Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (25 page)

Although not a native, the fellow often came into the county to tend “accounts” of a kind he was vague about. He said, “The main use of land here is to treat it like a commodity. You know, like stock you hope to buy low and sell high. Then you take your profit and go get a yacht or you invest in building a new condo somewhere else. I’m not talking about the locals. This is about outsiders from across state or across the country. Half the property here that’s selling is going to speculators — mom-and-dad speculators mostly. They don’t want to move here. I mean, look at this place. Hey, if you don’t fish or hunt, what do you do? Read a book?” He spoke the last sentence as he might ask, “Commit suicide?”

Mo said we’d heard about differences in zoning between Steinhatchee and Jena. “I don’t know anything reliable about that, except anything goes in Jena.” He wet his whistle and ignored a question from me. “Today you can call this place Little America. They’re doing the American Agenda — profit at any price. They ought to change the name Jena to Grabola or this place to Hatchascheme. But at least it’s not on the Road to Nowhere anymore.”

For the third time that day, mention of the “Road to Nowhere” came up. I was beginning to suspect the phrase might not be a metaphor of an old, doomed economy. Mo asked what it was. “Cross the bridge,” the man said as he headed for the door, “and take the road south. See if you can figure out why it’s there and why it’s paved.”

There being no true watermen’s taverns in Steinhatchee or Jena, my congenial way-fellow was willing, perhaps because of his abiding interest in writing a mystery, to pursue for a couple of days a different topic, one promising intrigue.

The next morning at breakfast in the Bridge End Café, I asked for his help in marking the Black-Eyed Pea Line, the northernmost extent of cafés serving as a matter of course those esteemed members of what Gus Kubitzki termed the Fraternal and Protective Order of Nature’s Little Guys: raisins, capers, olives, peppercorns. Today, it’s more useful to any traveler wanting to honor the Southern regional menu to know the demarcation of the B-EPL than the Mason-Dixon Line. I told him the Pea Line didn’t reach as far north as the Grits Line, and that was a shame, given the greater nutrient value of a legume over hominy. After requesting the waitress add black-eyed peas to my eggs and grits, I heard loudly from the kitchen, “He wants
what
with his eggs?” evidence the cook might be from Kankakee or Lompoc and really should not yet be entrusted with the preparation of anything Southern beyond warming a MoonPie.

Across the river, we went south until we were encompassed by alterations of marsh with low, almost impenetrable undergrowth of cord and salt-joint grasses. Yet, running through it all were twelve miles of good, wide pavement, straight as a drag strip and showing black streaks of spinning tires. The asphalt, County Route 361, paralleled the coast a bit over a mile distant, but Deadman Bay wasn’t visible until the road turned into a sand lane for a few hundred yards, then ceased altogether; from there we could see a far shoreline perforated by thousands of inlets and baffled by hundreds of islets and keys. Okay, I said, if this road isn’t for dragsters, who’s it for? What’s it for? Mo shook his head and drew his words out. “Something’s going on down in here.”

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

S
OMETIME 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

O
NE 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.