Country Funnin'

I’d gone up to the house to have a cup of coffee, when the truck from the lumber yard pulled up. Running out to greet the driver and show him where I wanted the lumber put, I saw it wasn’t one of their regular drivers, but a big, younger guy with a heavy Southern accent. He was shouting something over the truck engine. I couldn’t understand him, and came along the side of the truck so I could hear him better. “Beg pardon?”

“I just killed a snake,” he said, coming around the back of the truck. Just then I caught sight of an orange and yellow object coiled up on the open bed of the truck. I jumped back.

“See?” he said. “You don’t like ‘em either.” No, I don’t. I lived in a place in Central America once where there were just a few too many of them for comfort. Sometimes people would be bitten by them. But then again, I don’t go around killing them just for the heck of it. Most of them are shy, retiring, and actually beneficial.

“I stopped up here, right on the dirt road,” he said, pointing behind him, “to check the load. I thought it was comin’ loose. And there it was.”

“It was in with the lumber then?” I asked.

“No,” he said, “it was layin’ there right in the road. So I got him with this.” He held up a steel pipe, used to turn the winches that tighten the straps that held the load down on the bed of the truck. The snake, although badly damaged, was still moving.

“You know what kind it is?” I asked. I know corn snakes and milk snakes were fairly plentiful around here, and have basically the same coloring. I figured a country boy would have a name for it.

“No, I don’t,” he answered. “I don’t care what they call ‘em, I don’t like ‘em.” Apparently he didn’t have a name for it. “I’m gonna have me some fun with it, though.” We went ahead and started unloading the truck. He explained to me what he meant.

“My boss knows none of the boys in the yard like snakes. Kenny and the old black guy both hate ‘em. So he’s always putting them in the truck when they go to make a delivery. Now I never go out without checking under the seats, behind the seats, and in the glove box. Just like checking the oil, fuel and water, gotta check all them places.

“But, whoo-ee, I’m gonna have some fun with this one. Not sure where I’m gonna put it yet, but I’m gonna get ‘em back good.” He got a large piece of plastic out, and picked up the snake with two sticks, and rolled it up in the plastic. It was then I noticed that it had sort of a triangular head.

He threw the rolled up plastic into the cab of the truck, backed it around and headed out. “Y’all have a good one, now!”

It’s sort of unusual for any snake to be out on the road in the heat of the day this time of year. And I’d never seen a snake that looked like that around our place before. I’m not convinced that snake didn’t come out of the load of lumber when he stopped.

When I got back to the house, I looked it up, just to be sure. No doubt about it, it was a copperhead.

Slouching Toward Emmaus

A recent Newsweek article states that the number of Americans identifying themselves as "Christian" has declined by ten percent in the last twenty years.

A young friend of ours was no exception to this trend, even unsure about what denomination his family had identified with at one time. "Methodist, I think we were. Or maybe it was Baptist. No--Methodist--that's what it was." He found out later that it was Baptist, for what it's worth, and he's still pretty much a stranger to the inside of a church. But an unusual happening a few years ago got him thinking, maybe there is something to this whole business after all.

His work with a construction company took him up and down Florida's east coast. One day while grabbing a quick lunch at a fast food place in Deerfield Beach, an older woman whom he described as a homeless person, came up and placed something in front of him. "This old dirtbag gives me a napkin with a bible verse written on it. 'Luke' something. I threw it out and didn't think anything more about it."

"Then get this. A few days later, I'm in Miami, thirty or so miles south of there, and the same woman comes up, and hands me another napkin with the same verse written on it! I remembered it from before: Luke 24:32."

He was going to say something, but when he looked up, she was already out the door and disappearing into the crowd. "I mean, what does this mean?" he said. "Is this old lady going into every fast food place between Deerfield Beach and Miami and handing out the same bible verse written on a napkin? That's a lot of fast food places, man."

He got a bible, and looked up the verse. "It said, 'Weren't our hearts burning within us as he walked with us on the road and opened the scriptures to us?'


"It's about these two guys meeting Jesus on the road to Emmaus after the crucifixion and all. He lays out the whole thing for them, they invite him to lunch, and he just disappears right in front of them, like into another dimension. That's when they realized who it was. They were the first ones to see him after, you know, what happened."

"And the Old Testament tells exactly what was going to happen. It's all in there. You just need to look for it."

So, is He still causing hearts to burn on a modern-day road to Emmaus? Or is there an elderly lady who visits fast food joints along Florida's concrete canyons, handing out napkins scribbled with a scripture verse? Or both?

The Best of Times....(Updated)

A recent article in the Key West Citizen brought to light something that many of us have been maintaining for years, but that you don’t see in the local media or in broadsides from the chambers of commerce: the Keys are “fished out” and have been for years.

Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist Loren McClenachan compared 13 groups of "trophy" reef fish caught by recreational anglers using photographs taken in Key West from 1956 to 2007. The mean fish size declined from about 44 pounds to 5 pounds, and there was a major shift in species caught. Landings from 1956 to 1960 were dominated by large groupers, including goliath groupers, and other large predatory fish were commonly caught. In contrast, landings in 2007 were composed of small snappers. The average length of sharks declined by more than 50 percent over 50 years. Major declines in the size of fish caught were not reflected in the price of fishing trips, so customers paid the same amount for a less-valuable product, McClenachan said.
(Published Tuesday, March 17, 2009)

Many of the early pictures of massives catches were taken by Charlie Anderson, a Keys photographer who also had a highly entertaining and informative radio show on Marathon’s WFFG for many years. The station’s advertising of the time stated that WFFG stood for “World’s Finest Fishing Grounds.” And the Keys undoubtedly were. A combination of shallow waters, protective mangroves, combined with the proximity of Florida Bay and the blue waters of the Gulf Stream, provided a plentiful assortment of sea life to be harvested.

With the right kind of bait you could be sure of catching enough fish for your dinner. Visitors from the north were amazed when, after a mere five minutes with no action, I would insist on trying another spot. “Hey, you’ve got to give it at least an hour,” they’d say.
“Nope, not here don’t,” I would answer. You could usually manage to catch mangrove snapper, mutton snapper or grouper just by going to specific places, all within a short distance of home. That’s how it was back then: the fishing was that good, and it stayed good right through the sixties and seventies. By 1980 things were changing forever.In the recession of ‘74, instead of doing something sensible like going back to school, I took a job at a fish company in Marathon. The fish business was still good. Local waters provided a living for hundreds, and the abundant Keys seafood was a draw for winter visitors all over Florida. From August through March thousands of pounds of lobster came across our docks. From October to May huge vats steamed stone crab claws on a daily basis. In the fall cold weather brought schools of mackerel, kingfish, and bluefish. Drift netters came down from the west coast of Florida to harvest their share of the catch. Tons of mackerel were shipped to freezer plants in Miami and Tampa every day for months.These mackerel fisherman supplemented their income by selling trophies from an occasional by-catch. (Jaws was in the theaters that year.)

And there was always a steady supply of fin fish: yellowtail, snapper, and grouper. Our company sold first-class local product to every restaurant from Ocean Reef to Key West.
When I came back to visit after having been out of the Keys for a couple of years, around 1982, a lot of things had changed. Very little local fish were being caught, yet they were still busy fileting what looked like local fish. "Nope," said the boss. "All of 'em are flown into Miami from Honduras or Nicarague in these white vats." He estimated the percentage of local seafood being sold in the Keys at about 10%. The change in the situation was due to many things. You'll still hear some people saying it's the government regulations that killed it. "There's still plenty of fish out there." The fact is, because of increasing population pressure and demand, the oceans around there simply got fished out.Even if we do arrive at a "maximum sustainable yield" for some species, there are others that simply will never be widely available again. For instance, when was the last time you saw a pompano on a menu?Still, looking back, I gotta say it was a most interesting time. It was fun working in a mainstay industry of the Keys economy. It was altogether a special time in a special place. Some of the friendships I made have endured for years. And the fringe benefits: excellent, with a little bit of drawn butter.

Oh! Almost forgot! Here's the way the place looks now (compliments of Google Earth).
That's right, it's a condominium development. Gone are the boats, fishermen, mates, traps, trap sheds, bait lockers, freezers, fishermen's homes, the whole shootin' match. O Tempora, O Mores!

Stretching the Rubber Band

Larry was a heavy dude. Some said he’d been a biker for years. I knew he’d bummed around the Caribbean for a while. There were tales of smuggling of immigrants and such, although no one knew for sure if they were real or just talk. His rougher edges had been smoothed out to a degree when he shacked up with an artistic broad, a girl clever enough mentally and big enough physically to keep him under some degree of control. I knew him through her, so I suppose it was his softer side with which I was acquainted.

Still, there was talk that he popped a daily ten-milligram Valium tablet with his morning coffee, just to make sure that he could maintain a veneer of civility with his fellow man. In fact there were very few people that he could stand,. Out of a dozen or more Americans on the job there were only a couple that he could tolerate, by his own admission.

In addition to these peculiarities, he was also seemed to be one of the cheapest human beings I had ever met. The guys he lived with claimed he even had his own roll of toilet paper that he kept with him, unwilling to chip in for a general supply, given the possibility that one or more of his companions might actually waste this commodity. Thus I was surprised to find out that he was spending large sums of money on pre-arranged Voodoo ceremonies.
The first hint of this came when I inspected his concrete form work before a pour. Strange symbols began to appear regularly, drawn on the outside of the plywood forms. At first I thought this no more than an artistic impulse on the part of one of his workers, similar to the graffiti we sometimes saw on urban walls at home. I made no mention of it, because Larry’s crew was working like a well-oiled machine, accomplishing a great deal of work and pouring a new section of the project almost every day. The drawings continued, and became more elaborate.

One day there was a relatively rare occurrence. A form “blew out” during a pour. The plywood (which we reused until it became too worn and weak) had ruptured due to the pressure of the concrete. The place where it broke was right in the middle of one of the drawings. I pointed that out to Larry, and his response was inappropriately vague. It wasn’t till one morning, after another successful pour, that we noticed a series of black banners waving from the reinforcing rods over Larry’s project that it became clear. Something funny was going on. I went down to talk with Larry.

That’s when the story came out. He would confide in me, but I was the only American, with the possible exception of his boss, Jim O’Brien, who should know about this. He’d been talking with his men about his likes and dislikes (and general paranoia), and they had suggested that he consult a kind of voodoo operative called a bocor, who could cast spells and the like. For a nominal fee, the bocor had provided him with a specific potion, which, when applied to the face, elbows, and knees, would give him certain protection or powers. He showed me a clear bottle filled with what looked like a Haitian moonshine called clairin and various sticks and roots which I took to be herbs. He splashed a little out in his hand and spread it over his face, which I did notice had taken on an odd glow in the last month or so.He’d felt that the initial contact with the voodooists was so successful that he had ordered another series of private ceremonies. He was instructed to drive to a certain place near a cemetery after dark, to park and wait. After a while a young boy came out of the woods, and without speaking led him through the dark along a series of paths. After an hour they emerged from the woods, and there were more graves and a mausoleum-like structure. Larry had the feeling that they were back near where they had started, but wasn’t sure. There they were met by one of the men on his crew, and several others who played the role of zombies. Inside the mausoleum was the bocor. The crew member acted as interpreter. Voodoo dolls were set up representing various people Larry didn’t like, and they were stuck with nails, lit on fire with alcohol, and so on. Larry said at one point the bocor covered his arms with alcohol and lit it, but miraculously he wasn’t burned. One of the curses he requested was that everyone on the job that he didn’t get along with (which was just about everybody) would be eliminated, in one way or another.
The next day I mentioned to O’Brien what Larry had told me. At one time in his life O’Brien himself had been fascinated with primitive religions, and had actually traveled to Jamaica, the Bahamas, Haiti, and (so he said) Brazil to study Afro-Caribbean religious beliefs. “Tell him what he is doing is incredibly dangerous!” O’Brien said. “He is fooling around with low-level psychic phenomena, and it will lead to nothing but trouble!”

I told Larry what O’Brien said, to little avail. "He actually thinks it's gonna happen!" That afternoon the whole American crew got into a labor dispute with O’Brien (who had been on the job for two years without a break, and who had been acting a little testy). They went to the airport en masse to confront the big boss coming in from Jamaica, to present their grievances. What they didn’t know was that the money to complete the job had been held up, and the higher ups were at that very moment looking for a way to lay off a dozen men. When he saw them at the airport waiting to confront him with their demands, he just said, “Well, sorry, we’re out of money, and you’re all going home tomorrow anyway.”

For the next week Larry was walking around with the look of a crazed madman on his face. The ceremony at the mausoleum was worth every penny he had paid for it. He was planning another ceremony which he thought would secure him a permanent position with the company, and several other things about which he wouldn’t elaborate.

I told O’Brien he has walking around like the cat that ate the canary. “Tell him to desist! Tell him he is stretching a huge rubber band taught, and it will break and come back and hurt him!” I can’t remember if I passed this warning on to Larry. I’m pretty sure he continued with the ceremonies. Soon, however, he broke up a fight between two men. One was an old Tonton Macoute we had hired as a labor boss. The other was a younger citified guy with indeterminate duties, who was, however, a protege of the paterfamilias of our Haitian partner, thus not a man to be trifled with. The two got into an argument, and the young fellow had the old Macoute on the ground and was about to do him in with a sledge hammer, when Larry grabbed him from behind and pulled him off the guy. We had to let the man go, because of the assault.

He turned around and sued Larry in Haitian court for $60,000. (This is the amount the Haitians believe every American had in the bank, at a minimum.) The funny thing was that all the witnesses agreed with the plaintiff, that he had been basically minding his own business when Larry assaulted him for no reason.

Larry left for the airport two days later. To his horror his name was on the proscription list: those who would not be allowed to leave the country until any claim against them was settled. But his last name had been misspelled by one letter, and he was allowed to escape.

I think despite O’Briens’s warnings, the whole affair had a beneficial effect on Larry. Some time later I got a card and photo from him. After Haiti he’d cleaned up, shaved his beard, and gone back to Ohio and joined his family’s business. He’d gotten married to a nice hometown girl. In the photo he was wearing a three-piece suit and standing in front of a Cadillac.

Hang Angela Davis Now?

This old slide, showing a billboard advertising Islamorada's Theater of the Sea with some grafitti of the era, taken on Long Key in 1971, recently surfaced.
A thirty-something friend of ours, upon seeing it, said, "Huh? Who's Angela Davis?" I was completely taken aback for a minute, thinking, "What? Don't they teach history in our high schools any more?" Then I realized that I couldn't remember what she had done to engender such rancor, especially in the faraway Florida Keys. I had to look her up in Wikipedia.
Reflecting back it's remarkable how much the country has changed. And how much better off we are than those who live in places where ancient slights and schisms still claim people's lives.

Love Mock, Attack Real

(Islamorada, FL) A lady scuba diver from a Midwestern state narrowly escaped injury through the quick action of fellow divers, who frightened away a 400 lb. sea turtle which was apparently attacking her from behind. It was surmised that the marine reptile, not known for the acuity of its eyesight, mistook the woman's twin tanks and backpack for the shell of another turtle, and its advances were of an amorous nature.
The woman was reportedly wearing twin tanks, and a type of buoyancy compensator which was popular at the time (a SeaPro ATPack) which contained lead shot in lieu of a weight belt, (pictured above, also available in darker colors). The turtle recognized it as another shell, and proceeded to climb atop it in an aggressive manner. Some eyewitnesses maintained that the reptile gave the woman's black dive hood a playful nip. Earlier reports that it had punched a hole in her wet suit were discounted.

The Law's Delay, the Insolence of Office....Cutting the Gordian Knot

AT&T Inc. announced (a week ago) Thursday that it will cut 12,000 jobs – or about 4 percent of its global workforce – citing the slack economy along with corporate reorganization and declining demand for traditional landline telephone service.
At the same time they've also apparently started a more "flexible rate" policy. If you tell them that you can't afford to continue their services, they might give you a slight break in their rates.
Rare and fortunate is he or she, however, who has not at one time or another been ensnared in the Catch 22 of timeless bureaucracy. A man in upstate New York had to regain his commercial drivers license ab initio, with all the attendant costs, despite the fact that the problem originated not with him, but with a mistake made by the Department of Motor Vehicles. At least it was outrageous enough to make the news.
AT&T is certainly still coming out with an attractive array of products, if their ads are any indication, and their remaining employees are excellent at touting and selling new services. But you have to wonder if maybe they should have kept one or two people capable of cutting the Gordian knot. I now have an inch-thick folder of correspondence and notes to prove my point.
In the middle of last October we left an apartment we had rented temporarily in North Carolina, and called AT&T to have the phone and Internet services turned off. At the same time they talked us into ordering a pay-as-you-go cell phone, to get us through the time we would be without a regular phone. So far no problem.
When we got the next bill, we were being billed for a month's services in advance. We called, and they said ignore that bill, because you'll be getting a final bill in a few days. That same scenario has been repeated for four months now. We've spent close to four hours (no exaggeration) on the phone with them, and written four or five letters. Each time they say first that we didn't have the service terminated, but then they check it and say, OK, it was shut off, and you'll get a final bill in a few days. But all we get is an ever-growing bill (it's up to $400 and change now) and an occasional letter saying the bill is going to a collection agency.
Oh well, hope springs eternal, and maybe the fifth time's the charm. Hope so, anyway, and hope you are luckier....