There may be a day, decades or even centuries from now, when some genealogy buff, who looks vaguely like yours truly, gets curious about his or her roots and drills down to find an ancestor who lived on a farm in Taylor County, Florida. The official records will show a lawyer and a nurse anesthesiologist who lived in the panhandle for a very long time, then landed at Wyldswood and put down roots.
"How the hell did that happen?" they might ask (any descendant of mine is probably genetically predisposed to a salty vocabulary. DNA really is destiny).
"Well," says long-dead me, "that's a long story. A new blended family, a massive hurricane, a pandemic. Think Boccaccio meets the Perfect Storm."
"Tell me a little about what it was like, life in Taylor County in the 2020s."
"Where to start.
Taylor County was mostly flat, mostly rural, mostly pine trees as far as the eye could see. They used to call it the Tree Capital of the South, and there were still lots of folks in 2020 who made their living in the woods. The other big employer was the paper mill, which everyone called "Buckeye" although it had changed hands several times since that company owned the place. When the wind blew out of the east, which was rare, the smell of rotten eggs would waft over your ancestral farm.
It was maybe an hour southeast of Tallahassee, on what had been the main route from the upper Midwest to the Florida Gulf Coast. Al Capone used to stop here at Hampton Springs on his way south. Then the interstate came several decades ago and businesses closed and population went flat. Only about 20,000 people lived here in 2020, about a third of them in the county seat of Perry.
The part of Taylor County that would take your breath away, my big city descendant, was its shoreline. From Steinhatchee to Keaton, Dekle, and Jabo Beaches, to the stark beauty of Dark Island, it was miles and miles of grass flats and estuaries teeming with fish. And perhaps the best part was that, even as a thousand people a day moved to the Sunshine State, this place remained undiscovered, quiet, natural. Pictures don't do it justice.
And the rivers-- close your eyes and picture your wildest fantasy of the African Queen, or maybe Heart of Darkness if your imagination runs a little more menacing. That is the Aucilla and the Econfina, with tannin stained water and swampy jungle shrouding the banks, an occasional cracker cabin emerging from just around the next bend.
You needed to know that's 'EconFEEna,' not 'EconFIna,' or you'd be outed as an interloper. Likewise the name of the local newspaper was the Taco Times (I'll explain the concept of a newspaper another time), but if you pronounced it as you would the Mexican culinary delight you'd get a quizzical look from the grizzled guy in the camouflaged MAGA hat (don't ask) drinking a Natural Light on the next bar stool at the Elks Lodge. 'That would be TAY-co, son.'
And if you wanted a Natural Light, or a glass of jug wine from a bottle that's been open long enough that your merlot was a little skunky, the Elks Lodge was the only game in town. There was karaoke on Friday nights, and some of these people could actually sing. You would have wanted to try the fried seafood platter, homemade and served with piping hot hush puppies.
The people here mostly came from families that went back generations in this region. Maybe because of that, or because of the area's long history of being a major port-of-entry for the drug trade on account of the miles of empty coastline, there was a certain aloofness toward strangers. I'm told the Air Force quit sending trainers down from Moody AFB to shoot approaches at our local airport because some of the locals thought they were spying on them and took potshots at the planes as they flew overhead.
But once you got past that barrier, and they realized you weren't going anywhere and were not a government spy, the people here were some of the warmest you'd ever meet. They kept their word, showed up on time, and would be at your door at 2 a.m. if you were in trouble and needed help. There was no anonymity here, and a powerful sense of community that's been lost most everywhere else.
Of course, it was the South, and that community had limits. Maybe a quarter of the people in Taylor County were black, and yet I never knew a black person here, and only saw them at Wal-Mart or the grocery store. We had some work to do on that front.
We made our own fun--there were no water parks, movie theaters, or night clubs. There were only a handful of restaurants. On our off-time we fished, hunted, drove the boat way too fast, or sat in our truck bed swimming pool filled with ice-cold well water and drank wine. There was a golf course right around the corner where you could play all day until you ran out of beer for $18, with a cart. We were never bored.
I could go on, but you get the idea. Taylor County was an anachronism even back in 2020, a part of Florida that was almost completely untouched by the crush of humanity that transformed the rest of the state. It was a place filled with natural beauty, tough and kind people, and a stillness at night that almost let you hear the voice of God. You can be proud to have traced your roots through there, and would have loved the life we got to lead."
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