Roads to Quoz: An American Mosey (26 page)

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.

After listening to threats from the trespasser, Kinnard alerted his own witness to observe closely. Then, for us, just as he did that night, he took two slow steps backward and reached inside his shirt to demonstrate how he’d drawn his .22-caliber pistol and shot the man in the shoulder. Kinnard said, “The fool yelled out to his goon, ‘Goddamnit! He shot me!’ He couldn’t believe it.”

The police showed up, filled out some reports, and that was about it, except for one officer saying, “We ought to arrest you for poor marksmanship.” No further investigation, no prosecution. The trespasser’s body-mass took the bullet and saved him, but — even had the man died — Kinnard knew his own safety was secure within his new legal right. (Ah, the American pistol! That old righter-of-wrongs now become a wronger-of-rights, such as the right to judicial process.)

Looking at Q, Kinnard added, “I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six. Wouldn’t you now?” While still pulling at the back of my shirt, she said it was time for supper.

8

Playground for the Rich and Famous

O
N MY LAST DAY IN STEINHATCHEE
, I wanted to ask somebody with expertise whether the new money from realty transactions, much of it coming from outside speculators, was likely to imperil the long-established ways of life there. With no shortage of real-estate offices in the hamlet, I picked one at random and walked in. I’ll not describe the people of this encounter for a reason that will be obvious; perhaps their words will let you see them.

A woman, a former Californian, greeted me warmly and lessened her warmth only slightly when I said I wasn’t looking for property, but I did have a few questions. “Okay,” she said. I asked when the realty boom around Steinhatchee began, and she considered: “No more than about five years ago, I think.” Not wishing to spend time with a man who wasn’t going to be a customer, her responses became shorter, so I tried priming the pump with a debatable observation. I said it seemed to me that recent history along the river had been shaped, for better or worse, by the No-Name Storm and — avoiding the word
smuggling
 — illicit importations, and lately, overwhelmingly, by rapid real-estate development. The woman shook her head. “I haven’t been here that long.” It was one more dodge.

Another agent, a native, a woman with a pleasant face but a fully charged load of suppressed anger behind it, interrupted forcefully from across the small office. “Look,” she said, “Steinhatchee’s going to become the playground for the rich and famous. Clearwater, Miami — they’re used up. Where are they going to go now?” She stopped abruptly. “I can’t talk about it. I’ve got work to do.”

Trying a more oblique approach, I turned again to the first woman to ask whether there were density regulations in Taylor County. Her answers were perfunctory but polite. “Yes.” Were there city limits? “No.” Was there a formal town council? “There’s a project board with regular meetings.” What about incorporation? “It’s inevitable.”

The other agent, perhaps further inflamed by my honoring her wish not to talk about it, cried out, “Hey!” as she rose from her chair. “Somebody’s going to make the money! Somebody’s got to sell it! I grew up here! Who’s got a better right?” She sat down again. “I don’t have time for this.”

There I was, angering people in “stand your ground” gun-law territory. Were such questions provocation enough to plug me? In a somewhat theatrical way, I picked up my things to leave and said I was just trying to understand a place I found quite interesting, especially its history. The agent who had no time launched into a topic that had not come up. She said, again with more volume than required for a small room, “We can make an X, you know! We can sign our names! We’re not hicks! You know, we’re proud! People from outside —” She caught herself and stopped. She looked directly at me. Her interior serpent was coiled and ready to strike. “You go talking about changes,” she said. “I can tell you what changed things here.” She waited for me to ask, and I did. “The net ban,” she seethed. “The net ban is what changed everything! Those people will be the end of us!
The end!
”

“Those people” were not smugglers, realty speculators, or develop-at-any-cost builders. They were not snowbirds or the guy who bulldozes a lot into the forest for a rental house-trailer having a septic system made from a fifty-gallon oil barrel with holes punched in it. “Those people” were the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission.

A decade earlier, a constitutional amendment to modify certain outdated fishing practices — ones clearly shown to be destructive to the sustainability of the resource and, eventually, to people whose livelihoods depended on fishing — was put to a statewide vote. Although the measure didn’t win in Steinhatchee, nearly seventy percent of the rest of Florida approved it.

The agent rolled on so furiously I couldn’t take down her words fast enough, but the argument was this: the net ban had made earning a living from fishing impossible, and that was forcing natives to sell their land to outsiders. The whole thing was a scheme by various government entities that didn’t care a hoot about protecting fish or fishermen. No, their secret plan was to take away private property. But she didn’t want to talk about it.

9

In There Own Sweat

T
HE REAL-ESTATE AGENT’S ALLEGATIONS
sent me to a telephone to call a field office of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission up in Perry to ask for an interview with an agent or two. The next day Q and I drove to the edge of Perry where the Commission had quarters in a trailer and a couple of outbuildings. We talked first with Karen Parker, retired from the Army and now the Public Information Coordinator, before she introduced us to Lieutenant Bruce Cooper, the patrol supervisor, a graduate of Auburn University and a former outfielder on its baseball team. Both of the agents, in their early middle-years, were personable, calm, and open to any questions I had.

Among Parker’s duties was assisting people affected by the modified fishing regulations (widely but inaccurately called the “net ban”), then more than a decade old. She listened closely before responding to my questions, weighed her replies, and was unafraid to admit when she didn’t have an answer but always added she would try to find it. The changes in regulations not only had been voted in by a significant margin but had been upheld later by the Florida Supreme Court. Parker, speaking of the earlier, looser regulation of nets, said, “A lot of Floridians thought outdated fishing-regulations were killing Florida. This is the fishing capital of the world. Most people could see what was happening to a key resource.”

The new measures prohibited only
certain kinds
of nets, mainly ones that entangle fish. Such nets, some of them the length of six football fields, are quite effective at ensnaring not just mullet — the targeted fish — but also a couple of dozen other species, even game fish like grouper, pompano, or sea trout. Mullet, sleek-bodied vegetarians, migrate in enormous schools and thereby become highly vulnerable to massive commercial nets — that is to say, vulnerable to harvesting in numbers beyond their rate of reproduction. With the earlier gill and trammel nets, sustainability was rapidly declining, as became evident from what already had happened on up the Atlantic coast at least as far as North Carolina: over the last several decades, the number of mullet and species preying upon them had so decreased that commercial fisheries dependent on mullet were collapsing.