Ted Smallwoods Store, now a museum.
At the risk of being cliché, as Thomas Wolf once wrote, you can’t go home again and on my most recent trip to South Florida I found out what he meant. When I was young my father would take me fishing in the Everglades. We stayed on a little island that could be reached by a causeway from Everglades City. Chokoloskee Island was base camp for many three-day weekends fishing trips for Snook, Tarpon and Red Fish with my Dad. On these trips we stayed at the Blue Heron Motel and ate at Jane’s Place. It was at Jane’s Place I had my first Mt. Dew. Next to the Blue Heron Motel was a dry dock that was owned by a fishing guide named Mr. Bogas. The motel was owned my A. C. Hancock, who was also a fishing guide and his wife ran the motel. Hancock’s wife was the daughter of the long time island resident, Ted Smallwood. Smallwood owned a store that was build on stilts and held court there until the day he died. As a boy, after a day of fishing, I would go over to the store and would be greeted gruffly by Smallwood, who at the time was elderly. I have some very fond memories of the people who were part of the Blue Heron Motel on Chokoloskee Island.
I enjoyed the time that I spent fishing but mostly the time with my Dad. He took enough pride in my skills as a fisherman to include me in the Chokoloskee trips he took with his adult friends. In time, I learned to handle our boat, and navigate the islands and rivers. Recently I read Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, and he talked about how the riverboat pilot “read the river” knowing how to see the variations in the water to tell the difference between sandbars and deep water. I too learned how to read the water of the Gulf of Mexico so I could avoid the oyster bars, shallow flats and find the best fishing places because the tide was moving water through a certain area. I was in the company of men, and while I was just a kid, here I was considered one of them.
On this latest trip I went to take some photographs and was dismayed to see that the Blue Heron Motel was reduced to rubble. There was little to remind me of the dock where we put in our boat, the shack where we bought cokes and sandwiches, and the motel. The dry dock was also gone, Mr. Bogas having died many years before and had no one to leave it to. The only thing left was Ted Smallwood’s store that has since been turned into a museum. Gone is where the stone crab fishermen would bring their crabs and we would buy them almost as they were coming off the boat. This made for a most wonderful dinner in the room. Gone was Jane’s Place, the restaurant, where we would have dinner when the stone crab was not in season. It was a gathering place for all the local people and would from time to time become pretty ruckus, as it was the only place where a drink could be served. The owner once said to my father that he did not have to worry about it getting too bad until the walls began to breath. To this day I am not sure what he meant.
It was sad for me to see what is gone and what has changed. Chokoloskee has lost something of what I enjoyed most about it as a kid. The characters, the roughness of the place, and where a kid was treated on equal ground with an adult if he could pull his weight, and the time I spent with my Dad. But I have the pictures. I have the photos that my Dad took all those years ago. I have a photo of Jane’s Place that I took when I was last there in 1996 and I have the photo of the Smallwood store that I took today. They will help me remember a defining time from my youth.
RICK LANG photography 