In answer to the waiter’s query, I said that the grouper sandwich was good, though final judgment would have to wait till I sampled all the others on the island. He advised me to conduct my survey before the weekend; thousands were expected to descend on Cedar Key. Anyway, that was the hope. What with the plummeting economy, no one could be sure how many visitors would show up.
“You see, this side of the island survives on tourism. The other side on clamming,” he said, motioning at broad-beamed dories in the harbor.
“To change the subject,” I said, “we’ve got a couple of dogs in our truck. They’re in the shade, but they might be happier if we could bring them here. Okay?”
“Don’t think so, but let me check with Brian.”
In a moment, he came back with a stocky man wearing a baseball cap and a stubble of beard. Brian Skarupski was the owner, also the cook, and he arrived at our table with a fellow restaurateur, Glenda Richburg, who ran a breakfast place, Annie’s Café.
“I can’t let you bring the dogs here,” Brian said, apologetically. “I used to let my customers tie dogs up on the deck. Then the state health inspector told me I couldn’t do that anymore. The state required city hall to pass an ordinance prohibiting pets in a restaurant unless the owner had a permit. To get the permit, I had to install doggy-doo stations and plastic bags on the deck. I wasn’t going to. I thought, Hey, if you see a dog on a restaurant deck and you don’t like it, then you say, ‘I’m not going to eat there.’ That’s how America is supposed to work. You ask me, the whole thing is unraveling.”
“America, you mean?”
“You ask me, it is. What brings you to Cedar Key? Memorial Day?”
I told him about our trip. We’d been on the road only a week, but I’d honed the speech to two or three sentences.
“The country unraveling, that’s one of the things we want to ask people,” I said. “If they think it is, or what they think holds it together.”
“That’s a hard question, the way things are going.” Brian considered for a moment. “Take me for an example. I’m a small businessman. I own this place and a grocery in town. Found out the other day there’s going to be a new regulation requiring scales to register not just the weight but the nutrient value in chicken, pork, and beef. So much of this, so much of that.”
I asked how this instrument could distinguish a pork chop from a chicken breast, and then detect its content of protein, fat, vitamins.
“The scale has special software that calculates these nutrient levels,” Brian replied. “So I asked a guy from a scale company what one would cost me. Thirty-four hundred bucks! He told me that he feels the same way I do about government meddling and regulations. Except in this case because now he gets to sell real expensive new scales.”
“But aren’t regulations necessary?”
“The big money they don’t regulate,” Brian scoffed. “Small money like mine they do.”
Glenda jumped in. “Like the net fishing ban. All it did was put a lotta people outta work.” She paused to drag on a Marlboro Light. Glenda had denim blue eyes, slightly tilted at the corners, and high, sharp cheekbones that gave her a kind of tough-cookie good looks. “Worked the net boats myself when I was a kid. They said we were killin’ porpoise and crap like that. Well, we weren’t. Hell, everybody loves frickin’ porpoise.”
“Has the clam industry made up for it?”
“Not much,” she answered. Sure, at low tide you could see entire reefs of clams, but “big operators from up North came on down and bought up all the leases. The little guy doesn’t have enough money to go out on his own. You asked what holds this country together. Well, I have no idea whatever holds it together.”
9.
What finger-shaped Florida lacks in breadth it makes up for in length; Tallahassee is 480 miles from Miami (farther than New York City is from Cleveland).
The two cities are separated by another, greater distance. Miami has become a Latin American capital, home to Cubans of course, but also Hondurans, Colombians, Brazilians. The city jumps to a salsa beat. You can drive the whole length of Eighth Street, Calle Ocho, and swear by the billboards and storefront signs that you’re in Havana or Bogotá. Finding an English-language radio station is like an Easter-egg hunt with no egg at the end.
Country-and-western dominated the AM and FM bands when we got to Tallahassee, and the signs did not require translation. Magnolia and live oak bearded with Spanish moss shaded clapboard homes (in modest neighborhoods) and (in high-end precincts) the grounds of would-be Taras with white-pillared porticos.
We spent a day and a night with my son Marc and his wife, Erin, and babysat our three granddaughters. Although the guest room was no bigger than the trailer, Leslie was delighted to sleep on a real bed in a space that didn’t rest on wheels. The two women in my life weren’t getting along. Leslie is practical, down-to-earth, and low-maintenance, and she doesn’t suffer high-maintenance girly-girls gladly. That described Ethel. Ethel was also unpredictable; the propane alarm had gone off again, for no apparent reason.
Now that I wasn’t traveling alone, Marc’s opinion of my sanity had moderated. He’s a political reporter for the Miami Herald and helped me in my quest by arranging an interview with Dean Cannon, the Republican Speaker of the Florida House of Representatives.
I met Cannon at a Starbucks in a Tallahassee suburb. Speaker of the House evokes an image of a craggy-faced eminence like Tip O’Neill. Cannon, though forty-two, looked so young I wanted to ask him what he was going to do when he got out of college. As I approached seventy, almost everyone under forty-five looked eighteen. I sought Cannon’s opinions about what keeps our monster, mongrel nation in one piece.
He replied with a lawyerly dissertation.
“The nation is held together for structural, cultural, and historical reasons. We have a federal, not a national, government. It’s the difference between steel and Kevlar. The structure is flexible enough to respect differences in diverse peoples and diverse states, but strong enough to hold things together. It’s the only form of government capable of sustaining such a diversity of geography and ethnicity without everything blowing apart.
“There is a universal yearning in the human soul to be free, to be unfettered, and the degree of personal freedom we have here is greater than in any other country. You can start a business in your backyard, you can own a gun, you can travel from Florida to Alabama or Georgia without showing your papers. The Bill of Rights is our shared cultural legacy.
“We were born out of a group of brave, original thinkers. We had an unbuilt continent, blessed by climate and soil, a country rich beyond compare, and at a key moment in history, they knew how to take the best of the best and build a new form of government.”
There wasn’t a word I disagreed with. But, I asked, if we had this wonderful system, why were so many people up in arms? Tea Partiers calling for secession, mainstream politicians hinting that armed revolt might be a viable option?
“You’ve got to distinguish. There are some Tea Party people who are angry, social misfits, they’re just crazy jerks. But I think the vast majority of the Tea Party people I’ve spoken to aren’t so much angry as they’re afraid—afraid of the country, for the first time in its existence, losing sight of the fact that liberty and personal freedoms are the primary characteristics distinguishing us from every other country in the free world. The gravest threat to liberty is too strong a central government.”
There I did partially disagree. As Justice Louis Brandeis said in 1941, we could have democracy in this country or we could have great wealth in the hands of the few, but we couldn’t have both. Bigness was the gravest threat to liberty: big banks and big corporations in alliance with big government—an oligarchy, a corporatarchy, a plutocracy, call it anything you like. Maybe what had everybody, left, right, and center, so upset was the recognition that we were the suckers in a game of Texas hold ’em rigged by the Wall Street and K Street sharpies.
From reading
too many newspapers and listening to too many news broadcasts and talk-radio ravings, I’d formed the impression that most Republicans were like the mad-as-hell character in the film Network. But Cannon, who described himself as a “William Buckley conservative,” was so civil and reasonable that I left feeling better about Republicans all around. A lefty like me could talk politics with a righty like him without having a TV-style shout-fest.
10.
The two humans and their dogs left Tallahassee on Memorial Day and headed into the panhandle. A roadsign—TWO EGG—15 MI.—drew us off U.S. 90. Where better to have two eggs for breakfast? Fifteen miles on, another sign told us that we were in Two Egg, which appeared to exist in the sign maker’s imagination. All we found were two farmhouses surrounded by peanut fields. We doubled back and asked a clerk at a convenience store if we’d missed the town. No, we hadn’t. “Ain’t much there,” she told us.
“For sure,” I said. “Why had it”—if there was an it—“been named Two Egg?”
“All sorts o’ stories ’bout that,” she answered. “Man named Cox wrote a book about town names in Florida. You’ll find ’em in there, and the book in the bookstore in Marianna.”
The bookstore was closed for the holiday, and none of the other businesses looked as if they would carry Mr. Cox’s compendium of Florida place-names. It was hard to tell what kind of merchandise some of them stocked, like Bastion Piano and Christian Supply. Bullets and Bowls sold ammunition and either china or bowling equipment.
Marianna is a handsome town where the past is a presence. We drove by lovely antebellum mansions, the Confederate memorial—a white plinth like a miniature Washington Monument—and brass markers commemorating the Battle of Marianna, a fierce skirmish fought between a federal raiding party and the local garrison in 1864. In the cemetery of St. Luke’s Episcopal, we found the grave of John Milton—not the author of Paradise Lost but the Confederate governor of Florida, a fanatical secessionist who said he’d rather die than live in the United States. True to his word, he shot himself when the South surrendered. His grave, under a tombstone inscribed NON SIBI SED PATRIAE (not for self but country), lay under a huge old magnolia tree. I hoped he wasn’t turning over down there. A small Confederate flag was planted on one side; on the other, the flag of the union he hated.
There is no memorial to a very dark chapter in Marianna’s history. The tale of what happened to Claude Neal, a black man accused of raping a white woman in 1934, is To Kill a Mockingbird without the trial or Atticus Finch. A white lynch mob seized Neal from jail, mutilated him (I’ll leave it to you to guess how), hanged him, stabbed him repeatedly with sharpened sticks, then dragged his corpse behind an automobile into Marianna, where it was strung up on the courthouse lawn. The atrocity made headlines all over the country and led to passage of the antilynching laws under Franklin Roosevelt’s administration.
A long time ago, the city fathers say. Modern Marianna is progressive and diverse, a center of ecotourism with Florida Caverns State Park nearby. But that doesn’t mean that racism is safely stored away in the reliquary of the Jim Crow past. During the 2008 presidential campaign, Marc covered a story about a Marianna middle school teacher who’d given his seventh-grade students an unusual civics lesson. Noting that Barack Obama’s campaign theme was change, he wrote C-H-A-N-G-E on the blackboard and, with a laugh, told them that it stood for Come Help A Nigger Get Elected. The teacher was suspended for ten days, which represents progress of a sort in race relations.
Dwelling on this history, recent and remote, put me in a reflective mood as we rolled out of Florida and into Alabama. My body was in the New South, my head in the South I’d seen in 1961. Two college buddies and I were heading for the spring break bacchanal in Fort Lauderdale when we got lost somewhere in Georgia. We stopped at an all-night gas station to get directions. I was thirsty, and as I bent over the fountain on one side of the station, an attendant the size of a public monument tapped me on the shoulder with a wrench. “You don’t look like no nigger to me, son,” he said, and pointed at the sign I’d missed in the darkness: COLORED ONLY. I would like to report that I was outraged. What I did was apologize and go to the WHITES ONLY fountain on the other side.
I’m not dredging up this memory because I’m a snooty northerner who thinks Yankees are enlightened and southerners benighted; I grew up in Chicago, where the Klan could have taken lessons in bigotry. I dredge it up because in Alabama we found Old South and New South cohabiting.
A sign on a barn roof beckoned: HISTORIC CIVIL WAR BATTLE SITE. I’d no sooner glimpsed it than I saw another: TIN TOP CAFÉ. It was lunchtime, and we pulled off U.S. 231 onto a gravel drive and parked by an ancient tree, its branches casting shade for ten yards all around. Fred’s thermometer read ninety-eight degrees. For the first month of our journey, we were seldom to experience a day under ninety, which led me to question the wisdom of traveling in the summer with two long-haired dogs. Their welfare was a constant concern. Dog wrangler Leslie let Sage and Sky out for a pee break, then leashed them to the shaded rear bumper and set a water dish on the ground so they would survive our lunch hour.
With a tin roof, junk-cluttered wood porch, old Coca-Cola signs, and logos of extinct oil companies tacked to its outer walls, the Tin Top looked as if it had been around since the days of Model Ts. (We found out later that it dated to the 1980s; the decor, like distress marks on modern furniture, was there to give it a homey, antique look.) Lunch was served cafeteria-style, in southern country abundance. Fried chicken, biscuits, green beans, and coleslaw heaped on our plates, we sat down, next to a wall covered with dated license plates and rodeo photographs.
“See that?” Leslie whispered, and cocked her head at a poster. COMING SOON TO A HOSPITAL NEAR YOU—OBAMACARE, it said. A photoshopped picture of the president’s face, with a bone through his nose, was superimposed on the torso of an African witch doctor, clad in a leopard-skin loincloth.
“Guess they serve chicken here from the right wing only,” Leslie observed.
But right wing and left wing were beside the point because Obama’s health-care policies were beside the point. The photograph was the point. We were only a short drive from Montgomery, where in 1955 Rosa Parks changed a great deal by refusing to change her seat on a city bus. Segregated water fountains and lunch counters and bus seats were no more but, evidently, people like that gas station attendant were not yet an endangered species.
“Young man, have you had enough to eat? Enough to hold you till supper?” a man asked as we were leaving.
He was seated at a table near the door with two ladies of a certain age. Red suspenders held up his trousers, and pale eyes sparkled merrily behind his glasses. If he was older than I, it wasn’t by much, and I thanked him for calling me young and said that I’d eaten so much I would probably skip supper.
This appeared to gratify him. He was the Tin Top’s owner, Robert Messildine. He asked where we were from and where we were going, and after I answered he considered for a moment and said with a chuckle, “Alaska, huh? You’ll find it uphill all the way.”
Messildine exuded good humor and southern hospitality. I took an immediate liking to him and wasn’t able to square my liking with the racist poster. But then, there are shadowy corners in my own soul that I can’t reconcile with the brighter parts of myself.
“I’d like to see that Civil War battle site you’ve got advertised out there,” I said.
Robert shook his head. “You cain’t see it, cuz it ain’t there. My nephew was a surveyor up in North Carolina, near to Nags Head, and he was cleanin’ up after a hurricane and found that sign and brought it here. I got to take it down one of these days. How far you goin’ today? Don’t reckon you’ll make Alaska by nightfall.”
I said, “Tuscaloosa”—if the trailer parks and state campgrounds there had not all been blasted into oblivion. A month earlier, more than two hundred tornadoes had struck the Southeast in a single day, with the worst smashing through northern Alabama.
Robert spoke of million-dollar homes blown into a lake in Tuscaloosa, and of a Georgia woman who owned one of those homes. She was last seen fleeing in a red Jeep Cherokee, and most likely she and the car were at the bottom.
“If you want to help out in Tuscaloosa, there’s plenty of work for you to do,” he said. “They’ll be cleanin’ up for the next year.”
As we rolled toward Montgomery, Leslie spoke into her Android smart phone, which we’d begun calling “Magic Droid,” or “MD”: “Tuscaloosa. Tornado. Volunteer relief work.”
Allow me to digress. Though I’m not a Luddite, I have an ambivalent relationship with technology. It’s made life much easier, saved me epochs of time, and yet I resent it. Every week, it seems, Apple or Microsoft rolls out some new, complicated, expensive device that I’m supposed to master or I’ll get left behind in the digital dust. Even my flip-up cell phone, which doesn’t do much more than make calls, came with an instruction manual half an inch thick. As chock-full of apps as Santa’s bag, MD did everything but mix drinks and was to prove invaluable on the trip. Whenever we made a wrong turn, her GPS put us back on track. I use the feminine pronoun because MD gave driving directions in a female voice, a do-as-I-say voice—In one hundred yards, turn left—that reminded me of my eighth-grade teacher, Sister Joan Clare. And, like Sister Joan Clare, she was almost always right, which irritated the hell out of me.
I have navigated through wilderness with a map and compass, at sea with a sextant. Those instruments require skill and practice, and, accurate as they are, they’re subject to error. That uncertainty creates a tingling tension; so when you arrive at your destination you feel not only relieved but gratified, because your own brain and abilities, mixed with a little luck, are what got you there.
When she was in GPS mode, MD removed the elements of unpredictability that make travel an adventure. I remember an old-world atlas that had belonged to my father in high school; it dated from the thirties, when some parts of the planet still appeared as white spots on the map. Oh, how I loved to stare at them and wonder, What’s there? Even in my own youth, a few places, like the depths of the Brazilian Amazon or the interior of New Guinea, remained as uncharted as Mars. Now Mars itself has been partially mapped; as for our own planet, satellite technology has filled in every square mile. There were no mysterious, thrilling white spaces in MD. Communicating with those spinning satellites, she could take me down any road or street in America and deliver me to the exact spot I wanted to go. It was marvelous—and somehow depressing.
The Longest Road Page 6
