 Outside Magazine, August 1991 |
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Down the Coast of Imprecision (Cont.)
The quiet water of Pensacola Bay is one of the best spots around for mullet, which you can take with a cast net, wading in the shallows. In this part of the world, mullet is to the coast what catfish is to the interior. Everybody eats the fish, always fried. And if you go back west a few miles, to the Gulf Beach Highway, then turn inland and wind a few miles through the live oaks, you will come to Rusty's, a place that's been serving superb fried mullet approximately forever. When I first ate there, John F. Kennedy was president and the mullet was all you could eat for a dollar. Now it's more like nine dollars. Same fish, cheaper money.
It is this way all along this stretch of coast—if you have the sense to stay off I-10 and Highway 98, which are essentially designed to move people from condo to shopping mall to restaurant and back. Still, once in a while you have to join 98, if only to get yourself down the beach to another fine, lonely spot. If you follow 98 east, you will eventually hit the twin Florida towns of Fort Walton Beach and Panama City, where resort-town vulgarity reaches its highest flower: ceramic sharks, plastic pennants, miniature golf courses, water slides, go-cart tracks—they're all there. But if you keep going, you come to the towns of Port St. Joe and Apalachicola, genuine fishing villages where people harvest the best oysters on the Gulf, those from the waters of Apalachicola Bay. Both these towns have a number of fine roadside hotels (one being the turn-of-the-century Gibson Inn), and just across St. Josephs Bay there are rental cabins and a campground at St. Josephs Peninsula State Park, a semi-wild and semi-uncrowded place that you can get to by following the beach road out onto Cape San Blas.
East of Apalachicola, you have to work a little harder to find the beach by car, but it's worth it. Dog Island, which is owned in part by The Nature Conservancy, is reachable only by passenger ferry and is worth a day's trip if you tote along all the beach gear you can carry—including a shade tarp and a cooler. Just a few miles farther east you come to the Saint Marks National Wildlife Refuge, a marshland rich with wading birds; it's a good place to visit at sunset.
East of the refuge, you enter the Gulf's Big Bend, a place that, with its empty beaches and glassy coves, is considered by sailors to have the best cruising around. As a land traveler, though, you'll have to explore your way toward the water off Highway 98, poking down side roads off nearby U.S. 27, and making time to visit the towns of Steinhatchee or Suwannee. Both are small outposts named after the stately, unhurried rivers that feed them. There is nothing in these places to suggest the pricey, frenzied Florida that lies a few hundred miles to the east in the fever swamps of Walt Disney World and Epcot. And if you have the good sense to stay off the interstates and other auto arteries in this part of the world, your reward will be the last vestiges of a disappearing Florida. The pleasures of driving here aren't in long vistas and amusement parks. They are subtler, like those Gulf passes that make you turn back inland, following an empty road from white sand to red dirt and back again. They are the tasty fried mullet and catfish, the lush richness of a marshland sunset, and the shifting character of the place as you pass through it. These roads traverse a fast-vanishing world—enjoy its imprecise boundaries while you can.
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