Indian Pass is a place where the old and the new coexist.
You can trace the evolution of vernacular architecture in one location.
One thing that hasn't changed, yet, is the Indian Pass Trading Post and Raw Bar,
where your oysters slept in the bay last night, and a Sysco truck delivers the ersatz
butter-flavored oil and powdered processed Parmesan cheese the proprietor sprinkles
on them if you order them baked, instead of raw.
It's hard to fuck up a raw
oyster, although the proprietor didn't give me any horseradish to add to my cocktail
sauce, lemon juice, and Tabasco sauce, and, when I asked for a second dozen, he said,
"It'll be awhile--the truck just come, and we have to inventory the order."
His oyster shucker got around to me, eventually.
The proprietor had a droopy
mustache, discolored teeth, and wore a greasy baseball cap, inside. I kept thinking
of the sign in the Stag Bar of the NCO Club, at the SAC base in Albany, Georgia,
"He who enters covered here,/shall buy the bar a round of beer."
I had a Killian's Red. It was not on the house.
I don't know whether the
man thought I was a narc, a real estate developer, a reporter, doing a story on coastal
oyster bars, a retiree, with more free time than he had, or what, but he was distinctly
inhospitable.
What's your problem, friend?
Sometimes Old Folks rubbed
people wrong. They took an immediate dislike to him.
The oysters were so-so.
But it was mid-May, and the water had warmed up.