Still I find it a strange behaviour, for someone to stand outside my latest choice of temporary peripatetic abode – be that a nylon tent or a motel room – and to carry on an intimate conversation. It’s as if my lack of a visible presence has rendered my audio faculties null and void. Out of sight; ergo out of mind. “..there’s nothin’ out here, absolutely nothin’….”. The gent in question carries on in a similar vein as I try, unsuccessfully, to tune out the invasion.

“Nothin’ here”.  It would appear that he’s not alone in the sentiment.  This stretch of Gulf shoreline is marketed as ‘Florida’s Forgotten Coast’.  From estate agent to boat hirer, steamed shrimp seller to house frame builder, all purloin, all make a play on the name.

A series of sea spits, barrier islands of low lying sand dunes covered by saw palmetto, sable palm and Dynasty homes. The sloughs between the sand waves are flooded marshes of black tannins, ponds of indeterminate depths. Crossing a lagoon on one of the low causeways, shrouded in a luminous opaque world of morning fog, bald eagle roosts on a pole. Another time, passing over a bayou, looking down into the depths, to see two ghostly grey forms.  One breaches to take on air, then slowly subsides; manatees, grazing seacows.  White herons stealth-stalk the reed fringes, a crane struggles to swallow a giant frog, an osprey plunge-dives on a slack body of water.

It’s not just the Natural History Channel that’s “nothin’ out here”, the establishment at which we’re the recipients of  the above unwanted conversation, is one of a few motels sitting alongside a corpulent cordage of marina real estate.  We’ve already passed the court house, the hardware store, the grocery market, the gas stations and what is claimed by the City of Carrabella (pop: 2778), as the ‘World’s Smallest Police Station’.
It’s only later that I determine that: 1. my correspondent is being required to relocate from the North to Atlanta, and 2. his definition of remote is measured by the miles to a McDonald’s (forty).  Which also explains why I later discover that this stretch of Gulf is also disparagingly known as the ‘Redneck Riviera’.