“About 100 law enforcement agents and others spent days scouring dense vines and marshes around the baby’s home in a remote, makeshift community of dirt roads, tin-roof shacks and old mobile homes.”
Read the whole thing, the story gets weirder and weirder (the missing child from 1987 was NEVER FOUND??) Chipley is about an hour from Tallahassee near the Alabama and Georgia borders, smack in the middle of a vast stretch of the Florida panhandle that cannot be driven through without “Dueling Banjos” from Deliverance going through one’s head (and usually hummed aloud, even though it’s such a cliche as to be always embarrassing to hum aloud — the scenery simply demands it.) It’s an intensely depressing, remote dead zone (cellphone and otherwise) where the only industry seems to be state prisons, designated by miles of roadside razor wire and out-of-place-looking guard towers rising above the pine trees. When I think of Chipley (and surrounding areas), I think of winding, stagnant rivers of dark brown tannin-ed water and a foreboding sense of decay — paradoxical, since it for all appearances, nothing ever grew there in the first place. The tiny towns are disturbingly segregated (often on a town-by-town basis), the schools failing, and many homes don’t have phones, electricity, or automobiles. The automatic assumption, driving through in 2009, is that this area has been ravaged by meth or something, and maybe it has, but it was ravaged by something else first. It seems like it’s always been the way it is now. It’s this huge part of Florida that nobody even knows about. There’s an unusual local accent/dialect, (which I can “do,” though “lapse into” is a better way of putting it), that I guarantee you have never heard on TV or in movies, which for some reason seem to give all Southern characters an upper-class Raleigh or Atlanta accent. (I can think of exactly two exceptions right now, neither of which are Florida panhandle but are at least closer: Edie Falco in Sunshine State and Mary Kay Place in Sweet Home Alabama.)
Anyway, I’m a little bit over-obsessed with the Florida panhandle, I guess, but if you’re a laid-off person with a gift for photography and a curiosity about forgotten corners of America, get your ass down to Chipley, basically.
3 days ago
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