If you drive west along Highway 98, about halfway between Newport and Medart, take Highway 365 down to Spring Creek. It dead-ends at Oyster Bay. There's a restaurant there run by Leo Lovel with a mullet skiff out front with a Historical Display sign in it. The net ban put seine fishermen out of business.
Lovel's book, Spring Creek Chronicles, will tell you what mullet fishing
used to be like.
Brenda noticed a copy at Jack Wingate's Lunker Lodge, in
Bainbridge, Georgia, on Lake Seminole, where Owen was playing at a bluegrass festival,
and bought it, and Old Folks later bought copies for Owen and Balder. There is now
a Spring Creek Chronicles II in bookstores.
* * *
That was a relaxing weekend. Old Folks was waiting to be laid off, from
his tech-writing job in the fiber-optic cable factory in Atlanta, trying not to be
stressed out.
He sat in a folding lawn chair in the shade and read Leo Lovel's
book.
It was just what the doctor ordered.
My American flag bandanna was an attempt at irony.
I didn't want
some chauvinistic slogan-repeater to say he was more patriotic than I was.
I was patriotic.
I dissented. I spoke my piece. I put my money where my
mouth was.
No booze, no drugs, no weapons.
I was fixing to be ground
up and spit out by the corporate shit-hopper just as surely as Ken Lay's name is
Exxon.
Enron, rather.
In one of my early books I called Exxon Anthraxx.
This was long before Anthraxx was in the public domain, or a rock group, or domestic
terrorism.
Is Anthraxx a rock group?
This was 30 years before, when
the Cold War was still in flower.
Loyalty oaths and security clearances.