16
NOKOBEE COUNTY REGIONAL High School, located on the western edge of Clayville, had some good, dedicated teachers when Raphael Semmes Cody was there, but it was not among the premier public schools, even of the southern border counties of Alabama. But even with the relatively light demands placed on him at Nokobee Regional, Raff had not been a distinguished student. His grades had drifted around a B average, with occasional A's and C's. He could have done much better, he knew, but he had little interest in conventional schoolwork. His mind dwelled instead in the educational venues of Nokobee and the Boy Scouts of America. Unfortunately, neither was accustomed to writing letters of recommendation to institutions of higher learning. Therefore, he supposed, Duke, Emory, and Vanderbilt, the South's equivalent of the Ivy League, were out for him. So were the two dozen or so top-ranked liberal arts colleges sprinkled across the South.
These options were a matter of no great importance to the seventeen-year-old. Even with his uncle's money behind him, he never gave high rank and prestige serious thought. He had only one school in mind: Florida State University, where I taught. From our summers of conversations at Nokobee, Raff already knew a great deal about FSU. It was nationally ranked among public universities--not at the top, but high enough, and rising. But what mattered more to Raff was that the FSU campus was only several hours' drive from Clayville and nearby Lake Nokobee. And it was literally only minutes from the longleaf pine forest and hardwood enclaves of the Apalachicola National Forest. He saw Apalachicola as the Nokobee tract writ large, hence a great living library to him.
A month after the meeting with his Uncle Cyrus, Raff applied for admission to Florida State University. As much as a high school senior could, he put all his cards on the table, and then some. In his mind privately, it was FSU or nothing, at least nothing this first year. To the standard application forms he added his experience in natural history and the informal training in ecology he'd received from me at Nokobee. He expressed his hopes for a career in law and the environment.
I am especially interested in herpetology [he wrote in the introduction of his essay]. In a forest near my home in Clayville, I have been able to capture and identify 14 species of snakes.
His expertise in big animals established, he continued with his love of entomology, and his breadth of interest in ecology and conservation.
I have been especially interested in a very abundant kind of mound-building ant at Lake Nokobee and, because I go there often, have watched and taken notes on these ants for the last six years. Professor Norville from Florida State, who has helped me a great deal in this subject, tells me these ants are unusual and may even be a new species.
Ants are very important in the environment, I have read. If you weigh all the insects, ants make up two-thirds. They weigh four times as much as all the birds, mammals, reptiles, and amphibians put together.
I am very interested in the longleaf pine savanna and its conservation...I plan to go to law school and hope to have a career working for the environment.
Finally, Raff wrote a personal letter appealing to me. It was composed in a relatively formal style, suitable for scrutiny by an admissions committee.
Dear Dr. Norville,
As you well know, I am now a senior at Nokobee County Regional High School. I've continued my involvement in the Boy Scouts, as an Eagle Scout and the Junior Assistant Scoutmaster of Troop 10 here in Nokobee County. I have spent most of my life studying Lake Nokobee and the longleaf pine savanna around it, and hope to do more research on them. During the last year since your visit, my favorite insects have become the ants that build large mounds in the savanna, and I believe I have discovered the secrets of their life cycle. I hope to continue research on them while in college.
I have applied to come to Florida State University next year to study ecology and entomology. I'm very grateful for the help you've given me. It would be great to work with you. If you could help me be admitted, I would surely appreciate it.
Yours sincerely,
Raphael Semmes Cody
Innocently penned, perhaps, but probably a little less than innocently, and if so, then to defensible purpose. Raff had used the right words, written in the right tone. Only later did I learn, and should not have been surprised, that the essay and letter had been edited by Louise Simmons, his English teacher at Nokobee County Regional High School, an M.S. from FSU's School of Education and a fierce advocate of correct grammar and sentence structure.
I could do no other than acquiesce, of course, and with enthusiasm. I wrote on my own to the admissions committee to suggest that they should ignore his grades at the high school. Raphael Semmes Cody, I testified, admittedly has participated in no team sport, or sport of any kind. He plays no musical instrument. He has never been more than two hundred miles from Clayville, Alabama. But then, one recalls, Henry David Thoreau was similarly limited. Like Thoreau, young Cody walks to a different drummer's beat. As his Eagle Scout record shows, he is ambitious and hardworking in a unique way, with goals of his own choosing. I predict that among the ten thousand students admitted this year to FSU, he will someday be one of the alumni of whom this university will be most proud.
The result of all this overkill was that in the following February Raff was thrilled to receive the fat letter of early admission to the university. It further informed Raff that he was invited to join the Florida State University Honors Program, designed to provide gifted students with opportunities for creative work.
For their part, Marcia and Ainesley were delighted that their son would stay close to home. Only Uncle Cyrus protested: "Why not the University of Alabama, my own alma mater?" But he was quickly mollified. FSU was altogether okay, and what counted anyway was Raff's planned admission to law school down the line. Cyrus was satisfied that he had brought at least one worthy male heir into the Mobile Semmeses.
In the second week of September Ainesley and Marcia accompanied Raff to Tallahassee in the latest version of Ainesley's red pickup, and helped Raff pick his way through the crowd of students to his assigned dormitory room. Raff pledged to come home regularly. If they could believe anything he promised, they could believe that. They had Nokobee on their side as a powerful attraction.
Alicia and I joined the three Codys for dinner at a small roadside restaurant, the kind often called a cafe, in Sopchoppy, just outside of Tallahassee. We shared in the all-you-can-eat offering of fried mullet, turnip greens, and the small balls of cornmeal and chopped onions called hushpuppies. All chose sweet-tea, or else failed to decline it, forgetting that in the real South you are served unsweetened tea only if you request it. Ainesley chastely avoided beer or worse. As darkness fell, we watched through the window as Mexican free-tailed bats swooped in and out of the lighted parking area. They cut swaths through the gathering insect hordes, mercifully including mosquitoes among their prey. In this atmosphere of complete Southern authenticity, I promised Raff's parents to help him and let them know if he was having any special trouble at the university.
When Raff arrived at Florida State, he found it still surrounded by an abundance of natural open space. That was the case even though the campus had grown to become a small city in itself, with forty thousand students, twenty-five hundred faculty members, and thousands more of supporting staff. From our conversations at Nokobee, he knew he could drive away from the center of FSU in any direction, and within half an hour find extensive natural habitats of all kinds that grace the Florida Panhandle. There were longleaf pine mesic flatwoods, longleaf pine and turkey oak flats, turkey oak sandhills, and hardwood-covered steephead ravines to the north. Traveling west, you encountered the series of floodplain forests that border the Gulf-bound coastal rivers. To the south awaited some of the best-preserved coastal wetlands in the southern United States. Immediately adjacent to the FSU campus was the magnificent Apalachicola National Forest itself, containing most of the principal habitats of the central coastal plain.
During his first two weeks at FSU, Raff was swept along by receptions, orientation tours, and introductory class meetings. As quickly as he could manage, however, he made an appointment to see me.
Exactly to the minute of the assigned appointment there came a soft rap on my office door. The Raphael Semmes Cody who entered was different from the one I had known. He walked stiffly and erect, rather like a soldier reporting for duty. His handshake was sweaty. This was not the easygoing kid I knew at Nokobee. He was responding, it was clear, to my professional persona in an intimidating new environment.
As he stood there, it was "Yessir" to this and "Yessir" to that after almost every sentence I uttered. That needed correcting. So I hugged him, showed him to a chair, and pulled mine over to face him.
"Welcome to Florida State, Raff," I said in as warm a tone as I could summon. "I'm so glad you're here. I couldn't be happier to see you."
I peppered him with questions about his family and first impressions of FSU, in order to bring him out and put him further at ease. And I congratulated him on his admission to the Honors Program.
"Oh," I added, "I hope you'll find time to join us at some of the special lectures and symposia scheduled this year. It doesn't matter that you're just a freshman. You'll be real welcome. Of course, I mean if you can find time, Raff."
I studied him closely as we talked. Small in stature, about Ainesley's height, perhaps five-nine, but slightly heavier than his father--at a guess 140 pounds. Because I'd read a biography of his namesake, I knew he was, coincidentally, about the same size as the original Admiral Semmes. His face was thin, more Marcia than Ainesley. His hair, groomed in his Sunday best, was newly trimmed, brushed, and parted, a condition almost never seen at Nokobee. It was light brown in color, almost blond, perhaps enhanced through exposure to the sun of the Florida summer.
He was dressed in what I took to be his best clothes: dark lightweight wool pants, mauve cotton sports shirt, and a newly pressed linen jacket. The latter I was never to see again. On its lapel--and I liked him for wearing it--was a small silver Eagle Scout pin. He wore off-white shoes and thick white cotton socks. Except perhaps for the jacket and lapel pin, he would go unnoticed, I thought, in the mob of students flowing continuously along the university mall outside. For that matter, given his youthful appearance, he would fit in any high school hall in Florida.
Within half an hour, yielding to my efforts, Raff began to relax. "Dr. Norville" changed back to the honorary "Uncle Fred" of Nokobee. Because I had in mind most of what he knew about natural history, our relationship soon turned from one of professor and student to that of senior and junior colleagues.
The tribal bonds of naturalists, you should know, are woven out of war stories from past field trips. No war stories, no bonds. A good starting point on the Gulf Coastal Plain is the impressive variety of poisonous snakes. Everyone talks about poisonous snakes, and it seems that all who grew up in the rural South have personal stories to tell. For naturalists in particular, such accounts make ideal war stories, and, more importantly, scientific war stories. As Raff already knew, I'd survived two diamondback rattler strikes, and nearly died from the second one. My scary experience considerably outpointed his near-miss with a cottonmouth moccasin.
"Let me tell you, Raff," I said, smiling, "if you've got to get bitten by a rattlesnake, pick something other than a diamondback. I'd make it a pygmy rattlesnake. That's the smallest species there is, you know. The worse you'll get is maybe a swollen arm or leg for a week. But let's keep this serious. I'd say the best advice I could give you or anybody else is just don't mess with poisonous snakes, period. If you have to handle one for some reason or other, and even if you're pretty sure it's not poisonous, always use a snake stick and a bag."
"I just try not even to get near the poisonous kinds," Raff said.
I didn't believe that, figuring he was a lot like me when I was his age, but I didn't say so.
"Fine," I responded. "And it's always a good idea when you're in the field to have someone with you. Oh, and be sure you're aware of the nearest hospital that has a supply of antivenins."
There was a pause as a supersized lawn mower with a workman in the seat passed beneath the open window of my office. The smell of cut grass drifted in. While we waited I thought, Well, there they are together, the twin symbols of our middleclass culture: noise and lawns, they're eating up what little is left of the natural world.
Our conversation began to taper off. I looked at my watch. Raff, however, was reluctant to go.
"It isn't just snakes," he said. "There are a huge number of kinds of frogs and salamanders at Nokobee. I thought I might check to see if there are any special kinds that live in pitcher-plant bogs. We have some at Nokobee, but I just never got around to checking them out."
"Well, yes, that would be interesting, all right. If you get the chance why don't you look down into the water inside the pitchers and see if you can find any tadpoles living there? There might be some tree frogs breeding there. That would be a terrific thing if you found it."
A young woman student, smiling brightly and loaded with an armful of books, had arrived at the door for my next appointment. Twenty pounds overweight, eyeglasses, wearing artificially weathered jeans and a loose T-shirt, no bra--in short, a coed of liberated America. I stood up to let her in. Raff also stood up, but continued talking as we walked across the office.
"Another thing I want to see is the torreyas at the Apalachicola Bluffs. That's the only place they grow in the wild, and I understand they're dying off."
"Yes, yes," I said, feeling a bit impatient. "It's because of a fungus. Same sort of thing that wiped out the American chestnut."
Torreyas--or "stinking cedars," from the odor of their wood--are conifers left behind in the Deep South when the continental glaciers retreated ten thousand years ago. Most, but not all, cold-tolerant plants retreated with them. The torreyas decided to stay behind.
"There are a few they've got growing in a nursery outside Clayville." Raff was still talking as I admitted and shook hands with the new student. "They make nice ornamental trees, and the cultivated ones don't have the fungus."
"Sure," I said. "Okay, okay. We take field trips out of here to the Apalachicola Bluffs from time to time. Why don't you come with me and some of the other students on the next one? I'll see you around."
Finally, Raff relinquished and walked away. This kid, I thought, has come to the right place.