Chapter 28
Ten won’t come again, blow the candles out
Ten won’t come again, better live it now
“Ten Won’t Come Again”
Unlike our Starmount days, our individual callings as adults sound from disparate corners. What became of the Sons of Starmount? What kind of men did we boys grow up to be? Those questions are not as easy as they may seem. Where we found jobs, built homes, and raised families only tell part of the story.
In the years after Starmount, Jim Maples continued to feed his hunger for adventure, taking many more trips with the biologist, Jim Stevenson. That old 1965 yellow school bus once used for trips into the local woods eventually found itself rolling through remote wilderness areas we would never have imagined in 1977.
When Jim was eleven years old, he and six other boys went to the Yucatan Peninsula with Stevenson, tromping through the brush and catching snakes, iguanas, and anything else they could track down and grab. Let’s pause for a moment to define what “tromping through the brush” looked like in Mexico. It involved young boys, not inexperienced in the art of tromping, mind you, but still young. In tennis shoes, sandals, and hiking boots, they scrambled over taller-than-they-were boulders, eye-level cactus needles, and scorpion-laden ground cover, all the while kicking at, reaching into, and jumping over untold camouflaged death. And, naturally, loving every minute of it.
That trip south of the border tested Jim’s mettle in ways that our more casual forays into the American wilderness never did. The bus broke down somewhere along a back road in northern Mexico, and that’s where their real adventure began. After paying a local family a hundred bucks to leave the bus in their yard and having some local mechanics promise to fix it over the next few days, Stevenson and the boys loaded up in the small pickup truck they had been towing behind the bus and headed for the beaches of the Yucatan.
As a harbinger of the trouble to come, Stevenson and the boys found themselves directly in the path of Hurricane Allen as it raged ashore. The strong winds and tidal surges chased them off the beach and up into the mountains. Phones were out, and roads and bridges washed away, making it a dangerous journey back to the village where they left the bus. They arrived back in the village to find all their remaining gear burned in a large pile where the bus had been. There they were: no clothes, no gear, and someone stole the damn bus.
The trip, scheduled to last three weeks, stretched into five as all eight of them piled into the cab and bed of that small pickup truck and drove from Mexico back to Tallahassee.
A couple of years later, Stevenson returned to that little village and found the bus stripped down behind the mechanic’s house.
Jim Maples’s nose for adventure and, sometimes, trouble was instinctive. He felt it deep inside, like a pulse. That wild streak was still evident the few times I visited Jim in the years after Starmount. In one way or another, those visits always seemed to involve the topic of snakes and, at times, actual snakes.
The first time I went back, I was almost seventeen, and Jim was driving his family’s old Chevy Blazer, though not quite legally. We cruised around the old stomping grounds and even the back roads near the home I moved to after Starmount, on Hill n Dale Drive North. We were driving down the old gravel road that carved out the boundaries of that second home near Monticello and Wakulla Springs. We were recounting our friendship in the years before I moved away, when, like an eagle flying a hundred feet in the air, Jim spied a black racer in the field alongside the road. He slammed on the brakes, leaped out of the Blazer, and, in an instant, had that three-to-four-footer by the head and tail.
“What in the hell are you doing?” I yelled out the window, but I was too late. “Dude, don’t put that fucking snake in this car!” That was the only thing I managed to get out before Jim jumped back into the driver’s seat and shoved the serpent into the console between the seats.
“Man, that’s a pretty racer, don’t you think?” Jim asked, not expecting anything but the gleeful reaction he always got out of me back on Starmount.
I was a teenager by then and had long-since traded my passion for snakes for that of guitars, girls, and hamburgers. That’s a more genteel way of saying that even the topic of snakes, much less the actual snakes themselves, had reached the point of officially freaking me out.
As any sane person would, I kept one eye on the console and the other on the door handle the entire way back to Jim’s house. I contemplated the terror I might be confronted with if that snake found any number of openings in the console to slither through, eventually finding its way into any number of openings in my jeans. I also pondered what it might be like to jump out of a car going sixty-five miles per hour down the intestate. Rolling head-over-ass down I-10 seemed the more reasonable option in the moment, but Jim had confidence enough for the both of us, and that snake stayed put for the ride home. Thankfully, there was no need for me to “exit the vehicle.”
On my last trip to Tallahassee, some fifteen years after that, the topic of snakes found itself front and center once again. By then, the old Chevy Blazer was just a sweet memory, and snakes, thankfully, were a slightly less up-close-and-personal topic than they had been on that first trip.
While sharing a beer at a local bar near the Florida State University campus, I noticed that a section of Jim’s left hand had a decent-sized scar on it. The whole hand looked years older than his right hand.
“What the hell is up with that hand, Jim?” I asked, pointing somewhat rudely at the scar.
“Man, a cottonmouth got me in the bathtub.” Water moccasins are hemotoxic, so they can do a lot of damage to tissue and blood vessels, which explained the scarring and aging on his hand. As a side note, water moccasins can also kill you.
Just like that now long-ago ride in the Chevy Blazer, I felt freaked out beyond measure, but impressed, as always, by my friend’s adventurous courage. That is, until he told me how the snake had come to bite him.
“What are you talking about, man?” I asked. “Did that son of a bitch come up through the drainpipe or something?”
“Uh, no,” he said with a grin. “The moccasin was a pet. I usually hand-fed it mice in my bathtub.”
“Wait, what?” I had consumed a few beers and wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly. “You were feeding it a mouse, with your hands, in your bathtub?”
“Yes, Mark,” he replied, apparently incredulous at my shock.
Jim was an expert with snakes, and he had apparently successfully performed this procedure on countless occasions in the past. But this time, the snake gained the upper hand, so to speak, and sank its fangs into the index finger on Jim’s left hand, instead of the mouse, its intended target.
Once Jim had fully explained the incident in his most convincing tone, I just stared at him until I could think of something to say. “Well shit, man, that must have hurt.” It was the best and only reply I could muster, so I just ordered another beer.
Jim graduated from Leon County High School and initially attended Tallahassee Community College. He left school early to work for his dad in the family concrete business as the maintenance-shop manager. Jim has been working for his father in one form or another nearly his entire life, even buying dirt bikes as a kid with the money he made doing various jobs for him. They eventually sold the family’s stake in the company, but Jim continued to work in and around the concrete business, earning as many industry certificates as there were to have and working around the southeast for all the major commercial concrete players.
In between concrete jobs, Jim finished an associate degree at Tallahassee Community College and, in 1998, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in geography from Florida State University. That degree was in no small part a result of the days we spent navigating our childhood maps on Starmount.
Like me, Jim found love, married, and then eventually had to endure its end. He now lives on twelve acres, twenty miles north of Tallahassee, in Havana, Florida. He’s happy working for himself in the home-improvement business and spending most of his free time outside in a manner not that different from what we did in 1977. He fishes the local ponds, rides four-wheelers, and still catches snakes by hand, some of which I’ve heard to be ridiculously big and dangerous.
Starmount, for Jim, was the earliest indication of an unquenched thirst for life, a life that at times came too fast and too hard, but rarely without the adventure, independence, and searching that fills the soul.
John Maples was always one of the smaller kids on Starmount in 1977. Well, the small kid eventually grew up. He played football as the starting defensive end for Leon County High School, enabling him to find himself and stay on the right path at a critical point in his life. He considered playing in college and even visited universities around the south, but by the time he graduated, there was a girl who made sticking around town worth it.
There were stints at community colleges, working with his brother and dad in the concrete business, and running a lawn-care service, but not long ago he told me that meeting his future wife, Karen, calibrated his life in a way that school and jobs never did.
“I met my angel, and she flew me out of there,” he said.
The last thing I heard, John drove a truck for Budweiser and lives in the suburbs of Jacksonville, Florida, with Karen, their son, Zachary, and daughter, Madison.
Though the Stege brothers all eventually settled down in the Tallahassee area, they each carved out very different lives from one another.
Matthew attended Leon County High School and Lively Technical Center, the local Vo-tech in Tallahassee. And in a nod to our outdoor life on Starmount, he graduated with a degree in natural resources and horticulture. Matthew moved around a bit, living in Gainesville, Florida, for a short time, and later following a friend to Buffalo, New York. He got a job there at General Mills and, more importantly, a chance to get out of Tallahassee for a while.
Matthew has spent most of his adult life back home in Tallahassee, though. He worked for Second Harvest Food Bank for twenty years, eventually rising to the position of operations manager and, like many of us, he experienced his fair share of love, marriage, and divorce along the way.
He is now settled and enjoying life in rural Gadsden County, about thirty miles northwest of Tallahassee. He hunts deer and still reels in the bream and largemouth bass of our youth. He also works a midnight job, but that’s so he can support his real passion, running his own farm and honey business. Much to my delight, the name of his business has a direct link to Starmount, the dark woods, and Death Valley. His business is called “Sasquatch Farm Wildflower Honey” and, in a you’re-so-Starmount-if moment, the motto on his company’s T-shirts is “I Beelieve.”
Tommy Stege also graduated from the big county high school in Tallahassee. After graduation, he began working odd jobs as an electrician, until he found his true calling in law enforcement. He attended the police academy and became a Leon County sheriff’s deputy. After working at the county jail and on street patrol, he discovered his career passion. Tommy works with high school students as a school resource officer assigned to his old alma mater, and he has held that position for over two decades. He is happily married to Mickey, his wife of a dozen years, and, like Matthew, continues to fish, hunt, and enjoy the great outdoors.
Timmy Stege left the old neighborhood as a young teenager, but still attended Leon County High School. By his sophomore year, he found that traditional high school wasn’t for him and, like Matthew, decided to finish his education at Lively Technical Center. Timmy excelled at outboard marine and auto mechanics, his comfort with and mastery of engines being a natural extension of his years on Starmount, where even early on, he had the touch for making old, hapless go-kart and dirt bike engines spark anew. He even taught small-engine repair as a teenager at the adult technical school.
Timmy parlayed his mechanical talents into a twenty-year job working at a hydraulic shop and eventually owning his own well-respected shop, repairing heavy equipment like bulldozers and dump trucks. He worked alongside his son, Grant, and his wife, Jen.
We were all so young and healthy when we lived on Starmount, so it’s hard to imagine that one of the youngest among us is already gone. Timmy lost a difficult battle with cancer on January 15, 2016. He was forty-five years old. Though not the only Son of Starmount to disappear from view, his death was a stark reminder that the shadows cast from old wooden docks and dirt bikes don’t last forever, but the memory of friendship sure does.
Matt Bourgeois heard the call to serve his country long before he recognized it as such. His grandfather, his father, and his Uncle Carl all served in the military and their stories had constantly filtered through the ether of Matt’s young life. He entered the military early on, joining the National Guard while still a junior at Leon County High School. He continued to serve in the Florida National Guard until 1987, when he laid down an enlistment contract on a Navy recruiter’s desk. His personal statement was one sentence long: I want to become a member of the most elite unit in the Armed Forces, the SEALs.
And Matt did just that, becoming a highly decorated Navy SEAL medic, winning multiple medals and honors, including the Bronze Star and the Purple Heart. The Surgeon General of the U.S. Navy even created an award in his name to honor him, called the “Matthew J. Bourgeois ‘Muddy Boots’ Award for Force Health Protection.” The award itself is a sculpture of bronzed muddy boots, molded from Matt’s actual boots.
Matt served in the Gulf War and the war in Afghanistan, eventually becoming a prominent member of the famed DEVGRU, later named, Joint Special Operations Command unit SEAL Team Six.
War games back on Starmount were at times fierce, but always forgiving. Plastic Army men destroyed by firecrackers and dirty lawnmower gas, and relic Army helmets dented by dirt clods and stones were easy to replace. But that’s not real life. Soldiers may be replaceable with other soldiers, but the sons, daughters, brothers, sisters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, and friends they once were, are not replaceable. When we played Army in the woods and swamps around Starmount, we always came back home. But that’s not real life, either.
I got the call from Jim Maples in the spring of 2002, telling me that a land mine had killed our childhood friend during a training exercise at Tarnak Farms, an abandoned al-Qaeda base south of Kandahar. Matt Bourgeois was close to the end of his deployment, but instead of coming home, he became the thirty-first American service member, and the second SEAL, to die in that conflict. More than a decade later, the military reclassified the land mine that took Matt’s life as an Improvised Explosive Device, the infamous IEDs that were so destructive throughout the war.
Matt Bourgeois’s death did not define his life, and he leaves behind more than memories. His son, Matthew, just seven months old when Matt died, is now older than his father was on Starmount in 1977. But just like his father was then, Matthew is happy, healthy, and smiling in the Florida sun.
After attending Lincoln County High School, Joey Fearnside went to work for the state, pouring concrete, including a lot of the Maples’s concrete, for bridges, overpasses, and retaining walls all around Tallahassee. But that was just work; it wasn’t his passion.
Joey dreamed of auto racing, and in 2004, he moved to North Carolina, where he became a clutchman and transportation crew member for Allen Johnson and Chip King, both big names in the Pro Modified and Pro Stock racing world of the National Hot Rod Association. Individual track wins and even a world championship rolled in, with these cars going 0-250 mph in 5.8 seconds flat on the long, straight tracks of Bristol, Gainesville, Pomona, and countless others.
Having grown tired of all the traveling, Joey retired from the racing business in 2014 and now lives in Knoxville, Tennessee, running a vape shop with his son, Corey.
A whole other world awaited us beyond the limits of Starmount, and the role our old neighborhood played in our lives would, as expected, be as different as the adults we turned out to be. For some, Starmount symbolized a childhood left behind, like old toys in the driveway or photographs long since yellowed and unrecognizable. For others, Starmount was something we would try to return to repeatedly, for reasons both understood and not. Still others—most, even—seemed unmoved by Starmount either way. That’s the thing about childhood: it can be a blessing, a curse, or just something that you used to have.
Faded memories, incomplete as they are, eventually begin to play the role once reserved for the act of making them. Often, for better or worse, we wind up living vicariously through nostalgia. It’s clear to me now that I am the only one of the Sons of Starmount to remember the old stomping grounds with such grandiosity of spirit. I speak of my time there in words dripping with hyperbole, my heart full and completely satisfied.
Starmount, for me, is still its original, larger-than-life size. I can recall the images of my life back then as vividly as the ones from last week, and sometimes, even more so. Life burned them into my memory with an intensity that time has not eroded.
For me, Alligator Pond never dried up to the point where its namesake island looked more like a brushy knoll than the majestic centerpiece of a wild kingdom. The gurgling drainpipe, once hidden beneath the dock, never rose ten feet into the air, dry-rotted and rusting like some ghostly remnant of a West Virginia coal town. In my heart, Alligator Pond is still alive and well, with more fish in its belly than all the oceans of the world and more fun and laughter than a thousand county fairs combined. It continues to dare snakebite and alligator death in the marshy areas along its banks. The surrounding fields of tall grass and live oaks are still a place where dreams float on honeysuckle breezes and laughter clings to tire swings.
In my mind’s eye, the dark woods still stand like stalwart castles, never caving in to suburban sprawl or becoming asphyxiated by concrete nooses. Developers never castrated the grand loblollies that spiraled toward heaven, keeping watch over the Starmount kingdom. Those magnificent trees, more than a half a century old, were never brought down and replaced by ornamental landscapes so neighborhoods could feel surrounded by the wild, but not too wild.
In my heart of hearts, the dark woods still protect the mysterious creature that roams Death Valley, and the creek still runs clear and deep with crawfish and barefoot explorers. Sunbeams fighting their way through the dense southern canopy still point toward buried treasures like old pocketknives, Hustler magazines, and half-guzzled cans of redneck beer.
Even Starmount Drive itself remains unchanged in my imagination. A bulldozer’s blade never smoothed out the rocky dead end to the point where it could no longer eat boys on their bikes for breakfast. The fluorescent streetlights still flood the uneven blacktop like a midnight sun, while skateboards, Big Wheels, and childhood dreams rush by in an endless, innocent loop. More than anything though, the Sons of Starmount still walk in each other’s shadow, best friends and without a care in the world.
If I had my way, we would stay boys forever, never having to feel any of life’s indignities.
If I had my way, our paths would have never diverged due to luck, choice, or circumstance.
There would be no life-defining trouble, permanent heartbreak, or even the slightest inkling that any of us would ever pass from this world.
If it were up to me, we’d still be sitting on the hill between the Maples’s house and mine, blowing face-sized bubbles with day-old Bazooka bubblegum and waxing philosophical as only skinned-kneed, grass-stained prophets can. We would still be debating the merits of becoming immune to rattlesnake venom, pondering the best fishing holes on Mars, and congratulating one another on the heroes we were so sure we’d become. But one doesn’t always, if ever, completely get his way.
In time, each of us would leave Starmount, but I left the neighborhood at the right time. I left before circumstances made it small and unimportant. Some of my friends, I fear, stayed too long. They witnessed both the slow, natural death of a star and the volatile implosion of one. One thing is true about the past, though: everyone must make peace with his or her version of it, no matter if it was an all-too-fleeting gift or a seemingly never-ending burden. If you can make peace with your past, then peace is what defines your future.
Once you reach adulthood, acceptance by a larger social group no longer carries the weight of the world. The strength of adult shoulders and a sharp sense of individualism steps in to do the heavy lifting in life. Footsteps evolve from the shallow imprint of a boy’s barefoot heel and toe to the deeper and more plodding impressions of a man’s leather-soled business shoe or steel-toed work boot. Tracks that once covered the ground in random groupings eventually thin out and become, for better or worse, sovereign, purposeful, and permanent.