Fringe Florida: Travels Among Mud Boggers, Furries, Ufologists, Nudists, and Other Lovers of Unconventional Lifestyles (24 page)

tires, you pray, you cuss. Once you escape the clutches of muck, there’s

a brief
yeehaw!
moment that’s immediately followed by an impulse to

ford something bigger, deeper.

James and I have no illusions about taking our wimpy SUV through

the mud. We’re hooking up with a mudder to ride on a bona fide swamp

buggy.

The odd-looking amphibious vehicles rolled through the state’s mo-

saic of wetlands and prairies long before monster trucks and ATVs

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were conceived. It was rugged and soggy south of Orlando, Florida,

when the buggies were invented early in the twentieth century. The

Everglades, not yet channeled by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers,

was twice as large. Half of south Florida was a grass-filled river part

of the year. Not many people dared living in the region. The 1910 U.S.

Census registered only 32,300 residents south of Sarasota and Lake

Okeechobee. Those hardy few were an independent lot: either they or

their parents had sought refuge in the Glades for various, sometimes

nefarious, reasons. They hunted badgers, skinned gators, gigged bull-

frogs. They cleared virgin forests of towering pines and killed tropical

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birds for the colorful feathers that ended up on women’s hats in New

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York City.

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By necessity, these south Florida pioneers were an inventive sort.

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So, after mass-produced Model Ts took to the road, they figured out

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ways to adapt them to wheel through the bogs.

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Various Florida crackers claim their ancestors invented the first

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buggy, but Naples’s historians like to credit the late Ed Frank, a Naples

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mechanic who built
Skeeter
around 1918 out of Model-T parts and used

an orange crate for a seat. “I had no money. I built it out of junk,” Ed

later recalled to the
Marco
News
. He lived inland of Naples on a 220-acre

farm that adjoined untamed wilderness. He drove
Skeeter
through a

break in his thicket and disappeared into the Everglades on weeklong

hunts. Perfecting it after each trip, he added an extra transmission,

more gears, dual rear wheels, and tire chains. He turned the axles up-

side down to give more clearance over stumps and cypress knees, and

he swapped the orange crate for an aluminum World War I airplane

seat. His most noticeable modification was the wheels. He replaced

the spindly auto ones with bulbous tractor tires. His monster wagon

looked more like the modern swamp buggies around us in line than the

buggies that race in Naples as a direct result of his endeavors.

Legend has it that Frank and fellow hunters gathered to com-

pare notes on their vehicles the week before hunting season began.

Somewhere along the line, they started racing them for fun. Word got

around, and locals started gathering to watch.

When the races moved to a soggy sweet-potato farm closer to town,

city leaders jumped on board and encouraged buggy owners to stage

a parade. An official Swamp Buggy Days festival began in earnest in

1949, complete with a swamp buggy queen. Racers competed for guns,

proof

turkeys, and camping gear. The
Collier
County
News
, the local newspa-

per of the day, declared the swamp buggy was “as important to Florida

as the cow pony is to the West . . . [T]hey are the only practical means

of transportation once off road.” ABC’s
Wide
World
of
Sports
started airing the races in the mid-1950s. Cary Grant showed up. Prizes became money, encouraging backyard mechanics to build buggies more

for racing than hunting. Racers installed larger engines, propellers, and

sometimes even water skis, whatever they thought might give them an

advantage. Like NASCAR rides, the modern Naples racing buggy little

resembles its humble origins. Bodies are long and narrow, wheels are

thin, and racers wear helmets.

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“They haven’t been buggies in ten years,” complains Mike Fox, a

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third-generation Florida buggy builder. “They’re more like boats.”

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Mike, owner of M.C. Ventures in LaBelle, isn’t exactly a swamp

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buggy purist. Sure, he builds more than fifty buggies a year, which he

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claims is more than all other Florida buggy builders combined. He con-

structs hunting buggies, eco-expedition buggies, and utilitarian mod-

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els for the Park Service. But Mike also builds flashier show buggies that

are used for nothing but parading and partying at mud parks. They

look like luxury pontoon boats on tractor tires, complete with names

airbrushed across the back.

Mike’s crowning achievement,
Redneck
Royalty
, is to be our ride

for the day. I spotted the outrageously redneck buggy for sale online.

List price: $99,000. The price, though, wasn’t the eye-catcher. The bug-

gy’s back panel is airbrushed with voluptuous women in itsy bikinis,

stockings, and high heels—something along the lines of a trucker’s

strip-club fantasy. As if the motif weren’t parody enough of redneck

culture, three pretty, teenage girls in cut-offs and tied-up shirts pose

around the buggy in Daisy Duke fashion. Mike later tells me they are

his daughters.

At 13½ feet, the buggy is as tall as a house. The tires alone are 5

feet high. Every square inch is detailed. Gauges change colors with the

push of a button. The exhaust pipes running through its open belly are

chrome. The gold-painted wheels are laser cut with an intricate design

of crowns and the letters “RR.”
Redneck
Royalty
, indeed.

Appearance isn’t the only thing that sets
Redneck
Royalty
apart from

hunting buggies. The mudding vessel is equipped with more luxuries

than a stretch Hummer. It has a built-in flat-screen DVD player, an

overhead stereo system, an icemaker, a wet bar, tilt steering, and an

proof

electric retractable royal-blue canopy. The four, cushioned passenger

seats mounted along the outside have rising armrests with cup holders.

The center captain’s chair swivels so the driver doesn’t have to get up to

reach the bar.

Mike admits he got the idea for
Redneck
Royalty
during a late-night

drinking binge. He was downing Crown Royal with friends and started

pontificating about his dream buggy. His drinking buddies made sug-

gestions. As best as he can recall, the brainstorming session went

something like this:

“I’m going to build a buggy so big that when I pull up to a mud hole

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everyone’s going to be looking at me,” Mike declared, then added it

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would include a bar.

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One friend joked, “As much as you drink, you’re going to run out of

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ice.”

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“So, I’m going to build one and put an ice maker on it,” Mike

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responded.

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“Hey, if you’re going to put running water on it, you might as well

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put a wet bar on it, too,” one added.

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proof

Redneck
Royalty
, our ride

for the day. Photo by James

Harvey.

Another chimed in, “Let’s put a TV on it so we can watch games!”

In the light of day, the plan sounded, well, like a crazy drunken idea.

“You mean you’re going to build a buggy with 700 horsepower and

a rolling bar, and drive it through the woods?” another friend asked

Mike.

Yes, Mike confidently replied. His friend shook his head and said,

“Well, I’m just going to tell law enforcement to go the other way if they

see you coming because the paperwork would take way too long.”

No one laughed at Mike when his redneck masterpiece took first

place in the show buggy competition in West Palm Beach. Turns out,

there’s an east-west Florida rivalry in swamp buggy culture. The West

Palm swamp buggy community had long taken the trophies and con-

sidered theirs the biggest, badass buggies of Florida. But then along

came Mike, a small-town boy who raised the Florida creation to a new

level of decadence.

Mike laments that he can’t make it to the
Trucks
Gone
Wild
event.

He’s too busy filling buggy orders and dealing with cable-channel pro-

ducers who want to shoot a reality show based on his business. He’s

generous enough to hook me up with Tony Barnes, the buggy trader

who now owns
Redneck
Royalty
, and offers a few words of advice: “Be

careful who you ride with. They have to medevac people out of there

proof

every weekend . . . And I’d get out before dark.”

His warning explains the full-page liability waivers we have to sign

after finally arriving at the entry gate. Guys in Redneck Yacht Club

shirts check our driver’s licenses and do a cursory search of the SUV for

guns, knives, and chain saws.

A woman in a wooden booth takes our thirty-dollar-entry fees, the

one-day rate. At last we are inside the mecca of mud.

Our ride, the tallest vehicle in sight, is waiting in a grassy parking lot

just inside the gate.

Given the buggy’s
Redneck
Royalty
name and saucy design, I expect

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Tony to be loud and crude with a beer belly the size of a small country.

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Instead, he and his wife, Lacee, are soft-spoken, trim, and look like

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young suburbanites. Our meeting is not without some awkwardness.

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They are wearing University of Florida shirts and caps. James and I are

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wearing Crimson Tide caps.

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Southeastern Conference rivalries run deathly deep, and in recent

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years no contests have been fiercer than Florida and Alabama’s. The

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two schools have in essence battled for the national championship. I

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can take comfort in Alabama’s whipping Florida in the last match-up to

the point of making their quarterback Tim Tebow cry. But when I see

Tony and Lacee dripping in Gator garb, and they see our Bama flash,

it’s a little like the Hatfields finding themselves sharing a cab with the

McCoys.

We’re all too polite to talk smack about one another’s team. James

and I climb up the pull-down ladder and settle into the cushiony cap-

tain’s chairs along the rail. Tony mounts a large Florida Gator flag to

the buggy’s roof. I tuck a beer into my Roll Tide cuzie.

Clay, another rider, hooks his iPod up to the buggy’s stereo system.

Clay is a Florida cracker whose family has been in state for five gen-

erations farming large swathes of land near Lake Okeechobee. He’s a

chemical salesman for a Florida phosphate giant. Given his dress—a

casual designer shirt and shorts, silver ghetto chain, and flimsy Gator-

emblem flip-flops (yes, another Florida fan)—he hasn’t spent much

time in mud.

The two men met when Tony sold Clay a house in Fort Myers. Tony

is a man of many trades.

During the week he runs computer networks for U.S. Sugar in Clew-

iston. On weekends he sells real estate, and somewhere in between, he

deals in swamp buggies and staghorn ferns.

proof

Lacee is a legal assistant for a criminal defense attorney. They work

hard and earn more than a decent living. The rock on her finger could

cut steel wheels.

With the cooler stocked, Tony cranks up the buggy. The engine rum-

bles like a tractor on nitro, drowning out conversation. Clay cranks up

the stereo. Tony hits the gas. We’re off to the tune of Creedence Clear-

water Revival’s “Fortunate One.” Yeehaw!

Mudderdome

ATVs, four-wheel-drive trucks, and lesser buggies scatter like insects

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to make way for
Redneck
Royalty
. Forget driving on the right side of the

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road or yielding to the vehicle on the right. The only rule of the road

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here is that the biggest vehicle has the right-of-way.

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On the dusty thoroughfare that splinters the park, Tony opens it up.

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