The Living Dock at Panacea

 

Point and Shoot, FL (YU)—I loved Panacea.

      As you came into town there was a real estate sign, saying, “Selling Florida’s Last Frontier.”

      Now it would say, “Selling Florida’s Forgotten Coast.”

      There was a hardware store in Crawfordville, across from the Wakulla County Courthouse, with the clock that didn’t work.  There was a bench outside the hardware store old men sat at.  Bill Gwynn called a book of poems Loafer’s Bench, and had a picture of the men on the cover, telling lies.

      Dead Pecker Bench.  Bill Gwynn’s father married Scrib and Brenda in the Leon County Courthouse.

      There was a dock outside the rented house in Panacea.

 

 

 

 

      Scrib and Brenda sat on the dock on Saturday night, getting to know each other.  Talking about life.  Their goals.

      You could see the Milky Way in Panacea.  Not too much ambient light.

      Balder said one time he and Kyle were on the beach in South Walton County, when they were living in the trailer together, and there was a meteor shower, and they could see the whole thing, and they just sat there and gazed at it, amazed.

      Like Jerry Jeff Walker gazing at a TV set.

 

 

 

 

      Jack Rudloe wrote a book called The Living Dock at Panacea.

      That’s the sort of book the crew read that summer.

      Later, he published an edition with watercolor prints by Walter Anderson.

      In a preface, he told about seeing a documentary about Anderson on educational television, and driving over to Ocean Springs to visit his widow.  She showed him the Little Studio where Anderson lived apart from his family, and painted.

      He would paddle a rowboat out to Horn Island, on sketching trips.

      When he died, he left 30,000 pieces of art in the Little Studio.

      A university press has published several books from this treasure trove.

      The Friends of Walter Anderson built a Walter Anderson Museum of Art in Ocean Springs and moved the Little Studio to one corner of the museum.  You can go into the studio, from the museum.

      The other end of the museum opens into the old Community Center, with murals Anderson painted on the walls.

      This was all done 30 years after Anderson died.

      But better late than never.

      When I bought the edition of The Living Dock with the Anderson prints in it, and met Rudloe, we talked about Anderson.

      I had visited the museum, by this time, on the way to the Ingalls Shipyard, in Pascagoula, to turn an employment application in.

      A lot of my side-trips involve driving around, looking for jobs.

      I was driving home from Tallahassee, where I’d been looking for a job, when I met Rudloe, at The Oaks, at the bridge across Ochlockonee Bay.

 

 

…A man asked me,

“Do you want me to autograph that for you?”  I said, “Are you Jack Rudloe?”

He admitted that he was.  I said, “Yes, please inscribe it, `To Brenda Saunders,

happy birthday, Jack.’”  He said, “Are you Jack Saunders?”  We had read

each other’s books but had not met….

 

 

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