Andokides' Porch

When the people sat around on the porch and passed around the pictures of their thoughts for the others to look at and see, it was nice. The fact that the thought pictures were always crayon enlargements of life made it even nicer to listen to. -- Zora Neale Hurston

Tallahassee, FL - April 11-13, 2014



The weekend following my trip to New Orleans, I was off to Tallahassee for a celebration of 60 years of debate at Florida State. (For those of you who don’t know, I did debate for Florida State, 1973-1975.) My friend Jim Owens invited me to stay with him in Monticello, FL, about 30 miles east of Tallahassee. Given the distance and the brevity of the trip (I arrived in Monticello late on Friday night and left on Sunday morning), I spent more time in Monticello than in Tallahassee.

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In my two years in Tallahassee, I’d never had occasion to visit Monticello, but it was immediately familiar. Monticello is the county seat for Jefferson County, Florida. It’s classic, “old Florida,” a late-nineteenth century town set amidst scrub forest panhandle, houses with metal roofs and broad “settin’” porches, magnolias, scrub oak, live oak, longleaf and loblolly pine, palmetto. Spanish moss, all manner of wildlife scuttling through the underbrush and along the margins of swampy ponds. There is a primeval quality to the area, flora and fauna that are largely unchanged over millennia.

It seems appropriate, somehow, that whatever roots I have are probably here, in this sandy soil that holds nothing tight while at the same time hosting a landscape that is stubbornly impervious to alteration. There are living bald cypress trees in the swamps that are 600 years old and more.

The map that is imprinted in my DNA is punctuated by place names as exotic as the terrain: Quincy, Chipley, Bonifay, Apalachicola (home of world-famous Apalachicola oysters), Cypress (which, though I only lived there for four months in college, was a family homestead and probably the most constant place in my childhood), Wewahitchka (pronounced we-wah-HITCH-kah), Two Egg, Niceville, Wakulla. There is magic, music, and mystery in these names, charm, enchantment, and a dash of the terrible, or at least the possibility of the terrible--poisonous plants and insects, deadly snakes, dangerous reptiles.

Click here for additional photos of this trip to north Florida. To view as a slideshow, double click the first photo, then use the navigation arrows at the top of the page to scroll through.

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