Love Letters to the Gulf

I’ve been thinking a lot about Gulf sturgeon lately—these enormous, threatened fish that spawn in the big rivers along the coast. I wrote one of my early short stories about them. Well, a story about a lovesick marine biology student, holed up in an Apalachicola motel while he awaits data for his research project. But it was those sturgeon that came to me first, not my FSU grad student, and it occurs to me that a lot of my work, and much of the work that I enjoy, springs from a similar place. That is, from a desire to shine some light on all that we are losing along the Gulf Coast, as well as all that we have already lost. Threatened wildlife and environs, of course—but also the endangered cultures of the people who call this part of the world their home, especially those folks who depend upon the land and the water for their livelihood. I suppose art gives us a way to stop time in a sense, to enjoy both what was and what might never be again, but I pray that our love letters aren’t all we will be left with in the end.

—Skip Horack, author of The Eden Hunter

Skip Horack is currently a Jones Lecturer at Stanford, where he was also a Wallace Stegner Fellow. He is a native of Louisiana, and a graduate of Florida State University. His short story collection The Southern Cross was published by Mariner Books in 2009. His novel The Eden Hunter chronicles an escaped slave’s journey through the Spanish Florida wilderness, and is forthcoming from Counterpoint in September 2010.

From “The Gulf Sturgeon Project” (a story in The Southern Cross, published by Mariner Books in 2009, copyright Skip Horack 2009):

Landon drained the last swallow of bourbon from the plastic coffee mug he’d found in his motel room. A dark-haired woman was throwing a cast net from the fuel dock beneath his window. She released the net lasso-even and heavy onto a bubbling school of mullet while, downriver, noisy gulls chased a trawler under the Highway 98 bridge and back to Apalachicola. Onboard, young men in filthy white boots broke from sorting shrimp on the afterdeck. They waved to the woman, and she smiled big to the boys as she arranged herself for another throw.

With a little effort, Landon could imagine Gulf sturgeon swimming somewhere beneath that beaten trawler. His Gulf sturgeon. The five spawning females Cassie had helped him affix satellite popup tags to the previous spring. They were massive fish. Six, seven, even eight feet long. The largest of his research subjects—the one Cassie had dubbed Bertha—weighed over two hundred pounds and was pushing thirty years old.

The tags were programmed to release at midnight. They would bob to the surface of the river, and, thousands of miles above, the Argos satellite system would locate those tiny computers and begin downloading all the data they had collected over the past year. Finally Landon would have the mountain of data he needed to prepare his dissertation. He wondered if Cassie even remembered that they were supposed to be here tonight, that they were supposed to share this moment together. He pulled the cell phone from the back pocket of his shorts again. Maybe she would call. Maybe she would still come.

Landon returned to watching the sunset shrimp boat diesel upriver, the men working hard but no doubt already making plans to meet up later with their girls at some riverfront bar, a place where they would pay cash for salty steamed oysters and pitcher after pitcher of cold draft beer. In high school, Landon had spent his summers fishing crabs on Mobile Bay. He watched those men and suddenly he was certain that he would have been happier as a commercial fisherman. A life without research or dissertations. A life of just being out there on the water.

Excerpted from The Eden Hunter, published by Counterpoint in 2010, copyright Skip Horack 2010:

After ten yards the briers ended and the true swamp began. He gathered his feet under him and rose up. He was standing on a thin lip of black dirt that ran between the brier edge and a flooded stand of wrist-thick tupelos. The water was still and shined like a mirror. He could sense somehow that he was safe here. This was a forest within a forest. He sheathed his knife, then slowly peeled off his clothes.

He stepped into the dark water and let his foot sink. Powdery sediment pushed through his splayed toes until finally the bottom held firm. He eased forward, grabbing hold of saplings to help keep his balance. Rustling one he heard movement in the high branches, then a sunning snake slapped down onto the water and vanished.

He waded ahead, naked and weaponless, and the trees became larger the farther that he penetrated the swamp. Slender tupelos gave way to fire-blackened cypress, and then the trees were all enormous and well spaced and perfect.

The history of the dome swamp was written on these trees. Five or six years ago a lightning bolt had ignited a longleaf somewhere in the summer pinewoods and sent a great fire roaring through the dust-dry savanna. The birds would be the first to raise the alarm. Woodpecker and quail, songbird and turkey, start leaving in waves. The deer and the squirrels and the bobcats mark the exodus of the birds, then smell the smoke themselves. There is a panicked push for the river, and those animals too slow or too confused or too hampered by young to make the crossing are forced into the dome swamp while others burn dead. The briers catch fire in a uniform burst and form one great ring of solid flame around the swamp. When the blaze reaches the water it sizzles and hisses and the animals seeking refuge within crowd closer still—deer and panther, range stock and bear—they all watch together as burning leaves and needles come raining down. The fire kills the outer-edge tupelos but in the end dies out itself. After two days the forest cools and the exhausted and miserable and spared creatures emerge from the ash-crusted water, scattering back out into the smoking gray hellscape of the pine forest to once more hunt and be hunted by the other.

Check Skip Horack's schedule to catch one of his readings or appearances this fall. Copies of The Eden Hunter are available for pre-ordering here.

[Read more A Tribute to the Gulf Coast]