The summer Old Folks dug on the Aucilla
the crew ate at the Ship's Cove Café, in Newport, four nights a week. Old Folks got
fried mullet, French fries, and iceberg lettuce with bottled Kraft salad dressing
on it.
He liked the fried food, but his eyelids itched from vitamin C deficiency.
When he and the crew chief went to Tallahassee on Friday they loaded up on green
and yellow vegetables at Morrison's.
* * *
After the first summer in the field, during the school year, the archeology
students dug at the fire tower site out on the St. Marks wildlife refuge. They would
bring tents and camp, Friday and Saturday night.
The midden was very rich,
with greasy black dirt full of animal bones, shell, large sherds, and some flint
artifacts. They sifted the dirt and got filthy from it. It was like muck, or peat.
They would clean up across Highway 98 in the Newport Campground run by the state
Forest Service.
The last time Old Folks went by the campground they had a
portolet in front of the restrooms and several of the camp sites were occupied by
squatters who lived there year round, in hippie vans and old school buses. They
will keep the visitors out.
The St. Marks Wildlife Refuge gets a lot of visitors
from out of state, during the annual Monarch butterfly migration, and visitors from
overseas, where travel agents send people to the real Florida, just as the brochure
says, instead of Disney World or Six Flags Over Atlanta.
It's stupid of the
state to let the place go down like that. They don't have the money to pay someone
to keep the bathrooms clean. But what does that do to a major source of revenue?
The state wants it like that. A portolet is privatization. Get governments out
of the state park business.
Huh? Who else should run a public park but the
government? Some low-bid, fly-by-night exploiter of the working poor?
Yes.
If Jeb Bush is in. Or a buddy. A campaign contributor. Privatization is payback
for campaign contributions.
* * *
One time Old Folks and Brenda took Owen and Balder out there early in the
morning and they saw two otters, swimming in a pond. They often saw deer, beavers,
bald eagles, migratory waterfowl, alligators, snakes, turtles.
* * *
On one of the weekends at the site, a raccoon baculum, or penis bone, came
up in the sifter, and the principal investigator asked the coed pushing the sifter
basket if she knew what it was.
She said, "Why sir, I do believe that
is a coon prick."
He blushed.
* * *
Chief, on the other hand, had a baculum collection. He used them
for swizzle sticks.
Chief had speared a javelina with an atlatl and a fire-hardened
spear at the fire tower site.
Chief had also dug a site at the fire tower, 8WA14, not 8WA15, a later period,
that contained a gold artifact, an effigy of the ivory billed woodpecker made of
gold from a Spanish shipwreck that looked like the wooden artifacts Cushing took
out of Marco Island.
Old Folks's book, THE SOLID GOLD PECKERWOOD, was about
what would happen if a gold artifact showed up in a Santa Rosa-Swift Creek midden,
like 8WA15, an earlier period, pre-European-contact site. It would play hell with
the chronology.
That was the book where the crew looked for an ivory billed
woodpecker in vain.
* * *
One Saturday, instead of spending the night, the crew returned to the campus
early enough so that Old Folks, and Jay Johnson, who were on the food plan, could
eat chow in the cafeteria.
They didn't shower at the campground.
When they got back to the lab, it was almost closing time. All they had time to
wash up was their face and hands.
Their neck and arms, and T-shirts, were
black as coal dust.
* * *
When they walked into the dining hall, some varsity athletes, who ate chow
late, and lolled behind, to drink coffee and shoot the shit with each other-they
were kind of clannish, and didn't mix with the general student population-were nonplused.
Dave Cowans, a basketball player who hung out with the football players, some of
whom were white-he played on a team called The Busted Flush: him and four black
guys and a mostly black bench-asked Old Folks and Johnson how they got to be so dirty.
Old Folks was the size of a tight end and Johnson was the size of a wide receiver,
but they both were in fighting trim, from shoveling dirt in the hot sun all year
long.
They could have ripped off their heads and shit down their necks.
"Digging up dead people," Brew said.
Cowans immediately figured
out that they were archeologists, and not jiving.
"All right,"
he said, like that was an all-right major.
He majored in Criminology, and
wrote an honors thesis on the electric chair.
I think he played professional
basketball instead of going into law enforcement.
Bill Russell saw him play
and told Red Auerbach about him. FSU had been banned from post-season tournament
play for recruiting violations, so no one had seen him play.
Russell told
Auerbach he was going to be a champion. To draft him.
"How do you know?"
Auerbach asked.
"I can see it in his eyes," Russell said.
* * *
I don't know if Cowans could see in Old Folk's eyes that he was going to
be a champion writer, but he said hello to Old Folks on campus, and not all varsity
athletes did that.