The Birthplace of the Dangly Dingly

with my friend Phil on his 62nd birthday

You could easily get the wrong idea about my friend Phil. A woman in a campground once said he looks kind of creepy. It's true that his head pokes forward like a turtle's. It's true he hasn't had teeth of any kind since the 80s. It's true his face is tanned and wrinkled like a dried apple, with a deep scar across the nose. Some days his hip bothers him and he walks lopsided. Hell, he's even been cut up on the inside and burned with radiation to get the tumors out, and one of them is still in there. Life has beaten on him pretty hard, but if you could see him smile, you'd know there's a part of him that's been forged into a fine thing. And if you could hear him tell a story, you'd know he's grabbed life right back and squeezed the juice out of it.

We're going down the road in Phil's minivan that he's living in, making a tour around southern Florida to celebrate his 62nd birthday. Outside the windows are long stretches of palm trees, pines, and sugarcane fields. I'm riding shotgun and sewing up my mosquito netting, and he's telling stories and pointing out interesting things in the landscape: oak groves where a man might get some dry firewood, unusual motor homes, fishing spots, pull-offs that might conceal a vehicle overnight, radio towers and gantry cranes, town parks with shade trees and tasty drinking water, row crops, trailer parks that look nice to live in and ones that don't. But that's just what he notices on a country road; walk with him on a trail and he'll notice where the deer and raccoons have walked, where the hogs have rooted, a lone pine that's died for mysterious reasons, the construction details of a picnic shelter, a camouflaged lizard, a useful piece of trash, weeds with blossoms so tiny you could easily miss them but so pretty you're glad you didn't. In fact it might be hard to find a place where Phil wouldn't find something of interest. Being around him makes the ordinary come alive, from the blank spot on a map of Tennessee where he grew up, through his adventures as a janitor, logger, nurseryman, trucker, fence puller, tower builder, factory worker, carny, wildcrafter, moonshiner, shade tree mechanic, and junk juggler, right up to whatever remote spot he happens to be parked in today.

When Phil was growing up, they thought he might be too dumb to ever take care of himself. He couldn't seem to learn to read or write, and got held back in school so many times he was the only 7th grader with a driver's license. He played hooky as much as he could. But the way I see it, he was busy getting a different kind of education. He got the skill to spend a week or more camping way up a creek with his best friend, living off what they could fish and trap. He learned the wild plants that were good for food or medicine. He learned enough arithmetic to measure out corn for the hogs, and got strong as an ox from farm work. The older women figured he would never be able to get a wife, so they taught him to cook and sew. He developed a keen business sense and his "hillbilly math" is rarely off the mark. Like the illiterate ancients who could recite the Ramayana or the Iliad from memory, Phil has listened, remembered, and built himself a library in his head. But the books in that library aren't like most, full of speculations, accepted facts, and paper-thin abstractions. No, they're about how to thrive in this world, about the skills to harvest, build, repair, and repurpose, about where to find food, water, shelter, and fine weather, about how to do without this or that, and about the hard-earned wisdom of the elders. Phil could fix your car, build you a house, cook you biscuits, field dress a deer, prune your fruit trees, drop a snag, or find wild ginseng back in a holler. It's true he's not book smart, but he's the other kind, the kind that counts.

We drive south until we arrive on the island of Chokoloskee and follow the signs to the old Smallwood Store. We sit outside in the mangrove shade on folding chairs and eat our lunch from the back of the van. Then we pay our five dollars a piece to look inside. The teenager who takes our money is a direct descendant of the man who built the store back in 1906, and the place is now a museum filled with dusty old fixtures and merchandise. Phil recognizes a lot of it because, when he was growing up in the Tennessee hills in the 60s, people were still pulling wagons with mules, churning butter by hand, and preserving their crops without refrigeration. He points out the type of leather horse collar they used to turn into a comfortable outhouse seat when it wore out. We enjoy looking at hand cranked machinery, dusty old bottles, rattlesnake skins, gas lanterns, kerosene stoves, and a massive horn made from a conch shell. The breezy back porch perches high over the blue waters of the gulf. On our way out I remark that just spending time around old things is good for the soul, and Phil agrees.

Since Phil couldn't read about things in books, he had to go and see them with his own eyes. As soon as he came of age, he took off walking and made it up to Fargo, North Dakota, where the world was strange and different. Later on he came up with the hillbilly holiday, which he says is "selling everything you own except the vehicle you're driving and some clothes and head out." There was a whole country to discover outside Tennessee. He dangled his feet off the edge of the Grand Canyon, walked across the Hoover Dam, hugged General Sherman, and put both palms to the ground and felt the rumble of Old Faithful. One time when he lay down on the sidewalk to stare up open-mouthed at the mind-boggling height of the Sears Tower, a man dropped a five dollar bill on him and said, "go getcha some lunch." He worked when he needed to and traveled when he didn't. His mind started expanding along with his horizons and it hasn't stopped since.

On our way back north, at the end of 22 miles of dusty white dirt road, we reach our true destination, an old campground that used to be a place for lawless misfits to stay for free, but has since been developed and turned into a tidy ten-dollar-a-night kind of place. Phil shows me the spot where he once happened on a pile of broken old camp chair frames and empty propane bottles and invented the dangly dingly. He drained the bottles with a hammer and nail and cut their bottoms off with a bare hacksaw blade wrapped with duct tape for a handle. He fashioned a cross and hung the bottle from the middle with sections of chair leg all around it, and decorated it with bottle tops, shotgun shells, oil jugs, string, surveyors tape, bait cup lids, spatulas, construction helmets, and anything else he could pick up off the ground on his morning rambles. He called them dangly dinglies because, "they're made to dangle, but if they dingle a little too, that's all right." Many years later he's still making them, and gives them away or hangs them somewhere around camp. He makes customized ones for friends and neighbors, drawing from a deep box of colorful trash. Slowly the scattered detritus of a thousand hunters, fishers, and campers is gathered up and tied back together into whimsical art.

Phil sometimes says real fast that he's had: "five hernias, four cancer tumors, three radiations, two chemotherapies, one ex-wife that shot at me, stabbed me, and poisoned me, and cancer saved my life." He's been an alcoholic living under a bridge, tapping power from billboard lights to run electric blankets and a coffee pot, catching pigeons and roasting them on a spit for supper. He's been fat and he's been skeletal. He's been paralyzed except for his head and left arm, and two weeks away from losing his right one. He's had to work dangerous jobs. He's been cold, wet, and hungry. After all that, a lot of people might be bitter, but if there's a single hint of bitterness in him, I haven't seen it. It's a hell of a spirit that goes through that much hardship and winds up, not broken, but polished.

There was one more thing to do in Phil's old stomping grounds and that was to look for a legendary wild grapefruit tree with the sweetest fruits he'd ever tasted. It was just the time of year for them to be getting ripe. He got in on the secret years ago when a couple of drunks came back from a beer run with a bag of grapefruits, and he tracked their empty cans back to the source. But something like seven years have passed since those days and it takes us some time to find the head of the path because it's been blocked by fallen trees. We thrash our way back through thickets of saw palmetto and tangled vines. After a lot of circling through the brush we find the tree, but all that's left is a dead bleached trunk. Its offspring are all around, but they're still just saplings and too young to be fruiting. I'd been looking forward to the grapefruits, but the thrill of the chase is nearly as good.

The next morning we set out to make up for the dead tree. We poke around a rotting old cracker cabin and pick up wild citrus with a rind smelling like hand soap and a delicate lemony flesh. I spot a guava tree and Phil rolls up his pants, puts on his crocs, and wades across a leech-infested canal to gather a bag of them; I breathe in the their sharp sweet smell from across the water. We pull over to pick up two red bell peppers that fell off a truck but couldn't escape Phil's keen eye. We stop at a roadside farm and buy a big bunch of finger-sized bananas from an old Cuban. A man with a front end loader pushes over some trees near camp, Phil chops open the top of a downed palmetto with an ax and saw, and together we split out its tender pale green heart. We experiment with eating it raw and marinated in salt, vinegar, and wild citrus juice, fried in a pan, and roasted in the campfire. I would skip any Michelin-starred restaurant for one of these simple meals fresh off the coals. I would skip any of the seven wonders for one of these rambles down a dirt road in the twilight, insects buzzing from the bushes, lightning bugs and the smell of a distant thunderstorm rolling in slow. All the fruits of creation are around us, if we only reach out.