Sport, Men, and Paradise
HARRISON KNIGHT
The back of a postcard I haven’t sent says that Panacea, Florida was named “after the goddess of universal remedy, because of the curative properties of the waters.” It was given the name, the postcard’s story goes, by a group of investors from Boston who were interested in developing a patch of land surrounded by the white sand beaches of the Gulf of Mexico on one side and a network of chilly freshwater springs fed by the Floridan aquifer on the other. Before it was Panacea, it was Smith Springs, and it’s unclear if the ocean water or the spring water, or both, are alleged to have curative properties. It’s also unclear what the curative properties are, or were. An anachronistic afterthought on the card mentions that Panacea (or, here, Smith Springs) was home to a large salt plant during the Civil War, one that provided for most of Florida. On the front of the card, shadowed bubble letters in red and blue font read “SPORTSMAN’S PARADISE” atop a photo of a fishing boat idling away from the photographer, the image so filtered and desaturated that it’s almost black-and-white.
There aren’t many places to get a Panacea postcard in Panacea or anywhere, but one of them—probably the best one of them—is Crum’s Mini Mall, a long, one-story building on the side of Coastal Highway 98 in Panacea, Florida. A handful of parking spots line the western edge of Crum’s, almost lining the highway itself and making for a quick entry, a slightly precarious exit. The metallic overhang roof of the building is painted a pure red; about three-quarters of its exterior wall are painted white, and the bottom fourth lining the asphalt is royal blue—a deconstructed American flag, frozen in time and space, not even half mast. The Crum’s sign stretches well above the building itself and shows an illustrated sunset scene of an ocean filled with marine life, or, more accurately, marine life swimming their way out of the ocean and into the Panhandle air so humid that their gills might work. The plastic of the sign is faded; the sunset’s light has dimmed, but the sun hasn’t set. Out front is the gas station, a modest four pumps usually occupied by salty fishing boats on old metal trailers, towed by any variety of Ford, Chevy, and GMC pick-up truck. Today, the sun is high.
The man that steps out of the truck next to me has an outline of Florida tattooed on his hairless left leg—just a black line, no geographical details but inference and relation connecting the state’s hundreds of miles between Panacea and, say, Miami or the Everglades. At the corner of the building a graying woman in a Crum’s t-shirt smokes a cigarette. A man in cargo shorts and a different Crum’s t-shirt, a digital camo Crum’s t-shirt, walks past her carrying a bucket that says, in scrawled Sharpie, “PEPSI ICE ONLY.” Between them there’s a wall full of smiling faces, “Crum’s Wall of Fame,” a collection of happy customers and the fish they caught pictured on boats and in back yards, presented by Coca-Cola.The friend I’m with, not a fisherman, is unimpressed. Some of the fish aren’t even that big—maybe they’re rare.
Crum’s is a gas station, a convenience store, even a merchandise line bordering on a clothing brand, but it is, first and foremost, a bait and tackle store. The only one in the area according to—I swear—a Ms. Peacock, the woman who was smoking outside when I arrived and who can otherwise be found behind the front counter at Crum’s. To find another tackle store anything near the quality of Crum’s, “you gotta go all the way to Port Saint Joe or Tallahassee either direction,” about an hour both ways. With not much but the water around here, it’s a little surprising that there’s only one such store, but this is just how things work in the Panhandle. You drive thirty minutes for groceries; forty-five for school; up to an hour to get a decent pack of hooks or a strong enough fishing line.
The store’s lack of competition is a testament as much to the splintered, slow economy of a place like Panacea as to the extent of Crum’s inventory, an expanse that becomes clear once you climb a little ramp that connects the convenience store up front to a neon-tinted aquarium of artifice on the main floor. A walk through these aisles presses your face up against the glass of the fishing industry’s corporate marketing tank, where guys with boats figure out how to make one colorful piece of rubber sound tastier than the next: artificial bait, stacks of it. One brand with a relatively tasteful package design is called Slick and carries the tagline “You Can’t Catch Em on the Sofa!” A handful of the variations of their “Pure Flats” bait includes Jr. Ice Candy, Pink Dirty Chartreuse, SJ Mad Mullet, and SJ Cool Beans. Syntax begins to dissolve: one brand called Zoom advertises “Super Salt Plus Baby Brush Hog Junebug” and “Super Salt Plus Ultravibe Speed Craw White Pearl.” The packaging reads like a series of nothing hashtags on engagement bait from a bot account, and the effect is mostly the same; each word is an increased chance at connecting with the mental SEO of a fisherman, in which the sparse but strong synaptic connections to “ultravibe” may be just what’s needed to make a purchase. Things can get hostile in these aisles, too: other brands include Culprit, Rage Tail, Rage Survivors. Many people who enjoy sport fishing have a reverence for the fish they reel in, imagine it as a natural and even celebratory ritual of catch and release; others, it seems, view fish as the enemy, the culprit who needs to be detained and conquered by use of force.
The rest of your needs spread across the fluorescent sales floor in what feels like the store’s namesake, a mini mall. The density of product placement thins slightly as you approach the rear edge of the store. Here, the selection is more random and less specialized; the arrangements—the occasional cardboard boxes, out-of-date labels, or empty hangers—feel not quite finished. Shelves of PVC pipes and hinges suggest jury-rigs and DIY plumbing. This is where you consider a fishing boat’s frailty and buy a life jacket, a flare gun, and an anchor. On the level below, an array of technical fishing apparel crowds out an afterthought of cheap, floral dresses, and almost all of the cotton t-shirts available come from the brand Simply Southern. One aisle is lined with waterproof rubber shrimp boots all the way down, in two colors (black and white) and enough sizes to cover the whole family. The rest of Crum’s clothing is at the very front of the store, where their own merchandise is arranged along the entryway to be unavoidable. There are dozens of options: one shows a fish skeleton and the line “Catch and Fillet”; one shows the Floridian flag, with its coastal sunset scene that reflects the sign outside; and one shows the American flag, stripes constructed of cartoon fish and stars replaced by the Crum’s logo.
Ms. Peacock says that Crum’s has saved her “hundreds of trips to Crawfordville for hardware, hundreds.” She’s worked at the store for a year and a half, but she’s lived in the area since 1991 and has been coming to Crum’s the whole time. She’s seen it change, too. First of all, “it used to actually be a mini mall": the long, squat building was originally split into three shops. The first was Crum’s—back then it extended only to about the end of what is now the convenience store. Then there was an auto parts store owned by a man named George with a last name Peacock is blanking on. Finally, there was a lumber and hardware store: “That was Bailey’s, Ed Bailey owned the hardware store.” But they were all leasing the space from the owner of the whole building and the namesake of the mini mall, Ronald Fred Crum. This was the setup until 2003, when the walls between ventures were torn down and Crum’s Mini Mall became a one-stop-shop for Panacea, Sopchoppy, Crawfordville, and all the rest.
Crum finally retired in 2021 and sold the place to Sam, Peacock says. I have to ask who Sam is; Panacea is a first-name town. So this is where I stand in the recent history of Crum’s Mini Mall: the first era not owned by Ronald Fred Crum, but nowhere near removed from him. Crum still lives in the area and he’s in the store two or three times a week with his wife. Some of his relatives still work there; for all his kids and grandkids, it was their first job, “just like any other family-owned business.”
Peacock’s telling of the Crum’s story only reaches so far, and when it’s stretched thin she refers me to Ms. Ann, who, she says, has worked at Crum’s for forty-two years. Ms. Ann wears a pair of unassuming glasses and a face that says “duh”, but her generosity in conversation betrays her incredulity; she says everything like it should be obvious and keeps talking because she knows it isn’t. Like it isn’t obvious that one time, when Ms. Ann’s grandparents were young and living in Panacea something like a century ago, there were bars and dance halls lining the nearby coast of the town that would come alive on the weekends, a nightlife that had dissipated by the time Ms. Ann was of age.
Panacea was different then; the Panhandle was different then.
When you go back far enough, the story of Crum’s and the story of Panacea suddenly but not unexpectedly falls into a familiar arc of small-town American deindustrialization. When there was dancing along the coast, there were also jobs for young people, most of them in the crab and oyster industries—two abundant natural resources in the Gulf of Mexico. Back then, seafood was enough to buoy the economies of plenty of small towns along the Gulf Coast. But, as Ms. Ann tells it, environmental regulations in the seventies and eighties changed the whole industry, made the process of crab and oyster harvesting at the same scale impossible. Most of the big facilities shut down and took many of the town’s jobs with them. The clubs closed and the coast got quiet.
The crab and oyster industries haven’t evaporated completely, but today they mostly take the form of small, local operations—seafood markets to stop by for dinner material, or suppliers of nearby restaurants. Now, Panacea’s sunburnt economy is holding onto nautical tourism to stay afloat, and the persistence of Crum’s Mini Mall over the years, as so many other businesses have folded, is some kind of proof. Ms. Peacock estimates that half of their customers are tourists and half of them locals, numbers that change slightly with the season. People ask for gear advice from the guys that work the service desk and try to sniff out where the fish are really biting. They browse the neon aisles of dissociative adjectives and determine, actively or subconsciously, the extent to which their relationship with the sea will be one of domination. If they feel like it, they can spend anywhere from fifty to five thousand dollars on a fishing reel; they can buy a forty-inch “Bayou spoon” with which they can cook their winnings and a beanbag in which they can enjoy them. They can’t buy a gun, but they can buy ammo. A sportsman’s paradise.
There’s one more fact on the back of that postcard: in 1928, almost everything in Panacea was destroyed by a hurricane. Panacea and the rest of the surrounding towns are built to withstand hurricanes nowadays—houses sit high on stilts to avoid flooding, rock walls protect roads near the coastlines, and pieces of sheet metal rest in garages until they are used to protect glass windows. But destruction is still a regular occurrence. Almost every year a storm touches down somewhere in the Panhandle, and it’s impossible to ever really know how much damage will be done. Panacea’s position on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico makes it a risky place to live, but that position is also what gives it an economy, what draws in fishermen from hours away. Because fishing is sport, but it is also survival—and in Panacea that survival is twofold. There is fishing at its purest, borne of bodily necessity, when the products of one’s patience are blackened, grilled, or fried, served with hush puppies and cheese grits. And there is fishing borne of economic necessity, the creation of the industry on display at Crum’s Mini Mall, the industry that pays the bills in Panacea. The fishing industry ties the survival of the town to the very same natural resources that threaten to kill it. The survival of a business like Crum’s, then, reliant on this paradoxical relationship with the natural world, is in spite of the sky’s seasonal death threats, is even revenge against them. A sportsman’s paradise that has no sympathy for the sportsman; a panacea that can quickly turn hellish.
If this part of the Panhandle is defined by distances—to groceries, to school, to home—then Crum’s itself is defined by proximity. The one-stop-shop shrinks the land between specialty stores that would have no hope of subsistence on their own; the mini mall walls of separation must fall, reducing space by lengthening it. And in an uncentered coastal landscape, the one-stop-shop shrinks social life, too. Before I manage to talk to Ms. Peacock or Ms. Ann, I walk the aisles of Crum’s parallel to two high schoolers in board shorts and jean shorts and sun-repellent polyester fishing shirts, picking out snacks and small necessities while someone’s parent gasses up the boat outside. I realize they are the same two high schoolers I saw in Crum’s earlier this week, a young couple, wearing just about the same outfits and still killing time before a trip onto the water. When I loiter around the technical service desk, there’s a changing of the salesman guard: one is on his way out, saying something about the last day of snapper season. A kid near my age asks if he’s working tomorrow; the guy says, “yeah, I’ll be here with you.” The kid’s name is Colin, and he’s going to be a sophomore at Florida State University soon. Tomorrow is his last day at Crum’s. An older employee, the one who was carrying the Pepsi ice bucket, answers the sales phone and says, “I’m good, Robby, how are you?” And when I talk to Ms. Anne and she tells me about Crum’s the family business, the first jobs and kids grown up, she stops at a certain point, unsure of her memory, and turns to a younger man on the customer side of the service counter. She says, “How long did your mom work here?” He gives a guess. He’s uninterested; he’s Ronald Crum’s grandson.
At Crum’s, relationships form out of proximity and out of time. Generations flit across glass cases of fishing reels; customers become employees, employees become customers. The store changes and the people stay the same and these linoleum floors gather the sandy flip-flop tracks of a tight-knit social network sprawled across the Panhandle and centered on Crum’s. The store survives its changes; the people do, too. Panacea’s increasing existential precarity on the basis of geography alone might be, in large part, to blame for the closeness of its unincorporated population. And maybe the town’s persistence through year after year of nature’s tests is a testament to that closeness.
I was supposed to talk to Ronald Crum on a Sunday, after he finished up with church and family and could deal with a stranger and a microphone. But that morning, Alligator Point, the town near Panacea where I was staying, was forced to evacuate the area in anticipation of Hurricane Debby. We covered our windows in metal slats and moved the plastic outdoor furniture indoors; a county sheriff drove up and down Alligator Point’s main street and told any uninformed beachgoers to flee. On Wednesday, Ms. Ann had told me that somewhere between 1928 and 2024, there was no fire department in Panacea, not even a volunteer station like there is now. It was all at Crum’s: they had an emergency telephone line in the store and a fire alarm pole in the parking lot. When there was a fire, the store shut down, the employees ran off to deal with it, and they came back an hour or so later to get back to work. When I drove by Crum’s on my way out of town and out of danger, the store looked empty.