James W. Hall is the critically acclaimed author of eleven crime novels, including Body Language and Blackwater Sound. He's also published four books of poetry. And several of his short stories have appeared in magazines like the Georgia Review and Kenyon Review.
Now, writing in the spirit of Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Hall wins a new kind of reader with this collection of essays that run from insightful to opinionated, funny to wise.
Hall ponders subjects as diverse as his own love affair with Florida which began on a trip after college from which he never returned, to his equally passionate romance with books. He ponders the nature of summer heat, the writing of Hemingway and James Dickey, television, teaching, politics, fatherhood and much more. In the vibrant and elegant prose which characterize his fiction and poetry, Hall now proves himself a master of the essay as well.
James W. Hall is the critically acclaimed author of eleven crime novels, including Body Language and Blackwater Sound. He's also published four books of poetry. And several of his short stories have appeared in magazines like the Georgia Review and Kenyon Review.
Now, writing in the spirit of Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Hall wins a new kind of reader with this collection of essays that run from insightful to opinionated, funny to wise.
Hall ponders subjects as diverse as his own love affair with Florida which began on a trip after college from which he never returned, to his equally passionate romance with books. He ponders the nature of summer heat, the writing of Hemingway and James Dickey, television, teaching, politics, fatherhood and much more. In the vibrant and elegant prose which characterize his fiction and poetry, Hall now proves himself a master of the essay as well.
Hot Damn!: Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise
248
Hot Damn!: Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise
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Overview
James W. Hall is the critically acclaimed author of eleven crime novels, including Body Language and Blackwater Sound. He's also published four books of poetry. And several of his short stories have appeared in magazines like the Georgia Review and Kenyon Review.
Now, writing in the spirit of Dave Barry and Garrison Keillor, Hall wins a new kind of reader with this collection of essays that run from insightful to opinionated, funny to wise.
Hall ponders subjects as diverse as his own love affair with Florida which began on a trip after college from which he never returned, to his equally passionate romance with books. He ponders the nature of summer heat, the writing of Hemingway and James Dickey, television, teaching, politics, fatherhood and much more. In the vibrant and elegant prose which characterize his fiction and poetry, Hall now proves himself a master of the essay as well.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429905053 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Press |
| Publication date: | 08/06/2024 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 248 |
| File size: | 858 KB |
About the Author
Under Cover of Daylight, in 1986. A murder mystery starring a Key West fisherman named Thorn, it was a well-received beginning to a series that has, to date, yielded twelve books, most recently Dead Last.
Besides the Thorn books, Hall has written stories and novels of life in South Florida, as well Hot Damn!, a collection of essays. He teaches writing at Florida International University, and lives with his wife Evelyn. They divide their time between the Florida Keys and the mountains of North Carolina.
Read an Excerpt
Hot Damn!
Alligators in the Casino, Nude Women in the Grass, How Seashells Changed the Course of History, and Other Dispatches from Paradise
By James W. Hall
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 2002 James W HallAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-0505-3
CHAPTER 1
HOME AT LAST
Every time I see that bumper sticker — Florida Native — a ripple of envy and irritation flutters in my chest. It's a rare and exotic club to which I will never belong because I'm one of those thousands-a-week folks who have been flooding into Florida for the last few decades. Although they tell us that the tide has slackened to 591 new residents a day, Florida natives are still as scarce and outlandish as manatees. How unfair it seems that even though I've lived in the state for well over thirty years (surely longer than plenty of the younger natives), I should still feel like an interloper.
In 1965 on a south Florida winter day much like this one, I stepped off the train at the Hollywood station to attend Riverside Military Academy It had been an incredibly romantic journey, a long rumbling train ride through the brown scraggly fields of Tennessee and Georgia, then into the expanse of green nothingness that was north and central Florida, until finally the palm trees began to thicken, the greens grew lush, and the windows in the train slowly lowered. Suddenly I was standing beside the tracks looking at a sky dense with extravagant birds, white and huge with lazy wings, long orange legs trailing.
I remember taking my first breath of rich subtropical air. There was something sweet and spicy in the breeze — that warm macaroon aroma with an intoxicating undertone of cinnamon that seems to waft directly from some secret Caribbean island. That afternoon I breathed in a lungful of air I have yet to release.
Though I didn't have the words for it then, I knew the light was different too. Softer than the harsh and unglamorous Kentucky daylight I was used to. It had an almost romantic, twilight rosiness, a quiet light, yet at the same time far more vivid and precise than any I'd known before. A painterly January light. And while I had been on the platform of the Hollywood train station for less than a minute, I knew with utter certainty that I had taken a mortal wound.
Some time later that winter, I dropped the bombshell on my parents. I informed them that I had decided to turn down the Air Force Academy appointment my father and I had labored so hard to secure. I wanted to attend college in this newly discovered Shangri-la, Florida. While the shock of my passing up a free four years of college must have been incredibly difficult for them to absorb, to their everlasting credit my parents let me win that argument.
I never told them that the institution of higher learning I had chosen, Florida Presbyterian College, had caught my eye because the catalog I'd devoured in my boys' school guidance office had numerous photographs of coeds wearing Bermuda shorts in classrooms. Ah, sweet Florida, what a sensuous and libertine land.
I did four glorious years of college in the charming and soporific Saint Petersburg of the sixties. On holidays I explored the west coast, the Keys, camping at starkly primitive Bahia Honda, building bonfires on midnight beaches, discovering out-of-the-way taverns that served cheap pitchers of beer and spectacular cheeseburgers, bays where fish jumped happily into frying pans, and unair-conditioned piano bars in Key West where writers huddled in the corners and talked the secret talk. I had never felt so at home.
Then I graduated, and after serving a bleak exile in snowy latitudes to collect two more degrees, it was finally time to find a job. I was so determined to return to Florida that I didn't even bother applying for teaching jobs in any other state. It was a cavalier decision bordering on lunacy, for that was a time in the early seventies when teaching jobs were scarce and terminal degrees plentiful. Every taxi driver had one. When no job offer was forthcoming, I moved back to Florida anyway and put my new Ph.D. to use digging holes and planting azaleas, palm trees, and a host of other landscape plants around the bases of high-rise condominiums. Better to do manual labor in the relentless sun of Florida than to find myself in some university office staring out the window at the desolate tundra of Anyplace Else.
The phone call finally came. A new state university in Miami. The ground floor. A dream job. And then, little by little, all these years happened. But even after all this time, the light is still new and surreal and the air still drenched with spices they haven't yet named, and the sky is chock-full of the most impossible birds. Parrots squawk across my backyard sky every morning at seven. Garish flowers big as Stetsons bloom in December. Some evenings the breeze is so luxurious I feel like weeping.
I kidnapped a boy from Kentucky and transplanted him in paradise, and he grew up to write books that sing the praises and mock the dizzy and perilous follies of this gaudy corner of the nation. I love this place. I have loved it from the start and have learned to love it more with every passing year — all its quirkiness, its stresses, this simmering melting pot where no one wants to blend.
I have decided we need a bumper sticker of our own — those of us who had the misfortune of being born somewhere else but who made the difficult choices, overcame the fears and complications and the psychic traumas of abandoning the safety of one home for the uncertainty of another. There are 591 stories a day about how we arrived here, and sure, not all of us were as swept away by the sensory treasures of this place as that eighteen-year-old kid on the train platform. Some of us came simply for jobs or to play golf in February or to soothe our arthritic joints, and there are many who find nothing to rhapsodize about in the sumptuous air or rosy light, the awkward, delicious grace of a heron rising into flight. There are many of those 591 who simply ignore or endure what the rest of us cherish. Well, let them get their own license plate. But as for the rest of us, ours should say, Home at Last.
CHAPTER 2THE NAMES OF THINGS
Lace murex, wentletrap, lightning whelk, junonia. The names are as exotic and various as their shapes. Cones and tulips and angel wings, baby's ears and worms. Their bright colors litter the beach before me and crunch underfoot. With every step down the sugary sand I cringe with guilt at the possibility that I am destroying hundreds of rare specimens.
My wife and I have come for several days of relaxation on Sanibel Island. Each morning at first light we join the hordes who are prowling the shoreline, bent over in what is known in these parts as the Sanibel stoop. No one says hello, for all eyes are focused on the wash of new shells that are humped along the high tide mark as my fellow beachcombers inspect this daily bounty with something like the passion of Lotto fever. Some of them are kneeling over thick white beds of shells, sifting through the wreckage with tongue depressors. Some have arrayed their chairs and towels and other gear around their patch of beach while they work with a gold miner's frenzied focus.
Sanibel Island is the best shelling spot in the Western Hemisphere and the third best in the world, ranked just behind Australia and the Philippines. This fourteen-mile-long, shrimp-shaped spit of land is the only one of the barrier islands to run east to west, which makes it a perfect catcher's mitt for shells carried in the Gulf's north-running currents.
Because I'm not normally a beachgoer, these seaside vacations always seem to take a hallowed place in my memory Dawdling down the sand with no destination and no schedule, we soak up the sensuous beach scene with the purity of Florida newcomers. Everything seems marvelous and strange: the single dolphin rolling near shore, the lapping surf, the hilarious cries of the gulls and the shrieks of toddlers facing their first waves, the ungainly pelicans landing in the high unsteady branches of an Australian pine, a Labrador retriever chasing flock after flock of sandpipers.
To commemorate this rare sunny holiday I join my fellow beachgoers in prospecting for shells. Since I'm no connoisseur, the only requirement I have for choosing a shell is that it have a special shine when I pluck it from the damp sand. As we walk the shore, we choose and discard, choose and discard, scanning the piles of sculptured jewels at our feet until we spot the perfect specimen, a memento worthy of the day.
A mile or two down the beach, with half a dozen shells in my hand, I see a woman bent over her mound, digging with scrupulous care with what looks like a stainless steel dentist's probe. I show her the handful of shells I've collected so far and ask her if she knows what they are. She studies them for a moment and says no, she's not sure. It is clear that either the shells I've collected are exceedingly rare or this woman is as surprisingly ignorant as I am.
"I guess I should buy a shell book," I say.
"Or just stand in the bookstore and look through one," she offers.
I tell myself that it's not crucially important to know the names of these twisted pieces of calcium. These are, after all, just the carcasses of mollusks, bivalves, gastropods. The slimy things that once inhabited these husks are very far down on my personal hierarchy of compassion. I can't remember the last snail I really cared about.
But there is part of me that wants to know the names of everything. So that afternoon, with our growing cache of shells safely stowed in our room, we head to the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum in search of enlightenment.
We quickly discover that this is an establishment that takes itself very seriously. Within our first few minutes, we are reminded several times that the Bailey-Matthews Shell Museum is the only museum of its kind in the United States. The high-minded mission statement of the museum is to explain "the miracle of the mollusk" and "the influence of seashells on the affairs of mankind."
My goofiness detector is clicking madly.
But that doesn't last long, for when we enter the Great Hall of Shells we encounter some truly intelligent and sophisticated exhibits on "shells as money," "mollusks, medicine and man," and "shells in architecture." One of the most impressive displays is a series of cameos made of shells, works of folk art as marvelous and eccentric as any I've ever seen. Layers and layers of helmet shells in various shades and colors, arranged in delicate relief images of human faces or landscape portraits.
By the time we leave the museum, I am ready to buy my own stainless steel dental probe and become a full-time prospector. I have learned that mollusks come from eggs, that they are cannibalistic, that the small holes one frequently finds in the empty shells on the beach are drilled by attacking shells, which bore through the shell in order to cut the muscle attaching the mollusk to its armor, so that they can suck out the creamy delicacy inside. I have scribbled down a page of notes, but the one thing I haven't learned is the precise names of the shells that I've so recently collected. They are some kind of whelk, of that I'm fairly sure. But their exact species remains a mystery.
When the vacation is over, we take home our dozen nameless shells and add them to the collection that fills two large glass jars prominently placed in a main thoroughfare of our house, so that we will be reminded continually of a host of beautiful, stress-free days by the Atlantic or the Gulf.
By now my newly acquired shells have lost the glossy, colorful sheen that made me nab them up in the first place and are as dull and bleached out as antique Polaroids. From my recent studies I know that I can lightly coat the shells with oil to revive their vibrancy. But somehow that feels metaphorically wrong. While those languorous Sanibel days and nights, so full of the incense of the sea, are still hauntingly vivid, I know the memories will soon begin to fade, and like the shells, they too will someday be little more than bleached husks. Which is fine. Because then we'll need to replenish them with another trip to the seashore.
CHAPTER 3FLORIDA TRIFECTA
For nearly thirty years I'd been hearing rousing stories about the quaint inn on Cabbage Key, a mile or so offshore of Sanibel Island. And though I'd been in the vicinity many times and had every intention of exploring the island, something always intervened.
From newspaper articles and word of mouth, I gathered that the island was small and populated with a band of rough-and-tumble eccentrics, modern-day pirates, garrulous fishing guides, and crusty Florida crackers, just my type of characters. Again and again the inn itself had been portrayed in nearly mythic strokes. The walls were said to be papered with thousands of dollar bills, and the ancient mahogany of the bar etched with the names of famous writers. A place that resonated with extraordinary fishing yarns and fabulous tales of old Florida.
But I had delayed my pilgrimage to Cabbage Key for so many years that I had entered the danger zone. Dangerous to go because it was doubtful the reality could live up to the legends, and dangerous to delay for much longer for this was exactly the kind of Florida treasure that every day is being bought up and given a members-only exclusivity Another offshore bauble snatched away by the million-dollar club.
I decided to risk being disappointed.
I called my friend Randy Wayne White, a fine mystery novelist and columnist for Outside magazine. Randy used to be a fishing guide in Fort Myers, and since I had recently taken him dolphin fishing out in the Gulf Stream, leading him to an enormous school of big and active fish, I figured he owed me one. Actually, I figured he owed me two. For shortly after our dolphin expedition, he wrote an article about our day on the water, a scurrilous piece that was published in Outside magazine and later reprinted by several unsuspecting newspapers. Let's just say that the article's general subject was seasickness and it reflected badly on me, and ninety-nine percent of the facts in it were unfactual. Randy is, after all, first a fisherman and second a fiction writer, not exactly the credentials to inspire trust in his journalistic probity
Despite Randy's gross misrepresentations of me, the two of us have remained friends — a credit to my capacity for forgiveness as well as my passionate desire to someday find a way to retaliate for his slanderous article. Although Randy had just that day returned from an exhausting trip to Colombia and other South American territories, he generously invited my wife and me to drop over to see his house on Pine Island and then to take that long-awaited voyage to Cabbage Key.
Like his series hero, Doc Ford, Randy lives a simple life. His old cracker house is tin roofed and has plank floors and looks out at the calm stretch of waters of Pine Island Sound. But best of all, the house backs up on a sixty-acre archaeological preserve, land that the Calusa Indians, a maritime nation of highly skilled sailors, once used for various ceremonial purposes.
As Randy walked us around the hills and plazas of this ancient land, the mystical vibrations were almost palpable, as if enchanted fairy dust still hung in the air. There are so few places in Florida anymore that retain their unbroken connection with the primitive past, that when we stumble onto one of them, there is the sense that we are treading on deeply hallowed ground.
As my psychic tuning fork hummed, we drank a beer together on a peak overlooking one of the assembly plazas and were quieter than we would have been almost anywhere else on earth. I no longer cared if we went over to Cabbage Key This was fine. We could stay there all afternoon, standing shoulder to shoulder with the ghosts of our noble forebears who knew and loved this land when its waters were crystalline and dense with fish, its breezes uncontaminated by either noise or particulates.
But finally we pulled ourselves away, made the short drive to the tiny marina where Randy keeps his flatboat, and soon we were idling out the channel into Pine Island Sound, although the spell was still on me, a chime tolling deep in the blood, as if I were hearing the haunting echoes of another Florida, a deeper, more mysterious one that forever enchants and eludes us.
As we skimmed across the bay a pod of dolphins rolled off our bow. The water was sheened with golden sunlight. I was still in my mystical reverie as we pulled into the docks of Useppa Island. Cabbage Key lay a half mile farther out, but Randy thought we should see Useppa first. As we came to learn, the island was developed by the New York advertising mogul Baron Collier, the namesake of Collier County In the early 1900s Collier built a private mansion on the isolated island as well as a few guest cottages. His guests included Roosevelts, du Ponts, Rothschilds, and Rockefellers, and the afternoon we visited, some of their grandchildren seemed to be lounging there still.
The docks were crammed with great Gibraltars of fiberglass, teak, and chrome. On the hundred acres of land there are a hundred houses with the gray and white lattice, gingerbread, and genteel wood siding of a fabricated Olde Florida. There is a marina, a small restaurant, an inn, and a small museum. There are no roads, only pink shell walkways where golf carts roam. Croquet and tarpon fishing are the main pastimes on the island, aside from a once-a-year parade that the residents throw themselves during the high season when they decorate their golf carts like fruit baskets and racing cars and drive up and down their private beach. Yes, the rich are different from you and me. Goofier.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hot Damn! by James W. Hall. Copyright © 2002 James W Hall. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INTRODUCTION,
HOME AT LAST,
THE NAMES OF THINGS,
FLORIDA TRIFECTA,
NUDE WOMAN IN THE GRASS,
BACK TO SCHOOL,
WINNING ME OVER,
DREAM HOUSE,
TWO HOMES,
THE HARDY BOYS,
IT'S NOT THE HEAT, IT'S THE STUPIDITY,
SPRING RITES,
HEMINGWAY,
"NOBODY KNOWS ANYTHING",
AFTER-DINNER CONVERSATION,
GUNS,
TOUCHY-FEELY,
FRESH STARTS,
CAR WARS,
DISNEY VIRUS,
DRY TORTUGAS,
THE SMALLEST CHRISTMAS TREE,
WOODEN TENNIS RACKETS,
DRIPPING CLOCKS,
TUBULAR ADDICTION,
APRIL IS THE CRUELEST MONTH,
CLOSE ENCOUNTER,
HOT DAMN!,
LETTER TO MY FATHER,
A MOVING EXPERIENCE,
CABO,
A WALK ON THE BEACH,
DOGGONE,
ANNIVERSARY,
FAITHLESS IN SOUTH FLORIDA,
CAMPING OUT,
I'D LIKE TO THANK YOU ALL FOR COMING,
HURRICANES,
CHEETO,
POET SINKS TO CRIME,
ALSO BY JAMES W. HALL,
Copyright Page,
What People are Saying About This
"His new collection of 40 brisk, witty essays proves that poet and crime novelist James W. Hall (Blackwater Sound) is one of the region's biggest and most thoughtful boosters."—Publishers Weekly "Laid-back and quite competent ... to be enjoyed in the shade with the sound of the surf not far away."—Kirkus Reviews "Highly recommended."—Library Journal