Past a cluster of Miccosukee houses with steep, thatched roofs, the road angled sharply northwest, then ran west again, direct as a rifle shot into Collier County and through Big Cypress. Leaving the Tamiami Trail, we followed State Route 29 toward Everglades City. If Key West had been Dodge City on the Gulf Stream, Everglades City had been Tombstone on the Gulf Coast in the drug-running days of the seventies and eighties. It faces the Ten Thousand Islands, which resemble pieces of a jigsaw puzzle dumped out of the box, forming a seascape-landscape that looks designed for illicit pursuits. Pirates lurked there in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it was a haven for bootleggers during Prohibition. A few decades later, the U.S. Interior Department banned commercial fishing in the Everglades and told the locals to find other ways to make a living. Fishermen, oystermen, and stone crabbers, each with a chart of the Ten Thousand Islands printed in his brain, took the department’s advice and turned to marijuana smuggling. Pretty soon, half of Everglades City was in the trade. The money rolled in, good old boys exchanged their rattletrap pickups for new SUVs with smoked windows, their sluggish skiffs for fast fiberglass boats. It all ended in 1983, when two hundred federal agents swooped in and busted so many men that one female resident was heard to remark, “They’ve got all the men! This is gonna be a town of women!”
Actually, it became one more tourist town, though it still clung to its Wild West image. Crossing a bridge over the Barron River, we were greeted by a sign: WELCOME TO EVERGLADES CITY. WESTERN GATEWAY TO THE EVERGLADES AND THE LAST FRONTIER. In the twenties, it had bigger aspirations. A Gatsby-like entrepreneur, Barron Collier (his first name the eponym for the river, his last for the county), had visions of transforming what was then a decrepit fishing village into another Miami Beach. The Depression put an end to his dreams, and his half-finished resort city reverted to a backwater. These days, what was to have been a rival to Miami Beach has about five hundred residents. The Bank of Everglades Building and the city hall, both built by Collier in Classic Revival style, Doric columns and all, rise above crab shacks and clapboard cottages; the main street, a wide boulevard divided by a rank of stately royal palm, seems to cry out for upscale emporiums rather than the mom-and-pop stores lining it now.
A causeway carried us over Chokoloskee Bay to the island of the same name. We set up in a plush RV resort, as much for the dogs’ sake as our own. They were gasping in the heat, though they had enough energy to chase the lizards skittering around. We had dinner in town, where Leslie picked up a glossy guidebook to the Gulf Coast. Sandwiched into the ads for airboat rides, Everglades tours, restaurants, and miniature golf courses was this sign of the times: “Foreclosure Tours! Free! Call Now! 239-443-3000.”
A swollen sun hovered over the smoky horizon. It looked as cosmologists tell us it will look in its death throes four billion years from now: a red giant whose fires will incinerate whatever is left on Earth.
* * *
Varnished in insect repellent, we tried a morning walk with Sage and Sky, finishing up just as the mosquitoes and no-see-ums were stirring in the mangrove galleries alongside the causeway. How the pioneers lived in the Everglades without losing their minds was beyond me. You could make the argument that they were out of their minds to live there in the first place. The night we’d spent in the Everglades on the way to our start had already given us a small taste of what their existence had been like. Leslie had debuted one of my camping gear purchases, a mini–miner’s light worn on an elastic headband. I wanted to sleep, she wanted to read, so I suggested she don the lamp. She did, then cracked open The Innocents Abroad—and in seconds she wore a veil of insects. Her curses and swats at the midges, mosquitoes, moths, and gnats woke me up, and as I laughed at her traffic-cop gyrations, she suggested that I try the miner’s light, which she tossed helpfully at my head.
Now, in Chokoloskee, we sought directions from a guy in the campground office.
Leaning on a counter packed with fishing lures, Kenny Brown was deep in conversation with a rangy, saturnine man chewing tobacco.
“Come in here in the middle of the night and flattened that mound,” the man said as he drew a diagram of a U-shaped ditch on scrap paper. “How d’yuh figure, bulldozes the mound flat without documentation from state archaeologists and closes off a public road with no permission from the county?”
Brown narrowed his gray-blue eyes. “Says he’s well connected, and not here with the county.” He waved a hand to indicate that whoever they were talking about had nothing but contempt for local officials. “Says he got connections in the state legi-slate-shur.”
“Yuh know, the state archaeologist was all set to come down from Tallahassee to see what was here, but somehow he didn’t,” the other man said. “So this fella hires his own private archaeologist, and of course he said there’s nothing here.”
He spit tobacco juice into a paper cup. Brown, silent, shook his head. Into the pause, I asked for directions to the Smallwood Trading Post, opened in 1906 by a pioneer couple and now a historic landmark.
“Mamie Street, named for Mamie Smallwood,” the tobacco chewer said. “Closed off, all right. Developer blocked it off, a public road, like he owns it!”
I introduced myself. The man was Ken Smallwood, a descendant of the trading post’s founders. That explained his outrage.
“What developer?” I asked.
A limited partnership called Florida-Georgia Grove had bought the shell mound and its adjoining property from the Seminole Indian tribe, he said. Now it was clearing land and dredging a boat basin for a marina.
“And no regard for what’s here,” said Brown. “Chokoloskee Island is one of the most significant archaeological sites in Florida.”
“There’s a lot here? Artifacts?”
“This whole island is one big shell mound,” Brown said. “There’s burial sites from the Calusas on through the Seminoles on through the early white settlers. After a rain, you can walk and look over there and see a deer bone and then a human bone. You can look a few feet away and see pottery shards.”
“Or an arrowhead or a carved pipe,” Smallwood interjected, to which Brown added, “There’s no site like this in the whole world! Arrowheads made out of conch shells and Indian graves. Why, this place is hucklebuck full of stuff like that.”
Kenny and Ken launched into a history lecture, displaying a passion for their heritage. Brown, a great-great-grandson of a Florida Indian agent, informed us that Chokoloskee meant “the old home” in the Seminole language. But the Seminoles were Johnny-come-latelies. The shell mounds had been built by their predecessors, the Calusas.
“They were on this island from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries, not long before the Spaniards got here,” Smallwood said.
“Way before that,” Brown corrected. “The Smithsonian was down here years back and carbon-dated artifacts to 600 AD! The Calusas built canals. They built levees out of oyster and clam shells.”
“Florida’s first developers,” I said.
He laughed and went on. At one time, the Calusas were the mightiest tribe in Florida, adept at war because they were fond of it. Calusa meant “the fierce people.”
“When Ponce de León landed here in 1513, the Calusas met him with a whole bunch of war canoes and fought him off. Second time Ponce landed, 1521, the Calusas met him again. They wounded ole Ponce with a poison arrow, him and two other men. The Spaniards retreated, sailed away back to Havana, and Ponce took three days to die.”
Smallwood replenished his wad of chew. “Their bows were powerful, and their arrowheads made from shell could penetrate the Spaniards’ armor. Or they aimed for their knees, whatever wasn’t protected. Yup, Calusas killed those Spaniards for their bad ways.”
He and Brown seemed to draw inspiration from the tribe’s resistance to Spanish conquest in their own fight against the bad ways of Florida-Georgia Grove LLP.
“This county is gonna make that man restore the road, “Smallwood predicted. “And when his investors find out
all the trouble going on down here, they’re gonna contact their lawyers, and you watch—one by one they’ll drop out.”
We wanted to see a shell mound, and where might we do that?
Brown grabbed a chart and a pencil. “You go across the bay to the mouth of the Turner River, then paddle upstream to here.” On the chart he marked an X at a fork in the river. “You’ll see it. Bigole midden, once covered half a square mile.”
We rented a canoe and, with the dogs stowed in the trailer, set out across Chokoloskee Bay, cooled by a fresh southwesterly breeze. Schools of mullet creased the murky water, and an osprey circled above, seeking a meal with eyes that detect what the human eye can see only through binoculars. The canoe scraped a shoal entering the tidal river, coffee-brown, a quarter of a mile wide, shallow as spit, bordered by red mangrove whose roots looked like the legs of gigantic spiders. Young ibis waded nearby, scooping muck with their long, curved bills.
Near the fork, we spotted the midden. It resembled a rock pile, and it must have risen twenty feet above the shoreline. We turned toward it, passing a small blacktip shark cruising a bar, and a fine specimen of a tricolor heron—slate blue back, greenish head, a white stripe along its throat. It stood utterly motionless on spindly, crayon-yellow legs, its neck forming an S; then the neck straightened and snake-quick the long beak struck and came up with a minnow, shiny as a foil strip.
We beached the canoe. Wearing halos of mosquitoes, we climbed the mound and followed a path inland, above black, brackish ponds and snarled mangrove roots.
“How did he say this place was full of artifacts?” Leslie asked, looking at the ground.
“Hucklebuck full.”
Heads down, we searched in vain for an arrowhead or pottery shard on this primitive landfill of oyster shells mortared with limestone marl. Enough oysters to keep a raw bar in business for a century, and there’d once been hundreds of these shell mounds in southwestern Florida.
And thousands of Calusas, reigning uncontested over the Gulf Coast until the Spanish arrived. Two centuries after they’d driven Ponce de León back to Cuba, the Calusas, decimated by wars and by European diseases, couldn’t offer even token resistance to the Seminole Creeks migrating south from present-day Georgia. Soon afterward, they disappeared completely.
We boarded the canoe and paddled back across the bay. In the distance, the Smallwood Trading Post stood on its pilings above the muddy shore, no less than the Calusa middens a relic of a vanished culture. My heart was with Kenny Brown and Ken Smallwood, but I wasn’t sure, if someone asked me to bet on them or the developer, where I’d put my money.
7.
There are many highways that combine the banality of the interstate with the frustration of stoplights and heavy traffic, and that describes U.S. 41 as it passes through the urbanized parts of Florida’s Gulf Coast: Naples, Cape Coral, Fort Myers. An hour of stop-and-go persuaded me to temporarily lift the ban on interstates: we turned onto I-75 and sped up to Tampa, where we violated another prohibition by staying at a motel. We were going to visit my son Geoff, and there wasn’t a trailer park within a reasonable distance of his house.
Geoff, a music teacher and jazz guitarist, was playing a gig that night but promised to see us in the morning. He recommended that we kick back at a downtown bar, the Hub, warning us not to order doubles.
The Hub, “established 1949,” billed itself as Tampa’s oldest continuously operating bar, as if it were an English pub dating back to Henry VIII. It was a time capsule of sorts: dimly lit, black-and-white checkered floor, and some customers were smoking! Cigarettes! The reason for Geoff’s advice regarding doubles became apparent when Jamie, the bartender, poured me a martini that could have accommodated a school of gin-resistant goldfish.
She wore a ponytail, glasses, and a replica of the Tampa Tribune front page from June 7, 2004, on her T-shirt. OURS, read the headline, set in a font size usually reserved for declarations of war. “Ours” was the Stanley Cup, won that year by the Tampa Bay Lightning.
What did you call citizens of Tampa? Tampanites sounded too much like an exotic mineral, and Tampons wouldn’t do. Whatever the term, the whole city was hoping for a repeat, and all eyes in the Hub were on the TV, broadcasting the preliminaries to that night’s playoff for the Eastern Conference championship. Game 6, and the Boston Bruins were leading the series, 3–2.
I asked Jamie why the team was called Lightning.
“You don’t know?” growled a disreputable smoker sitting beside Leslie. He forgave my ignorance, then explained that Tampa Bay had an average of 874 lightning strikes per year, more than anywhere else in the world.
The martini was playing darts, and my cortex was the dartboard. I asked Leslie, sotto voce, if I was speaking clearly.
“You sound like a drunk trying to sound sober,” she whispered.
I left it to her to carry the burden of conversation with Jamie, a pleasant woman who’d fled New Hampshire in 1995 to attend the University of Tampa.
“I hate the cold,” she said. “Last winter, I visited my parents and I thought, No human should live in cold like this.”
However, Jamie’s desire for warmth exacted its price. Her fine-arts degree cost $120,000 in student loans, and she’d been tending bar for years to pay them off.
“Sixty thousand so far,” she said. “Sixty more to go. I’d really like to teach.”
“My … sh … son told me,” I ventured, “never order a double here.”
Jamie’s smile was kind but firm: she wasn’t going to serve me another drink. “Good advice. Because a single is a double, a double a triple. Nope. You never have to order a double in the Hub.”
* * *
We met Geoff for breakfast the next morning at La Teresita, a Cuban eatery where the waitresses called you “Hon” or its Spanish equivalent. We sat at the crowded counter, eating zingy three-egg omelets washed down with double espressos. While a video advertising bail bondsmen played on the TV overhead, Geoff regaled us with tales of the musician’s perilous existence: moody vocalists who had to be humored, no-show sidemen. He had three bands: a bread-and-butter group for weddings and corporate events; a quartet called the Otha Brotha, because three are Filipino brothers, Geoff being the otha brotha; and the one dearest to his heart, the FLO—Fusion Liberation Organization.
He followed us back to the motel parking lot, where we gave him a tour of Ethel, accomplished in two nanoseconds. Glancing at the forward bunk, about five and half feet long by three wide, he asked, “Do you two lovebirds fit on that?” “No,” I said, “that’s mine”; out of my natural gallantry, and the fact that I’m more inseam-challenged than Leslie, I’d given the wider, longer bunk in the rear to her.
Once upon a time, Geoff lived the jazzman’s life to the full. At thirty, he realized it was going to be a short life if he kept on, and he became a born-again Christian. Before we left, he put his arms around us and said a prayer for our safety and health. Though I suspected the divine intelligence of the universe had better things to do than watch out for us, I was touched.
8.
The coastline that runs north from Tampa to the west-ward hook of the Florida panhandle is referred to on splashy tourist maps as the “Nature Coast.” It’s as if some planning commission had zoned it for trees and grass and all the other coasts for parking lots and high-rises. My guess is that the absence of a main highway accounts for the Nature Coast’s relatively untouched condition. It’s not all that accessible. The nearest major road, U.S. 98, is a considerable distance inland and is a pleasure to drive, lightly trafficked and free of commercial glut in its passage through pine and palmetto forests and cattle ranches whose emerald pastures look as tended as park lawns.
Most people don’t think “Florida” and “cowboy” go together, but the central part of the state has been cattle country since the days of the first Spanish settlers. The Anglo and Scots Irish cowhands who displaced the vaqueros pushed their livestock through the scrub with long drover’s whips whose rifle
-shot crack, some say, was the origin of cracker as a term for backcountry whites.
And there on the road map was Crackertown. Its derivation was obvious, but its immediate neighbor, Yankeetown, mystified us. Hoping for a colorful tale—maybe New England Puritans settled there after sinning, maybe Yankee carpetbaggers took it over after the Civil War—we were deflated when a gas station attendant told us that the town was named for northerner retirees who’d migrated to Florida.
* * *
State Highway 24 ran like a railroad track, which in fact it once had been, till it jogged to the right, bridged an estuary, and dropped us off in Cedar Key, a remote fishing village in danger of becoming self-consciously charming because it now depends more on tourism than fishing.
Downtown, patriotic bunting hung from the verandas of old-Florida inns and hotels, and workmen were putting flags on lampposts and telephone poles in preparation for Memorial Day. We found a seaside parking lot with sufficient shade to keep the dogs from dying of heat stroke and looked for a place to eat lunch. There were several on Dock Street, a street on a dock. The restaurant that caught our eye was a brightly painted shack boasting the best grouper sandwich on the island. It had a big deck and was called the Big Deck. Literal-mindedness appeared to be a town trait.
The waiter, a hefty kid who looked no older than sixteen, handed us a menu that featured a special—the Ripper, so named for the effect it would have on your digestive tract: a fried hot dog smothered in jalapeño peppers, banana peppers, cheese, tomato, sour cream, and salsa, and served with curly french fries. I opted for the grouper sandwich to test the Big Deck’s truth-in-advertising. Leslie ordered crab cakes.
The Longest Road Page 5
