Roatan Island, Honduras

The Graying American Frontier

by Alec Newell

Central to the notion of what it is to be an American, is the concept of the Great American Frontier.  It is an ever changing place that is always  just beyond the familiar confines of where we are, and it always offers the limitless possibilities of what we could become in a new place.  For each generation of Americans that destination has come to mean something a little different, but for a growing number of retiring American Baby Boomers, the face of the Great American Frontier is looking a lot like Central America.  I was almost one of them.

Alligator Nose at Roatan's East End - photo by Newell


 

When I bought my house in Mayport for the princely sum of $15,000 in 1976, I remember my new neighbor, David Torrible commenting to me, "You must have wanted to come to Mayport awful bad to pay money like that for your house."  I was a little taken aback.  I had been living in a garage apartment a block and a half off the ocean in Neptune Beach, for $75.00 a month (utilities included), but the country had been in an escalating real estate bubble.  The house where I had been renting, had changed hands three times in as many years and each time it had, the rent for all the other tenants had gone up.  It was just a matter of time before mine would too.  The price of everything was going up, and two things were becoming very clear to me:   a.)  I could not afford to buy a house, and b.) I couldn't afford not to.  In a few short years the country would see mortgage interest rates  climb from less than 9 percent to more than 18 percent, and the house in Mayport had seemed, at least to me, to be a stroke of great luck at the time.

Thirty years later, the mortgage had been paid off, the estimated value of the house had increased many times its original value and I knew I had done well;  but the country was in the middle of another real estate bubble, and there were rumors afoot that someone had plans to turn Mayport Village into a cruise ship terminal.  What the Villagers would soon discover was that the Jacksonville Port Authority had quietly devised a plan to buy up key sections of waterfront property, then acquire private homesteads by exercising "Eminent Domain" laws, as the  residential property values in the village fell.  The net result would be to displace homeowners who would then have to relocate to new addresses in a rising housing market.  By 2008 the Jacksonville Port Authority had acquired most of the targeted waterfront parcels, and seemed to be well on its way to paving over Mayport Village and its 450 year old historical legacy.

America, love it or leave it.  The more I thought about what the Jacksonville Port Authority was doing, the madder I got.  Coincidently, my wife happened to bump into a former student, who knew about some cheap property for sale in Honduras.  What followed was a three or four year long installment of House Hunters International that included a 2400 kilometer, week long trek through Panama, and three or four trips down to Honduras, the original banana republic.  What we found were endless colonies of retired American expats who had bought property in Central America, sold their homes back in the States, and were having their Social Security and retirement checks forwarded to their Central American bank accounts.  They were living pura vida or "the good life" in exotic destinations that in many ways, bore an eerily resemblance to the Sun Belt communities that their parents or grandparents had escaped to a generation or two before.

The Bay Islands lie just off the Northern Coast of Honduras.  They boast the second largest barrier reef on the planet, and they are a favorite destination for scuba divers from all over the globe.  The plants, animals and terrain are exotic, beautiful, and diverse.  The fishing is excellent.  Columbus visited the Bay Islands on his fourth voyage to the New World in 1502.  Near the island of Guanaha, he had encountered native islanders paddling seagoing cayugas (canoes) fashioned from single giant logs.  There are still some of them around that were made as late as the 1940's and 50's that are still being used as fishing boats by some Islanders.  American playwright Eugene O'Neill had come to Honduras in 1910, as a young man to look for gold, and  William Sydney Porter (aka O Henry) had escaped to Honduras in 1896, running from the law.  He wrote a very memorable a collection of short stories called Cabbages and Kings from his experiences there.
 

 

Banana Republicans near Roatan's Airport 

 

 

On the East End of Roatan, largest of the three Bay Islands,  is Port Royal.  It is a place of desolate beaches where iguanas sun themselves on the stone foundations of ruined colonial forts , and vines cover lost relics from buccaneer settlements.  Just off the beach at Port Royal, within easy rowing distance,  is Careening Kay which bears no human habitation.  It still looks pretty much as it did in the 17th Century, when Captain Henry Morgan used it as a place to beach and repair the hulls of pirate ships.  The West End of the Island caters to tourists and is populated with family owned restaurants, bars, dive shops, and the kind of one and two story barefoot walk-up hotels that travel agents love to feature in their brochures.

 

Relaxed Building Codes for Native Islanders - photo by Newell

The first wave of 20th Century Gringo Expats to take up permanent residence in the Bay Islands was a gritty, self reliant, quirky collection of lassie faire entrepreneurs, adventurers, and criminals who could operate quite comfortably in a culture where anything and everything was OK if you had the money or the influence enough to make it happen.  More recently arrived pilgrims tend to be retired or disenchanted refugees from an American economy and culture in a state of  decline.  They are looking for a new place to either reinvent their lives, or at least to live out their final years in a place where their devalued nest eggs can still buy them some measure of ease and comfort.  Many of them have opted for gated communities with private security guards where they can still celebrate Independence Day with fireworks, beer, and watermelons, or attend rum soaked Karaoke nights, play golf, shop at the new mall, and eat at the fast food restaurants that are popping up all over the island.  What most of them have failed to take into account is that while they may have managed to escape the economic decline in the culture they've left behind, it is all but impossible to escape from the cultural baggage that the new pilgrims have brought with them.

 

Turquoise Bay Roatan -  photo by Newell

If you are looking for a beautifully landscaped 3/4 acre home site lot with fruit trees, an ocean view, beach and boat waterfront access, in a friendly close knit American expat community, on an island paradise in the scenic Caribbean,  I know of one that is currently listed for a mere fraction of its original purchase price,  contact: alecnewell@gmail.com

 

Smoked Mullet

Smoked Mullet: A Mayport Thanksgiving Tradition

 by

Alec Newell


Mayport Village 1950's-60's, courtesy of Sandra Tuttle

 

Thanksgiving Day signals the kick-off of the Holiday Season, with roots and traditions that stretch back to the Autumn of 1621, when the Massachusetts Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians met for a communal feast  to celebrate that year's Fall harvest.  For most Americans a turkey dinner has become the centerpiece of that tradition, but what many Americans do not know,  is that the first Protestant European Thanksgiving celebration in the New World occurred in 1564 near Mayport, 57 yr. before the Pilgrims,  and it is also very likely that smoked mullet was on the menu.

 

 Drawing by Jacques Le Moyne 1564, near Mayport.

Centuries before Laudonniere's French Huguenot Colony was established at Ft. Caroline,   Timucuan Indians had been harvesting the vast schools of mullet that migrate north along the St. John's River every year on their way to the Atlantic Ocean to spawn.  From Jacques Le Moyne,  Laudonniere's writer and artist, we have illustrations of native fish weirs for catching, and wood frame racks for smoking the fish.  The Timucuan word for these racks was buccan and barabicu.  The French adopted the word buccan, which becomes first boucane, then boucanier, a word used to describe European castaways or escaped sailors who foraged along remote beaches and cooked over crude open fires. The word has come down to us as "buccaneer."  The word barbacoa or barabicu, has survived pretty much unchanged as "barbecue," and thus the tradition continues.  To the villagers of Mayport, smoked mullet is as much a Thanksgiving tradition as  the turkey, which is also frequently served smoked.

 

 Robert Thomas at the Little Jetties, Sandra Tuttle

 

Before the ban on seine nets for commercial mullet fishing in 1996, Mayport  fishermen would camp out at the Little Jetties, often in very cold weather, and wait for the mullet to show.  Sometimes fishermen would build rude temporary structures of old railroad ties and tarps to break the wind.  To help ward off the cold, there was also usually a bond fire and whiskey. The season would run from about the first week in November, until just before Christmas.  Seine nets would lie piled up in flat bottom wooden boats called "bateaus" (emphasis in the first syllable), and  the boats sat on the beach until a school of fish was sighted.   The old boats were equipped with oar locks and rowed, later models  had "kicker wells" built into the middle of the boat that were designed to keep the two stroke outboard motor from fouling the nets.

Bateau 1950's-60's, Sandra Tuttle



When a school of mullet was sighted, a boat was launched, and the net was payed out to circle the school, then hauled back to the beach to pick out the fish.  There was usually an old baby scale on the beach so that passing motorists could pick out and weigh, their own fish from the net for the retail price of  25 cents a pound.  The rest of the fish were piled into a rusty pickup truck or  van and sold for much less at the local fish house.  It was said of one fish house owner, "When it comes to the benefit of the doubt, he gets the benefit, and you get the doubt."  It was not a job for wimps.

 

 

Little Jetties 1950's-60's, Sandra Tuttle

 



When the net bans went into effect, mullet fishing began to change.  Almost overnight, there was a demand for oversized, custom made cast nets that couldn't be bought in stores.  That niche market was pioneered by Mayport's own Joseph C. Brown, or "Mr. Brownie."   He is now well into his 90's, and is, I believe, still making, modifying, and repairing his specialty "Brownie nets."  Pickup trucks parked alongside his Palmer Street fence line in November, is a sure sign that the season is on.
 

The old wooden bateaus have been gradually replaced by mass produced, wide bottomed, fiberglass boats with the center console moved forward.  They are equipped with electronic bottom finders that can locate fish schools in deep or choppy water.  The new boats are called "bow riders" because they allow the helmsman to operate the boat from a standing position in the bow of the boat to spot fish more easily. One man runs the boat with an eye on the bottom finder, the other man helps to spot surface schools, and throws the cast net.  Today's mullet fishermen have nicer boats, better trailers, new electronics, and drive nicer trucks, but when you're throwing nets with an average radius of ten to fourteen feet, and weigh up to 35 pounds, it's still no job for wimps.

 

Bow Rider 11/2013, by Newell

 



There is only one big fish house in Mayport now, Safe Harbor, and they don't deal much in mullet  anymore.  Most of the buyers are seasonal truckers who are really only interested in buying female, or "red roe mullet" which they truck to a processer in Tampa, to harvest the yellow egg sacs for which there is a big demand in Asian markets.  The males, or "white roe mullet," bring fishermen only a small fraction of the price paid for the females, but are actually preferred now for smoking, because they are smaller and cheaper.  Catching, cleaning, and smoking mullet is still mostly done by hand.  It is a  labor  intensive process and the product is not usually sold in grocery stores.   When compared to factory processed sardines, kippered herring, or canned salmon, smoked mullet is a rare and exotic delicacy that makes for great holiday snacking. 



The Recipe

 

 11/2013 by Newell

Hickory nuts ripen and fall just before the annual mullet run at Mayport every November .  In the years before there was refrigeration, salt and smoking was the best way preserve meat or large catches of fish, and with the hickory nuts just laying around on the ground,  smoking mullet with hickory nuts was a practical and delicious no brainer.  It still is, but any kind of hardwood will work.  Fallen oak trees or broken shipping pallets, usually made of white oak, are passable substitutes and  easy to find, if you don't have access to a hickory tree.

 

 White Roe Mullet, 11/2013 by Newell



The most important thing to remember is to use the freshest fish you can find and keep them well iced until just before you lay them on the smoker.  Mullet is an oily fish that offers a perfect medium to absorb the sweet smoke, but the fatter they are, the more quickly they spoil. They should go from the net to the ice chest and die of hypothermia.  Lay them flat, then let them firm up from the ice before you split them.  To save time, leave the backbone in one side of the fish.  Scrape the excess fat and black membrane from the gut sac.  You want a cold fish and a sharp knife for the work.  Leave the skin and scales on your fillets, they will insulate the meat and keep it from sticking to the grill.  If you are cleaning a large quantity of fish, use an electric knife and remove the heads and tails, you don't need to waste grill space smoking parts of the fish you can't eat.  This part of the job is messy, so keep a water bucket handy to rewash your fillets before repacking them in ice.  At this point you can brine your fish over night  in ice,  or just shake salt and powdered cayenne pepper on them just before they hit the grill.  For purely a Minorcan style option, skip the cayenne, and just dress the smoked fish with datil pepper sauce when the fillets have cooled.



 

 11/2013, by Newell

 

The cooking temperature in your smoking chamber should between 220 and 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Cooking time is appx. two hours per rack of fish.  When the filets begin to firm up, carefully lift them from the grill and onto clean newspaper to cool and drain.  Presoak all of your hardwood or hickory nuts before putting them in the firebox, and keep a bucket of water or a hose handy to extinguish any flame ups.  You can use a bed of hot charcoal in your firebox to get started.  Add hardwood as needed, but don't use any fire accelerants after the cooking starts.

 

 

Happy Holidays!

Them Good Ole Days: Ed Smith

Them Good Ole Days: The Next Generation

by Alec Newell
  

It has been almost forty years now since I walked into Silver's Drug Store at the corner of Atlantic Blvd. and First Street where I saw a stack of signed copies of Ed Smith's newly published THEM GOOD OLE DAYS in Mayport and the Beaches, sitting on the counter, and handed Ester the front cashier, $5.95 for my copy.  The dust jacket on that copy, with the old Mayport Lighthouse pictured on the front, is now worn, torn, and faded; but Ed's anecdotal history of this area should be required reading for anyone who identifies them self as a Beaches resident.

With a grandson who has just entered Fletcher Sr. High School, and a wife who is about to wind up a 30 something year teaching career there, it occurred to me that there were already generations of Fletcher grads who were oblivious to the spring tradition of Fletcher coaches marching the boys in their gym classes the four blocks to the beach to swim in the Atlantic Ocean for phys. ed.; or that there were thousands of Beaches residents who have no memories at all of landmarks like the Atlantic Beach Hotel, Campbell's Pharmacy, Hixson's Surf Shop, Silver's Drug Store, or Ed Smith's Lumber and Hardware Store.

On a recent reread of Ed's book, my eyes were opened to the vast body of Beaches lore which was still waiting to be written.  Anyone lucky enough to have grown up at the Beach, or to have lived here for any length of time, has already been a part of Beaches history; and for each generation living them, these are the good ole days.

With an appreciative nod to Ed Smith's contributions, and in the hope that I continue the tradition by forging another link in the chain, there are a few snippets of lore that I'd like to add before they are forgotten and lost to future generations

 

Ed Smith 1903-1979