We took classes at FSU, we drank beer, we applied to Tulane, and were accepted, me with an NDEA fellowship and tuition waiver and Brenda with a tuition waiver and the chance of an assistantship later on.

I could borrow an amount equal to my stipend each semester, on a low-interest government loan, which I wouldn't have to pay back until Brenda and I graduated and had jobs teaching college.

That is, the fellowship paid half what I needed to live on, but I could borrow the rest.

Why not--it was the American way.

Tulane had an accelerated PhD program where you could get the degree in three years.

I was being paid to go to school.

Going to school beat working. I was good at it. I'd start writing after I got my PhD in anthropology and got a teaching job.
A college professor's job involves primary research, teaching and publishing, advancement of the discipline, and service to the community.

I like to think that, as a novelist, I do all four of those. Outside an institutional setting.

Back then I hoped to do them within an institution. Inside the system.

A lot of writers combine writing and teaching college.

Of course, most of them teach writing. Not Southeastern Archeology, or The History and Philosophy of Anthropological Theory.

Anthropological theory was an interest of mine. Dr. Dailey taught a class in French Structuralism in which we read Claude Lévi-Strauss.

I don't remember what Chief taught.

But the whole rest of our year at Florida State we knew we were going to Tulane in the fall, and we knew we were going to dig with Chief and Dr. Dailey in Port St. Joe the summer between Tallahassee and New Orleans.

We were going to look for the mass grave of the victims of a yellow fever epidemic that hit the town in the summer of 1841, killing three-fourths of the inhabitants.

Chief always made sure he had a couple of students to run the archeology part of the dig for him. Cover his back. This dig, it was me and Brenda.

For the rest, a dig was to have fun, to get away from teaching schedules, wives, other faculty members, university administrators, campus politics. To eat and drink and be around young coeds, in skimpy bikinis.

Chief didn't allow drinking at the site. But after working hours--or, sometimes, at lunch, if Chief was away, on business, doing public relations with local business leaders--the drinking lamp was lit.

None of the crew drank until after work.

Meals were an event.

Every night was a feast.

And at lunch, we ate leftovers.

Sandwiches, but roast beef, ham, turkey, lamb, duck, pheasant. With bakery breads, pumpernickel, rye, sourdough, Kaiser rolls. Mustards. Cheeses, olives. Green salad, potato salad, vine-ripe tomatoes.

Emerson called Thoreau the Captain of a Huckleberry Party. That was Chief. We went scalloping, digging for coquina, floundering, crabbing. Chief had a deal with shrimpers to bring us fresh shrimp, and their off-catch. Back them, they didn't sell bulldozers commercially, you had to get them from a shrimper.

Many civilians didn't know what a bulldozer was. A bulldozer is a slipper lobster, or shovel-nosed lobster.

That's about it.

We ate well, we swam, at Dixie Belle Curve, after work.

You can't do that, now.

Now, it's WindMark Beach, and US 98 has been diverted, so you can't go through WindMark Beach, you go around it.

Why not--it's their beach.

The old 98, Mr. Peabody's coal trains have hauled it away.

It's been dug up and sodded over.

It stops, magically.

The new US 98 goes through the piney woods.