RIDE OF PASSAGE
WE CROSS THE FLORIDA LINE AT NOON, thundering through forests of spindly back-road pines. Tar snakes slither before us, gluing the road together in kinks. We’ve been circling Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp—the most primeval of Southern wilds, which survived the drainage attempts of former Confederate officers and the ravages of forest fires said to rain ash and smoldering moss on towns downwind.
It’s 1999. Spring. I’m sixteen years old. My father and I are riding our motorcycles in echelon, our boots kicked out on the pegs. We’re on the way to my grandmother’s house, around the swamp and across the Panhandle, to Fort Walton Beach.
My father loves to strike out riding for the coasts of Florida where he grew up. He follows serpentine
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