Week 28 - Woodbine, Osceola National Forest

When I left Beaufort the air was warm and tinged with the smoke from controlled burns, smelling sometimes like a campfire and sometimes like fine pipe tobacco. As I passed Savannah the dock cranes stood out in the hazy distance like huge skeletal beasts. I made a stop near Darien, Georgia at the "smallest church in America" which had a very pretty little chapel. In one corner there was a tiny food bank, and two bulletin boards with all kinds of messages: prayers, sweet notes to estranged relatives, and the manifesto of a man travelling by bicycle to spread the gospel. Although I could have made it all the way to Florida in a day, I didn't have it in me, so I decided to stop for the night in Woodbine, Georgia, where my friend EG had told me there was a very good barbecue restaurant called Captain Stan's. I rolled up in the mid afternoon and saw a sign proclaiming "Bikers Welcome" and a phalanx of Harleys lined up out front. The atmosphere turned out to be every bit as cool as I'd been told, with a ring of covered seating around a central courtyard shaded by a massive live oak and a military surplus parachute. On one side was a stage where apparently they often have live music, but it wasn't happening at the moment. I sat on a soft couch, relaxed, and had a late lunch.

Woodbine also had a single place to stay, the Stardust Motel, so I headed over there and checked in. The Indian family that owned the place was in a front room watching TV, and the smells that drifted out of the little service window took me straight back to Delhi. On this trip I've noticed a lot of the businesses in deep rural areas are owned by immigrants, and I'm guessing it's because that's where the opportunity is now that urban real estate is largely too expensive to be family-owned. I struck up a conversation with the guy in the room next to mine, who'd grown up in the area, and asked him what there was to do or see. He said the church and the river walk were pretty much it, so I chose the river walk. And wow, what a gem of a trail! There was a boardwalk along the Satilla River, and a sort of pier going way out into the stream on an old rail bridge. Heading back toward town, there was a lovely greenway built on the old rail bed, which an information display said was part of a system stretching all the way from the southern coast of South Carolina to the northern coast of Florida. The part that went through town was especially pretty, following a sinuous path through shade trees and blooming azaleas, both sides lined with well-preserved historic houses. Along the way I found a grave in the form of a concrete tree stump and, near a gazebo, a shrine to a local woman who died a few years ago, with painted stones and other offerings. It felt like a place people cared deeply about.

Back at the motel, I joined a video chat with some of my childhood friends. Since the air in my room was stale and smelled like cigarettes, I sat outside in the courtyard, where it was too dark to bother turning on my camera. The rest of the night passed uneventfully except for waking up at 3:45 to the sound of my neighbor having sex while playing strange looping music from a tinny cell phone speaker. I wondered idly if his partner was one of the waitresses from Captain Stan's, whose bar closes "whenever". I got back to sleep and woke up at sunrise as usual, but the time was 7:30 instead of 6:30. Daylight savings is way more obvious when you schedule everything by the sun! Compensating for the lost hour was the fact that it's much faster to move out of a hotel room than a campsite. I ate breakfast in Folkston and then went right to the edge of the Okefenokee before realizing I was almost out of cooking fuel and switching to a more built-up route that would take me past a hardware store.

I was entering the land of the saw palmetto, with sandy soil and long straight roads through open forests of managed pine. I rolled into Cobb Hunt Camp in Osceola National Forest in the afternoon. It was so warm that I took my shirt off while setting up camp, and was delighted to be able to string up my hammock again for the first time since fall. Walking around the camp, I saw all kinds of shelters: vans, camper trailers, cars with tents, and what I can only describe as tarp caves. It seemed as if the 14 day stay limit was not being strictly enforced, and when I started meeting my neighbors, I quickly realized that I'd stumbled into a really wonderful little community, anchored by regulars who come and stay for the winter. The first person I met was PP, a Tennessean in his early sixties (of whom more later). He introduced me to R, also from Tennessee, who acted as the local mechanic, spending the winter fixing people's vehicles, with a "pay whatever you feel called to" policy for poor folks. Through R I met J from Daytona, who had recently gotten a propane oven and was baking things for people. Hanging out at J's tarp mansion I met several other interesting folks. There were people at the camp who clearly kept to themselves, and not all the sociable people knew each other, but somehow it felt like a little village.

And I've rarely found people from so many walks of life gathered in one place. There was a guy with a huge solar array on his truck and a Verizon signal repeater who taught piano lessons via Zoom and played for virtual church services. There was a woman who was recovering from injuries sustained while walking the Appalachian Trail. When she came off the trail she'd taken a bus to the nearest Walmart, loaded up on supplies, and taken a taxi out to the campground. She lived with her dog Tequila in a massive tent she called "the Taj Mahal", furnished with inflatable furniture. There was a musician with drums, a bass, and an amp, who'd left his apartment because the new neighbors weren't okay with him playing music at all hours. There was a woman with two kayaks planning for an epic trip down the Missouri. There was an older couple with a 1977 Chevy Chevelle to pull their trailer and a 1980's Chevy Chevette to run around in, from which I concluded they were skilled mechanics. I saw lots of examples of people taking care of each other: giving rides, picking up stuff from town, and checking in on R when he was feverish from a toothache.

On a blank part of a park sign by the road, someone had written "NO Gods / NO Masters / NO Slaves," which I looked up and found out was a riff on an old anarchist slogan. And like all anarchic spaces I've known, Cobb camp wasn't all sweetness and light. There was talk of the grifting meth tweakers who'd just moved out, leaving a huge pile of trash. There was talk of a guy who'd driven up in some psychotic state and just sat in his car and screamed. There was mild grumbling about the musician playing too loud. But for me, when I compared it to the usual experience at paid campgrounds where everyone pretends like they're the only ones there, I was more than willing to accept a little sketchiness as the price of admission. As PP told me, "I always come to Florida for the weather, but I stay for the visitin'."

So yeah, my favorite neighbors were PP, the hillbilly from Tennessee, and his travelling partner JT, a retired hospice nurse from Pennsylvania, who returned on Wednesday by train from visiting her daughter down south. I wish I could do them justice here but I'm afraid I'm bound to fall short. Although PP made much of his illiteracy and lack of education, I found him to be curious and observant, sensitive, creative, practically skilled, kind, and a master raconteur. He'd survived alcoholism, imprisonment, a motorcycle crash, paralysis, poisoning, stabbing, homelessness, and cancer, all without a hint of bitterness. And amidst all that, he'd spent every free moment going on adventures which he called "hillbilly holidays": "sell what you can, throw whatever's left in the truck, and hit the road". He'd seen the natural and man-made wonders of the lower forty-eight, from watching the northern lights while ice fishing, to feeling the ground tremble next to Old Faithful, to dangling his legs off the edge of the Grand Canyon. He once walked from Tennessee to North Dakota. He said, "I couldn't read about all those places in books so I had to go see 'em." He'd worked all kinds of jobs: putting up cell phone towers, riveting the beams of skyscrapers, oil drilling, construction, trucking, logging, wildcrafting, making clocks out of cypress knees, moonshining, and more. If all that doesn't make for an advanced education then I'm not sure the word means much. I wish I could tell some of his stories here, but a) I couldn't reproduce the way he told them, and b) I was enjoying them way too much to take notes.

But at the moment he was pursuing his hobbies, the main one of which was making hanging sculptures he called "dangly-dinglies": "they're made to dangle, but if they dingle too that's okay". He started making them 20 years ago when he was staying on Bear Island and found a pile of empty one-pound propane tanks and busted camp chairs. With just a screwdriver, a hammer, and a hacksaw blade with a duct-tape handle, he started making them into art and giving them away. On his daily walks he would collect trash, and keep anything colorful or interesting in a bin until inspiration struck. His pieces were hanging all over camp, some of them themed especially for the recipient. For example, R's was made from lighter pine (aka fatwood) and car parts, with the K of a Kia emblem standing for "king" because R had been nicknamed the "lighter pine king" for his jet-like campfires made entirely from resinous wood. When I brought P an empty fuel alcohol can one evening, by the next morning he'd made it into a fire-themed sculpture with lighters and shotgun shells. I've seen a fair amount of trash art and his was right up there with the best.

Another of his hobbies was shooting slingshots. He had a piece of plastic cut out of an antifreeze jug hanging as a target, with a bed sheet behind it to catch the strays. The slingshots were two he'd made from forked sticks, rubber bands, and duct tape, and one store-bought one that JT had given him as a present. The ammo was marbles: blue ones which are easier to find in the daytime, and clear ones which are easier to find at night with a headlamp. I joined him for some sessions, taking turns shooting five marbles each until they'd all disappeared in the pine straw. The thwack of hitting the target was highly satisfying. One evening he and JT introduced me to a card game called Five Crowns, and I played a round of that and lost badly. On two nights we stayed up much later than we were used to talking around the fire, and on my last night in camp JT and PP invited me over for a dinner of fire-roasted vegetables and rice, the picnic table spread with a red and white checkered tablecloth.

I wish I'd had more time to get to know JT, because she struck me as a singularly grounded person. I asked if she'd ever go back to living in one place and she said no. When I asked what she'd miss if she ever did, she said, "This... Just this." When I told her about an empty campsite I'd found back in the woods under a massive spreading oak, she said she'd stayed there for months one year, and once during a wild storm she looked out and the air was full of fireflies, and she wasn't afraid of the storm anymore. She'd written a lovely poem about it which she let me read. (The place under that tree had the feeling of a church to me, and others must have felt it too, because at the edge of the clearing was a pet grave with "Jack" carved into a stone, a bouquet of red plastic flowers, and a green plush frog.) PP and JT were great company, but also a huge inspiration for me. They showed me that this kind of life doesn't have to be an occasional thing, it can be deeply fulfilling, and it doesn't require youth or lots of money, just a little mobility... I came to Florida for the weather, but so far the visitin' is my favorite part.

Things I Learned

• Punkin's first gear is quite useful in soft mud. I tried my first serious off-roading of the trip and although I had a moment of panic when the engine stalled in a water crossing, and the throttle grip pulled off during the rescue, and the engine started racing, everything was fine in the end, apart from Punkin being filthy. I see this as a sort of exposure therapy to get me more comfortable with handling "disasters".
• When I went swimming in Ocean Pond, it struck me immediately that it must be the same kind of lake as the Carolina Bays, which according to my favorite theory were formed by fragments of a meteor that skipped off the glaciers covering the center of North America.
• There are scorpions in Florida. I need to start remembering to shake out my boots before putting them on.
• Morel mushrooms are also known as "dry land fish".
• Rice was cultivated all along the tidal zones of rivers in South Carolina and Georgia, because the paddies could be flooded or drained by opening simple one-way valves at the right time.

Wonderful Things

• The smell of the bark of the pine tree I slung my hammock from, a brown papery sort of smell with a strong hint of nutmeg and cinnamon. I think it was a longleaf pine but it might have been a slash pine.
• Sneezing and hearing a deer in the bushes "sneeze" back at me.
• Coming out after a thunderstorm and making a basket from the grapevines on a dead tree that had just fallen down. Of course I gave it away since it doesn't fit with my lifestyle, but it was very enjoyable to make something with my hands.