Reclaimed Lumber

Sinker cypress paneling and moldings make an impressive room

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.

Forests Primeval

Tough the Flournoys are from Alabama, they are nonetheless part of a strange and insular subculture whose epicenter lies a few miles north of Howard Creek in Wewahitchka, Florida. Wewa, as the locals call it, is as hardscrabble and middle of nowhere as it gets, a swampy no-man’s-land twenty miles due north of Apalachicola on the Gulf Coast. The town is famous for its tupelo honey, which inspired the 1997 indie film Ulee’s Gold. But its biggest commodity by far is sinker cypress reclaimed lumber, apparently of no great benefit to the local economy: When last measured, in July 2007, the population of Wewa was 1,683 and falling, and the median household income stood at $31,500, significantly below the state average of $47,804.

Old growth cypress logs are available today

On sandy, sun-baked compounds off of State Road 71 in Wewa, piles of fat cypress trunks sit curing in the heat. Some are huge, like whale carcasses. The smell in the yards, especially when the sawmills are buzzing, is sweet but vaguely repulsive, like that of horse manure. A cottage industry for decades, the business is a vestige of the state’s old-growth logging industry, which boomed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and died in 1955, when the last big cypress mill, in Perry, Florida, shut down.

According to the Encyclopedia of American Forest and Conservation History, forestland covered nearly 80 percent of Florida, or 27 million acres, in 1750. Limited logging began in 1760, and business boomed around the time of the Revolutionary War, as Florida supplied England with massive amounts of naval stores: The Royal Navy’s magnificent warships were built largely with raw materials grown on what would become U.S. soil. Florida logging—particularly cypress logging—picked up steam in the 1870s, as the state’s fledgling railroad expanded, reaching into the swamps in and around places like Wewahitchka and carrying milled lumber from Pensacola, Perry, and elsewhere to the growing industrial centers of the North. Over the next fifty years, the logging frenzy decimated the old-growth forests in Florida, all but wiping out the state’s ancient cypress groves.

But harvesting the wood was not nearly as efficient as this thumbnail history may suggest. It was performed by a rough bunch of men—Dutch, French, German, Native American, freed slaves from Africa—sometimes called bull hunchers, a moniker that evokes the loggers’ strength as well as the backbreaking nature of the work. The first step was known as girdling; the loggers removed a ring of bark at the base of a tree, causing the tree to die and, significantly, to lose enough moisture to become buoyant. The bull hunchers felled the trees—by ax in the early days, and later with huge crosscut saws—and painstakingly moved them from the swamps and into the rivers of Northwest Florida. Great floes of timber, some as long as twenty-five miles, were eventually loaded onto railway lines that ended, or deadheaded, at the water’s edge. (Today, recovering river cypress is commonly known as deadheading or deadhead logging.) But if a tree had been improperly girdled, and retained too much moisture, it was liable to sink. Of the millions of acres of cypress cleared, an estimated 10 percent to 20 percent ended up on the river bottoms, waiting for resurrection by the likes of Don and Jim Flournoy.

Salvaged cypress logs can be 4 to 5 feet wide

The Cypress Wars

The winch screams. Having just surfaced, Jim sits atop one of the pontoons, breathing hard in his wet suit. Moments earlier he cabled another log, diving down and wrapping the three-quarter-inch-thick steel tether around the fat trunk, a ten-minute process. This time he’s sure it’s cypress. “I ran my hand along the surface and dang near cut myself,” he says while Don works the winch. “Some of the cypress, if it ain’t been rubbed completely smooth by the river currents, still has thorns on it. This one’s cypress. And it’s big.”

The cable draws tight. The winch whines, fighting to free the mired log, and the boat sinks low into the water. Everett rises to his feet, focusing on the spot where the cable disappears beneath the surface.

The cable suddenly goes slack, and the boat lurches toward the clear blue sky. “We got her,” Jim says as the cable spools.

The log hurtles toward the surface, coming into view: It’s dark gray and bigger around than an oil drum. When the ancient hulk breaks the surface, Everett bellows, “Thar she blows!”

Divers go up to 50 feet down to find deadhead sinker cypress

The legal term for the river bottoms around Wewahitchka, in the context of deadhead logging, is “sovereignty submerged lands.” In other words, state property. Anything resting on that land is also deemed state property. Recognizing sinker cypress as a commodity, Florida leased or sold rights to recover it, creating a modest revenue stream by regulating deadhead logging. But in 1974, the state’s Game and Fresh Water Fish Commission objected to the practice, citing the possible destruction of aquatic habitat. Environmentalists were also concerned that deadhead logging disturbed the riverbeds, stirring up silt and sand, which they said is potentially detrimental to animal life and to the river itself. Based on the commission’s objection, deadhead logging was outlawed.

But then a funny thing happened: Everyone ignored the law. In fact, with the tacit approval of state and local legal authorities, a handful of Wewa locals such as Russell Bourkard, seventy-two, and his son, Eddie, thirty-six, and the Causey clan, who’ve been in the logging business for four generations, kept the practice alive.

In the late 1990s, recognizing the futility of the law against deadhead logging—and again that regulating the business could generate money for the state—Florida instituted a permitting process that remains in force to this day. The first permit was let in 1999, according to Sara Merritt, the Department of Environmental Protection environmental specialist who has administered the program since its inception. That year, a total of forty-two permits were issued, allowing for the recovery of logs from designated segments of rivers including the Brothers, Choctawhatchee, Yellow, Apalachicola, and Escambia. Nearly six thousand cypress and heart pine trunks were recovered in a single year, the equivalent of a gold rush.

Then, the bottom dropped out. Merritt speculates that many loggers found the expense of the permits—up to $6,000 for a three-man team—prohibitive. “It’s hard to know exactly what happened,” says Merritt, who notes that an average of twelve permits a year were issued between the years 2000 and 2005.

In any case, the business rebounded and, in 2006, began another surge that continues to the present day. That year, twenty-five logging permits were issued. In 2007, the number jumped to thirty-six. Permitting in 2008 is on pace to reach more than forty, and the number of logs harvested has risen to more than 1,500 a year. (Merritt surmises that the actual amount of recovered timber is much greater, due to underreporting by loggers.)

Merritt has also noted a demographic shift. “The majority of the loggers have been in it for a long time, like the Bourkards and the Causeys,” she says. “But in the past two years, the logging seems to be a secondary interest for the people coming in for permits. For them, it’s almost a recreational thing.”

The coexistence of part-time loggers, some of whom come from out of state, like the Flournoys, and local family outfits like the Causeys, hasn’t been peaceful. “I get complaints that someone is stealing logs from another logger,” says Merritt, who, along with DEP law-enforcement officials, leaves her desk in Pensacola to visit places such as Wewahitchka. “There, we have a concentration of illegal activity. It’s my job to enforce the codes and make sure that anyone pulling logs is permitted.”

Charges have been brought in three cases this year, one in Madison County, one in Gulf County, and another in Liberty County, for harvesting logs without a permit; the offense—basically, theft of state property—is a misdemeanor with penalties of up to six months in prison and a $10,000 fine. But Merritt admits that her authority is limited. “There’s really nothing I can do about the other type of theft, between one logger and another—that’s the sheriff’s job,” she says. “In the Wewa area, deadheading is their blood and their life; it is all they know. Anyone who hasn’t been there forever is viewed as an outsider; the local folks feel like the logs and the land belong to them, no matter what.

“There have been clashes, and there are grudges and personal threats,” Merritt says. “I have been told, ‘We’ll take care of it ourselves.’ I’ve heard stories of gunplay. I had one logger who tried to run over another logger with a pickup truck. It’s a soap opera.”

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.

Some sinker cypress logs need more encouragement

“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.”

Old growth sinker cypress treasure lies in the murky water

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.”

Reclaimed lumber from deadhead sinker cypress

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.”

[via Garden and Gun and Stephen Alvarez]