In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  The news videos we’d watch on our phones at day’s end—they were always about this elusive beast, demos. Just who are these white, working-class voters driving the poll numbers? one pencil neck would ask another pencil neck. Then, before bedding down, I’d read long articles penned by pencil necks about the irrational anxiety of factory workers in Ohio and auto mechanics in West Virginia and, yes, commercial fishermen in Florida—but the demos they described, did these geeks ever actually interact with them? Outside of press junkets at town diners, I mean. Did they ever actually meet with them on their own terms? Hop aboard their trawlers? Or did they just condescend to these people, who had to listen to themselves be argued over like children caught between feuding parents at the dinner table?

  In parking lots and gas stations, in churchyards and high school football stadiums, we’ve met with demos. Who are they? They are a class that has been told time and again that they are exceptionally free. Free to fashion their social and economic identities howsoever they choose. Free to master their fates and captain their souls. Yet everywhere they turn, these individuals are stymied by political and financial powers from whose vantage they appear to be as abstract and insignificant as remainders on a spreadsheet. There is a growing discrepancy between demos’ right to self-assertion and demos’ capacity to control the forces that might make such self-assertion feasible. And this growing discrepancy is getting to be too much for many to bear.

  So they are a class disabused of everything, even of their privileges, to which they cling by reflex. In spite of that they are polite, for the most part, and eager to explain themselves—especially so when Glenn takes out his camera (and I hide my notebook). But they are also resentful, and the resentful are, of their nature, coarse and ponderous. (The resentful can destroy, but they cannot create.) Most of all, they are scared and angry. Talking to them, we’ve seen terror and rage pass from person to person the way a leaf in the wind passes its shudder to its neighbor.

  And demos want us to be led by a bunko man. Donald Trump is a swindler and a demagogue in the sense that Ahab is a swindler and a demagogue: He draws his strength from his oratorical ability to sweep away an individual’s fear that her sufferings are meaningless. He convinces her instead that there exists a gloating, external consciousness that has arrayed the world against her. He has replaced her sense of life as a series of random defeats with the sense that life is a righteous struggle against a huntable enemy. Mexicans, Muslims, tax-evading financiers, free traders, blacks, Jews, the Chinese and their farm-raised prawns—the enemies are innumerable, interchangeable. All that matters is their names be recited in Ahab’s high raised voice that drops into an animal sob. All that matters is this litany never, ever include the one true adversary: pride.

  Donald Trump is from New York City, but he operates out of Palm Beach. I think it’s more than safe to say that this real estate tycoon turned reality-television star will make for our first Floridian president. This development would tickle me greatly if it didn’t also frost my marrow. What can you say, though? Guy’s got the better pitch. He tells the better story. He’s figured out what people want to believe, and he’s giving it to them. People don’t need to be persuaded to believe, you know. People want an excuse—any excuse—to believe. That’s why there is no limit to the damage the best rhetorician—the best storyteller—can do.

  “Riiiiiiiiight,” Glenn finally answered Gabriel.

  The ensuing silence was given definition by the cackling gulls pacing the boat.

  “Well,” Gabriel said, plucking a couple of nuggets from his weed jar. “Just like your seafood is fresh, this was grown right here in these woods. You liberals are welcome to partake in our little powwow. You’re gonna need something to dull the pain come November.”

  “You guys got any opioids?” I asked, not entirely joshing.

  “We don’t play around with those,” Wesley stated.

  “It’s why we’re extra careful on the boat,” Gabriel added. “You get hurt out here, they’ll give you scrips. But you get hurt out here, might as well be a death sentence. That’s it. You start taking them so you can get back to work. Then you keep taking them so you can keep working. Next you know, you’re hooked on them.”

  “Next you know, they’re putting you in the ground,” Wesley said.

  * * *

  —

  The nets swung heavy, studded with shells. Wesley uncinched one and then the other over a table affixed to the end of the stern. Horseshoe crabs, eels, electric skates, juvenile catfish, shovelnose sharks—a slapping gawping pile of bycatch was spilled onto the table as “Runnin’ with the Devil” poured from the ship’s hi-fi. Glenn, crouched and scrabbling against the roll of the Gulf, stepped on a stray fish and nearly lost the camera overboard.

  “Y’all watch for them rays,” Gabriel said. “You step on one of them and you will bust your heinie.” He turned and kicked the fish overboard. The gulls flurrying around the spotlights screamed hideously, frothed after it in the wake.

  “We’ve dumped nets three times already,” Noah asked, hoisting the mike over me as I tried to pluck a shrimp from the spasming mound. “How many more we gotta do?”

  “We do this till the sun comes up,” Wesley said. He and his captain were using a tool like a craps rake to sift the bycatch. Gabriel was hoping for a large haul so he could buy Christmas bikes for his grandkids as well as the children he’s got with his new girlfriend. Wesley needed money for the solar-powered houseboat he was building. “Then we sleep for six hours,” Wesley said, “and have the privilege of doing it again.”

  Glenn drew nearer to the table, zoomed in on a convulsing fish. Its eyes were wide; its fins were propellering; its parted beak vibrated with a silent death rattle. “I think, ah, this guy’s having a hard time over here,” Glenn said. Neither Gabriel nor Wesley heard him, or chose not to. For reasons too existential to get into, I began to laugh hard.

  “That poor goddamned fish,” Glenn continued, strafing with his camera. “Sacrificed at the altar of redundancy.” He checked the footage in the flip-out LCD screen. A shallow smile spread across his lips.

  Gabriel removed his cap to wipe a slime streak across his brow. He said, “We do this two nights a week, and then the other five we hustle something else. Ain’t no such thing as a full-time shrimper no more. But maybe once Trump starts whupping Chinese ass, that all gonna change.”

  He and Wesley proceeded to fulminate at length against globalism, the Chinese, and Hillary Clinton’s Satanism. They presented a critique of contemporary liberalism that was, I thought, remarkably cogent. To them, contemporary liberalism was the ideology of imperial academia funneled through the media into governmental bureaucracies. (In so many words.) Why they hated it, they explained, was it was ultimately responsible to nothing but itself. Contemporary liberalism had overlooked or downplayed their grievances, derided their identity, dismissed their worldview as the product of poor education and congenital ignorance if not outright moral deficiency—and this was a big part of why the men were voting for Trump. As much out of spite as conviction.

  We pulled thirty pounds of jumbo shrimp from the hundreds and hundreds of pounds of dead and dying bycatch. Gabriel and Wesley’s working rapport was an easy one—though it was less buddy-buddy than current-cellmates. Partners in a particular kind of suffering and survival, like. We three didn’t have much to add to their back-and-forth. But they enjoyed our presence, I think, because they believed we were there only to document. They could ease their pain in the certitude of our muteness, if not our sympathy.

  Wesley pushed the suffocated fish over the side of the boat with his craps rake. Their bodies did not sink and evanesce; sharks snapped them up just below the surface. “Couple more hauls, fellas,” Gabriel announced. “Then we’ll have ourselves a thousand-dollar night. Cut in half and split two ways, of course.”

  The two of them returned to the pilot
house for another powwow. Glenn, Noah, and I stayed on deck, leaning against the gunwale and staring into the blackness. “One thing Florida is not,” Glenn stated, “is short on anecdotal metaphors for human nature.” I thought it’d started to rain, but the plosive little plops hitting the deck were gobs of seagull shit.

  —

  MILE 205 — Carrabelle

  GOOD, BAD—DALE’S THE GUY WITH THE BANG STICK

  A rosy twig of dawn widened into a crow’s-foot of dawn. We of the Cracker Style made one last haul before dropping anchor. Punctuating the mass of blacktip sharks, jellyfish, skates, and grunts were twenty-five pounds of shrimp. Removing these pink commas from the hodgepodge spilled onto the table—it was as if we were diagramming a sentence, editing out all punctuation so as to hasten its conclusion.

  As the sun rose, it reflected brightly off the Gulf, casting our tired faces into high relief. “Captain Dale’ll be along shortly for you boys,” Gabriel told us, wiping his hands with a rag. “Your sea Uber approaches, never you fret.” He and Wesley chuckled to themselves as they shook our hands. Then they retreated into the cabin, to sleep till late afternoon.

  “We really do draw deeply on the kindness of others,” Glenn remarked.

  “It’s not easy to like yourself, leeching like this,” Noah agreed.

  “The moral cost of ambition,” I said with a shrug. “Also: journalism.”

  A speck appeared on the horizon. Within a few minutes, an aluminum fishing skiff was puttering up to us. “I woulda come met you yesterday, but I had contact bridge until eight p.m.!” called out Captain Dale, a wiry, white-haired, deeply tanned codger. The most immediately striking things about Dale were his blue eyes, which glowed as though wicked up to some unadulterated fuel. How I imagine a prospector’s or a frontiersman’s eyes to shine—with a steady, all-illuminating rapacity—that’s what Dale’s did. While his skiff drifted to the Cracker Style, he flitted about with the jumpy excitement of a sourdough mustered out of bed while still in his union suit. He stowed this, threw that overboard. He was a-grinnin’ and a-gigglin’ as if on the verge of striking the mother lode.

  We dropped our gear and then ourselves into Captain Dale’s craft. We motored toward Carrabelle, a fishing village down the road from Apalachicola where Dale works as a nuisance-alligator wrangler.

  “Uh-huh, yessir, you boys aren’t the first come out here trying to film me,” Dale said as Glenn kneed his way around the skiff, camera in hand. Deftly, Noah fitted Dale with a remote mike. “I got all kinds of TV people coming here, trying to do a reality show about me, or about Carrabelle. I guess gator hunters are a category now. I tell ’em no. I don’t feel comfortable speaking on behalf of this region. I only been here twenty-two years, you know. So I chase ’em off.”

  “Then why let us film you?” Glenn asked.

  “Well, I seen you boys camping by the side of the highway a few days ago. And then I saw you walking into town. I figured you weren’t like the other documentary fellas. Yessir, you boys need all the help you can get.”

  Dale’s boat skipped across the placid Gulf. “I’m seventy-seven years old,” he told the camera. “Lived in Florida for all of ’em. Been all over both coasts. This here is the most unique place in all the rest of Florida. This stretch of coastline. Yessir, hands down.”

  Prior to 1992, Dale had lived on the southwestern outskirts of Miami (which he pronounced “My-ammuh”). But then came Hurricane Andrew. The Category 5 storm wiped out his home, and the homes of his family, so they decided to up and move to the “Forgotten Coast” as a unit. “Was like going back in time,” Dale said, which was his way of complimenting the area and the few isolatoes populating it.

  “Yessir, it’s real living out here,” he continued. “We’re all from the earth, you follow? And we’re all going back to the earth. We used to be able to live with the earth like this in My-ammuh. But they got away from it. And when you get away from the earth, that’s when you’re lost.”

  Dale steered us to the dock at the end of his property. There, a rolling lawn led to a modest one-story house and adjoining workshop. “Bought this house twenty-two years ago, uh-huh. See them pines there? See how they’re all scarred up along the trunks? No, look there. Point the camera at that. You call that ‘catfacing.’ You scar the trunk of the longleaf pine like that, and it causes the gum, or the ‘resin,’ they call it, to run. Then you attach gutters like those there to direct the resin into a cup like that one. The resin you distill into what you call ‘pitch.’

  “Now, the reason that this industry here is referred to as naval stores has its origins in that the majority of the resin that they distilled was distilled to create pitch, you follow? Then fellas would use this pitch to caulk holes in their boats and coat their rigging. Of course, boats aren’t made of wood no more. Except the one I’m building in here…”

  Captain Dale led the way to his workshop, waving hurriedly at Glenn to follow. It struck me, then, how sorcerous the camera is—like a dowsing rod that cannot fail at finding water. Having never worked with one prior to this trip, I kind of can’t believe how much easier it makes things. Not only does the camera mediate the complex demands of face-to-face interaction—it also makes plain the compromise inherent to any reportorial venture. We’re splitting off what we need from you, what we can use. And you, you’re gaining a platform, a force multiplier. Maybe even legitimacy.

  As opposed to the pen and pad (or even the voice recorder), the camera practically compels the words and actions out of a subject. It’s so simple, my God! We might as well be pointing a gun at them the way we get whatever we want, whatever we demand. Get—and get away with. We don’t even need the credentialing of a respected outlet. In our case, it’s probably better that we don’t have the imprimatur of some studio. No, the Nikon’s all the justification we need: Have camera, will travel. It’s as if a subject sees the void in the lens, decides it’s his fault it’s vacant, and tries as hard as he can to fill it up.

  In his workshop, Captain Dale showed off the boat he was building out of juniper and cypress. “An oyster boat,” he said, running his wrinkled hand along the smoothly planed wood. “Not a fast boat. Though I used to race those. Airboats. Race and build them. Used to have a place out there in the Everglades, but actually the government took it.”

  “Hey, my dad used to race boats,” Glenn said, bringing the camera nearer to Dale’s face.

  “Yessir, I could get those suckers up to eighty-six miles per hour,” he said. “Not this one, though. This one, I’m gonna patch up with the resin from that catfaced tree. You know, turpentiners, they came down from North Carolina. Scarred up all the trees there, so they came down to Florida for its pines. Uh-huh, ain’t no more but three million acres of old-growth longleaf left in the state. Hike through the St. Marks Forest, you might find some old Herty cups left over from the crackers. That’s what they called the pioneers of the Florida backwoods, you know. The Florida cracker, he ain’t like your Georgia cracker. The Georgia cracker gets his name from corn cracking, but the Florida cracker, he gets his name from the crack of his whip. Rawhide whip, what would drive the oxen carrying his timber and his turpentine. Sounded like someone shooting a pistol in the barrens. I don’t know how it come to designate a shiftless man. But, yessir, as I was saying, I got a big family here…”

  Captain Dale exhibited his bear traps, his many tools, his considerable arsenal of weapons. His property, taken altogether, was a shrine to autosufficiency. And—look. I get that masculinity does not inhere in one single guy. That it is shared. That it is a code of conduct that requires men to maintain certain attitudes and postures, often to the detriment of themselves and others. That it can exist only with the cooperation and complicity of everyone on the boys’ team. It’s a group activity. It’s something that, as you practice it, you are accompanied by and critiqued by an invisible chorus of all the other guys. Who hiss or cheer as you atte
mpt to approximate some arbitrary ideal. Who push you to sacrifice more of your humanity for the sake of said arbitrary ideal. And who ridicule and shame you when you hold back. This chorus is made up of all your friends and bitter rivals, your drinking buddies and bosses, your ancestors and putative heroes—and, above all, your old man, who may have been a real person or who may have existed only as the myth of the man who got away. Masculinity is a prison, they say. The world’s only true panopticon.

  Sure. But in this place, with Captain Dale explaining to us just how one stalks an alligator, sidles up to it, and shoots it in the brain—explaining this while wearing (on a thick, Cuban-link gold chain) the tooth of one nine-footer he bagged right here, in his backyard, and look, there’s its skull mounted on the hood of his RV—in this place, I could not help but feel inadequate. Did we know how to butcher an alligator? Dale asked. How about constructing a smokehouse for the meat? What kind of wood would we use for the fire, and why? Where would we find this wood? How do you build a fire, even, much less a boat?

  I might attribute this feeling of inadequacy to a kind of Aristotelian sensibility deep within me. Some dim awareness that a man cannot have practical knowledge of the useful and the good unless he himself is conformed to the useful and the good. “The Grandpa-ean Ethics,” we could term it. And Dale, I sensed, knew well the instruction manual for the human machine. Glenn did not. Noah—not really. I certainly don’t.

  Dale’s eldest son pulled into the driveway. He carried with him a string of fish—mullet, for that night’s spaghetti-and-mullet feast. He waved at us with his free hand, nonchalant as you like, as though three grimy dinguses filming his dad was par for the course. Bounding out of the house to greet this man was a young boy.