader.) That morning, we heard a story from a man unafraid to tell it and willing later to stand by it.

  At the Lynn-Rich Restaurant on the east side of Steinhatchee, we watched a large man eating a slice of pie and speaking earnestly to another fellow who seemed uneasy about whatever the topic was. Between them lay a thick binder of blueprints. Although they sat several tables away from us, it wasn’t difficult to hear sentences the big man emphasized, ones he clearly considered especially pithy: “Five percent of five million is a nice piece of chump change.” And later, “Look, at any point I’ll sell out.” Later still, “Share the pie, and you eventually get more pie.” Since he’d already eaten his pie, I assumed he wasn’t speaking literally. And then the words that drew us to him: “If you want to develop land anywhere, you’d better know how to do an end run around a city council or a county commission.” It seemed evident that a piece of the future of Steinhatchee was getting laid out between a slice of pie and two cups of thin coffee.

  After an hour, the quiet man left and the other gathered up his documents. We walked over, and Mo asked if he knew whether the village had a sewage system. It was a leading question, a test question. I expected the man to rebuff us and make a hurried exit, but he opened his binder and explained a little about the problems of sewage in an area of porous limestone and abundant springs, where streams, including the Steinhatchee River, can have miles of subterranean flow. One current sewage method there — septic fields of mounded earth — was barely adequate for only a few scattered homes.

  The man, Charlie Kinnard, was in his late sixties, about six feet tall, his balding head cropped close as was his white beard. He was articulate, capable of turning a phrase in the Southern manner, possessed of an affability that appeared to match a capacity to intimidate should he need to. He’d been in Florida for seven years and lived now across the state. “I’m a Tennessee hillbilly,” he said, but later clarified that he grew up in Nashville and had attended a prestigious prep school. He’d married more than once and divorced more than once.

  To my surprise, Kinnard began explaining amiably his proposed development for the area, being quite specific about where it was to be. As he laid out blueprints, maps, aerial photos, and photographs, he said, “Two and a half years ago I’d never heard of Steinhatchee, but right now I’ve got approval for four twenty-five-storey condos. That’s four-hundred units.” I said he could house more people than now lived in Steinhatchee and Jena combined. “After those units, I want to do even more. You know the Road to Nowhere? That’s a paved road waiting for somebody to use it, make it go somewhere. How about two ten-storey condos — two-hundred-fifty units — out there?”

  Mo said we’d heard there was a thirty-two-foot height limit on new construction. “That’s Steinhatchee. Across the river in Dixie County, they’ve got no limit. There’s already a six-storey building going up now. And I’ve got questions about how well it’s being done.” As he talked, he pointed out each location on a map and held up sketches of his proposed buildings. “If all my units get built, they’ll be fifty percent of the tax base in Dixie County. That’s pretty persuasive.”

  Kinnard closed the binder and lowered his voice and said ominously, “Step outside.” As we followed him to his car — a sun-bleached top-of-the-line Central European model, one of two he had there — Mo whispered to me, “Is this the part where the Yankee asking too many questions takes a little ol ride back into the swamp?”

  Tapping the hood ornament, Kinnard said, “She’s got a lot of miles on her. I want a Bentley.” He shook his head at his remark and added, “I’ve got as much junk as a white man ought to have. These plans of mine, when you get down to it, they’re plans to build a fund for more toys.”

  He looked around, measured our interest in his pursuits, and said just above a whisper, “The difficulty here is with local contractors. Their attitudes — it’s all small-town stuff. I’m not in the family, and I don’t want to be. I just want reliability and quality and no messing behind my back.” Moments later, as if to illustrate, a local builder pulled his pickup in next to Kinnard’s automobile and blocked an exit. To the bulky, tough-faced man, Charlie said, “You’re in a driveway.” The other said, “Is it your business?” and went into the café. Soon he was back out to move his truck; after he’d done so, he said menacingly to Kinnard, “Does that satisfy you?” and he stepped close for a further exchange of theories about the duties incumbent with tidy parking. Neither man, each big enough to hold his ground easily, gave an inch. The contractor headed toward his coffee but paused to call over his shoulder, “You’re an idiot.”

  Kinnard, who still had not altered his casual lean against his car, smiled at us and said calmly, “You see what I mean? You can’t work with stupidity. One time it’s a fool, and somewhere else it’s a fricking environmentalist crying about a frog — or a manatee.” Still smiling, he said, “Have you ever eaten manatee?” Good god, I said, everybody loves a manatee! I said Christopher Columbus, after seeing his first manatees, wrote in his log he’d seen mermaids (they weren’t so beautiful as painted). With a nod, Kinnard said, “Sure, we love them because their taste is between a bald eagle and a spotted owl.” Trying to realign the conversation, I made a display of writing in my notebook. Kinnard watched for a moment, then looked at Mo and said, “Why save something that’s too dumb to get out of the way?” I wrote that down too.

  As he left, he invited us to come by his condo site to see what he had going. The next morning, Mo had to return home, and not long after, Q rejoined me. The two of us drove out to view the location where the high-rise condos were to go. We found Kinnard inside a semitrailer he’d set up as an office in a bulldozed area of low-lying land I’d have thought too soggy to set a fishing shack on, let alone a high-rise. Among the few jaggedly broken trees still standing, palmettos and scrub growth were trying to return as if to heal the stripped earth. He greeted us warmly, surprised I’d followed through with a visit. I asked what would happen when potential investors or residents learned they couldn’t see the Gulf three miles distant from the site. “That’s one reason we’re going up,” he said. “The footprint will be small, but the view big. I brought a seventy-foot crane out here and took pictures from the top of it to give people an idea of the view they’ll have from upper floors.”

  We talked about construction, problems of sewage created by several hundred new residents, “skyprints” that block views from the ground, the low and porous land, the effect of
a changed tax base, hurricane bait. He planned to hire outside builders whenever he could. “You saw the problem yesterday in the parking lot,” he said, paused, then added, “I’ll tell you something.” Lowering his voice, he stepped close, although no one else was within a half mile of us. “That contractor yesterday — I could have shot him. Legally. Maybe you don’t know it, but Florida’s got new handgun legislation.”

  He was speaking of the so-called “stand your ground” law, propagated by the National Rifle Association in Florida with the idea of spreading it across the rest of the nation, as the organization had a couple of decades earlier with the “right-to-carry” gun laws. I was confused about the reasoning of Florida voters: many were recently enraged by a judge who granted a natural death to a brain-dead woman, yet now they were content to permit the living to shoot it out over a parking space. None of this, of course, came into our conversation. Q was becoming apprehensive and was secretly pulling on the back of my shirt to get it to leave.

  In words of utter calmness, Kinnard explained how a few months earlier he had dealt with a neighboring tenant, widely known as a scofflaw who kept trespassing on commercial property the developer owned on the Atlantic coast. One night, he and a friend (a potential witness) got the trespasser — a big, meaty guy holding title to adjacent commercial land — and his backup to make threats as the four men argued over boundaries. Demonstrating for us, Kinnard became dramatically deliberate as he acted out the incident, using the bulldozed scrub as his stage. Q was as uneasy as I’ve ever seen her.