Not A Word About Valentines Day
Roadtrip Notes of January 2-23, 2019
I had the pleasure of working with close friends and neighbors, Jerry and Marion Solom in January 2019, in Indiantown, Florida. Since I was retired, I thought I could be of some help working on their steel sailboat, Indian Summer, stored in an Indiantown marina, as they were going there for a few months to do yearly maintenance on it. Neither are in the best physical shape and since I was ‘younger’ and more able, I thought I’d ask them if they’d want me to go too. My wife and friends thought it was a great idea.
However, I decided to sleep on my decision. No sense in being hasty for I knew what I was getting into as I had helped Jerry ready Indian Summer for its maiden voyage to Norway in 2000, grinding and sanding rust off the deck in Louisiana along with Jerry’s son, Terry, and a friend named Stuart. When Jerry worked on his boat, he worked on his boat and, although we had some fun too, I had had my fill of it by the end of the two weeks I was down there.
I doubted Florida would be any different nineteen years later, though I doubted Jerry would even accept my offer. He has always been so fiercely independent, a fact that persevered through the dangerous northern route crossing of the North Atlantic with just him and Terry as crew in 2008, his leukemia diagnosis in 2009, and resulting radiation & chemo treatments at Mayo Clinic through 2010. Although cancer cost him the physical strength he once had, in addition to the loss of three inches of height, he has continued to operate his steel fabrication business in Palmville, and remains the go-to guy, in our area of NW Minnesota, for guaranteed welding and machining work.
To my great surprise, Jerry jumped at the opportunity,“You’d do that? You’d go? That’d be great!
Suddenly I was faced with packing clothes suitable for both the equivalent of the arctic and the equator, in three hours. We left on a cold January 2nd for Delano, Minnesota where we were spending the first night with their daughter Mary and her family.
After a post-Christmas night and morning at their daughter’s house, with the two sets of twins opening belated Christmas gifts from gramma and grampa, we stopped at a bank in Delano to get $20 worth of quarters for the Illinois toll booths, only to be turned away because we didn’t have an account with them, and this was after patiently standing in line and experiencing “Next Teller, Please” signs twice. Normally an easy-going guy, Jerry was perturbed as we walked from the bank. A customer service person at a front desk, smiled and said “Have a nice day!” and I answered, “It sure in hell didn’t start here.”
I offered to drive a few times, but didn’t push the subject. Some people just want to do all the driving. In some ways it’s a treat to be the passenger, because I’m the principle driver at home, but going along on this trip was in part, thinking I’d drive part way to save on Jerry, but at long last he said he’d prefer to drive because grasping the steering wheel was better for his back. So that’s what I did the whole 2000+ mile trip, just ride. Marion sat in the backseat, reading her Kindle and setting up the GPS routes--and sleeping when she wanted. They’d carry on a banter discussing possible routes, as I followed with the map, occasionally helping out in heavy traffic situations following routes alternate to the GPS.
We spent two nights in Yorkville, Illinois, at Marion’s oldest brother, Paul, and his wife, Eileen’s lovely house that was decorated with lots of Christmas decorations, lights, candles, and a huge tree that Elieen said was way below standard as she usually went all out for Christmas in years past. As I’m a bah-humbug type guy at Christmas, I was impressed all the same.
The next day we went to a Menards to purchase a sheet of insulation, some adhesives and cleaning agents Jerry could use on the boat. It was there when we were leaving, that a man looked long at me, then smiled as if in recognition, and I, being the friendly sort (that day anyway) smiled back.
The guy stopped in the exit, turned to me and said,
“You still live over on Elmwood?”
And I said, “Uh, no... I’m from NW Minnesota.”
“Really? Well, you have a clone here!” the guy mused, going on toward his car. “You look just like him.”
“That ain’t sayin’ much about that guy,” I laughed.
Paul helped Jerry buy an EZ-Pass for Illinois toll roads that we’d encounter that would save on toll fees and slowdowns to throw money in a pot or stops at a toll guard for change. Our friend Joe McDonnell uses EZPasses on his driving trips to and from Boston and said they’re the way to go for sure.
Paul had worked at CAT (Caterpillar) in Yorkville for over 30 years, and so took us on a drive through the city to where the CAT factory stood under its several roofed acres, and telling us what was where. He no longer had authority to enter the plant but told us of his connections as a engineer to the CAT 988K wheel loader, one which serendipitously, was being loaded across the road from the plant, on a huge multi-axle semi trailer heading for the west coast. We went over talked to the truck driver who was busy tightening and routing heavy chains. I began seeing CAT equipment all over the place.
Sitting in the backseat of Paul’s beautiful black Dodge Charger, I saw four places advertising waffles on our route. So I wondered what was up with this midwestern passion for waffles all of a sudden? I later note the phenomenon increasing farther south. It mystifies me. Pancakes, I can see, they’re simple to make, but for waffles, you gotta have special mold devices, like making lead balls for a muzzle loader. A pancake is just poured free hand into a hot lightly oiled skillet. Simple!
Leaving Yorkville the next day, we headed toward Florida, on Illinois highway 47, across an Iowa-like Illinois landscape of surreal-looking wind turbines whose huge blades, I saw, cast shadows on nearby farmhouses. An ancient cylindrical clay-tile corn crib stood by itself where there was once a farmstead. On distant quarter sections, storm-damaged windbreaks gloved islands of empty farmhouses and derelict outbuildings, many with their farm lanes overgrown and dead-ended.
We began seeing green grass and black fields, three miles in any direction, the only trees seen were along rivers and creeks. The idea that “This is January,” just didn’t seem right for some reason.
I see who I think are a young indigenous family at a McDonald’s. I read somewhere that the Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomie, Ottawa, Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo indigenous people lived here pre-contact, and probably many still do.
Checking off our slow 1036-plus mile passage through the states of Kentucky (just a wee bit of its SW corner), Tennessee, and Alabama, to Gainesville, Florida our next stop, we passed signs about adult bookstores, hog hunts, and several miles of billboards about people knowing a specific lawyer who got them awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Jerry noted the billboards didn’t say how much of their money the lawyer got.)
You know you’re getting into the South when Elvis, Patsy Cline, CASH, Grand Ole Opry, Canton Plantation, “The Longest Bar in Nashville”, Mammoth Cave Fun, Bowling Green Tennessee Guide, The Hermitage, Free Moonshine Tastings, Bell Meade Plantation, and the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum brochures pack a corner of your motel continental breakfast nook.
“Listen, Marion!” I said. “I think I hear a cardinal with a southern accent.”
Entering Civil War sites territory make me wish I had reviewed Bruce Catton’s Civil War trilogy to refresh my memory before I left Minnesota. In Tennessee, we passed exits to the Civil War Battle of Franklin and Battle of Spring Hill.
Saw a poster in a Men’s Room at a rest stop that was titled: History of American Baseball that referred to the
beginning and ending of ‘Negro Leagues’ but made no mention of Jackie Robinson or any other black players.
In the road atlas we carried, I saw we were east of ‘Shiloh’, that, according to Wikipedia, was the seventh-costliest battle of the Civil war that racked up, 23,746 casualties.
Out my window, growing along fences and up into tall trees were the invasive Kudzu vines. I hummed a few bars of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” saw signs for “Tennessee Walking Horses,” “David Crockett State Park,” a billboard for the Jack Daniels Distillery stating: “There are road trips, then there are pilgrimages.”
I talked to Jerry about our Greyhound bus trip to his boat at Slidel, Louisiana in 2000, from Fargo, (our closest point of departure) and when we rode through rural Alabama, recalling the woods and pastures we drove past then, that reminded me so much of Minnesota, that now conjure up Civil War battles I’ve recently read about since.
Jerry and Marion talk about the time they got Indian Summer stuck in Lake Pontchartrain. Further conversation included visiting Mandeville, and eating at Zazu’s. The Solom’s have been everywhere man!
Southerners may resent Hollywoods caricatures of them, but do Minnesotans? You have to admit “Fargo” is pretty darn close.
Sweet Home, Alabama!
Saturn 1B rocket at rest stop.
Browns Ferry Road.
Hoover Hogs (Armadillos)
Birmingham 34 miles
Home of Mud runs.
“EAT MOR CHIKIN” billboards are funny enough to make a U-turn for, but we didn’t do it.
I remember that in 2000, I was the only one to leave the bus for a few minutes, at a little gringy bus station in Selma, wondering about what its four dark, dirty walls and linoleum floors had witnessed in its existence when Selma and the Civil Rights movement were so prominent in national TV news.
‘George Washington Carver High School’, Montgomery, Alabama.
I read a lot about George Washington Carver of my own choosing, back when I was in school. I remember finding his biography interesting.
Road kill becomes unidentifiable. All these critters have been turned inside out by something, leaving each of them anonymous. Jerry wonders if they’re just ‘playing possum’.
Hurricane Michael debris was still being bulldozed from roadside ditches in Alabama and the Florida panhandle. Buildings with blue tarps nailed to their roofs, downed fences and housing debris were seen mile after mile. Michael was a deadly and destructive storm, killing at least 43 people in the U.S., and leaving thousands homeless.
Seeing the miles upon miles of damage firsthand, even in this stage of cleanup three months after the storm, drives it home to us northerners that have only read about it or seen it on a TV screen. I can’t imagine being there experiencing such a thing, even with the tornadoes we’ve seen.
Passed by a truck whose door reads:
“CAUTION: This truck carries extremely comfortable materials.
200 TerraCotta Soldiers/International Arts Center/Troy University Troy, AL
We generally stopped driving before dark, looking for a place along the route just before sundown, anticipating seeing exits for motels and restaurants, a handy combination when you're stopping for the night. I believe we talked about stopping at Dothan originally, but we were tired and just south of Ozark, when we pulled off the highway to see what the GPS had to say about a motel there. I think it was one of those times when it lost its satellite signal and we didn't wait around for it to gain it before we pulled back onto the highway heading south again--missing a turn into a motel right there-- and rather than turn around, continued on toward Dothan down the road another twenty miles or so.
Now it was dark and the truck traffic heavier, semis passing us like we were standing still--when the front end of the truck fell into a big hole or jumped over an obstruction we never saw, and Jerry and I both dirtied our drawers right then and there and it pitched Marion forward against her seat belt. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" I yelled in surprise. Jerry was sure one of the front wheels fell off, but the truck didn't pull to either side. It still steered straight.
"It must have been a big hole we didn't see," I said, still studying the dark roadway directly in front of the truck. "It is broken up along the border of the shoulder here in places."
"I'm wondering if it wasn't a truck tire that came apart," Jerry ventured. "I haven't seen any, but they blend into the road, in the dark."
I give Jerry credit, despite such impact, he kept us and the equipment trailer we were pulling on the road.
We spent the night in Dothan, Alabama, site of Hurricane Michael damage. Jerry and I inspected the truck for damage after we parked in the hotel parking lot, but couldn't find anything. The tires appeared sound. The front end and steering components didn't looked damaged, amazingly.
Although we were unfamiliar with the city, it served as a great place to stay, only 250 miles away from Gainesville, Florida. Darkness had hidden the landscape until morning, so it was only then that we began seeing buildings with blue tarped roofs and savagely toppled trees.
Cows grazing on green pastures--in January, hard to believe my eyes.
Split rail fences.
TWINKLE for Lt. Governor (Later on we saw a Bob BRIGHT sign below)
Creek Nation and the ‘Red Sticks’ 1813
National Peanut festival
Dothan waffle Houses
Dothan National Golf & Hotel. Grounds appear salted with golf balls.
Was that a cotton field? Dark plants about waist high with white bunches of something on them. Could be.
We took US 231 south out of Dothan to Interstate 10 in Florida, driving through a wide swath of hurricane debris being cleaned up with heavy equipment including dozers, loaders and dump trucks. Recent December rains left standing lakes and inundated ditches, filling the ruts made by earth movers and tracked backhoes wrenching fallen trees into wet muddy stacks. Florescent green & yellow vested workmen talked by four-wheel drive vehicles, and directed traffic off-road, as traffic like us sped by on-road, looking at them going on about their business.
“Drowsy Driving Advisory Zone” signs over the many lanes of traffic read.
“Don’t Be Risking Your Life, Break The Drive if Sleepy.”
“Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over.”
“Safe Roads Start With Safe Drivers.”
These messages are good but presume all drivers can read.
Farther on: “Our Church is prayer conditioned.”
“Go to Church or The Devil Will Get You.”
In Canton, Alabama we stopped at a rest stop for toll road information that we knew we’d be encountering before long, when I spied a Trump look-a-like wearing bib overalls, and a big shock of long yellow orange hair ‘neath a baseball cap and savoring a big mouthful of plug tobacco that affected his speech. Leastways, I couldn’t understand him. Oh yeah ...
Steak & Shake.
Hank Williams Memorial
Now we’re 20 miles from Tallahassee, Florida and wow, the FHP is out in force today! They’re driving snazzy black & gold cars and SUVs and sittin’ at a bunch of crossroads on Hwy I-10 like they’re expectin’ a whole lot of somebody. I’d like to stay and watch--but we don’t.
Road kill becomes identifiable. That one was a deer...
Workers pick up road trash without pick-up sticks. Is this a scene from “Cool Hand Luke?”
Florida hand dryers blow, weakly.
Marion’s Gainesville cousin Dale and his wife Helen were Duluth, Minnesota natives who moved to the Gainesville about fifty years ago when Dale began teaching engineering (40 years) at the University of Florida. They keep a lake home near Hermantown to escape from Florida summers, which I understand can be quite brutal. Hard to imagine, but considering it can get into the 80s in January, I guess I’ll take their word for it. We were planning to spend a few nights there before driving the last leg of our 2371 mile road trip from Wannaska to Indiantown. I had no idea it would be such a paradise.
Dale said to call him when we got near because GPS devices didn’t always direct people right to their door, so between him and Marion (the real navigator in the scheme of things) they developed a route off Hwy 75 that would put us within a few miles of their place, and then, if we still had cellphone contact, he’d direct us through the ins and outs of their community to where he’d be waiting along the road.
We miss a turn, then pull off the road and stop after acquiring a long line of traffic compiled of people who are too afraid to pass slow us in a long level passing zone. As Jerry and Marion heartily discuss their route changes, I get out of the truck and walk ahead looking for a place where Jerry can safely turn the truck and trailer around on the narrow gravel road we’re on, rather than back onto the highway. I watched for aggressive big snakes, alligators and bananna spiders--but didn’t see any. Whew! We get turned around and started down a different road when I see a silver car by a gate ahead, and a man standing outside it and point him out to Jerry. “There’s Dale, I’ll bet.”
The man waved at us, then got into the car and began driving ahead, us following him on a long and winding hard-packed sand road that passed beneath tree limbs and along tall woven wire fences accompanied by a pine plantation on its opposite side. We went on past a stable with two horses, one black and one brown, who watched us go by without the least bit of curiosity, following another long curve of the road past an old DC Case tractor that aptly caught Jerry’s attention, and soon we approached a big fine-looking low-roofed white house with forest green trim set back under the Live Oaks with their own trim of Spanish moss. BEAUTIFUL!
He pointed out that during some heavy rains late last summer, the river had over-flowed its banks, going from a narrow winding ten feet wide to over thirty. He had received word that a severely wounded alligator, (minus a chunk of its tail), somehow got hurt during the higher water and entered the watershed there and actually crossed their yard until it was discovered by a caretaker who called the DNR for its removal. Dale said he had never known alligators to be in the Sante Fe River all the years he lived down there. He did admit to having some snakes and more than a few big banana spiders, but said we shouldn’t be concerned.
He told of an early landowner there who had kept several families of Afro-Americans there, in a sort of bondage, just after the slavery era, but was investigated by the Federal government, charged and then imprisoned. The land had been caught up in years of legal wrangling before he could purchase the property in the late 1950s. He pointed out a clay pot wedged in a cleft in a pine tree that he said was a copy of those leftover from the days when folks would collect resin and sap from the tree which was later used in the production of turpentine.
Heading back toward the house, we went through a deep water muddy stretch of the trail rather than go around it. On a drier quadrant, he pointed out sign of Gopher tortoises that frequent his property, saying that other animals live in the holes they dig. https://myfwc.com/wildlifehabitats/wildlife/gopher-tortoise/
Dale, I learned later has known a great many things and forgotten a great many more, but takes it all in stride, saying it’s not important to remember everything. A brilliant man, he has come by his accolades honestly, even patenting an early Mars rover device for collecting dust particles. Also patenting “An original design of an Inertial Droplet Separator (IDS) designed to change the way fine particles are measured in source emissions.”
Dale and Helen raised four daughters and two sons, the eldest of whom died in 2018 after a long battle with cancer. A close knit family, three of the daughters and the one son live near Dale and Helen, a daughter lives in Wisconsin. One daughter, lives on her property a mile or so away, the Sante Fe River adjoining her folk’s farm, just a kayak trip downstream. She owns the two riding horses at their place and upon learning that I live on a farm close to Jerry and Marion’s, she asked me if I rode horses.
“Well, I have. We owned a couple Arabs for awhile. I rode one, but I’m no horseman,” I admitted, totally eliminating any possibility that she’d ask me to help her exercise them by riding one down through the trees along the bayou some day where, she said, in the evenings, she’s seen banana spiders as big as bowling balls hang from the trees waiting for unsuspecting passersby, especially on horseback.
“Some people say they don’t bite,” she said watching my reaction. “But I’ve had them in my hair and on me, and they do. They bite.”
“Uh, no thanks,” I think I may have said, confidently, trying to cover up the fact that me and banana spiders wouldn’t necessarily get along that well, especially on horseback in the gloaming of a warm Florida night neath the silvery Spanish moss. I’m sure I’d squeal and kick, wavin’ my arms all willy-nilly, shaky-like, as though the demons of hell were tryin’ to drag me back to their lair, the whites of my eyes bigger’n that of the horse, all wild-eyed itself sayin’ (in horse talk), “Get this dumb ass spider-bit banshee off me! Where do you get these guys, Leonard?”
“No thanks, li’l missy, I said, bravely. “With talk like that, I miss Minnesota already.”
Oh, it’s not like I haven’t seen alligators on TV, or recently in an Alabama tourist shop, where Marion and I contemplated purchasing a back-scratcher made from ‘gator claws or such, but decided against it. I am thinkin’ now, it was the closest to an ‘alligator’ I was going to get this trip, so regretted my fiscally prudent decision despite my reservations getting it through TSA at the airport on my way home.
The morning after we arrived at Dale & Helen’s, Helen had a doctor’s appointment and so they were gone all day. We just lazed around, walking about the yard, me taking a bunch of photos. Jerry and I looked at Dale’s old Case tractor that he doesn’t remember the model of, that sits in a corner of his yard as a welcome sign. We visit with the two riding horses on the way back (There’s the guy who’s scared of big spiders dropping on his head in the swamp ... one horse looked to have telepathically said to the other.) and wandered over to visit with the goat and horse pair of buds who live together, of all things.
I believe that was the same day when Jerry and Marion learned we had lost a day on our travels. I admit that in some ways, days crept by, but in this case one slipped by without any of us realizing it while we were sitting in the breezeway between the house and garage, having a bit of coffee and some blueberry muffins. Marion and Jerry were talkin’ to their daughter, Sara, who lives in Dodge City, Kansas and handles all their business affairs while they’re away. I overheard the conversation because they were on speakerphone. Marion had said something about tomorrow being Thursday ...
Sara said, “You know it’s Tuesday.”
And Marion said, “No, it’s Wednesday.”
And Sara, calmly but clearly replied, “Tuesday.”
Jerry gave a thoughtful look at the ceiling, then lowering his gaze toward his smartphone, said, “Tuesday? Yes, it is Tuesday.”
“It’s only Tuesday?” Marion exclaimed, finally realizing it was Tuesday and not Wednesday, and we had lost a day somewhere and had arrived a day early to Dale and Helen’s, who, graciously, never let on their surprise.
Jerry said, “We can’t overstay our welcome by staying through to Friday morning. We’ll leave Thursday, January 10th.”
And so it was to be. We’d get to Indiantown a day earlier than planned, but it would alleviate some stress getting there Friday, by noon, when the boat would be moved from the storage area to the work area. They knew of a place called “The Seminole Inn” in Indiantown where we could stay a couple nights, before we went aboard the boat. https://www.seminoleinn.com/
Well, Dale and Helen heard about me never seein’ a true, live, alligator and decided to take us to Payne’s Prairie Wetland, where they said, there were 10,000 alligators living there any day of the week, guaranteed. So it was we made a trip on another beautiful sunny warm Florida day, out to a seemingly urban setting, just beyond a residential street where a sign greeted pedestrians entering what appeared to be a little city neighborhood park:
This reminded me of sign in Ireland, that read only, “This is a premises,” and all that, no guard rails or cautionary tape as you ascend the open sided stairwell of a thousand year old castle--likewise, here at Payne’s Prairie, something might lunge at you and drag you into the water or gore you or trample you to death. Your call.
Here Helen, at 86, is pushing a walker after knee surgery. Jerry, at 73, is walking with a cane. Marion, age unknown, is loaded down with her camera and big purse. Dale, though nimble for his age of 87, probably can’t run much faster than me at 67. I wonder how this day is going to go. Oh well, I’ve brought my camera, so I’ll just video the event if necessary for forensic record.
As our luck would have it, the water table was too high--an unusual event-- and the alligators, all 10,000 of them, were no where to be seen, as neither were the free ranging bison, or wild horses. I’m thinkin’ it was really just a theme park, but we did see some birds, including what I think was a Great Blue heron from Minnesota, maybe even Palmville, here along Mikinaak Creek.
Can’t blame Dale or Helen. It’s not their fault. Although I didn’t see any reptiles at Payne’s Prairie, I saw plenty of Gators walking on the University of Florida campus. What college-age young person would not want to attend school at the U of Florida and wear shorts to class in January, then go to the University of Minnesota--Duluth in summer & fall? I wish I would’ve thought of it. Too late now.
Gainesville and the U of F went on forever. There were people everywhere, all kinds, all colors. Just amazing stuff. It was great. Dale showed us many of his favorite haunts he knew when he was teaching on campus ‘back in the day’, repeating the litany of his history among the multi-storied buildings, offices and people of his life that Helen had likely heard told a million times. Their patience with one another was an extraordinary demonstration of a loving, long-term relationship that I enjoyed observing.
Leaving was almost a teary-eyed affair (well, for me, if not anyone else) I had come to appreciate the people and environment, but I knew we had to press on and get to Indiantown another 270 miles or so farther south before we could really throw our anchor out. My time was getting short down south, so we best be gettin’ at it.
South central Florida surprised me being more rural than I imagined, with its open level country and horse and cattle ranches rivaling South Dakota spreads. I haven’t seen Live Oak trees with their classic drapings of Spanish moss for nigh on 20 years. There are a lot of pines here too, but I reckon they grow good in this warm weather and sandy soil. Great clouds of smoke billowed up from the distant horizon in places, someone later speculating they were burning off sugar cane fields that had been harvested. Farmers in Roseau County, Minnesota do the same thing, burning of vast tracts of blue grass and small grain fields after harvest, so it wasn’t visually unusual for us. Legends have it that Jerry Solom too, has burned some grass on their place when he’s least expected it, but it’s all just conjecture, I think.
Entering Indiantown, at last, seemed familiar if only because of the intense position of sun overhead and the warmth of the concrete from the highway as we slowed for lower highway speed limits. It looked as a rural town anywhere, save for the existence of palm trees. It had open grassy park areas with several open-sided shelters. Many trees. A set of railroad tracks gleamed just west of the highway denoting its regular use. A Radio Shack & auto parts store with a cowboy-themed eatery named, “Crackers Cafe” nestled in a corner of the parking lot next door. Many taco stands, a Burger King, JB’s Bar & Saloon, a thrift store, post office, a community library, several gas stations, a corner ice & water dispensary, a bank, an IGA grocery store that sold Guinness Extra Stout-an unbelievable find, Family Dollar.
Spanish was heard everywhere, even as music on the IGA sound system. I found it fun, an interesting/familiar change of sounds and language. I regret not learning enough of it, remembering that when I was in elementary school in Des Moines, that our early grades were among the very first in the school system then, to have been taught Spanish on television in the very early 1950s. I retained the basics for years afterwards, so I hear it with some affection--although I understand these days, many non-Spanish speaking people detest its commonality. I think a person has to realize that Spanish has its origins in Florida and Cuba, and is heard here as a mixture of the Seminole language and other languages as well. There’s a beauty/belleza within it.
The Seminole Inn was an interesting place and I enjoyed its handpainted upper floor, wall murals about Seminole/American History that were captioned in the stark reality of what the Seminole endured and fought for, than written to placate the ancestors of the white American invaders. Look for “The Battle of Okeechobee” references on-line.
Jerry and Marion always make a point of becoming familiar with the local libraries in the towns and cities they stay in on their travels, so one of the first places we went to after arriving in Indiantown, even before the marina, was the Indiantown Library, just off the main highway through town. It was open Tuesday-Saturday from 8:00-5:30 and usually well-attended by children and adults. With a good number of cost-free ‘rentable’ computers, people did taxes, checked emails, did college course work, arranged flights home...
I used it too, entering my Wannaskan Almanac blog and checking emails, or reading local newspapers. School age children thronged play sites and study areas, their bicycles laying about the grass near the front door. It was a friendly clean well-used facility with several office personnel who conversed bi-lingually as necessary. I could see why children and others of the community enjoyed going there.
We had to ask somebody how to get to the marina even though Jerry and Marion were there last year after arriving from the Bahamas. The marina isn’t visible from the highway, Jerry remembered, and only recalled it was tricky to get to. Stopping at a gas station I went in to ask, realizing that the young woman’s use of English was almost as good as mine of Spanish, but I was in no hurry, and using a system of hand signals and arm motions she told me I had to turn at the bank, the road would turn and turn, over the railroad tracks, then left, it was way back. Smily face.
I liked this place a lot already. So it was we turned at the bank, followed the road this way and that, went over the shiny railroad tracks, and--missed the left turn into the marina, going beyond it and snaking about through a residential area, turning around where we could, and coming back saw a big sign with an arrow that said, “Indiantown Marina,” this way.
Wow! Look at all these huge boats! Ocean-going boats, not the big fresh-water cruisers I was used to seeing on Lake Superior. These were boats were fifty feet long and twenty feet tall from the ground to the deck and masts of sixty feet. The majority of the 400 + craft I saw were sailboats, many two-masted beauties, some in water, but most cradled on jack stand supports against their hulls in the storage and worksite areas.
Jerry’s boat looked small and plain in comparison to more expensive sailboats of 50 feet or more in length, with all their chrome capstans and sail furlers, and he knows it, telling a story of when Indian Summer arrived in Bergen, in 2000, the deck paint had come off in spots and looked horrible next to all the shiny Cadillacs and Porsches of the rich sailing set, “Indian Summer looked bad, like a cow in a horse show.”
We were there in time for moving day, when a boat lift resembling a giant backless steel chair, with each of its each legs sitting atop a huge rubber tire, is driven astride a boat. Strong canvas-like straps are positioned under the hull and then lifted by large electric motors so that the boat nestles on them only a few inches off the ground, and wheeled to the worksite or storage area. Once there, the wheeled crane sets the boat on its keel, or floats, on wood blocks, where jack stand supports are tightened against the length of its hull by workmen. The straps are disconnected, and the boat lift is backed out of the site, leaving the boat standing by itself. You can stay on your boat in the work area, but not in the storage area, nor can you work on your boat anywhere else. Other boats are launched instead, taken to the marina and lowered onto the water, where their masts are readied for sailing.
It had taken us eight days just to get to Indiantown and I hadn’t done a lick of work to help the Soloms, so it was decided I stay another couple weeks to see my obligations through, arranging to fly home mid-week on January 24, Jerry driving me to Orlando and Joe driving me home from Minneapolis. What a team effort.
All the time I was down there, the weather was fantastic, I will admit. January in Florida is unbelievable and likely so is February and March. It was so warm here, mosquitoes would sneak onto the boat after sundown, but their numbers were few. Food is inexpensive and local populations low. I only wish my wife Jackie could’ve been there too instead of having to stay home and enduring subzero temperatures and lots of snow. We were in contact a couple times a day via cellphone, but it’s not the same when one person is in a different climate zone like southern Florida and the other northwestern Minnesota. She was totally supportive, but did say, toward the end, our time apart had been long enough.
It was a great time.
Roadtrip Notes of January 2-23, 2019
I had the pleasure of working with close friends and neighbors, Jerry and Marion Solom in January 2019, in Indiantown, Florida. Since I was retired, I thought I could be of some help working on their steel sailboat, Indian Summer, stored in an Indiantown marina, as they were going there for a few months to do yearly maintenance on it. Neither are in the best physical shape and since I was ‘younger’ and more able, I thought I’d ask them if they’d want me to go too. My wife and friends thought it was a great idea.
However, I decided to sleep on my decision. No sense in being hasty for I knew what I was getting into as I had helped Jerry ready Indian Summer for its maiden voyage to Norway in 2000, grinding and sanding rust off the deck in Louisiana along with Jerry’s son, Terry, and a friend named Stuart. When Jerry worked on his boat, he worked on his boat and, although we had some fun too, I had had my fill of it by the end of the two weeks I was down there.
I doubted Florida would be any different nineteen years later, though I doubted Jerry would even accept my offer. He has always been so fiercely independent, a fact that persevered through the dangerous northern route crossing of the North Atlantic with just him and Terry as crew in 2008, his leukemia diagnosis in 2009, and resulting radiation & chemo treatments at Mayo Clinic through 2010. Although cancer cost him the physical strength he once had, in addition to the loss of three inches of height, he has continued to operate his steel fabrication business in Palmville, and remains the go-to guy, in our area of NW Minnesota, for guaranteed welding and machining work.
Suddenly I was faced with packing clothes suitable for both the equivalent of the arctic and the equator, in three hours. We left on a cold January 2nd for Delano, Minnesota where we were spending the first night with their daughter Mary and her family.
After a post-Christmas night and morning at their daughter’s house, with the two sets of twins opening belated Christmas gifts from gramma and grampa, we stopped at a bank in Delano to get $20 worth of quarters for the Illinois toll booths, only to be turned away because we didn’t have an account with them, and this was after patiently standing in line and experiencing “Next Teller, Please” signs twice. Normally an easy-going guy, Jerry was perturbed as we walked from the bank. A customer service person at a front desk, smiled and said “Have a nice day!” and I answered, “It sure in hell didn’t start here.”
I offered to drive a few times, but didn’t push the subject. Some people just want to do all the driving. In some ways it’s a treat to be the passenger, because I’m the principle driver at home, but going along on this trip was in part, thinking I’d drive part way to save on Jerry, but at long last he said he’d prefer to drive because grasping the steering wheel was better for his back. So that’s what I did the whole 2000+ mile trip, just ride. Marion sat in the backseat, reading her Kindle and setting up the GPS routes--and sleeping when she wanted. They’d carry on a banter discussing possible routes, as I followed with the map, occasionally helping out in heavy traffic situations following routes alternate to the GPS.
The next day we went to a Menards to purchase a sheet of insulation, some adhesives and cleaning agents Jerry could use on the boat. It was there when we were leaving, that a man looked long at me, then smiled as if in recognition, and I, being the friendly sort (that day anyway) smiled back.
The guy stopped in the exit, turned to me and said,
“You still live over on Elmwood?”
And I said, “Uh, no... I’m from NW Minnesota.”
“Really? Well, you have a clone here!” the guy mused, going on toward his car. “You look just like him.”
“That ain’t sayin’ much about that guy,” I laughed.
Paul helped Jerry buy an EZ-Pass for Illinois toll roads that we’d encounter that would save on toll fees and slowdowns to throw money in a pot or stops at a toll guard for change. Our friend Joe McDonnell uses EZPasses on his driving trips to and from Boston and said they’re the way to go for sure.
Paul had worked at CAT (Caterpillar) in Yorkville for over 30 years, and so took us on a drive through the city to where the CAT factory stood under its several roofed acres, and telling us what was where. He no longer had authority to enter the plant but told us of his connections as a engineer to the CAT 988K wheel loader, one which serendipitously, was being loaded across the road from the plant, on a huge multi-axle semi trailer heading for the west coast. We went over talked to the truck driver who was busy tightening and routing heavy chains. I began seeing CAT equipment all over the place.
Sitting in the backseat of Paul’s beautiful black Dodge Charger, I saw four places advertising waffles on our route. So I wondered what was up with this midwestern passion for waffles all of a sudden? I later note the phenomenon increasing farther south. It mystifies me. Pancakes, I can see, they’re simple to make, but for waffles, you gotta have special mold devices, like making lead balls for a muzzle loader. A pancake is just poured free hand into a hot lightly oiled skillet. Simple!
Leaving Yorkville the next day, we headed toward Florida, on Illinois highway 47, across an Iowa-like Illinois landscape of surreal-looking wind turbines whose huge blades, I saw, cast shadows on nearby farmhouses. An ancient cylindrical clay-tile corn crib stood by itself where there was once a farmstead. On distant quarter sections, storm-damaged windbreaks gloved islands of empty farmhouses and derelict outbuildings, many with their farm lanes overgrown and dead-ended.
We began seeing green grass and black fields, three miles in any direction, the only trees seen were along rivers and creeks. The idea that “This is January,” just didn’t seem right for some reason.
I see who I think are a young indigenous family at a McDonald’s. I read somewhere that the Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, Potawatomie, Ottawa, Sauk, Fox, and Kickapoo indigenous people lived here pre-contact, and probably many still do.
Checking off our slow 1036-plus mile passage through the states of Kentucky (just a wee bit of its SW corner), Tennessee, and Alabama, to Gainesville, Florida our next stop, we passed signs about adult bookstores, hog hunts, and several miles of billboards about people knowing a specific lawyer who got them awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars. (Jerry noted the billboards didn’t say how much of their money the lawyer got.)
You know you’re getting into the South when Elvis, Patsy Cline, CASH, Grand Ole Opry, Canton Plantation, “The Longest Bar in Nashville”, Mammoth Cave Fun, Bowling Green Tennessee Guide, The Hermitage, Free Moonshine Tastings, Bell Meade Plantation, and the Country Music Hall of Fame & Museum brochures pack a corner of your motel continental breakfast nook.
“Listen, Marion!” I said. “I think I hear a cardinal with a southern accent.”
Entering Civil War sites territory make me wish I had reviewed Bruce Catton’s Civil War trilogy to refresh my memory before I left Minnesota. In Tennessee, we passed exits to the Civil War Battle of Franklin and Battle of Spring Hill.
Saw a poster in a Men’s Room at a rest stop that was titled: History of American Baseball that referred to the
beginning and ending of ‘Negro Leagues’ but made no mention of Jackie Robinson or any other black players.
Out my window, growing along fences and up into tall trees were the invasive Kudzu vines. I hummed a few bars of Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons,” saw signs for “Tennessee Walking Horses,” “David Crockett State Park,” a billboard for the Jack Daniels Distillery stating: “There are road trips, then there are pilgrimages.”
I talked to Jerry about our Greyhound bus trip to his boat at Slidel, Louisiana in 2000, from Fargo, (our closest point of departure) and when we rode through rural Alabama, recalling the woods and pastures we drove past then, that reminded me so much of Minnesota, that now conjure up Civil War battles I’ve recently read about since.
Jerry and Marion talk about the time they got Indian Summer stuck in Lake Pontchartrain. Further conversation included visiting Mandeville, and eating at Zazu’s. The Solom’s have been everywhere man!
Southerners may resent Hollywoods caricatures of them, but do Minnesotans? You have to admit “Fargo” is pretty darn close.
Sweet Home, Alabama!
Saturn 1B rocket at rest stop.
Browns Ferry Road.
Hoover Hogs (Armadillos)
Birmingham 34 miles
Home of Mud runs.
“EAT MOR CHIKIN” billboards are funny enough to make a U-turn for, but we didn’t do it.
I remember that in 2000, I was the only one to leave the bus for a few minutes, at a little gringy bus station in Selma, wondering about what its four dark, dirty walls and linoleum floors had witnessed in its existence when Selma and the Civil Rights movement were so prominent in national TV news.
‘George Washington Carver High School’, Montgomery, Alabama.
I read a lot about George Washington Carver of my own choosing, back when I was in school. I remember finding his biography interesting.
Road kill becomes unidentifiable. All these critters have been turned inside out by something, leaving each of them anonymous. Jerry wonders if they’re just ‘playing possum’.
Passed by a truck whose door reads:
“CAUTION: This truck carries extremely comfortable materials.
200 TerraCotta Soldiers/International Arts Center/Troy University Troy, AL
We generally stopped driving before dark, looking for a place along the route just before sundown, anticipating seeing exits for motels and restaurants, a handy combination when you're stopping for the night. I believe we talked about stopping at Dothan originally, but we were tired and just south of Ozark, when we pulled off the highway to see what the GPS had to say about a motel there. I think it was one of those times when it lost its satellite signal and we didn't wait around for it to gain it before we pulled back onto the highway heading south again--missing a turn into a motel right there-- and rather than turn around, continued on toward Dothan down the road another twenty miles or so.
Now it was dark and the truck traffic heavier, semis passing us like we were standing still--when the front end of the truck fell into a big hole or jumped over an obstruction we never saw, and Jerry and I both dirtied our drawers right then and there and it pitched Marion forward against her seat belt. "WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT?" I yelled in surprise. Jerry was sure one of the front wheels fell off, but the truck didn't pull to either side. It still steered straight.
"It must have been a big hole we didn't see," I said, still studying the dark roadway directly in front of the truck. "It is broken up along the border of the shoulder here in places."
"I'm wondering if it wasn't a truck tire that came apart," Jerry ventured. "I haven't seen any, but they blend into the road, in the dark."
I give Jerry credit, despite such impact, he kept us and the equipment trailer we were pulling on the road.
We spent the night in Dothan, Alabama, site of Hurricane Michael damage. Jerry and I inspected the truck for damage after we parked in the hotel parking lot, but couldn't find anything. The tires appeared sound. The front end and steering components didn't looked damaged, amazingly.
Although we were unfamiliar with the city, it served as a great place to stay, only 250 miles away from Gainesville, Florida. Darkness had hidden the landscape until morning, so it was only then that we began seeing buildings with blue tarped roofs and savagely toppled trees.
Cows grazing on green pastures--in January, hard to believe my eyes.
Split rail fences.
TWINKLE for Lt. Governor (Later on we saw a Bob BRIGHT sign below)
Creek Nation and the ‘Red Sticks’ 1813
National Peanut festival
Dothan waffle Houses
Dothan National Golf & Hotel. Grounds appear salted with golf balls.
Was that a cotton field? Dark plants about waist high with white bunches of something on them. Could be.
We took US 231 south out of Dothan to Interstate 10 in Florida, driving through a wide swath of hurricane debris being cleaned up with heavy equipment including dozers, loaders and dump trucks. Recent December rains left standing lakes and inundated ditches, filling the ruts made by earth movers and tracked backhoes wrenching fallen trees into wet muddy stacks. Florescent green & yellow vested workmen talked by four-wheel drive vehicles, and directed traffic off-road, as traffic like us sped by on-road, looking at them going on about their business.
“Drowsy Driving Advisory Zone” signs over the many lanes of traffic read.
“Don’t Be Risking Your Life, Break The Drive if Sleepy.”
“Drive Sober or Get Pulled Over.”
“Safe Roads Start With Safe Drivers.”
These messages are good but presume all drivers can read.
Farther on: “Our Church is prayer conditioned.”
“Go to Church or The Devil Will Get You.”
In Canton, Alabama we stopped at a rest stop for toll road information that we knew we’d be encountering before long, when I spied a Trump look-a-like wearing bib overalls, and a big shock of long yellow orange hair ‘neath a baseball cap and savoring a big mouthful of plug tobacco that affected his speech. Leastways, I couldn’t understand him. Oh yeah ...
Steak & Shake.
Hank Williams Memorial
Now we’re 20 miles from Tallahassee, Florida and wow, the FHP is out in force today! They’re driving snazzy black & gold cars and SUVs and sittin’ at a bunch of crossroads on Hwy I-10 like they’re expectin’ a whole lot of somebody. I’d like to stay and watch--but we don’t.
Road kill becomes identifiable. That one was a deer...
Workers pick up road trash without pick-up sticks. Is this a scene from “Cool Hand Luke?”
Florida hand dryers blow, weakly.
Marion’s Gainesville cousin Dale and his wife Helen were Duluth, Minnesota natives who moved to the Gainesville about fifty years ago when Dale began teaching engineering (40 years) at the University of Florida. They keep a lake home near Hermantown to escape from Florida summers, which I understand can be quite brutal. Hard to imagine, but considering it can get into the 80s in January, I guess I’ll take their word for it. We were planning to spend a few nights there before driving the last leg of our 2371 mile road trip from Wannaska to Indiantown. I had no idea it would be such a paradise.
Dale said to call him when we got near because GPS devices didn’t always direct people right to their door, so between him and Marion (the real navigator in the scheme of things) they developed a route off Hwy 75 that would put us within a few miles of their place, and then, if we still had cellphone contact, he’d direct us through the ins and outs of their community to where he’d be waiting along the road.
We miss a turn, then pull off the road and stop after acquiring a long line of traffic compiled of people who are too afraid to pass slow us in a long level passing zone. As Jerry and Marion heartily discuss their route changes, I get out of the truck and walk ahead looking for a place where Jerry can safely turn the truck and trailer around on the narrow gravel road we’re on, rather than back onto the highway. I watched for aggressive big snakes, alligators and bananna spiders--but didn’t see any. Whew! We get turned around and started down a different road when I see a silver car by a gate ahead, and a man standing outside it and point him out to Jerry. “There’s Dale, I’ll bet.”
The man waved at us, then got into the car and began driving ahead, us following him on a long and winding hard-packed sand road that passed beneath tree limbs and along tall woven wire fences accompanied by a pine plantation on its opposite side. We went on past a stable with two horses, one black and one brown, who watched us go by without the least bit of curiosity, following another long curve of the road past an old DC Case tractor that aptly caught Jerry’s attention, and soon we approached a big fine-looking low-roofed white house with forest green trim set back under the Live Oaks with their own trim of Spanish moss. BEAUTIFUL!
Not only was it amazing in itself as the end of our road for awhile, but its curving corral fences, stable, vast closely mown yard, and its rainforest-like canopy of towering trees presumably hundreds of years old was just so jaw-dropping lovely, that I wished Jackie could’ve been there to see it with me. Built as the first of its kind residential Morton Steel Building, this wasn’t the first time it had created such reaction from first time viewers we learned.
But there was time to explain that all later, Dale enthused, and after warmly greeting Marion and Jerry, urged Marion to go on in the house with Helen while he took Jerry and I on a whirlwind tour of their farm in his Kubota 4x4 while there was still daylight. Opening a huge sliding door on his equipment shop, he beckoned us to get in and get our seatbelts fastened--Jerry in the middle because he’d fit nicely there--and off we went down through the gathering trees and tall fern growth and sago palms, past a picnic shelter he had recently built as a memorial to one of his grandchildren (He’s 87), around a muddy stretch of leaf-strewn trail, around tight turns, and over a very narrow bridge over a creek that entered the Sante Fe River that flows through his property of 80+ acres.
He told of an early landowner there who had kept several families of Afro-Americans there, in a sort of bondage, just after the slavery era, but was investigated by the Federal government, charged and then imprisoned. The land had been caught up in years of legal wrangling before he could purchase the property in the late 1950s. He pointed out a clay pot wedged in a cleft in a pine tree that he said was a copy of those leftover from the days when folks would collect resin and sap from the tree which was later used in the production of turpentine.
Heading back toward the house, we went through a deep water muddy stretch of the trail rather than go around it. On a drier quadrant, he pointed out sign of Gopher tortoises that frequent his property, saying that other animals live in the holes they dig. https://myfwc.com/wildlifehabitats/wildlife/gopher-tortoise/
Dale, I learned later has known a great many things and forgotten a great many more, but takes it all in stride, saying it’s not important to remember everything. A brilliant man, he has come by his accolades honestly, even patenting an early Mars rover device for collecting dust particles. Also patenting “An original design of an Inertial Droplet Separator (IDS) designed to change the way fine particles are measured in source emissions.”
Dale and Helen raised four daughters and two sons, the eldest of whom died in 2018 after a long battle with cancer. A close knit family, three of the daughters and the one son live near Dale and Helen, a daughter lives in Wisconsin. One daughter, lives on her property a mile or so away, the Sante Fe River adjoining her folk’s farm, just a kayak trip downstream. She owns the two riding horses at their place and upon learning that I live on a farm close to Jerry and Marion’s, she asked me if I rode horses.
“Some people say they don’t bite,” she said watching my reaction. “But I’ve had them in my hair and on me, and they do. They bite.”
“Uh, no thanks,” I think I may have said, confidently, trying to cover up the fact that me and banana spiders wouldn’t necessarily get along that well, especially on horseback in the gloaming of a warm Florida night neath the silvery Spanish moss. I’m sure I’d squeal and kick, wavin’ my arms all willy-nilly, shaky-like, as though the demons of hell were tryin’ to drag me back to their lair, the whites of my eyes bigger’n that of the horse, all wild-eyed itself sayin’ (in horse talk), “Get this dumb ass spider-bit banshee off me! Where do you get these guys, Leonard?”
“No thanks, li’l missy, I said, bravely. “With talk like that, I miss Minnesota already.”
I’d been in Florida for all of a day and had yet to see an alligator. I had, supposedly, a close run-in with an alligator in Slidel, Louisiana, in 2000, when I ignorantly slept in a tent just off the water’s edge in Bona Fouca Marina there, where, they told me afterward, a number of people had recently seen a big alligator in the vicinity, the first in a very long time. They said they took me for a Yankee just for that fact alone, and figured (had bets) the ‘gator would too.
The morning after we arrived at Dale & Helen’s, Helen had a doctor’s appointment and so they were gone all day. We just lazed around, walking about the yard, me taking a bunch of photos. Jerry and I looked at Dale’s old Case tractor that he doesn’t remember the model of, that sits in a corner of his yard as a welcome sign. We visit with the two riding horses on the way back (There’s the guy who’s scared of big spiders dropping on his head in the swamp ... one horse looked to have telepathically said to the other.) and wandered over to visit with the goat and horse pair of buds who live together, of all things.
I believe that was the same day when Jerry and Marion learned we had lost a day on our travels. I admit that in some ways, days crept by, but in this case one slipped by without any of us realizing it while we were sitting in the breezeway between the house and garage, having a bit of coffee and some blueberry muffins. Marion and Jerry were talkin’ to their daughter, Sara, who lives in Dodge City, Kansas and handles all their business affairs while they’re away. I overheard the conversation because they were on speakerphone. Marion had said something about tomorrow being Thursday ...
Sara said, “You know it’s Tuesday.”
And Marion said, “No, it’s Wednesday.”
And Sara, calmly but clearly replied, “Tuesday.”
Jerry gave a thoughtful look at the ceiling, then lowering his gaze toward his smartphone, said, “Tuesday? Yes, it is Tuesday.”
“It’s only Tuesday?” Marion exclaimed, finally realizing it was Tuesday and not Wednesday, and we had lost a day somewhere and had arrived a day early to Dale and Helen’s, who, graciously, never let on their surprise.
Jerry said, “We can’t overstay our welcome by staying through to Friday morning. We’ll leave Thursday, January 10th.”
And so it was to be. We’d get to Indiantown a day earlier than planned, but it would alleviate some stress getting there Friday, by noon, when the boat would be moved from the storage area to the work area. They knew of a place called “The Seminole Inn” in Indiantown where we could stay a couple nights, before we went aboard the boat. https://www.seminoleinn.com/
Well, Dale and Helen heard about me never seein’ a true, live, alligator and decided to take us to Payne’s Prairie Wetland, where they said, there were 10,000 alligators living there any day of the week, guaranteed. So it was we made a trip on another beautiful sunny warm Florida day, out to a seemingly urban setting, just beyond a residential street where a sign greeted pedestrians entering what appeared to be a little city neighborhood park:
“Entering Wilderness Area.
USE EXTREME CAUTION.
Remember this is not a zoo or theme park.”
OPEN RANGE: BISON, HORSES, ALLIGATORS.
FREE ROAMING.
DO NOT FEED NOR APPROACH.
Here Helen, at 86, is pushing a walker after knee surgery. Jerry, at 73, is walking with a cane. Marion, age unknown, is loaded down with her camera and big purse. Dale, though nimble for his age of 87, probably can’t run much faster than me at 67. I wonder how this day is going to go. Oh well, I’ve brought my camera, so I’ll just video the event if necessary for forensic record.
Can’t blame Dale or Helen. It’s not their fault. Although I didn’t see any reptiles at Payne’s Prairie, I saw plenty of Gators walking on the University of Florida campus. What college-age young person would not want to attend school at the U of Florida and wear shorts to class in January, then go to the University of Minnesota--Duluth in summer & fall? I wish I would’ve thought of it. Too late now.
Leaving was almost a teary-eyed affair (well, for me, if not anyone else) I had come to appreciate the people and environment, but I knew we had to press on and get to Indiantown another 270 miles or so farther south before we could really throw our anchor out. My time was getting short down south, so we best be gettin’ at it.
South central Florida surprised me being more rural than I imagined, with its open level country and horse and cattle ranches rivaling South Dakota spreads. I haven’t seen Live Oak trees with their classic drapings of Spanish moss for nigh on 20 years. There are a lot of pines here too, but I reckon they grow good in this warm weather and sandy soil. Great clouds of smoke billowed up from the distant horizon in places, someone later speculating they were burning off sugar cane fields that had been harvested. Farmers in Roseau County, Minnesota do the same thing, burning of vast tracts of blue grass and small grain fields after harvest, so it wasn’t visually unusual for us. Legends have it that Jerry Solom too, has burned some grass on their place when he’s least expected it, but it’s all just conjecture, I think.
Entering Indiantown, at last, seemed familiar if only because of the intense position of sun overhead and the warmth of the concrete from the highway as we slowed for lower highway speed limits. It looked as a rural town anywhere, save for the existence of palm trees. It had open grassy park areas with several open-sided shelters. Many trees. A set of railroad tracks gleamed just west of the highway denoting its regular use. A Radio Shack & auto parts store with a cowboy-themed eatery named, “Crackers Cafe” nestled in a corner of the parking lot next door. Many taco stands, a Burger King, JB’s Bar & Saloon, a thrift store, post office, a community library, several gas stations, a corner ice & water dispensary, a bank, an IGA grocery store that sold Guinness Extra Stout-an unbelievable find, Family Dollar.
Spanish was heard everywhere, even as music on the IGA sound system. I found it fun, an interesting/familiar change of sounds and language. I regret not learning enough of it, remembering that when I was in elementary school in Des Moines, that our early grades were among the very first in the school system then, to have been taught Spanish on television in the very early 1950s. I retained the basics for years afterwards, so I hear it with some affection--although I understand these days, many non-Spanish speaking people detest its commonality. I think a person has to realize that Spanish has its origins in Florida and Cuba, and is heard here as a mixture of the Seminole language and other languages as well. There’s a beauty/belleza within it.
The Seminole Inn was an interesting place and I enjoyed its handpainted upper floor, wall murals about Seminole/American History that were captioned in the stark reality of what the Seminole endured and fought for, than written to placate the ancestors of the white American invaders. Look for “The Battle of Okeechobee” references on-line.
Jerry and Marion always make a point of becoming familiar with the local libraries in the towns and cities they stay in on their travels, so one of the first places we went to after arriving in Indiantown, even before the marina, was the Indiantown Library, just off the main highway through town. It was open Tuesday-Saturday from 8:00-5:30 and usually well-attended by children and adults. With a good number of cost-free ‘rentable’ computers, people did taxes, checked emails, did college course work, arranged flights home...
I used it too, entering my Wannaskan Almanac blog and checking emails, or reading local newspapers. School age children thronged play sites and study areas, their bicycles laying about the grass near the front door. It was a friendly clean well-used facility with several office personnel who conversed bi-lingually as necessary. I could see why children and others of the community enjoyed going there.
We had to ask somebody how to get to the marina even though Jerry and Marion were there last year after arriving from the Bahamas. The marina isn’t visible from the highway, Jerry remembered, and only recalled it was tricky to get to. Stopping at a gas station I went in to ask, realizing that the young woman’s use of English was almost as good as mine of Spanish, but I was in no hurry, and using a system of hand signals and arm motions she told me I had to turn at the bank, the road would turn and turn, over the railroad tracks, then left, it was way back. Smily face.
I liked this place a lot already. So it was we turned at the bank, followed the road this way and that, went over the shiny railroad tracks, and--missed the left turn into the marina, going beyond it and snaking about through a residential area, turning around where we could, and coming back saw a big sign with an arrow that said, “Indiantown Marina,” this way.
Wow! Look at all these huge boats! Ocean-going boats, not the big fresh-water cruisers I was used to seeing on Lake Superior. These were boats were fifty feet long and twenty feet tall from the ground to the deck and masts of sixty feet. The majority of the 400 + craft I saw were sailboats, many two-masted beauties, some in water, but most cradled on jack stand supports against their hulls in the storage and worksite areas.
Jerry’s boat looked small and plain in comparison to more expensive sailboats of 50 feet or more in length, with all their chrome capstans and sail furlers, and he knows it, telling a story of when Indian Summer arrived in Bergen, in 2000, the deck paint had come off in spots and looked horrible next to all the shiny Cadillacs and Porsches of the rich sailing set, “Indian Summer looked bad, like a cow in a horse show.”
We were there in time for moving day, when a boat lift resembling a giant backless steel chair, with each of its each legs sitting atop a huge rubber tire, is driven astride a boat. Strong canvas-like straps are positioned under the hull and then lifted by large electric motors so that the boat nestles on them only a few inches off the ground, and wheeled to the worksite or storage area. Once there, the wheeled crane sets the boat on its keel, or floats, on wood blocks, where jack stand supports are tightened against the length of its hull by workmen. The straps are disconnected, and the boat lift is backed out of the site, leaving the boat standing by itself. You can stay on your boat in the work area, but not in the storage area, nor can you work on your boat anywhere else. Other boats are launched instead, taken to the marina and lowered onto the water, where their masts are readied for sailing.
Boats come and go in the work storage area. Friendships are made, and maintenance information shared as work goes on sometimes seven days a week depending on individual situations. It costs $30 a day to occupy a worksite, so you want to make the most of it. The marina offers repair services, as listed on their website, but many boat owners do their own work to save money and satisfy their addiction to it by doing it themselves. Electricity and water are provided, but appliances aren’t allowed and likely monitored.
It had taken us eight days just to get to Indiantown and I hadn’t done a lick of work to help the Soloms, so it was decided I stay another couple weeks to see my obligations through, arranging to fly home mid-week on January 24, Jerry driving me to Orlando and Joe driving me home from Minneapolis. What a team effort.
All the time I was down there, the weather was fantastic, I will admit. January in Florida is unbelievable and likely so is February and March. It was so warm here, mosquitoes would sneak onto the boat after sundown, but their numbers were few. Food is inexpensive and local populations low. I only wish my wife Jackie could’ve been there too instead of having to stay home and enduring subzero temperatures and lots of snow. We were in contact a couple times a day via cellphone, but it’s not the same when one person is in a different climate zone like southern Florida and the other northwestern Minnesota. She was totally supportive, but did say, toward the end, our time apart had been long enough.
It was a great time.
I hope this was as much fun to write as it was to read. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteWaffles, and cardinals, and hog hunts! Oh my! Thanks for the tour. Almost feels like I was on the ride-along with your three, plus assortment of sights and adventures - sort of. Hoping for more stories to come!
ReplyDeleteWritten from the brilliant-white light Forest. -- JP Savage