Sunday morning, two weeks ago, the parking lot of the Dollar General in Eastpoint, Florida, was jumping. Beth and I had stopped for bottled water. We were headed into the interior of the Florida Panhandle for a day of kayaking.
To the east, is State Route 65 where we would turn north, drawn by a squiggle on a map labeled Graham’s Creek. Our destination is a blackwater stream that, as we will discover, twists through forests of overhanging cypress, tupelo and live oak. A fellow named Captain Larry in a kayak shop on St. George Island told us about the place.
Sometime back, this area was branded “The Forgotten Coast.” From the looks of it, it has remained that way. The place has a laid-back authenticity not easy to find in a state littered with pastel beach bungalows, curio shops and retirement plantations.
We were towing a trailer with two kayaks, and I parked the car at the edge of the lot. As they often do, the kayaks attracted attention. I got out of the car to find a tall man with a ponytail wearing scuffed jeans and a rumpled work shirt standing by the trailer looking at the boats.
“This Kevlar and fiberglass?” he said pointing to the smaller kayak.
“It’s carbon,” I replied, “and that one is polyethylene, a heavy plastic.”
“My father made kayaks with a wood frame walrus and seal skins,” he said. “They weighted 16 pounds.”
If his opening foray was any indication, this was not going to be your standard Dollar-General-parking-lot encounter.
My inquisitor was Eddy Curran, 66, native of Goose Bay, Labrador, son of an Inuit Eskimo father and an Irish mother and brother of 13 siblings. Eddie landed here 40 years ago after a string of adventures that took him the length of the Americas, from Alaska to Patagonia.
He has a roofing business and lives on nearby St. George Island, also part of this Forgotten Coast.
We talked a bit, but he needed to go and Graham’s Creek was calling. We walked into the Dollar General together. It seemed everyone knew Eddy
When I called him Thursday afternoon, Eddy said he couldn’t talk. That day he had climb on three roofs for estimates, mixed concrete mud for Venezuelan tile, driven to a building supply store in Apalachicola to see if they had white, three-tab shingles and taken a load of wood to Patty’s Raw Bar on St. George Island.
Still on the to-do list was the load of scrap he needed to take from his front yard to the landfill, feeding and putting up the chickens and “I’ve got a piece of fish I’ve got to cook on the grill for my wife tonight.”
I told him I’d call back some other time. Before letting him go, I slipped in a question about the kayaks.
“My dad made them for us. These white-man kayak boats, they’re a beautiful design. They make them with Kevlar, fiberglass or whatever. With the native boats we were making up there — the Greenland kayaks — no two were alike. If you’re a small person, say 5-foot, he would make a 5-foot kayak to suit you; if you’re a tall, skinny person, he’d make 6-1/2-foot boat that’s going to be heavier.
A brother, Walt, who lives in Newfoundland, still makes the animal skin and wood kayaks.
“(When we were kids) we’d go out in the kayaks in Labrador late at night,” he said. “The icebergs up there get as big as houses or bigger. The sunlight from the day when it absorbs into the icebergs, they’d glow this greenish glow at night, this eerie looking green color. We’d go out there duck hunting between the icebergs at night.”
Ten-year-old kids shooting ducks with World War II surplus rifles out of sealskin kayaks at night. That’s a memory you would carry with you for life.
Eddy had talked on for 12 minutes after telling me he had to go; he showed no sign of slowing down. I told him I’d call back when he had more time to talk. As for me, I needed to catch my breath.
“I love talking about the old stories, the old times,” Eddy said, before hanging up. “There is so much I remember. One time when we were hunting, we got so cold we took the guts out of the moose, and we crawled inside to stay warm.”
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
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