Sketches of Overlooked America V. 5
Munksville Shores, FL
Nessy Johnston was born in Munksville Shores and has lived there all but seven of her sixty-eight years. Still spry, Ms. Johnston organizes Tri for Munksville, an Olympic distance triathlon, the first Saturday each April. This will be its twelfth running. At 6:45 AM Ms. Johnston emerges from the Gulf of Mexico clad in speed suit and swim cap. She lifts her goggles from her face and stretches her neck with a tilt of her head in either direction. The morning over the gulf is grey and the din of insect life can be heard over the knee-high shore break. In the distance an oil tanker slides across the southern horizon.
In the wake of the 1855 scandal of Munksville Pier Ms. Johnston’s great great grandfather, Ebenezer Johnston was fired from his position as party chair of the now-defunct Know-Nothing Party. Ms. Johnston produces a party program from the year 1856 and points out the party’s nominee for president, Millard Fillmore. A clandestine meeting between President Fillmore and Mr. Johnston in August of that year took place at the end of the town pier over a shared peach pie. A disagreement ensued at some point in the discussion between President and Party chair, and the meeting came to an abrupt end; President Fillmore removing pie from his face and the Party Chair under an uncomfortable pile of Secret Service. This imbroglio notwithstanding, Mr. Johnston’s party would still back the President in the election of 1856.
Aberdeen Wilson is twenty-one years old and is the wealthiest resident of Munksville Shores. Ms. Wilson was a child prodigy at the piano and in mathematics. She is also the youngest and only surviving member of the family business, Wilson Marmalade, INC. Ms. Wilson lives in her ancestral home, an imposing Victorian overlooking the sea. The house was flooded during hurricane Myrtle in 1962, and has subsequently undergone four total renovations, the latest at the behest of the current scion of the marmalade fortune. Ms. Wilson has won Tri for Munksville four times, three times as first female, and once overall. The race is won, she says, on the run. While formidable in all three disciplines, she has made the 10k run her strongpoint. She runs the actual race route twice per week, usually on the days she volunteers at the Shady Arms community home. At Shady Arms she sits down at a well-loved Baldwin upright grand and favors the residents with selections from her repertoire, which is expansive. Music, she notes, can evoke memories that otherwise lay dormant in the failing minds of the aged.
The Shady Arms sits on the bank of the Santa Ynez River, thus named; it is said, by the Spanish Explorer Juan Quesada in 1599 after his grandmother Ynez, who was granted sainthood by Pope Innocent IX. The river has its headwaters in Chickamauga Lake, and somewhere beyond that in the Appalachians. At its mouth the river flows languid, still as the spring afternoon. Alligators lounge on the banks, warming their blood, practiced in the art of ignoring most human provocation. In the thirty-seven years that the Shady Arms has been in operation there has only been one fatal encounter between resident and gator — a record the institution holds in high regard.
The population of Munksville Shores has an average age of 64. A town of dying industries, those who remain are comprised in large measure of those who have always been residents, whose parents and grand parents and great-great grandparents dipped their toes in the surf of the gulf, who fished the brackish waters of the Santa Ynez and those who, now residents of the Shady Arms were once the contractors and engineers who built it.
Ames Martens owns and operates Fillmore’s Bakery and Pastry Shop, which is situated off 2nd Ave in downtown Munksville Shores. The Patisserie is one of several businesses in town which have played off of the infamous meeting between Mr. Johnston and President Fillmore over the past 160 years. In Mr. Martens shop the peach pie is a favorite and owns a prominent position on the menu board. Mr. Martens provides slices of pie at the finish of Tri for Munksville and will claim that his is the most important job in the organization of the race.
On a lot adjacent to Ms. Wilson’s home is a greenhouse. The owner of the land and the attendant structure is an LLC registered in Grand Cayman. Inside the greenhouse are a variety of plants and flowers which have been outlawed as non-native invasive species by the Department of Agriculture. The greenhouse is rumored to contain the only Silversword outside the slopes of Haleakala. Valery Chevalier tends to the contents of the greenhouse, which have thus far eluded the interest of law enforcement. Though Ms. Chevalier has overseen the ostensibly illegal gardening operation for three years, when asked about the owners of the plot or the specific contents thereof, Ms. Chevalier has always responded by saying that she knows nothing.
Inland, three miles up the Santa Ynez is Branklin’s Marine Salvage. The yard is adjacent to a boat ramp leading from the dirt road at the edge of the Branklin property down into the river. The concrete that once existed has broken down into oatmeal colored lumps mixed in with the iron-rich soil. Two hundred yards upriver sits the Branklins salvage vessel, the Leggy Dame, New Orleans, LA, subtitled: Proverbs 21:9. The vessel is stout in the water, equipped with a crane that extends ten feet off the deck and is painted yellow. Lanny Branklin is as stout as his salvage ship and has fingers that are the circumference of a roll of quarters. He lives on site and claims to have recovered over 71 vessels in various stages of damage or submersion. For his troubles Mr. Branklin has been well compensated, but chooses to remain inland, on his property. The yard of Branklin’s lies beyond fencing and razor wire. There on lifts are the hulls of eight vessels in varying degrees of disrepair. Mr. Branklin is in the process of repairing two and trying to sell the other six. In the far corner of his salvage yard is a garden box full of sunflowers. Mr. Branklin keeps them in memory of his wife who died four years ago of sarcomatoid renal cancer. After his wife’s passing Mr. Branklin was in poor health and dealing with the depression that attends the death of a spouse. Nessy Johnston invited Mr. Branklin to help with Tri for Munksville, and then to participate. Two years ago, Branklin’s Salvage served as a title sponsor of the event, and this year, for the first time, Lanny Branklin will toe the line.
