The Book Tour Episode Eighteen: Panama City, Pelicans, and Jim Bikeman

  

A winter morning in Panama City, and the temperature is hovering at around 90. I pass a pawn shop where a mink coat is for sale for $229. Mink?

“I’m originally from Mississippi,” says an American flag woman apropos of nothing: flag on the front of her t-shirt, flag on her baseball cap, flag trousers. In her arm is a large plant. “I’m here in town to see my son. He’s off to Koo – ate. Now I live in the Keys.”

“I knew the Keys years ago,” I say, a trifle unsure. Is she referring to the Florida Keys? “Back in the 1950s, they were quite wild and beautiful.”

“Now that’s all ruined,” she says. “All them tourists.”

“And malls. And roads,” I add.

“Malls? We got some beautiful malls. It’s the crimes that’s bad. We people have to be armed these days against the criminals. I got a permit for a concealed weapon in my car. All my friends do. We’re all widows.”

“Doesn’t surprise me,” I say mildly.

“We have a great time.”

            Spanish explorers arrived here in the 1500s searching for gold, but there was none to be found. Hurricanes destroyed their colonies, and thanks to European-imported disease, there were too few natives round to be used for forced agricultural labor, therefore Florida remained a backwater. It was, however, a handy hidey-hole for pirates preying on ships traveling between Mexico and Spain, and they buried their treasure in the sandy beaches, then forgot to come back, or were killed off before they could: in the 1800s, there were still plenty of doubloons to be found.

The French arrived, built Fort Crevecoeur (broken heart), then left. The English settled, developed a thriving trade network with the local Chatot as well as Creeks pushed out of Alabama and Georgia by American settlers. After independence, the British departed, and American settlers decided that the native population was unnecessary. The natives naturally disagreed, and only after the long and violent Seminole Wars (1816 to 1868) were they evicted en masse and sent on to poverty and starvation in Oklahoma and Arkansas. Some managed to stay on, hiding in the forests, becoming trappers, farmers, and lumbermen: only recently have a few acknowledged their ancestry.

Panama City is now a modern holiday paradise and snowbird refuge, and condominiums, streets, restaurants, housing developments, and hotels all pay tribute to pelicans: Pelican Walk, Pelican’s Nest, Pelican Pointe, the Pelican Grill, the Pelican Ice Cream Bar, Pelican’s Peak. Pelicans are gregarious birds, traveling in flocks, hunting together, breeding in colonies, and nesting on the ground; and even enthusiastic tourist brochures cheerily encourage folks to go pelican sighting. What isn’t mentioned is the very rocky relationship between humans and these birds. Accused of competing with fishing, pelicans have been clubbed to death and shot by “sportsmen” from ship decks. Their eggs have been deliberately destroyed, and the young birds have been massacred. Feeding and nesting sites are degraded by water management schemes and wetland drainage, and in the 1950s and 1960s, DDT pollution was a major cause of decline. In Louisiana, the decrease in the pelican population was so drastic, 500 pelicans were imported from Florida: over 300 subsequently died from pesticide poisoning. In California in 1990 and 1991, 14,000 pelicans died perished from botulism or from eating fish contaminated with neurotoxic domoic acid, the result of environmental damage. Today’s threats include oil spills; fish hooks that are swallowed, caught in their skin and webbed feet; fishing lines that wind around their necks, feet, bills, and cause crippling, starvation, and death.

Once upon a time, where there are now condominiums, expensive homes, parking lots, and flashy hotels along the beach drive, there was a tiny private cemetery with the graves of John Clark (1766-1832), his wife Nancy (1874-1832), and several of their descendants. Clark, once governor of Georgia, had come here to protect the extensive oak forests used by the US navy for shipbuilding. But this was swampy mosquito-infested country, and in 1832, both Clark and his wife died of yellow fever. Their graves remained untouched for a hundred years until neighbors began complaining: they couldn’t sleep comfortably at night because they could hear haunted horses hooves clanking against the abandoned gravestones. The protests increased, and the Daughters of the American Revolution finally raised enough money to have the gravestones and coffins sent back to Georgia. However, when finally excavated, only coffin handles and one silver dime were found.

Most interestingly (for me) is Clark’s long-forgotten romance: In his younger days, he fell passionately in love with an orphan, a Miss Chivers. It was a bad choice: she was the sister-in-law of Jesse Mercer, a pastor, a fanatically religious born again Christian. Mercer disapproved of the match, but Clark defied him and eloped with his beloved. They rode for hours through a cold winter night looking for a preacher who would marry them (supposedly no one wanted to defy a man as influential as Mercer) until Miss Chivers took ill. The couple finally found refuge in a friend’s home, but it was too late: Miss Chivers died from pneumonia. Of course, Mercer held Clark responsible for her death.

I wander down Harrison Avenue, just another nondescript shopping street with the usual stores, and roaring traffic, but it was once lined with tall noble oaks. The local men despised these graceful giants, claiming they were a danger to cars and wagons, but the town ladies protested that they provided both beauty and shade, and rebelliously, mounted a guard to protect them. The men were not to be foiled: meeting secretly one night when the ladies were safely tucked away, they cut every single one down.

Some streets behind the city are still tree-lined and hint at a paradise lost: but a potentially lovely little stream stinks terribly and pushed under the tangled vegetation are Styrofoam cups, truck tires, used baby diapers, condoms, needles, and other horrors.

“Are you looking for a place to sleep?” asks a young, open-faced man in a cowboy hat. He has seen me poking around and decided I’m one of the homeless, about to cozy down.

“Well, you’ve missed the mission dinner,” says another. He’s wearing a baseball cap and pushing a bicycle with myriad sacks hanging from the handlebars and piled high with bundles, protest signs, a compass, large reflector light, and a small electric guitar, which he immediately unpacks to quietly serenade me. Of course, this is the one and only Jim Bikeman, local homeless celebrity, self-declared activist fighting police abuse, bad treatment of the homeless, and noise: His office is the local library where he reads up on things, learns all he can, checks his email, prepares to fight cases in court, and keeps up his website (https://dirtycopperstopper.com/). As he states in his, Poor Man’s Bill of Rights: I will at all times treat people in a manner that I would want to be treated and will expect that I will get treated just as harshly as I treat others, especially those who are harmless, homeless, financially poor, confused, and will never falsely arrest anybody out of hate, spite, power.

“Most people think I’m nuts, but here’s my main message.” He points to the sign strapped to the back of his bike: Be Nice.

 He’s right, of course. All we have to do is be as nice as possible. That doesn’t sound nuts to me.

More about my books and passionate life can be found at http://www.j-arleneculiner.com

and http://www.jill-culiner.com

and on my story podcast at https://soundcloud.com/j-arlene-culiner