On the Road Again (cont'd)

The Visitor's Center gift shop
on the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge
has three books on the--Lord God--
ivory billed woodpecker. A leitmotif
of my murder mystery set at the fire tower site

was the crew looking for one. We did see several pileated woodpeckers.
But the ivory bill was gone. Lowell shot one. Hunting with Uncle Warren.
He left the bird behind, as worthless. Uncle Warren told him to go back
and get him. "They're better eating than fried chicken," he said. It might have been
the last one in Gulf County. Now the St. Joe Company is promoting a 481-acre
planned community they call Wetappo. So if Lowell didn't get him the upscale
eco-lodges, intrusive as an exotic species, would have. Habitat destruction is like
mission creep: an irreversible process.

There's a bike trail on a former railroad bed
between Tallahassee and St. Marks that's very popular with
the yuppies from the university. I don't know how it plays

with the mullet culture at Shell Island Fish Camp, or Posey's Topless Oysters

and Smoked Mullet. One time Slim McElderry and I
sat on the deck at Posey's and ate oysters on the half shell,
with cocktail sauce, and smoked mullet, with drawn lemon butter,
and watched a swallow-tail kite gambol on a thermal over the St. Marks River,
a working river of working fish boats and working fishermen.

Busman's holiday, chez Mac and his Out Back Smoke Shack
(Army surplus barracks from Camp Gordon Johnston).

One time I took the brains out of some Hessian mercenaries
dug up at San Marcos de Apalache, the Jacksonian period fort,
so Dr. Dailey could measure the skulls and compare them to
indigenous Indian and white settler populations. I went in through
the foramen magnum with an iced tea spoon. When I pierced the integument
of the pickled brains--they'd been preserved in brine, in the marshy soil
outside the fort--a miasma was released that smelled like it had come
from the very gates of hell. A kind of a pinkish odor. Kind of dead person.
Unmistakable. You step back and say, "Grandfather, Chief." Like
William Faulkner in "The Bear."