Saveur Magazine May 2008

Gator Man

In the marshes and flatlands of Central Florida, old ways die hard.

By MARIA FINN

ON HIS 65TH BIRTHDAY, John Tanner was going mano a mano with an outraged, feral razorback hog in an abandoned orange grove. With the scent of half-rotted fruit hanging in the humid air, the hog thrashed around inside a metal trap that Tanner had baited. "Get ready to jump and get up a tree if he gets away," he shouted at me, as he reached into the trap with a length of rope.

After a grunting, sweating, swearing tangle that pitted bristles and sharp teeth against chapped hands, the boar was finally roped and hoisted into a cage secured to the bed of Tanner's pickup truck. "Now I've got to feed him good grain," said Tanner, his sturdy frame none the worse for the wear. "Then you're looking at some fine barbecued pork."

The land on which Tanner traps is part of the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, 140,000 acres of coastal estuaries, dunes, and scrub oak and pine in the shadow of the John F. Kennedy Space Center, in central Florida. Local hunters and trappers like Tanner are allowed to cull the wild pigs, which proliferate in the area. Tanner, whose great-great-grandfather came to Florida from Georgia as an army scout in the mid-1800s, just after the Second Seminole War, comes from a long line of Florida Crackers.

At the term cracker, outsiders often wince, believing that it refers to a racist or that it's a put-down equivalent of "poor white people". Hayley Downs, a documentary-film maker I know who is from central Florida, explained to me a while ago what a Florida Cracker really is: "It's a person who lives off the land, survives in the Florida wilderness, and stretches -- or ignores -- the law to fit their life." Downs's own grandfather was a Cracker who hunted in the Everglades and sold what he caught to make a living; he was considered a poacher, but to him it was just getting dinner. And Downs's father, Albert, who also hunted and fished the scrublands and wetlands of central Florida, was a Cracker too, though he had a day job. He also founded the Albert D. Downs Wild Game Feast, held each May for the past 16 years in DeLand, Florida, to help keep the Florida Cracker tradition alive; rattlesnake, wild turkey, alligator, wild pig, and frogs' legs are regular features on the feast's menu.

Crackers, many of whom are the descendants of the region's pioneer settlers, could be called the last gasp of old rural Florida. There are still pockets of them scattered throughout the stateónear the central towns of DeLand and Christmas and even as far south as Homesteadóbut as suburban sprawl in booming cities like Orlando swallows up formerly rural communities and the surrounding wildlands, more and more Cracker families have packed up and left for Alabama and Georgia, where development is less rampant. In many places, the only thing that remains of Cracker culture is the cooking. Thanks to food festivals like the Wild Game Feast and to restaurateurs interested in local foodways, "Cracker food", a homegrown mix of classic Southern dishes, wild game, and tropical fruits, has been inherited by a generation of Floridians who drive to a desk job every day instead of heading into the swamps and flatlands to catch frogs and trap hogs.

WHEN HAYLEY DOWNS first told me about John Tanner, she called him the Gator Man. I pondered the nickname as Tanner and I rode in his pickup later that afternoon alongside rows of overgrown orange treesóvestiges of abandoned groves, some of which date to Spanish-colonial timesóscattering the occasional family of feral hogs ahead of us. When we passed through a particularly dense stand of trees, we startled a bobcat, which took off sprinting down the path. Moments later, an armadillo (called "possum on the half shell" by locals) scurried by. When we reached the bank of a canal, Tanner stopped the truck and we got out. He cupped his hands to his mouth and made a noise that sounded like a cross between a dog's whimper and a bullfrog's croak. We waited. After a minute or two, I could make out the shape of an alligator cutting through the still, green water. After a while, the animal stopped at the bank, floating as still as a log, its doll's eyes fixed on us. "This gator's a male," Tanner said. "He was wondering if I was going to mate with him."

Tanner, who raises cattle for a living and also sells meat from the hogs he traps, is contracted by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission to catch "nuisance" alligators; as development explodes in Florida, more and more people are finding the reptiles lolling in their swimming pools or resting under their cars. Having grown up hunting and trapping in the marshes and woods near the town of Christmas, where he still lives, Tanner knows how to tie gators; he learned when he was a kid. He explained his method as the gator swam closer: "First I cover its eyes; then I tape its mouth shut; then I strap its arms and legs behind its back. And I tie a half hitch in the tail so it can't hit me with that."

To my relief, no wrestling took place that afternoon; Tanner was just paying this gator a visit. "I like to be out here in nature," he said. "I learn about the animals, and they learn about me."

Hunting, trapping, fishing, and small-scale farming have long been the traditional pursuits of Crackers, some of whom have traced their family lineage in Florida to the 1700s. Many Florida Crackers claim Scottish-Irish descent, and some believe that their name has Gaelic or Celtic roots. In the English writer and lexicographer Samuel Johnson's famous Dictionary of the English Language, first published in 1755, the word cracker is said to denote a noisy, boasting fellow. But many historians and Crackers themselves think the word comes from the noise made by the cracking of a cow whip, cattle herding having long been a common means of livelihood in Florida. Still others attribute the name to the term corn-cracker, a reference to the crop that has traditionally served as Crackers' staple food.

Not surprisingly, Florida's native fauna feature prominently in Cracker dishes: stewed softshell turtle, fried frogs' legs, broiled rattlesnake, deep-fried armadillo, and so on. The meat of alligators, which may be legally hunted on a limited basis in Florida, wasn't eaten by Crackers in the old days, when the reptiles were killed only for their hides, but now farm-raised and wild alligator meat is found on "Cracker platters" at roadside restaurants and community cookouts across the state. Much of Cracker food is fried and emphatically Southern in character, but many dishes incorporate tropical fruitsósour orange pie, grilled pork served with guava and sweet onion sauce, baked grapefruit, orange fritters, and biscuits with guava butter, to name a few.

THE DAY AFTER OUR encounter with the hog and the alligator, Tanner invited me to accompany him to some nearby pastureland to cut swamp cabbageóthe crunchy inner core, or "heart", of young sabal palmetto, a favorite food of Crackersófor the Old Timers Picnic, an event, held the second weekend in May, that he organizes every year in his hometown. Usually, Crackers slow-cook swamp cabbage with cured pork for a deeply flavored stew, though the crunchy, tart- tasting raw hearts are also sometimes sliced thin and made into salad.

Tanner and I drove to the grazing grounds, near the headwaters of the St. Johns River, that Tanner leases for his 600 head of cattle. A few of his steer could be seen browsing the stretches of wiregrass dotted with scrub pine and sabal palmetto, which can be harvested in limited quantities on some public and private lands in Florida. (It also happens to be the state tree.) "The cabbage from the palmettos near the pine trees is too tannic," he explained. "You've got to find ones out in the open."

I could hear the whine of chain saws and the crack of splintering wood in the near distanceóthe sounds of swamp cabbage being harvested by friends of Tanner's who were also planning to attend the Old Timers Picnic. In the old days, an ax was the tool of choice, Tanner told me, but either way, the method is the same. Using his own saw, he showed me how the first cut is made, three to four feet above the base of the trunk. The second cut is made just beneath the fronds. The resulting segment contains the tree's edible core and is referred to as the "boot", the outer layers of which are left intact to protect the delicate flesh until it's ready to be used. Once the heart's outer husk is peeled away, you get a tender cylinder about four inches across and three feet long.

"When I grew up, 70 percent of our food was subsistence," Tanner said, as he deftly worked the saw. "Now it's closer to 50 percent. It's just too easy to go to the grocery store these days."

On the day of the picnic, which draws thousands of people from all over the country and is held in the town park, Tanner and I arrived early to help set up. I recognized a few of the other men who'd been cutting with us a few days earlier. A few of them had brought portable barbecue cookers. Soon, the air was filled with wood smoke, as chickens and racks of pork ribs began cooking. I watched as Tanner worked his knife around the edge of the palmetto hearts he'd harvested, removing the parts he knew to be tough or bitter and dropping the trimmed pieces into a vat of water, to let the swamp cabbage soak and lose some of its tannic acid. A short while later, Tanner took his vat to a cooking area, where a few of his friends added bacon and salt and pepper and started the cabbage simmering.

Later, after Tanner had helped the bluegrass band set up and had served sweet tea to a few of the oldest old-timersóthe picnic's most honored guestsóhe brought me a heaping plate of barbecued chicken and ribs, accompanied by biscuits and stewed swamp cabbage, which had a smoky-sweet taste that reminded me of German potato salad's. As I ate, I listened to people share stories about a past that seemed to be fading a little more every day, and I thought of an analogy my friend Hayley Downs had related to me when I'd asked her for a recipe for swamp cabbage. "Actually, swamp cabbage is a good metaphor for Florida Crackers," she'd said. "It's a secret passed down from earlier generations. The heart is hidden, and only those who have learned from past generations know how to cut it right."