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Jeff Klinkenberg's latest book explores the Land of Alligators

By Gregory McNamee, Special to the Times
In print: Sunday, March 30, 2008

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ADVERTISEMENT [LARA CERRI | Times (2007)] Alligators bellow and grow bellicose at Gatorland, an Orlando attraction where this ancient, ruthless member of the “old, weird America” still has a voice. But now and then they still turn up in Floridians’ pools and front yards. Loading Video...

When I was very young, no more than 5 or 6, I saw an alligator eat a poodle right out of a Tampa back yard. It dawned on me at that sanguinary moment just why it was that my grandmother had forbidden me to play near the canal behind her house, where, naturally, I spent my time playing, and it gave me a lasting, nicely traumatic memory of Florida to nurse over a lifetime.

Had he been on hand, I suspect Jeff Klinkenberg would have been cheering for the gator. After all, one of the heroes of Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators, his new collection of newspaper columns turned into essays, is an ubergator — something on the order of a dragon, really — named Mojo, once resident in Kanapaha Botanical Gardens near Gainesville.

"You know how alligators will roar at other gators?" remarks the director of the gardens, who, suggestively, is missing his right hand. "Mojo was so dominant that when it thundered, he'd roar back at the thunder."

Long familiar to and even beloved by St. Petersburg Times readers, Klinkenberg is a fan, defender, student and denizen of what the great pop culture historian Greil Marcus has called "the old, weird America," the country that hasn't yet been absorbed into the monoculture of chain stores, cookie-cutter houses and mass-produced taste.

Preferring the confines of the Sunshine State, which is plenty weird enough, Klinkenberg has devoted decades to chronicling the wide spots on Florida's blue highways — and, for that matter, the places where, improbably, no highways have yet been located, despite Florida's incessant growth.

Take the Loop Road, for instance, an hour from Naples on one end and an hour from Miami on the other, a century from either in real time. Klinkenberg knows every inch of the road, and he knows as well its dozen-odd full-time residents, folks who have found it expedient to disappear into the Big Cypress for reasons of their own.

One of them was Ervin Rouse, the fiddler who wrote Orange Blossom Special, and who passed away some years ago. Another, still with us, is a park ranger who might be singing with Ervin in the choir celestial had she not been ornery enough to shake off a load of pygmy rattler venom injected into her foot by said creature. "I was wearing flip-flops," she allows. "Somebody should have written D-U-M-B on my forehead."

If there is a theme in Klinkenberg's genial wanderings down the Loop Road and other roads like it, it is that many of Florida's more interesting venues conspire not just to relieve the visitor of excess cash, but also of life and limb. There are the storms, of course, which Klinkenberg praises as allowing rare opportunities to enjoy the beach by oneself, sans loudmouth neighbors bearing boom boxes and drunken grudges.

There are the bull sharks, which liberated an arm from another of his interlocutors. There are the snakes and skeeters behind every rustling blade of grass, the occasional wild-eyed outlaw, and, of course, the snowbird oblivious to the norms, physics and laws of motor traffic.

But then there are treasures worthy of the dangers, and Klinkenberg has a rare gift for finding them. One is a backwoods type named Spook, who likes nothing more than to bring down a wild hog or two with his bare hands. Another is a pair of more pacific, indeed Thoreauvian swamp dwellers who have made their own version of paradise on the aptly named Peace River.

There are the ghosts of hard-drinking, hard-smoking, hard-writing Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who turns up at several points here, and, to keep the otherworldly theme going, a Tampa eccentric who makes elaborate sculptures of animal bones, as well as the recently departed Gill Man, Ricou Browning, who scared us all to death half a century ago with his visage in Creature from the Black Lagoon — if you look at it sideways, a Rawlings story gone terribly astray.

And then, by way of a celebration of life, there is a visit to "the best place to eat pancakes in Florida, if not the world," which by Klinkenberg's estimation is the Old Spanish Sugar Mill and Griddle House in De Leon Springs State Park, up by Daytona Beach. (For my money, that honor goes to the Ranch House near Montpelier, Idaho, but de gustibus . . .)

These are treasures to be sure, fine exemplars of an old and weird legacy. It's clear on every page that Klinkenberg has lived several worthy lifetimes in Florida, that he loves the place immoderately, and that he laments the state's transformation, along with the rest of the nation, into a land of tatty strip malls and soul-killing cul-de-sacs.

Jeff Klinkenberg comforts himself with the thought that, come the apocalypse, the gators will still be here. It's a thought that ought to bring solace and a smile to the rest of us as well. So will this gracefully written, endlessly entertaining book, a gift for all who love the real Florida.

Gregory McNamee lives in Tucson, Ariz. The University of Nebraska Press has just released his book ''Moveable Feasts: The History, Science, and Lore of Food'' in paperback.