By Joe Bargmann | Dec 08/Jan 09 | Features

The Swamp Men

In the backwoods of Florida, men dive beneath dark waters in search of cypress logs that sank more than 150 years ago. The dangers are great, but the rewards are even greater 

A white plastic bleach bottle bobs in the green-gray water about twenty-five feet from the thickly wooded bank of the Brothers River. Air bubbles ripple the murky surface around the buoy, fleeting evidence of Jim Flournoy’s approximate location on the river bottom, twenty feet below. Tethered to the bottle by an orange nylon rope, he has been crawling around down there for thirty minutes now, with forty pounds of lead weights strapped to his waist and a bowie knife lashed to his leg. “The knife’s really just for show,” Jim had joked before disappearing into the alligator-infested water. “By the time I got it out, I’d be missing a leg.”

He was pissed off and tired when he went into the water, and the oxygen in his tank was running low. Working since 9:00 a.m., he had already located and cabled three big logs, which Jim’s ruddy-faced father, Don, seventy-six, brought to the surface with the sixteen-ton electric winch mounted on their pontoon boat. “I wouldn’t have come all the dang way out here if I knew we was just gonna be pulling crappy ol’ gum sticks,” Don had said.

He smiled when he made the crack, but Jim, forty-eight, answered with a scowl. “You think I want to pull crappy ol’ gum sticks, do you?”

Raising the thick twenty-five-foot-long gum timbers, which weigh two to three tons, is like cutting into a vein of fool’s gold. Unfortunately, sorting through the worthless logs, mired in the river muck since the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, is part of the process for the men in the dangerous business of recovering ancient sinker, or deadhead, cypress. Working by feel in opaque waters, a logger like Jim Flournoy has a hard time distinguishing between a gum stick and a cypress log, the latter of which will bring as much as five thousand dollars in its raw state—and even more after it’s milled into lumber.

Frustrated and maybe a little embarrassed for his mistake, he explained: “I felt the grain of the wood—just like cypress—and the end of the log had ax cuts. Those are usually telltale signs of good old wood.”

The buoy glides south along the shoreline, thirty yards, forty yards, fifty yards, then turns back upstream. The clock ticks. Jim has been under the water for forty minutes now.

Lounging on the deck in the back of the boat is Willis Everett, fifty, of Gay, Georgia. A big man wearing baggy khakis, a plaid shirt, blue Chuck Taylor high-tops, and old-fashioned sunglasses, Everett brings to mind the actor John Goodman. For several years the Flournoys have been supplying sinker cypress to Everett, whose company, Vintage Lumber Sales, kiln-dries and fashions the precious commodity into meticulously handcrafted interiors. Old-growth river-recovered cypress—some of it in excess of two thousand years old—has a cultish, almost fetishistic attraction among a handful of wealthy clients, many of them Southerners. The wood is prized for its color, which ranges from honey blond to red to dark gray; its tight grain and softness, which make it excellent for detail work; and its natural, glowing matte finish. A room fitted out with Everett’s cypress can cost in excess of $150,000 and exudes a striking sumptuousness. “Some people buy it because of its history, because it was harvested by hand 150 years ago and has lain in the rivers since then,” Everett says. “They also like that it’s ‘green.’ They’re buying lumber from a tree that’s already been cut down. But it’s also a very limited commodity, and some clients just like having something that no one else has.” Everett’s highest-profile job to date is the restoration of the historic Cloister at Sea Island. His individual customers include Sea Island Company’s CEO, Bill Jones III, and professional golfer Davis Love III, plus a few others whose identity he closely guards.

A birdcall pierces the tense silence on the boat. Everett, an avid naturalist and a former organic farmer, purses his lips and calls back, mimicking the bird. “Tufted titmouse,” he says.

Don swivels in his chair at the helm of the pontoon boat, resting his feet on a black metal box containing a .45-caliber Springfield Armory model 1911-A1 semiautomatic handgun—and plenty of ammo. “It’s real good at close range,” Don says. “There’re some big gators out here; it does a good job with them, and snakes and whatever else might come up. I always carry protection.”

He trains his eyes on the bleach bottle, which has been bobbing up and down in the same area for a couple of minutes now. “When he messes around in one spot like that,” Don says, “it usually means he’s got something.”

As if on cue, Jim bursts through the surface, flashing an enthusiastic thumbs-up. “Now we’re in business,” Don says, adding sarcastically, “The boy finally did something right.”