A Good Stick

After thirty minutes of using the winch to raise the log, then wrestling it into position near the riverbank for sawing, Jim Flournoy fires up a chain saw with a four-foot-long blade. A plume of water and saturated sawdust shoots into the air as he cuts the thirty-foot cypress trunk in two. He ties the logs to the pontoon, and Don steers the boat back upriver, returning to the dock at Howard Creek.

“It’s a good stick,” Jim says, sitting on the back deck while the boat glides up the green corridor of trees along the river. Over his wet suit he wears a blue button-down oxford with a Ralph Lauren horse logo. He leans back and looks up at the tufts of white clouds that have formed in the blue sky.

Don turns his head and peers over his shoulder at his son. “Well, you redeemed yourself, sort of,” he says.

Jim just keeps looking up at the clouds. “Yes, Daddy,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Thank you.”

Jim Flournoy may have made the process of recovering a cypress log look relatively easy. But back in the truck, he confesses that he’s aware of the dangers. “Mainly gators and sharks,” he says. “There’re a lot of big ones in the water we were in today. There are catfish that get up over a hundred pounds, and sturgeon, too. You get down there in the water, and you feel something move over you. It’s creepy.”

Even creepier—and just as dangerous—are the disorientation and panic that can come from diving in complete darkness. Flournoy tells the story of a dive years ago, when his father was still donning a wet suit and swimming alongside his son. “We’re out near Big Swamp Creek, in Alabama, diving about fifty feet deep,” Jim says. “We swim under a ledge, and it’s completely lights out. There are deadheads down there; we can feel them. But we get up under a ledge—there are underwater caverns there—and I start to back up. I feel trapped. I start really freaking out, and at fifty feet deep, that’s a bad thing. Daddy puts his forearm across my back and pins me down on the bottom. I’m bucking, fighting, breathing probably about fifty times a minute. I can hear him yelling through his mask, ‘Be still! Be still!’ So, I just stop moving, and all of a sudden I feel very calm.”

Risky Business

Getting inside the world of the deadhead loggers can be almost as disorienting as diving in the dark. There may be rivalries, but the individual conflicts are to remain unknown to outsiders. The loggers have a kind of omerta, and mostly they obey it.

At the Flournoys’ logging camp Jim works the mill, cutting lengths of cypress. Don stands with his arms crossed over his chest, watching Jim saw. Behind Don is a pile of perhaps thirty huge cypress logs, and beside that pile are several neatly stacked flats of lumber. “We work hard, and we have to protect ourselves,” he says. “I’m worried about Jim sometimes in the water. You’ve got your natural enemies, the gators and the sharks, and your unnatural enemies—mankind. Some of the people who’ve been in the business all their life, they feel like they own the swamp. I carry a gun, yes. I have to.”

Asked if he’s ever used the gun or even had a serious confrontation, he just stares straight ahead. After a long silence, he says: “If you go out and haul in and brand your logs, which we do, and then you go and find your logs on another man’s land, then you have to call it theft. The state will prosecute—and has prosecuted. Though I’d rather not use any specific names.”

Silence again. It hangs there for a good minute or so. Finally, he says, “I will give you a name, though: Causey, C-a-u-s-e-y.”

A few miles away, the backyard at the Causey compound is scented by the musty smell of wet cypress. It is a broken-down, rough-looking place, with a ramshackle woodshed hung with countless sets of antlers from the deer the Causeys have shot, and there’s a Wood-Mizer mill that they use to carve our their living. Boats are strewn about the yard, flat-bottom outboards that won’t get hung up in shallow water when the Causeys are pulling logs. These are the boats that haul in their catch, not in nets but on the ends of frayed ropes and steel cables—whatever’s been available for the past four generations.

On May 2, 2008, Edison “Tiger” Causey passed away of lung cancer at age fifty-three. It is just two days after his death, and his family is in mourning. But his sons—Brad, thirty-one, Brian, twenty-six, and Brandon, twenty-four—still receive visitors, total strangers, to tell their father’s story, and their own. It is one of life in the swamps, of a place seemingly forgotten by time but with a rich history of logging. Edison’s sons don’t really know the history. Not the details, anyway. They just live the life, finding and pulling old-growth cypress.

Today, Everett inspects the Causeys’ recent haul of wood, huge timbers in a pile fifteen feet high, twenty feet wide, and maybe forty feet deep.

“You better get to sawing,” Everett tells Brandon, the youngest but also the most talkative of the brothers.

“Soon’s you say the word,” Brandon says, revealing a brown-toothed smile.

Everett takes good care of the Causeys. He has them up to hunt on his farm in Georgia once a year, and he pays them as much as $20,000 a haul for their cypress.

“This here’s a real biggun,” Brandon says, slapping a log five feet in diameter. His accent, like his brothers’, is guttural, deeply Southern, and as thick as pine pitch. Brandon is proud but sad, his eyes cast at the sandy ground.

“Daddy taught us all,” says Brad. “I’d been pulling logs with him since I was sixteen. Now I’m thirty-one.”

“It’s what we do,” Brandon says. “Sometimes, you dive all day and find nothing. Next day, you get ten logs. It’s like that.”

I find out later that Brandon’s diving days are officially over, on account of felony charges in Calhoun County stemming from a run-in with Jim Flournoy. On January 31, 2007, Brandon pleaded no contest to trespassing, criminal mischief, and filing a false police report for raiding the Flournoys’ compound and spray-painting “BC” on a pile of their cypress sticks, and then calling the sheriff’s department to claim that Flournoy had stolen them. For all of that—plus making numerous threatening phone calls to Flournoy, according to police and court records—Causey paid Flournoy $750 in restitution, was placed on probation for a year, and permanently lost his deadhead logging license. This marked the end of a way of life for Causey, though he will certainly continue to cut the logs that his brothers pull.

And there will always be more Causeys diving for river cypress, to be sure. Edison Causey’s obituary notes the survival of his wife, Peggy, and their three sons, plus eight brothers and sisters. Two months before Edison died, so did his mother, Vera Mae Armstrong, seventy-seven. Her obit lists twelve siblings, nine children, thirty-six grandchildren, and fifty-seven great-grandchildren, all of the Wewahitchka area.

“We ain’t going anywhere anytime soon,” says Brandon. “And there’s still a lot of wood in the water. Don’t nobody need to worry about us. We’ll get the logs. If they’re there, we’ll get ’em.”