Blue Laws & Black Water The Okefenokee

I left Macon, in Central Georgia; pastures and pines; hungry for sweet potato cakes and grits.

Neon-colored billboards on I-75 featured fresh pecans and adult erotica superstores. Somewhere between Macon and Valdosta, I stopped off to get a bite to eat. The restaurants were closed, so I dropped by the quik-mart.

A set of jars with a yellow-green liquid sat on a hotdog stand. Bottled inside were the grimy feet of pigs — pickled pig's feet. A whole refrigerated display of Vanilla Coke, Frito-Lay chips, Nut'N'Butter, Squeeze-Cheese. There were some refrigerator magnets and maps of Georgia. I was hungry, but I couldn't eat like this. I picked up a package of Lunchables and shook it. I put it down, and left.

The next morning, I woke in the Gator Motel and left my hotel fee under the lamp, in dollar bills. Across the street at the market, I relented to three packages of Lunchables, several gallons of water, and a beer.

"It's Sunday," the clerk said. "No beer on Sunday."

I found that ridiculous. A twenty-four ounce of Pabst is the perfect nightcap after long hours on the swamp. Eyes peered at me from every corner of the market, as if I had done something wrong. An Atlanta woman heard the exchange and said, "Ain't from Jawjuh are ya?" I knew she had faked her accent; the sounds of Atlanta mimic the sound of America.

I told her that I thought this was the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard. She told me her life story. We parted ways.

There is nothing in the Bible that says you shouldn't have a beer on Sunday. Jesus worshipped with wine. Beer was around for thousands of years before Jesus. A Sumerian goddess with a beautiful name, Ninkasi, was even named the goddess of beer.

Some beer historians like to argue that the Bible’s “strong drink,” shekar in Hebrew, often meant beer, and the Bible does speak of “wine and strong drink” in the same breath.

At Cana, though, the Greek is plain: water into wine. Jesus was no brewmeister. But beer was there all along, and nobody in the Bible is told to put it away on the Sabbath.

Blue Laws and Rebel Flags

The Georgia blue law against selling beer on Sunday is older than the state itself; Sunday laws came over with the colonists, designed to keep people focused on Sunday worship, and they would later help fuel the slow march towards prohibition. Georgia held on to its version longer than most, and refused to give up on an embarrassing chapter of its history. (It finally let towns and counties vote on Sunday sales in 2011.)

A young woman walked in the market. Her t-shirt said, "Don't Mess with My Rebel Flag." She was barefoot.
"Havin't got any of the sticky ones?", she said from the sweets aisle.
"Honey, they ain't here yet," the clerk said.

There is a certain shock in seeing an allegiance to the Old South. To me, the 'war of Northern aggression' was an embarrassing chapter in Southern history; a time without grace and of needless death. There was no intellectualism, no romance. Why did some in the Deep South hold pride in something so shallow when they could rally around their greatest moments? What was the fascination with the Confederacy when the South's past was literally a goldmine of heroes?

I always thought Southerners ought to pick up that cornerstone of Southern history, the Louisiana Purchase — that time when Americans bargained their way through the dual threats of Spain and France nipping at the South's door; the result of which united the States as a continental power; setting Lewis and Clark on a scientific fact-finding mission across the unknown.

Chickens Are Just Flying Iguanas

The market was also the social center of town. Loiterers were slumped in chairs that looked about to collapse. One gentleman, his hands filthy with dirt, his face too, showed his teeth at me.

I asked him if people ate 'gator' here, but that was an icebreaker. I was curious about the myths and realities of Southern Georgians' apparent preference for game meat, sometimes called roadkill. He snickered at the questions, like he was hiding something. "Some eat snakes," he said. "Some eat armadillas. I can vouch for gator. Tastes lahk chicken. Yont'ny?"

You know why they say everything unusual tastes like chicken? Because when they are talking about unusual, they are usually talking about reptiles — gators and snakes. Alligator does taste like chicken, and from an evolutionary point of view, that’s no accident: birds are what’s left of the dinosaurs, and crocodilians are their closest living relatives. Chickens are just feathered dinosaurs, really. Rattlesnake and iguana are more distant cousins, but still in the family, more or less.

"And every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth shall be an abomination; it shall not be eaten. Whatsoever goeth upon the belly, and whatsoever goeth upon all four, or whatsoever hath more feet among all creeping things that creep upon the earth, them ye shall not eat..." — Leviticus 11:41–42

You couldn't say that possum tastes like chicken, nor armadillo or catfish. But in southern Georgia, I became fascinated with that myth about backcountry southerners and roadkill. I continued with my questions along the route to the islands; I was so fascinated with the response, I wanted to taste a marsupial dish — it was the ultimate southern dish of poverty.

There are hundreds of published recipes for possum. Some use dark beer, some whiskey. Another calls for Worcestershire sauce and Tabasco. One is so simple, it has kind of a raw elegance to it: one possum, salt and pepper, six large sweet potatoes.

"It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your dwellings, that ye eat neither fat nor blood." — Leviticus 3:17

The Bible could be taken as a warning against roadkill. If the fundamentalist majority of South Georgia (Protestants who read the Bible literally) approached the Jewish dietary laws with the same dogma they use to revise the laws of science, wouldn't they follow the Old Testament's recipes and notations on what to eat? Why does fundamentalism exert doctrinal exactitude only when it suits itself?

"And the fat of the beast that dieth of itself, and the fat of that which is torn with beasts, may be used in any other use: but ye shall in no wise eat of it." — Leviticus 7:24

Into the Black Water

I was happy to leave Fargo, on the road again. Just a wanderer in Dixieland, heading east. I had three packages of Lunchables, a beautiful Sunday morning, and a paddle. I tuned the radio to find something interesting. Too many stations, on this sunny edge of the swamp, played fundamentalist sermons, preachers hollering at the morning. I was relieved to find a country music and NASCAR racing station.

"...So what was it like when you first met Dale Earnhardt?"

"You know, I was really fright-uned at first. He can be real aggressive, you know. He wants to make you know who he is..."

When I stopped at the banks of the Okefenokee to register a canoe, a couple horn-honkers waved me down — the ladies from Atlanta. They had been tailing me since Fargo. "It'll be warm by tonight, but here's a beer."

They left me there with a cold Anchor Steam.

I slipped the canoe into the water, and a few minutes later, I would be gone. There can be nothing as pleasant as paddling through the black tannic waters of the Okefenokee.

I pushed off from the main channel — the Suwannee River, towards a place called Big Water, the enchanted heart of this giant peat bog. The water route is like a road — dressed in overhanging cypress, blooming lilies and Southern turtles. The alligators poked their heads from the water by the dozens, snorting like the night moans of cattle, and Spanish moss hung like tinsel for Halloween.

The décor of the Okefenokee is neither a moss, nor Spanish, but a peculiar species belonging to the new world plant family Bromeliaceae. It’s technically a bromeliad; more closely related to pineapples and those brilliant epiphytes that cling to the jungles of Central and South America.

Along the river's edge hung these evil-looking plants called hooded pitchers. Glands in their hoods create secretions that attract insects. A thin translucent 'window' under the hood gives the insect an impression of an escape route. Rather, it's a cover to fool the insect into entrapment; most likely causing it to fall down the trumpet throat and into the enzyme rich watery base of the plant.

After a few miles, the sun no longer made its way under the dense cypress — the darkest water in this cathedral-like passage to Big Water is choked with carnivorous bladderworts. When a small aquatic bug brushes the trigger hairs on one of the plant’s tiny bladders, the bladder snaps open, sucking the bugger in to be dissolved. When they produce stalks that shoot outward from the water to bloom, they give a spooky kind of structure to the swamp's mirrored surface.

A giant fishing spider sat on a tree; he could have been five inches across; a black mark on a tree just above the waterline. It takes isolation like this to see such a rich and odd biosystem. But the Okefenokee had almost been destroyed — first by a company that tried to drain it in the 1890s, then by loggers who took most of its old cypress. In 1937, the federal government made most of the swamp a national wildlife refuge, some six hundred square miles, and Georgia went on to protect hundreds of miles of saltwater marshes along its coast. Even so, the swamp isn’t safe. A few years ago, DuPont wanted to mine titanium along the ridge on its eastern edge, and only gave up after a long fight.

The fight would come back. In 2019 a company from Alabama, Twin Pines Minerals, proposed its own titanium mine on the same ridge, and for six years it looked like it might happen. In 2025, the Conservation Fund bought the land outright and the mine was dead. A year later, in July 2026, the Okefenokee became Georgia’s first UNESCO World Heritage Site, and the first national wildlife refuge in the country to get the designation.

But as I'm paddling here, other ranges of wetlands in Southern Florida and Louisiana are losing their level of protection — you could ask why? But degradation of habitat, balance, moderation and resource sustainability are all blurry abstractions if your voting public's views on environmentalism have been framed by the quest of the creation scientists — those fundamentalists who preach against science to millions.

If you paint a religious map of the South, shading every county where more than half the churchgoers belong to Southern Baptist and related conventions, almost every county takes their color. So why do fundamentalist conventions forget about the important biblical stuff, like their own diet, and instead concentrate on the fruitless attempts to debunk natural selection?

Stuckie the Mummified Dog

It was a great question, and I was on the long road to Waycross, to find out part of the answer. I met two guys sitting in the shade — one guy must have been fifteen or so, he wore overalls. His partner (it turns out they ferried tourists into the swamp by skiff) was elderly and wore a cap. They invited me into their argument, which was about riding lawn-mowers. The elder said that the riding lawnmower existed 'way before the car.'

"Eighteen-eighty-four, ahh believe," he said.
"Jus'nit possible," the younger said, "motors were invented for the cah."
"Oh, not motorized. It was lahk a bahk. You rode it aruhnd lahk a bahcicle."

I enjoyed the slowness of their banter; the young guy could have been paddling a raft invented by Mark Twain — their accents weren't awful at all, like they're always depicted — but pleasant and rolling, like a blues song from long ago. I told them I was going to visit Waycross, where I wanted to see a petrified dog. The old man laughed at this, and said, "marvelous!"

Somewhere in the south Georgia woods, loggers cutting a chestnut oak found a hound dog wedged in the tree. Probably, around 1960, he had chased some southern cuisine — possum, squirrel, raccoon — up into the tree’s hollowed trunk and got stuck.

In a rare display of nature’s work, he didn’t rot. The hollow trunk worked like a chimney, drawing air up and away from him, and the tannins in the oak dried him out like leather. He wasn’t petrified at all; he was mummified. He, and the section of tree, were hauled off to Waycross, Georgia, to go on exhibit at the local forestry museum. In 2002, the museum held a contest to name him. The winner was “Stuckey,” which the museum spelled “Stuckie,” and the name stuck.

Southern creation-scientists use Stuckie as proof that God created the world just a few thousand years ago. One writes, "(we) are often taught that it takes millions of years for things to petrify," but Stuckie, among other evidence, such as a "mummified cowboy hat" and a "fossilized fish giving birth" provide ample evidence that "petrification can take place instantly." And thus, naturally, dinosaurs must have roamed the Earth within the last six thousand years. Never mind that Stuckie isn’t stone at all, but dried-out dog.

I wanted to find out more about how Stuckie the Dog had influenced the creationist scientific movement, so I called the Creation Science Evangelism Institute's science experts and asked what they thought about Stuckie.

Although willing to chat, they refused to answer my gentle questions — a closed-door approach that reminded me of my interviews with stumbling Taliban-sympathizers in 2001.

Everything Fried in Brunswick

The road to Brunswick is lined by vast coastal wetlands. Georgia, awash in wetlands, was one of the first states to recognize their ecological importance. As far as I can see, these miles and miles of water and brush are protected by the state.

Brunswick is lines of fast food chains; it is a port town and a stopover point for tourists on their way to Florida. It is gray streets, broken-down hotels, freight cranes and litter.

Still, a place called Captain Jack's had food, and I was hungry. Perhaps some steamed clams? I was the only customer; the carpets were rotting, I could feel the springs in the seats. The waitress, it was just her and me, was popping bubble gum. I thought I’d make small talk, but she wasn’t having it.

Since it all seemed fried, I asked what to order. "The sampler seafood plate," she said, staring out the window. The plate was filled with fried fish — fried catfish, fried shrimp, fried oysters, fried crab claws. It all tasted the same. "Which one is the oysters?" I asked.

A gruff-looking customer and two girls walked in and took seats. The seat made a noise, and he stood up to feel the seat. Then he asked for a beer.
"No beer, sir," the waitress said.

He looked angry. I snickered and made a comment. I said I was on my way to a tradeshow. He said he was a sports writer from Florida. We introduced ourselves from across our tables. I asked, "How many ways can you write about a team winning and a team losing?"

He didn't answer, but explained that he did travel writing on the side and was on his way to Savannah to do a story about the coastal town. I noticed the tears in his collar and shirtsleeves, the poor writer. I imagined him with his pen, "Savannah is a city rich in history, Southern charm and old-fashioned hospitality. Our hotel was beautiful."

He told me the glamour of travel writing; how he could get a free hotel stay in exchange for an article. I told him that was a great way to open his daughters' eyes up to the world. He patted them on the head and said, "this fish is awful!"

"Where is all the southern food?" I asked.
"Oh, you have to look for it," he said. And after a pause, "The truth is, it's not very popular anymore. The shops are closing up. People want hamburgers, you know." Along the way, I got more of the same. An Alabama man would later tell me that "the young folks, you know, they want Applebee's."

I woke early next morning to drive across the bridge to Jekyll Island to take a walk in its overgrown interior. Since the pathways had flooded with spring rain, it seemed nobody had walked through the towering oaks for weeks. I came out the other end, crossed a street and found my way to the white sand beach of the Atlantic coast. I sat down and wrote for hours in my journal. So many days without email or phone gave me some kind of sense of priority. I busied myself on that beach with the affairs of home. Then I got hungry. I hear they have great crawfish in Savannah.