Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (22 page)

That night, so long ago, my friend’s talk of the Anchor Inn started a voyage for all of us, although several soon gave it up along the way. We talked how sometime we’d go together to Bobbie Cheryl’s to celebrate our graduation from Phuddom and our release into a world not drawn from fiction but from actuality. After that night, for me at least, the Anchor Inn became archetypal and legendary, and — 
I see now
 — it helped carry me on through and smack out of academia. I think these very sentences — and likely most of the others I’ve written over the last quarter century — wouldn’t exist without that anchor of a roadhouse and its promise of convivium. Bobbie Cheryl sang a siren song that for years I could only hum because I didn’t understand the words.

But I’m getting ahead here.

Mo and I both eventually emerged with our Phudentials which in the end proved useless in those years when teaching jobs in our field all but evaporated. He joined the advertising department of a large Southern insurance company and earned a good salary, more than he ever would have from any imagined life dispensing nimble conspectuses to enraptured undergraduates. I continued to spiral down for some time, even after I hit the road to pursue stories of a kind the Anchor Inn surely was full of. Mo earned enough among the underwriters and adjusters to buy a thirty-seven-foot sloop and become a blue-water sailor whenever he could escape the office; he no longer needed an Anchor Inn, to confuse my metaphor, to buoy him. As for me, I underwrote my writing with a job clerking in the county courthouse and, later, one hoisting things on a loading dock, and yet another delivering bundles of newspapers in the wee hours. But always, I knew, out there somewhere in America were the Anchor Inns, the Dew Drop Inns, and all those taps owned by all those Shortys and Luckys.

Not long ago, when the Ouachita was still flowing fresh through my life, I received a letter from Mo saying he’d left the insurance office with enough in a retirement account to free him at last to write, and he was eager to pursue a book about the vanishing watermen’s taverns along the Florida Gulf Coast. He’d met an artist who was ready to paint watercolors of what he hoped to find. His letter suggested a quest was key to his idea. The taverns, lying at the end of roads stopping at a waterfront, avoided advertising, and in effect put themselves in secret locations, allowing patrons the joy of discovery. He was anxious to start right away, before the dwindling places vanished entirely. In his letter I saw the promise of a quoz of conviviums. At his side, I’d follow his tracks.

2

The Black Lagoon

Q
AND I STARTED
for the Florida Panhandle south of Tallahassee.
There we were to meet Davis. At sunset on a Sunday we came
into a landscape of subterranean percolations of water rising through limestone to form rivers and creeks and lakes, only to, as if having seen enough of the new Florida, disappear again into the pervious rock, sometimes reemerging as a spring or resuming as a stream willing to try the territory again. While not hollow, Florida a few inches down is as porous as a weathered thighbone you might find in a High Plains pasture. Lake Iamonia, near the Georgia line, has come and gone more than once during my years of traveling the state. In this view, water surrounds Florida on four sides: east, west, south, and underneath. It’s a piece of loosely stuck geology not so much affixed to the continent as merely anchored for the night.

That invisible hydrological nether-realm creates almost all the allure I’m able to find in a place afflicted for some years by nearly a thousand new residents a day. Even though it was the first “state” successfully settled by Europeans, as late as 1900 the greater part of Florida was still wilderness, a situation the people ever since have been working to eradicate. (Given the flooding population, Floridians ought to cotton to a visitor like me who comes in, spends a few bucks, fails to see what they see, and soon gets out, leaving folks a dollar or two ahead.) If you have neighbors thinking of moving to Florida, recommend they first drive multilane U.S. 19 from Crystal River to Clearwater; if they can view that stretch as the happy fulfilling of their dream and of the American way, then the state may indeed be for them. If, on the other hand, they find it a harbinger of the end of sensible life, then they may be better off redirecting their exodus. That’s why, after all, North Dakota exists — for those who want, for the price of only five or six months of winter, to kiss good-bye life-absorbing congestion in search of a mall.

But synthetic Floridorable was elsewhere on the Sunday evening Q and I arrived in the Apalachicola National Forest in Wakulla County in the eastern end of the Panhandle. Although just fifteen miles south of Tallahassee, we were surrounded by an ostensible wilderness. In the falling darkness, the narrow road through the thick hummock-land rose only slightly above the swampy terrain and appeared to be floating on pontoons. The air was thick with the scent of woods and water, and when we stopped once to take the place in, from the thicket came squeaks and rasps and murmurs, stridulations, tremolos and low caterwauls bemingling into a polyphonic, boggy concert of contrapuntal voices. It was an ancient kingdom, not a “magic” one but real, safe for a little while longer in a piece of vanishing Florida. A half century earlier, Edwin Way Teale, the American naturalist, wrote of that very place in his
North with the Spring,
a narrative about one leg of his seventy-five-thousand miles of road trips around the continent:

It was the voice of the dark, the swamp, the vast wilderness of ancient times. It links us — as it will link men and women of an even more urbanized, regimented, crowded tomorrow — with days of a lost wildness.

When Teale reached the banks of the Wakulla River in 1953, he wanted to photograph the snail-eating limpkin, a bird once “highly esteemed as food,” he said, and so intrepid or unsuspecting it was easily slaughtered until nearing the edge of extinction by the 1920s. Unlike the passenger pigeon, the limpkin shed its fearlessness, became more suspicious of humanity, less tolerant, and retired to newly created sanctuaries where, after several of its generations, it again had become bolder and more visible by the time Teale arrived. Yet, at Wakulla today, the limpkin is still listed as rare.

We stopped at the Wakulla Springs Lodge, a Spanish Colonial–style building — white stucco walls, Moorish arches, red roof tiles, marble floors, grand fireplace — that seemed to fit the lowland, if any human structure can fit a swamp. Old Joe, the eleven-foot stuffed alligator whose age allegedly was two centuries, lent his presence to the mood. After hours of long miles, to stumble into a corporate motel is merely to end the day, but to reach a place imbued with its own native territory is to
arrive
(the word comes from the Latin,
toward shore
), to fetch up on a distant strand.

The lobby had a high ceiling of exposed cypress beams painted with what were, perhaps, Aztec-inspired designs; the guest rooms — furnishings, bathroom fixtures, and possibly the lightbulbs — were from the 1930s when the lodge was built. In its aura of forgotten Florida, the place was ideal for a search into its disappearing remnants. As we went outside to survey the terrain in the moonlight, the clerk warned, “Keep your eyes open for gators, because they’re out there.”

The freshwater spring, with the largest volume issuing from a single fissure on the planet, is the source of the Wakulla River and the reason the lodge exists. It was into that fountain, which Indians considered the home of four-inch-tall homunculi who danced in its depths on moonlit nights, that Tarzan (in the person of Johnny Weissmuller) made several high dives. And from it some years later emerged a creature to disturb the sleep of many a child in the 1950s. Soon after Teale’s visit, a movie crew came along to gape 185 feet straight down into the clarity of the pool to determine whether filming in its depths was feasible. They asked a young Tallahassee man, Rico Browning, to swim it for some test footage to see if native aquatic plants looked exotic enough to stand in for a lost Amazonian river.

The director watched Browning’s powerful and rhythmic underwater stroke, a strangely beautiful quarter-rotating crawl. It was perfect for the antediluvian creature in the 3-D fright film he was about to make. He had Browning fitted out in a sponge-rubber suit that turned him into the amphibious subhuman Gill Man who performed marvelous aquatic maneuvers. It helped that Browning, so I heard, could swim underwater while holding his breath for four minutes.

Over the past fifty years, I had believed
The Creature from the Black Lagoon
(a movie that inexplicably keeps appearing in my books, although I’ve seen it only a couple of times) was filmed on a Southern California back-lot pool. I’d never thought it possible to look into the real “lagoon.” The spring and its surround, while neither a back-lot set nor a piece of Disney World plasticity, nevertheless were once in the sights of those very theme-park developers.

There are thousands of springs in Florida, several of them famous attractions, including one with mermaids performing under-water modern dance with the help of air hoses. But Wakulla is a quieter place, and that quiet allows its distinctions — geological, ornithological, mythological — to arise quietly and naturally like its translucent water. There is even the legend, claim a few local historians, it was on the Wakulla River where an Indian shot an arrow into the neck of Ponce de León to end his quest for a Fountain of Youth Eternal.

As I was wondering aloud what it would be like to descend into water so deep it holds ice-age mastodon bones, Q asked if I’d actually do it. Maybe tomorrow if we have time, I said. (All marriage counselors agree that tarradiddle to a spouse is acceptable — 
if
it’s patently obvious bunk.)

Mo had left a hand-drawn map directing our way southward a few miles along a road paralleling the Wakulla to its junction with the St. Marks River about six miles above its mouth in Apalachee Bay where, five more miles from the open water of the Gulf of Mexico, one entity after another contested the area since at least 1677: Indians, pirates, England, Spain, France, America, Confederates and Federals. That long and curving shore of upper Florida, fretted with stream outlets and heavy marsh grasses and impenetrable thickets, had until recently proved too topographically uncertain to lure big-dollar development. Yet, with the rest of the coast at last largely built-upon or being readied for draglines and dozers, the northern section had become highly vulnerable.

Some years ago, Floridians started naming their coasts: the stretch around Miami became the Gold Coast, the reach above St. Petersburg was the Nature Coast, Pensacola lay on the Emerald Coast, and — although its limits varied — the curve of the Gulf from about Cedar Key to Panama City belatedly turned into the Forgotten Coast. Just who it was who forgot it, I never learned, but it certainly wasn’t developers and speculating buyers of land. Throughout that area, realty signs sprouted in the underbrush like palmettos, and a billboard summed things up:
IT’S ALL ABOUT REAL ESTATE.

At the little counter in Posey’s Oyster Bar on the St. Marks River sat my friend whom I’d not seen for so long; on one side was his wife, Celia, and on the other, Rosalie Shepherd, the watercolorist for his book. Also waiting were two bottles of beer at two empty seats for Q and me. Arriving soon after us was a bowl of fish dip, a name sounding like some piscatorial prophylaxis, a parallel to what farmers use to disinfect sheep.

I now believe mullet fish dip, a delicacy tricky to find, is deliberately unappetizingly named to conserve a limited resource. Recipes for it vary, but most begin with smoked fish pulled from the bone and then minced before adding differing ingredients: crumbled crackers, cream cheese, pickle relish, celery, mayonnaise, but always with spices remaining secret from maker to maker. Q, as she quite possibly took more than her share from the bowl, asked why I’d never told her about smoked-mullet spread. I said the classic fish dips of Old Florida, like state-champion trees, must be kept secret to protect them from excessive appreciation. (My second falsehood of the evening; in truth, Mo had just introduced me to them also, a detail raising the question why
he
had never before mentioned them to me.) To avoid missing out on such discoveries is another reason for traveling often to see friends, even when they live halfway across the continent. For the next several days, he and I would be looking for smoked-fish dips along the coast, comparing recipes and executions. As he talked about second-to-none amberjack spread, the rest of us were piling soda crackers with Posey’s mullet dip; I could have made a fine meal of it on saltines had not baskets of fried-snapper sandwiches and coleslaw come to the table. At moments like those, all the yellow highway stripes between Missouri and Florida seemed as nothing.

The old café, its floors showing more relief than the surrounding land, had commensurately undulating wooden walls and ceiling, the latter mostly concealed by a gray cloud of signed dollar-bills that, like an approaching storm, had begun descending earthward along support posts. At Posey’s, the custom got started years ago, explained the bartender, when a commercial fisherman flush from a sale of mullet put his name on a few bills and tacked them overhead so he’d have money for beer the next time his nets came up empty. On the night we were there, his original four dollars had multiplied into about fifteen hundred. Mo said, “The authenticity disappears once tourists start adding their autographed bills,” to which Q responded, “Maybe it’s a new authenticity beginning.”

After supper, he and I walked out back to the porch at the edge of the St. Marks River, once a haven for pirates. Buccaneers long dead, my flashlight beam revealed only dark water alive with slow gliding red dots — eyes of alligators. Did Posey’s qualify for his book? “It’s authentic and unpretentious,” he said. “And it’s aged to the point of being beat-up. The food’s local and good. The building’s right on the water, and it’s out of the way — a place you have to search for. But, like so many other places today, it’s missing a key element.” Which is? “Where are the commercial fishermen? Here instead you’ve got college students.” I said Posey’s, then, must not be a kind of Bobbie Cheryl’s Anchor Inn. He looked blank for a moment before the memory returned. “No,” he said with a smile more enigmatic than joyful. “The Anchor’s something else.”