Horacio Pascual McAllister Fuentes

 For three and a half months, Horacio Pascual McAllister Fuentes had been standing, sitting, and lying down in the parking lot of the Ralphs at the corner of Lincoln and California and he could not for the life of him remember why. 

He had paced the sleepless nights around the corners, eyes pegged open, wearing a fine suit of black wool and a tie in the colors of the Mexican flag with the Dodgers’ logo in the middle of it and a pair of shiny brown-and-white shoes that felt a size too large. He had looked across the street at the Ross and the donut shop and the school and the DWP substation and the old Aquarium store whose neon sign still swam through the night and the yoga studio. Each one, he realized as he looked at it, seemed new to him. He had spent the days trying to get people to talk to him, and hadn’t succeeded yet.

He had smelled the tacos cooking at the stand across the street and walked toward them, even, but decided against crossing the street before even leaving the parking lot. The comal that the compas had going was rich, maybe too rich for him. He had heard the faint strains of norteño music rising from somewhere he couldn’t quite see, and considered walking there, but found himself paralyzed by fear before leaving the lot. He had felt the drops of soft February rain that pushed him under the awning, and been socked in by the thick marine layer of the early mornings.

In the Norwalk office of the Los Angeles County Registrar-Recorder-County Clerk, Underregistrar II Dianne Ochoa began a second day of verifying petition signatures for an attempt to recall a County Supervisor. She had heard the whole speech yesterday from the Chief Deputy Registrar herself, that this campaign had become national, that they needed to make sure they were being scrupulous as possible so that they didn’t end up on cable news, that the people of Los Angeles depended on them to ensure the integrity of the system.

The days of an Underregistrar are unremarkable, mostly. It takes a lot of work to effectively run elections in a county of ten million people, and Diane Ochoa’s usual job was to map out the mobile vote centers that would pop up in the three weeks before election days, and verify locations with the organizations that sponsored them the previous time around. But when petitions came in, everyone in the office had to do a little verification.

Horacio Pascual McAllister Fuentes wandered toward the Ralphs again on a gray morning, feeling the overcast around him. There was a man standing outside, wearing a neat blue collared shirt and polyester slacks and comfortable sneakers. He was young, short, Black, smiling, with a thickly piled clipboard in his arm.

Like everyone outside the Ralphs these days, the young man looked up toward Horacio. Most people squinted toward him and then turned away, or tilted their heads like expectant labradors and then turned away, or started to cry and turned away, and every time it was a sad surprise for Horacio. But the young man looked into his eyes and said “Hello, sir!” 

Startled by the young man’s cheerfulness, Horacio jumped. Then, he walked toward the young man, right up to him, and hugged him. The young man, surprised but professional, patted Horacio on the back until he let go of the hug, and then a shudder of recognition passed through his body. Three months ago, this very same man, in this very same suit, in this very same place, had hugged him exactly the same way. The young man had been taken aback then, but not nearly as much as he was unsettled in this moment.

Horacio stood looking towards the young man, and the words he wanted to say were on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t get them out. The young man waited, and then asked the question he’d be asking all day. “Are you a registered voter, sir?”

Horacio said “yes I am.” The young man had expected this, the man had signed his petition three months ago, when he was collecting for a recall of a County Supervisor.

“Would you like to sign some petitions today, sir?”

“What do they say?”

“Well, you can read them, this one on top is to allow everyone to work for whatever kind of wage they want, and the rest are there too, there’s nine in this pile today.”

“Ok, I will sign them all.”

“You’re a good voter, sir. Very patriotic, sir.”

Underregistrar II Diane Ochoa was expecting to finish the thousand signatures she’d been assigned to spot check before lunch. She was efficient, and proud of it. She’d been disqualifying about a third of what she saw, which she felt was a fairly good ratio for the petitioners. She didn’t know much about this County Supervisor they were trying to recall. She lived in Norwalk and the Supervisor’s district was on the Westside.

She read out loud to herself the name written in the stuttering hand of an elder. “Horacio Pascual McAllister Fuentes,” and breathed out. She typed the name into the computer, and found the man’s registration. She matched his address, his zip code, his city. The signature was the signature of an older man than the one who signed to register, but it matched. She went to click the “verify” button and noticed a red dot next to “Check Other Records” which would usually pop up for voters who might have had a name change.

She entered his name into the Registrar-Recorder-County Clerk’s database and found his voter registration, two property deeds, and a death certificate. She began to match the records.

Horacio Pascual McAllister Fuentes began to sign the ninth petition (a referendum request on a law requiring solar panels on all new residential buildings) and the young man thanked him profusely. These fifteen minutes’ work had netted him $41, and he hadn’t had to actually ask for much of anything at all.

As he finished signing the last one, Horacio said “thank you,” and looked the young man in the eyes. The young man looked back, and said “thank you, sir” and watched as Horacio walked off, back away from the Ralphs, toward the fence on the far side of the parking lot. The young man shook his head and smiled and saw a woman coming towards him.

The Underregistrar matched the dates on the voter registration and the property deed and the death certificate, and pursed her lips. She clicked the box that rejected the signature (the man had been dead since a couple of weeks before they’d started circulating the petition three months ago) and clicked another box that said “deceased” and then clicked through to the next screen. There was a checkbox that said “Strike from Roll” and she checked it and clicked submit. The next signature, of a Laurel Jansen, popped up. Before she read the name, the Underregistrar said “rest in peace” and made a plan to mention the old man’s name in her prayers that night.

The young man looked past the woman, who’d said she was too busy to sign but might on her way out, toward Horacio and watched as the old man vanished in front of a tree. The young man shook his head and rubbed his eyes and said “Hello ma’am, are you a registered voter?” to the grandmotherly woman walking towards him now.

Officials Say Dead People’s Names on Gascon Recall Petition; Review Sought

The Trees Out Past Arvin -- A Holiday Story

 - The man who planted the Remnant Trees died in the dam wars in ‘33 or ‘34, though it might have just been he was old and the small growers wanted a martyr. His family was out by ‘35, to somewhere in Arkansas. I heard it was somewhere around Palm Bluff, but I’m not sure that that’s a real place. Long time since I’ve cared about places that far away, and longer since I’ve seen a map of Arkansas. It’s hard for me to imagine many palms in Arkansas. I was there once, you know? I went to a beautiful museum in the mountains, with hundreds of painted pictures and a billionaire’s sculpture collection, and while I was there it rained for three days in a row.

- Bullshit it rained for three days in a row.

- When I was your age, kid, it sometimes rained three days in a row even in Los Angeles. Even snowed occasionally on the San Gabriels. 

The old man caressed the left donkey with the reins, and the left donkey took the kind of heed a donkey is wont to.

- You know what snow is, right?

- I’m young, but I’ve read plenty.

- You’ll probably see it sometime, if what I’m hearing is right.

The right donkey ably negotiated a colossal chuckhole as they turned back downhill.

- What is it you’re hearing, Rav?

- That we’ll have to go again. There are the Moise Lands up in Alaska, they say they’re still wet enough to grow things, and still expansive enough to live unbothered. You see what I see when we leave the Fairfax. There are a lot of desperate folks out there.

- Shit, Rav, I’m desperate. How do you think you got me coming with you to see these trees of yours?

- They’re not mine, you know. They belong to the planter’s kids, or their kids now probably. I don’t know them, I never have. I sent a letter to a colleague in Little Rock some years ago and asked him to find them if he could, but he wrote me back from somewhere in Carolina saying he’d been expelled before he could and advising me never to write again. His handwriting in English was beautiful, like he’d put effort into calligraphy. A wonder what we used to be able to do when we all had that time to read and think.

- I read, you know?

- And what have you read lately?

- How to Blow Up a Pipeline and a couple of the Army Doctrine Publications on Small Unit Tactics, Rav.

- Nothing less practical? Maybe to broaden the mind?

- Would they have sent me with you over the Grapevine to go see these fucking trees, Rav, if I wasn’t an incredibly practical person? Would they have sent me with you alone?

- In my childhood even the practical of us read literature and Torah.

- Yeah, yeah, my hands are the hands of the Torah.

The old man pulled the donkeys to the side of the road and adjusted the cowboy hat on his head so that it blocked the setting sun from his neck. He looked over and saw the algal remnants of Pyramid Lake and remembered it crystal and shimmering.

- Another hour and we should make Lebec, and we can find out if we can camp with Jimmy the Ghost. It’ll be such a pleasure to see him again, if he’s still there.

- Did you mean what you said about the Moise Lands? I’ve heard murmurs too.

- I was wondering when it would reach your folks. We’d want to go all at once and you’d have to take us to the Marina.

- They said the Marina wouldn’t work. It would have to be Pedro for a large enough wharf. The Boat is huge, so they say. A real Ocean-Goer. Called it HaTikvah, but I’m not sure if that was a joke.

The old man chuckled.

- I expect it’s both.

The left donkey stumbled, got back up into stride, and pulled them on. The old man looked out with concern. If either donkey went, they probably couldn’t make the grove. They sat in silence as he stared down the legs of the donkeys with the practiced eye of a man who’d been doing this his whole life. The sun fell behind the mountain. They saw and then heard a firework as the donkeys took an old freeway exit. There was a shift as the passenger’s rifle came out from where it had been hiding.

- I suspect that’s Jimmy!

- It better be, Rav. 

They pushed on a little ways, and heard some movement and then a horse whinnied. The old man called out loudly into the twilight.

- Oye, Jimmy, ¿todavía tienes el caballo que me trató de matar?

There was a second rustling, the horse poked through some tall chaparral, and an old man, pale and with a scraggly silver beard groomed from his chin down to his belt, called from the top of the horse.

- ¡Rabbi! ¡Otro año y nos vemos como siempre! What’s your friend' s name?

– – – – –

- Your man Jimmy is crazy, Rav.

- Good morning to you, too.

- He lives nowhere, in an Adobe. He has like ten horses. His greenhouse has fucking tea bushes in it. He speaks English and Spanish and he said Russian too. He wouldn’t show me his card. He said he was Hidden, but it’s obvious he’s had recent visitors, and nobody Hidden lives in East Jesus like this. He’s crazy.

- I’ve known him for 40 years at least, kid. I drove to his place in a car, even, back in the early days. He’s always lived out here, always had the greenhouse even though he did used to have more tea bushes back when he was selling up and down the grapevine. He maybe speaks more than Russian, honestly, and I’m not sure he has a card. Does that clear it up?

- Fuck no, Rav. 

- Oh ya, he’s not Hidden either, that I know for a fact. That he made up for you.

- Yeah, yeah, that I figured.

The donkeys strained against their harnesses as they went around the bend in shadow, and the road fell away.

- That’s the sign for the grade right there. Used to say 6%. Jump in the cab for me and hit the brakes if we get going too fast?

- Which ones are the brakes, again?

- Sit behind the wheel, it’s the foot pedal on the left. You gotta really press it, a lot of these systems were electric-assist and without the engine running they don’t work that great.

- Should I be worried?

- Nah, I’ve gone down here like ten times in this cart, it’s never a big deal. Can even leave the donkeys in the front. And I checked the brakes before we left Jimmy’s too. You were still asleep. Watch my left hand here on the windshield, and if I make a fist you push down on the brakes. If I leave it a fist, push down harder.

- Got it. 

The wagon followed the donkeys down the hill, though the donkeys weren’t pulling. If either of the people guiding the donkeys had heard a stuck pig before, they might have equated the squealing. They turned the last bend and the valley opened out in front of them.

- Holy shit, Rav.

- There’s a lot of it, huh?

- Don’t believe I’ve ever seen so much of a place

- I do not believe that you could imagine what this would look like all green. When the water went counted in acre-feet to the men who poured it into nuts to sell in China and Alfalfa to feed to cows, mostly.

- I thought they grew food here?

- Before, yes, before. There were families who had little plots and grew oranges and peaches and avocados and such. Everyone could eat like that before the Dam Wars…

- And then they couldn’t, and we don’t even know what we’ve lost, right? I’ve heard the stories.

- Yeah, yeah, ok, no reminiscing. Just the remnant trees left. That’s why they don’t mind us heading here. There’s nothing useful anymore.

The old man caressed the rump of the right donkey and gave a light tug to the reins, and it pulled right.

- Gonna ditch this main freeway here and take the road toward old Arvin.

- Is that another friend of yours?

- Ghost town, actually. Used to kind of service some farms. The Resnicks, who were a shonde fur de goyim, bought up all the land around it and it was a company town for a while. Never really flooded, just started to disappear as the work dried up, and then got bombed by the Bear Flaggers in the Dam Wars. They had a whole squadron of old warbirds they stole from museums and they put them to as good of use as they could.

- Warbirds? Like, birds but for killing?

The old man laughed.

- Ah, sorry. That’s what we called vintage military airplanes. There was one, I was under it in Manteca when it was landing and I’m not sure how they got it to work, but I swear it’s the loudest sound I’ve ever felt.

- The airplane was loud?

- Apparently back when they built these they more wanted to make a point than actually hit you, or they thought that there was no getting away anyway. They bombed the life out of a bunch of these little towns.

- So there’s nobody in Arvin?

- If there was anyone there, you’d think they’d have noticed the trees.

The left donkey shuddered and stopped, and the right donkey obeyed his friend. The old man jumped down and brought a bag of water over and the donkey drank deeply and whinnied assent. The old man got back on, twitched the reins, and they were off.

– – – – –

- What the fuck is this, Rav?

- A lot of folks would tell you it’s a mirage, and keep moving, but not me.

The old man pulled lightly and the donkeys made a square turn to the left towards the trees about three miles away.

- Those aren’t really that many trees together, Rav. That’s not a thing.

- The brush can be deceiving, I agree. The chaparral and the tumbleweeds and such. They do a good job of deterring other folks who come out this way, and since nobody’s really in this part of the Valley anymore, no drones get sent, so far as I can tell. Otherwise someone would have noticed.

- Someone should have noticed when you kept showing up in October with all those fucking esrogs, I think.

- They don’t know our holidays.

- Whether they know our holidays or not, they should have figured out something was up when you came through the gate in Santa Clarita with a thousand pounds of citrus fruit from nowhere.

- The head iceman in Santa Clarita likes an old drink, called limoncello. They don’t make it anymore, except I do, every year, for him. Takes like a third of my annual allotment of ritual wine that I have to distill first, but I end up with enough for shabbats and holidays anyway, so this keeps us in what we need.

- I didn’t know you were Maccabi, Rav?

- Did I say I was?

- You said you give liquor to an iceman.

They pulled up and got out of the truck and walked over to the trees. They were heavy with yellow fruit which smelled like summer a hundred years before. 

- We’ll only pick what we can bring with us, which’ll end up being between eight and nine hundred of these. Fill the sacks with the ones that look like they still have the little thing on the bottom end. I brought clippers, leave a bit of the branch on there. I’ve got 12 sacks.

- How many fucking trees are there, Rav?

- The grove’s about 10 acres. Why?

- How the fuck are there ten acres of citrus trees alive out here, Rav? We passed that nodding donkey rusting away like three hours ago, and we haven’t between there and here seen a single fucking tree! Who’s irrigating these? How are they still alive?

- About five years after I was told about this grove and started coming here I dug up a couple of pipes. Can’t say I think I’ve found anything that says the water went through them since the 30’s. 

- SO HOW ARE THEY HERE?

The old man picked up a sack and started clipping low-hanging fruit. He looked at the bottom of each one, finding a little nub and discarding those without it. He looked to make sure they were plump and yellow, without big spots. Occasionally he’d take one of the ones he was discarding and scratch the rind and smell the fruit deeply. He dropped about one in ten.

- You know, Rabbis in choosier times would drop like half of these. 

- How are any here at all, Rav?

- I like the smell of these ones. I love the shade of the grove. You know I brought Brahim O’Sullivan out here the third year I came, and had him sketch the whole grove for me. I have all ten of his sketches in my office.

- I don’t believe you.

- It was three weeks before the clearings up here. He wouldn’t leave, and so they left him. I think he ended up making it about four months longer. He left me a painting in the grove.

They filled the sacks, working methodically.

- We’re going to have to go when we get back, you know? 

- I had heard maybe before the end of the year?

- Boat’s coming now. I only learned just before we left. When it doesn’t rain again this winter you know whose fault that’s going to have been, and then where will we be? Better to get going now when they might let us just leave.

- I won’t miss it. I have a plan to move us.

- You’ve been holding back what you know. So have I, I admit it. So have I. I don’t know that there’s any plan but to walk to Pedro down the 110. 

They sat, backs against trees, and the young woman looked above the old man’s head and saw an oil painting of a young rabbi holding a citron in his left hand, with trees behind him nailed to the tree, faded a little and molding at the edges but basically intact.

- You know the train that brings the Calfresh through, Rav? I think the engineer is Hidden.

- No!

- He always wears a hat, he’s got a good long beard and hair, his shirts have torn edges sometimes

- So he’s a trainman?

- And the first time we fucked, Rav, I noticed his cock was cut.

The old man nodded, and then covered the sacks with a blanket in the bed of the cart and watered the donkeys.

- He could get us all?

- There’s what, like, six thousand of us left here? 

- Closer to 10. 

- It’s going to be hard for him. If we pack the train, we can fit maybe four in a night.

- They’re going to see the ship.

- It’s got fruit in it, we’ll fit in overnight and the next night, and they won’t ask while they’re unloading.

The old man thought. He touched the right donkey with the reins, and they set off back through the scrub. 

- The ones with long pointy tails have no seeds, but the rotund ones do. You should be able to grow them from seed when you get up to the Moise Lands. I brought you because I know you garden. I asked for you by name, Samantha Malamud, at the meeting of the Maccabi, because you garden. Any gunslinger will do out here, because if we ever have to shoot we aren’t making it back anyway, but I need someone to know how to get these out of the ground when we get to the new place.

- You’re gonna be there, Rav, unless you call me Samantha again.

- There’s no room for men my age on a boat like that. I’ve seen the sketches and so have you. We’d be lucky to have eight thousand actually fit. I’ve made peace with it. Just make sure they actually use these for ceremony this year.

- You can come, Rav, everyone loves you.

- Everyone loves tradition, but you can make it yours. Dry a few of these carefully so they last you until the fifth year your trees grow up there, or else they won’t work like they’re supposed to. They’ll grow from this grove.

- You’ll see them grow up there, Rav.

The old man turned back toward the road. He and his friend breathed in the scrub and the smell of the fruit rising from the back of the cart. They sat and the donkeys pulled, on their way to the long waiting line at the combination cart stop and guardhouse outside Santa Clarita, where they’d sleep that night. Sukkot was still three weeks away, and he wondered idly whether they still had any palm fronds to thatch a hut roof.

The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #4: In The Waves

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

Part 3 Here

--

One of the people who came to meet Dr. Hayling – and to seek the guidance and support of the NAACP of Brevard County – some years later had walked a long way to get there. State Senator Lawton Chiles started a little meander in a little town on the Alabama line, and kept going through place after place, picking up media coverage and endorsements and hangers-on all the way.

He was walking for the US Senate, for the Democratic nomination to succeed a man with an equally Southern name, Spessard Holland. He was from a small town in the field country south of Orlando, and there were next to no Floridians outside his state Senate district who had heard of him at all. C. Farris Bryant had, of course, he was the Governor and Chiles’ primary opponent, but as Chiles meandered his stunt gained coverage, and he gained recognition and then he had the clout to meet with enough folks to maybe actually go on and seriously challenge Bryant, and then he was finding that he needed to build a broad base of the new Democratic party, which brought his walk through Dr. Hayling’s office.

He had skipped St. Augustine, it was out of the way, he needed to go down the spine of the state through Gainesville before he cut over through a little rural area that he needed to walk because it was the home of the Speaker of the State House, who would be endorsing him as they wound their way together through the hamlets the rotund older man represented, wearing walking boots and long-sleeved seersucker shirts to keep down the mosquitos, chewing the air as they talked.

He had skipped St. Augustine because he’d never been there, and he’d have plenty of time to cut back up that way in a car or a plane or whatever. And so he was out on the Space Coast and chatting with Dr. Hayling about “the race question” and how he would be toeing the line in the campaign but voting the right way in Washington if the rubber ever did actually hit the road. Dr. Hayling didn’t find himself inspired, but Farris Bryant had been an explicit segregationist while Chiles never was, and that didn’t hurt.

They talked for a while about St. Augustine, and Chiles said good things about the right to protest and the right to own guns, and Chiles resolved to visit St. Augustine one day, maybe, he told Dr. Hayling, when one of his many investments paid out well enough to earn him a vacation.

Continuing down the Space Coast before he cut inland, Lawton Chiles stopped in at a bar to talk to the patrons. He found a number of folks receptive to his down-home folksiness, honed inside about a dozen county-seat courtrooms. His platform didn’t seem to matter much, there really was nothing to campaigning but smiling at a jury of a few million of your peers and making them like you enough to put a checkmark by your name on election day.

He approached a tall man with a well-trimmed mustache and quickly they found that they were both brothers of the same fraternity. The man said his name was John Robarts, and he was down on vacation. At the end of a long day, a non-constituent was exactly what Chiles needed to unwind, and he ordered another drink for both of them and talked to Robarts for a while about their shared hobby of hiking through the backcountry. After a few more drinks it came out that Robarts was in fact the Premier of Ontario, down in Florida doing something like campaigning himself among Ontarian snowbirds on behalf of his party and among Quebecois snowbirds in French on behalf of the Canadian Confederation.

Chiles, seeking to master foreign policy in the state of consciousness he preferred to discuss it, asked Robarts if he was the right or the left up there, and Robarts told him, truthfully, that his party had governed Ontario for 30 years by living up to its name, he was a Progressive Conservative. 

In the general election, whenever his Republican opponent would try to tar him as a liberal, Lawton Chiles would say no, he wasn’t a liberal, he was a progressive conservative, a modern man for a modern time.

He and John Robarts agreed to meet in St. Augustine (Robarts had never been either, the snowbirds preferred it a bit further south, most times, he said, in places where speaking French was more acceptable in public) sometime, maybe down the road. Robarts said he was planning to retire into a life of advocacy for Canadian Confederation outside of elections. 

When Governor Chiles eventually made his first visit to St. Augustine it was 1997 and he was there for the ribbon cutting on the 100th Red Lobster in America. Lawton Chiles had founded Red Lobster, and the insatiable appetite of the American People for Cheddar Bay Biscuits and popcorn shrimp had paid for his famously extensive vacations from the Senate and now the Governor’s Office. As a founder and the Governor, he could of course make time to cut a ribbon. Maybe he could even meet that old Canadian who had made his long career possible with that preposterous slogan from another time, a political self-description that Chiles was still using even though it hadn’t caught on with anyone else.

The only things Lawton Chiles saw in St. Augustine were the parking lot outside the Red Lobster and the decor inside. He found himself quickly whisked away to another party, a fried chicken fundraiser in Jacksonville at a thousand dollars a quarter chicken, learning from an aide in the car back to the airport that Robarts, who he had invited down to eat at the Red Lobster with him, had ended a long battle with depression 15 years before.

–

For the vast majority of Floridians, the beach is a common feature of life, especially at a young age. It’s easy, when you’ve grown up by the saltwater, to forget what the beach says to someone who lives more than an hour away. There’s something to be said, of course, about the compelling human desire for the sea, and it’s already been said better by other folks, folks from New England and Newfoundland and Ireland and Sri Lanka and other sea-dependent places.

The mystique of the beach for the inlander is related, of course, but not the same. It was debated, in the cheap seats of a beat up 2002 Ford Taurus wagon originally purchased by the driver’s Grandfather to haul his grandkids around, whether someone from inland could even understand the beach, or whether it was forever hidden from them. There were five of them in the car, and their things for a week away from the pedestrian cares of work and school in the back.

It was argued persuasively by one of the young women in the back, Doreen, a PhD student in Spanish Literature at the University of Florida, that her girlfriend Emma, who had been Kentucky state champion in the 100 and 200 yard backstroke twice before heading southward for college, was a person who understood the beach implicitly despite being raised a mountain range away from the nearest saltwater. Emma loudly agreed that all water, to a swimmer, is water. She worked for the Florida Department of Children and Families now, in the rurals around Gainesville mostly, and this was her third visit to St. Augustine. She preferred the gulf beaches, having found the first time she was there that there was more to them.

This was contested enthusiastically by the driver of the wagon. Sam, a biochemist who had grown up in the swamps on the islands just northeast of St. Augustine and now worked at a pharmaceutical company outside of Tallahassee. She wasn’t arguing that salt and fresh were enemies, she said, just that waves were important to think about, that the sounds of an ocean-facing beach were different from a river, a lake, a pool. The bigness of the tides and the sloshing of the water and the rumble of the sea (she had seen and heard it close up on calm warm days and when her mom had decided they’d stay home and drink through hurricanes) were distinguishing factors, and she preferred the sun when it beat down on her near the ocean.

This was Sam’s new boyfriend’s first trip to St. Augustine, and she and Doreen had planned an itinerary. He was a digital artist, mostly, when he was doing things, and he smoked Camels because, he said, a man with a fifties name like Craig should smoke Camels. The boyfriend wasn’t joining the argument, or even thinking about the sea at all, really.

Their first stop was going to be the lighthouse. Doreen (who had named herself after her great grandmother) liked to take in the whole city as soon as she got back, and soak its weird resiliency into her before she had to face her family. The five of them (and Sam’s friend Enrique, who had stayed local after high school and worked his way up from janitor to re-enactor at the lighthouse, so he could get them all in for free) climbed the twisty steps, pausing on the vertiginous landings to tease each other about looking down into the widening gap. They wondered, as Sam and Doreen had since they first visited together on a third grade field trip, why the lighthouse keepers hadn’t rigged up a pulley system to lift the oil up, instead of hauling the heavy buckets on the narrow stairs with their low railing.

Now they were stepping out the door into the light, and Craig was lighting a cigarette and saying there wasn’t much to look at, really, from up here, and Doreen, after kissing Emma, gave Sam a knowing look. Who couldn’t see the wonder from up here? Enrique and Luis, an electrical engineering PhD and stagehand for the community theater in Gainesville, were discussing the Fresnel lens inside, and had plenty to occupy them. They’d both seen the city from up there anyway, and Enrique was terrified of heights, a secret he was assiduously keeping from the folks who kept promoting him.

They’d test Craig again, Sam decided, down at the Alligator Farm, and the low current of skepticism that had been in her mind for a month or two now would rise more sharply to the top of her mind until then. Maybe he was just a grumpy Long Islander who’d already stood on top of better lighthouses and seen cooler cities expand out below him, more interesting and more meaningful and more historic. But if he couldn’t find the joy in the albino alligator, or if he wouldn’t pose with the babies, then maybe the city had said all it needed to already.

–

I ran into them on Vilano Beach, though I can’t say I knew it. My uncle and I had hopped in his golf cart and sped through the trailer park and across A1A to a little parking lot next to a beach access, and walked down the wooden stairs battered and partially buried by the last hurricane of the season a couple of weeks before. We walked past the group, there, and they seemed happy, both in and completely out of time. It was the day after Thanksgiving, and it was nice and warm out, and we were going into the ocean. 

I was melancholy for a moment, looking back across the Atlantic (still warmer in November than the Pacific off Los Angeles is in August) at Ireland and thinking of my ancestors, but the waves came in again and again and I bobbed up and down in them as my uncle boogie boarded. We had the time together because my aunt and my cousins and my Aunt’s mom, who I figure has some kind of relation to me but since my Uncle is the blood one I don’t really know how to classify her except as the maker of excellent meatballs, were headed to the Outlets north of Daytona for some shopping.

I’m lucky that my uncle let me in on his solitude, I think he enjoyed regaling me with tales of the corrupt and foolish local officials who populate the news in north Florida as we drove over, and my questions about them as he came out to the deeper water to catch another wave. I know I enjoyed telling him that he wasn’t alone, the officials (and the developers I interacted with) in South Carolina were similarly loose with their grasp of law and sense. I know also that he loved my stories of attempted bribes.

I spent the time bobbing up and down and occasionally treading water or diving under big waves and feeling the power of the ocean in what was left of my hair. I spent it getting a sunburn on the tops of my shoulders which would remind me of my hubris but tan out nicely. I spent it thinking about how lucky I was that I could be there with family, in an interesting and fundamentally different place, and not have to brave the wilds of Thanksgiving travel back across the country. 

I’ve told my uncle since how much I appreciated his invitation down, and told my aunt how much her letting me in on making the sourdough and sausage stuffing and the other trimmings gave me joy, and it’s impossible to disconnect those feelings from an indelible sense of place that they shared with me whenever I needed it.

The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #3: Elsewhere Isn't Nowhere

Part 1 Here

Part 2 Here

--

Traveling to Miami to settle some of his accounts, Anton Cermak did not see himself as conducting the official business he had been elected to as Mayor of Chicago. His pass on the Illinois Central had been issued to “Mayor of Chicago” with the assumption that the IC’s old friend Big Bill Thompson would be making use of it, and they had neglected to take it away from Mayor Cermak.

The first politician to ever deploy the “I didn’t come over on the Mayflower but I got here as soon as I could” line, Anton Cermak was a distinctly colorful character, an ostensible reformer with a highly checkered past, who governed as a sewer socialist even if he refused to admit such sympathies. His victory over Big Bill Thompson – on the shoulders of his fellow immigrants who, it turned out, did want “a World’s Fair Mayor” – was the last time until a blizzard elected Jane Byrne that the Mayor of Chicago wouldn’t be handpicked by the machine.

He had backed the wrong horse at the Democratic convention in 1932, his co-religionist Al Smith had been his choice, but Chicago was struggling. A right-wing revolt aligned with the defeated Mayor Thompson had significantly slowed collection of property tax, and Cermak sought federal assistance.

It was in service of that goal that he was traveling to Miami to meet the President-Elect. He slept most of the way down, his sixteen hour days on the fifth floor of City Hall trying to figure out how to stretch a budget pulled apart by the tax revolt had worn him down, he was realizing, to nothing. And then the train was turning South again, and pulling into the station in Gainesville for a meal and he was waking up ravenous.

As he gobbled down a plate of salisbury steak and rice and greens, he saw a poster behind the cook in the dining room with a lighthouse, striped in black and white swirls, rising over a giant Spanish-style manse and a small fort. St. Augustine, said the top of the poster in a sea-green font, Relax In Old World Luxury, said the bottom. He thought as he brought the salisbury steak – salty but otherwise under-spiced compared to what he was used to in the beer halls of Pilsen on the South Side of Chicago – to his mouth that he could really use an extra week there, relaxing. He would go to St. Augustine on the return trip, delay for a while, sit near the beach and remember his wife and how she loved the sea.

The little city was real to him as he got back on the train, and realer still as the train cut over to run along the coast toward Miami, and he was imagining vacationing, promise in his pocket to fill the municipal coffers with this New Deal of Roosevelt’s as he waited next to the stage in Miami, and he was thinking of climbing to the top of the lighthouse in St. Augustine, the one he’d seen in the poster in the station in Gainesville, as he extended his hand to shake FDR’s, and then he was thinking of nothing at all, the bullet famously redirected at the last moment by the whack on the arm holding the pistol delivered by a sharp-eyed woman’s swift purse, the assassin hitting the Mayor of Chicago instead of the future President of the United States.

In Miami today there is a monument at the spot where Anton Cermak was gunned down. The inscription is “Thank God it was me and not you” and perhaps that is a charitable interpretation of whatever Czech words issued from his mouth in the general direction of President-Elect Roosevelt as he fell clutching his chest, the anglophone Chicago Tribune reporter assuming a string of expletives and wanting to present a brave face to the world, when really what the falling mayor gasped with one of his last breaths was “I would like to have seen St. Augustine.”

–

A. Philip Randolph, still the President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters after all these years, and Dr. Robert Hayling, a local dentist, were sitting down to a simple lunch in a small cafe on Riberia Street in the first week of December, 1963. Riberia Street south of King (named for the King of England by Tories), of course, in the Lincolnville section of St. Augustine. They were there to plan in comfort. Randolph, a child of Crescent City who had left for greener pastures, was on vacation and enjoying the town. Dr. Hayling had reminded him that it was a working vacation, and so they were working.

It was Randolph who had gotten Jackie Robinson to denounce the imprisonment of four teenagers who sat in at a Woolworth's, and it was Randolph who had connected Dr. Hayling directly to Martin Luther King. Dr. Hayling needed that connection to be made because the NAACP had threatened the revocation of the chapter of its St. Augustine branch. Dr. Hayling had had the temerity, after getting kidnapped and publicly beaten by the KKK, to insist on armed self-defense for the residents of the Lincolnville neighborhood, particularly on those nights when the Klan sent riders through the neighborhood shooting and throwing bombs.

They were planning for a visit by Dr. King to St. Augustine in the new year, and the problem kept coming up that they had never known someone from far away who had come for a visit. There wasn’t much in the Green Book about St. Augustine, and they’d been fighting this battle on their own. They’d been heard about and talked at from all around the country, from every corner of the movement, just for standing up for themselves. 

They lived, Dr. Hayling reminded Randolph, on a peninsula, surrounded by rivers and then by one of the most viciously and actively and aggressively racist communities of white folks in the entire country. Dr. Hayling was beginning to describe the details of his kidnapping by the KKK (and his later arrest by the Sheriff of St. John’s County for “assaulting” a mob of hundreds with his back as they hit him) when there was a loud rumble in the gravel parking lot outside and a pickup truck hauling a trailer pulled in.

On the trailer was a gleaming-if-slightly-battered Carolina blue 1963 Chevrolet Bel Air with the number 34 painted on the side in Unocal orange. A tall, balding man with a wide mustache stepped out of the pickup, and a second man, shorter and wider and darker, with an Esso ballcap on, got out of the passenger side. They walked around to the racecar, checked it was tied down well, and came inside. Dr. Hayling was up to greet them as they came through the door.

Dr. Hayling smiled past the taller man at Randolph and asked if he wasn’t standing in front of the fastest Black man in America. As a racing fan he was pretty sure he was, but he also knew that  he would annoy Randolph a little by saying a race car driver – whose machine topped out around 75 miles an hour on a good asphalt track – was faster than any Sleeping Car Porter in Randolph’s Brotherhood when a streamlined engine pulling Pullman cars could hit 120 on a flat straightaway. And then Wendell Scott told the dentist that as of this past Sunday in Jacksonville he was standing in front of the single fastest man in America regardless of color or creed.

Dr. Hayling offered to buy lunch for the race car driver and his one-man pit crew so that he could hear the story he’d already read in the paper, and Wendell Scott was happy to tell it. He had won, he said, but they had given ol’ Buck Baker the trophy until he protested, and they went back and counted the laps again and saw that it was, in fact, Wendell Scott who had crossed the line first, and then gone on to drive two more laps entirely while waiting for the checkered flag. They had revised the results, he said, and given him the money but left the trophy with Buck.

A. Philip Randolph turned slowly to Scott and said that there was no way they’d let him smile at a white lady anyway, and a knowing smile broke on Scott’s face as he remembered that Miss Florida had presented the trophy to Baker at the end of the race.

Dr. Hayling asked Scott why he was back, and he said something about meatloaf and reminded the dentist that he’d been in town working the weekend before, on the dirt track oval in St. Augustine, but he hadn’t gotten to see much of the town. He’d eaten some meatloaf over at the track they said was from this cafe, though, and it reminded him of his grandma’s so much that he had to come back. He couldn’t possibly stay too long, though, this was a detour already (though a celebratory one) through to Daytona to pick up replacement camshafts before he turned back north toward Savannah Motor Speedway.

They ate lunch and talked racing (Dr. Hayling was a fan of Scott’s and asked if he’d finally be getting real sponsorship after this win, and perhaps a car that wasn’t a hand-me-down from one of the other racers) and then the driver and his one-man entourage left and by that time Randolph had figured it out.

They can come if they mean to go somewhere else, he told Dr. Hayling, and they went to work. Dr. Hayling would invite Spring Breakers to visit him on the St. Augustine beaches, to come from far and wide and integrate Amelia Island and St. Augustine Beach and Vilano before they had their fun in Jacksonville and Daytona and Panama City.

–

The kids came, as requested, in solidarity with the folks who lived there but not to stay. Some of them ended up having to, so many were arrested integrating the beaches that a special camp was installed outside the jail. Eventually the power in the town just decided they’d drive hundreds of the Spring Breakers into the ocean, hoping they would drown. None did, there on the beach, those who could swim helped those who could not. The sheriff let out the folks from away, and hoped they hadn’t seen, but they’d known the place for what it was as soon as they got there.

Others came to learn for themselves how they could help by their actions. Among those arrested for sitting somewhere, together, which was illegal, were the mother of the governor of Massachusetts and three of her Main Line friends, all wives of Episcopalian bishops. 

Dr. King, who had come down to help in person, was arrested at a restaurant attached to a motor lodge in an old house built in the Flagler style, imitating the Spaniards but with elements of colonial revival. Dr. King had been trying to integrate the restaurant along with local activists.

From the jail in St. Augustine Dr. King wrote a Rabbi friend of his about the meaning of supporting the movement right there. The county made the largest mass arrest of Rabbis since the destruction of the second temple a little while later. They saw the place for what it looked like while they were there.

It’s hard to say that anyone else didn’t, after the manager of that same motor lodge famously spilled hydrochloric acid into the pool, so offended was he at the idea of people swimming together.

The circumstances, and the individuals who were responsible for them, chased Dr. Hayling out of town. And while it was bitter, he knew he’d figured the place out. He cheered the passage of the Civil Rights Act and was personally honored by the committee celebrating the 400th anniversary of the City (after the Governor of Florida, C. Farris Bryant, heard from President Johnson that he better make them) and then he disappeared to practice dentistry peacefully for another 20 years elsewhere, down the coast a ways, far away, near the new and growing communities working on the Space Coast.

The owners of the town papered over the problems of St. Augustine, and never really tried to do any more solving than they’d already tried, commissions and dialogue and anything, anything but action. Everyone who passed through had no choice but knowing what they were getting into.

The St. Augustine Visitors' Bureau #2: Florida East Coast (Railway)

The Standard Oil Company was founded in Cleveland, which is about as far spiritually and climatically as it is possible to get from St. Augustine anywhere in the United States. The failed salt miner Henry Flagler, who had made friends with John D. Rockefeller when both were selling grain, was one of the partners. It is hard to imagine a person in this country who has not heard of John D. Rockefeller, and harder still to imagine a regular person who is aware that John D. Rockefeller gave all the credit for Standard Oil’s monopolization practices and success to Henry Flagler.

Henry Flagler’s wife was dying when he first arrived in Florida, and the climate of Jacksonville, though no good for the consumption that Mary eventually died of, sparked an idea in Henry's business mind. He gazed down the east coast to the Keys, and then directed his eyes back up. Wasn’t there something in St. Augustine?

He headed down there, a day’s journey through swamp on bad roads still, and found on the outskirts of town a large mansion, which he tried to rent. He was rebuffed, though he offered nearly ten thousand dollars, an absurd sum for the time, to rent for just a week. Instead, the owner of the mansion, on a plantation, suggested that he move to town.

His new wife needed little convincing, and they built a large home for themselves in St. Augustine. Suddenly, around them, on the day they arrived to occupy the home, possibility began to form. A whole town, it seemed, had come into existence around them, with a lighthouse, and some picturesque old Spanish ruins being maintained with a surprising amount of love by a group of folks calling themselves Minorcans, not that Henry Flagler had ever heard of Minorca before, and some clapboard shacks.

He decided, almost at the spur of the moment, that people would want to visit, many people, who would need to be accommodated in great luxury. He built a hotel, over 500 rooms that almost bankrupted him, one of the grandest in all the land at the moment its doors first swung open. A belltower and a Spanish tile roof and a beautiful orange stucco exterior that could be seen for miles and miles and miles around, and then it was decided that what was missing was a grand railroad station to go along with a grander railroad.

It was an ambitious name, Florida East Coast, for a road that went from Jacksonville to Daytona via St. Augustine, the puffing iron horses burning coal from Pennsylvania that came down on the Seaboard Air Line and boiling water for steam from the same only-slightly-brackish springs that people were drinking out of.

There would be more, though, he believed, and it started to come true a little bit, his branch to Palatka connecting with the Atlantic Coast Line and the Central of Georgia carrying passengers through from Gainesville, where the University just now was, out to see the sights in St. Augustine.

–

Usually railroaders are the men who move the trains around and railroad men are the barons who move the money around, and usually the ties that bind the money to the wheels get forgotten, but sometimes memory demands and receives intention. We remember the Chinese section hands of the Transcontinental now because we’ve made a concerted effort to thanks to the demands of their descendants, and we remember the Irish and Italian and Black trackmen and sandhogs of the New York Subway because the city’s put effort into commemorating their memory, and we remember the prisoners of the Tsar and the Soviets who built the Trans-Siberian because they wrote hauntingly of their experiences and we chose to read. The folks who laid Henry Flagler’s rails, though, have faded like so many others.

This is probably because Henry Flagler was leasing these men from the state of Florida. Sure, the Civil War had ended, and slavery ostensibly with it, but being poor and Black in Florida was a very good way to get arrested and convicted and find yourself in a group of folks exempted from the protections afforded by the thirteenth amendment, leased out to the Florida East Coast. These men swung machetes and burned brush and slept in jail camps each night. They poured fill into muck, braving quicksand and disease and slept under the armed guard of deputy wardens. They cut wood for ties and hauled long rails over and placed spikes in and whacked spikes down and did it all again to the called cadence until the light got low and they tucked into cots that were property of the State of Florida.

But in their hastily-assembled jail camps some of the men sketched out tales of the future. They talked, they gambled, they planned. There was a peninsula out there, on the opposite side of the Tolomato river from the tracks they were putting down. There was a section, south of the King’s Road, that was wet a lot, but looked solid enough to bring up crops. Over there, nobody had anything built or staked. One of the men swore the land belonged to someone who’d gotten it off the Freedmen’s Bureau and still had it in his family, just he used it to pull shrimp from the river and nothing else, sold those for enough to pay the tax and feed himself.

If they got out from under the yoke of the state, three then five then twenty of the section hands said, they could fill the land like they’d been filling around the track ballast. They could work for the Railroad for money instead of time and fish the rivers to supplement their income and bring their families around, too, and build a little community, but a real one.

And morning after morning, laying the interchanges and shoveling the small-stone ballast and hewing ties with axes and tossing up telegraph poles alongside, more and more of them started to see what it might look like, just on the other side of the river. They stayed, asked to be in the group of leased folks who built the station and then the hotel and as they got released they kept staying there, right where they’d imagined they would.

Their comrades of the nine pound hammer who wanted to get gone barely noticed as the folks who had thought the plan through slipped off into what looked like nothing to start building for themselves. And so some moved along further south with the Railroad, pushing towards Daytona, but some others began to form part of the place with their hands and tools and in their own eyes too.

–

And then, one winter, it froze. For the first time in a long time, a genuine cold settled upon St. Augustine and also on the rest of Florida known and used at the time, cracking timber and killing trees and wiping out in one violent breath millions of dollars of investment until, from the southernmost point, from a ranch straddling the Miami River and covering six hundred and forty acres of dry land, came a bouquet of fresh orange blossoms.

These blossoms, courtesy of a Julia Tuttle – who said that she had founded and divided up a townsite on the river and would sell the lots as absolutely frostproof, as proven in this hardest of hard frosts, if only the railroad would come through – were delivered to Henry Flagler in his mansion in St. Augustine. He had them made into a bouquet and presented them to his mistress, and construction began in earnest again. Julia Tuttle sold property and built a city and caused, from very little, a second boom in citrus.

That was, of course, accompanied by a boom in tourism, and not just to the new Miami. Those people seeking the warmth and delights of Florida no longer thought to stop in its north, where there might be a freeze they had already come so far to escape. They could go instead to Miami, or to Key West, even, on the Overseas Railway, and so they did that too.

This would seem to concern us very little, sure, Miami is a different world entirely. But it came to pass that it was too profitable to cary freight (in the form of citrus and orange juice) up and down the coast, and Henry Flagler was a jealous man, and so the Champion Service of the Atlantic Coast Line went down the west coast of Florida most of the way, and the Silver Meteor of the Seaboard Coast Line went down as far as Jacksonville and then turned inland until Palm Beach. 

And so it was that our little St. Augustine, bypassed except by oranges, remained served by a little branch out towards Gainesville, whose residents (and their neighbors in the more far-flung parts of Alachua County) took advantage and made the tourism their own, a little sea and sand and sun the privilege of the working man. Why more working people, from elsewhere, didn’t come to their little outpost was for them a question that didn’t need an answer.