There's a campground in Newport across from the entrance to
the St. Marks Wildlife Reservation. It has restrooms, including showers.
We cleaned up there when we dug at the Fire Tower site (8WA15/8WA16).
That's where Grant Peeples held the Wakulla Wing Ding. I met Sammy Tedder
and his wife there. He did the music on the Elam Stoltzfus film about the Apalachicola,
with river-cane flutes he made himself. His wife Sandy is a potter who makes plaster
castings of wildlife footprints, then fires them in clay. I had sent him a Saunders Brothers
CD, so they knew who I was. I met an archeologist there and we traded war stories.
He had heard of the people Brenda and I had dug with and knew others who stayed
in the field whom we'd lost track of. Apropos of footprints. There is a boat ramp.
I met two kids with a canoe who were Dread Clampitt fans who recognized me from
The Red Bar in Grayton Beach. They knew I was a semi-famous unknown-writer.
When we would stay in Perry, we'd stop at the wildlife reservation and walk
the nature trails, early in the morning, and I'd stop at the campground and pee
before going in to the park. We'd usually see deer. Once we saw two otters.
Otter bacula are sacred to the Indians. I remember Dr. Phelps showing a coed
a raccoon baculum that came up in her sifter, and asking her if she knew what it was.
She batted her eyes at him and said, "Why, Dr. Phelps, I do believe that's a coon prick."
She got honeymooner's disease, riding a motorcycle to Jacksonville and back.
I'd fuck her. That's the first thing a man thinks when he hears that.

Here I sit, trying to piss,
thinking of the girl who gave me this.
If she's around, when I get well,
I'll catch it again, sure as hell.

We didn't drink. We didn't have wild, screaming sex.
It was in loco parentis, don't you know.
It was Sean Connery and Harry Andrews in The Hill.