A father's dream becomes a son's adventure

Redneck Riviera: Outlaws, Armadillos, and the Demise of an American Dream
By Dennis Covington
Counterpoint, 224 pp., $25

The American dream of the subtitle of Dennis Covington's "Redneck Riviera" was a 2 1/2-acre parcel of Florida real estate the author's father purchased in 1965, sight unseen, from Jack and Leonard Rosen, two former carnival barkers who had made a splash on early TV with their marketing of diet pills, home appliances, and Charles Antell cosmetics.

A dream is exactly what it stayed, the elder Covington having died without ever laying eyes on it. Setting out to inspect the property, which is now his, Dennis Covington ponders the appeal that River Ranch Acres must have had for his father, who had spent most of his life in Birmingham, Ala., working for U.S. Steel.

"Saddle up!" a colorful brochure had said. The author recalls that "Wagon Train" and "Rawhide" were two of his father's favorite TV shows.

What Covington finds in Polk County and describes in "Redneck," which is both an adventure and a tribute to his dad, is "a landscape of beat-up tin shacks with dog runs and outhouses, junked appliances and swamp buggies that loomed beneath the trees like the intact skeletons of steel dinosaurs. . . . An oily sheen floated on the surface of the water in the potholes, and the air was foul with the smell of diesel and spent cordite. The Hunt Club was having a turkey shoot that day to raise money for a new hog pen; the last shots echoed flat across the palmetto fields."

The locals are, to put it mildly, unwelcoming -- reluctant even to admit that the 2 1/2 acres are Covington's property at all, much less grant him access to it. And it is more than a matter of bad attitude, dirty looks, and quasi-legal runarounds. They are carrying guns.

Now his father's dream becomes his own dream. Covington's blood is up, manly primal urges are stirred, along with a not-so-primal urge (or so a reviewer suspects) to follow up his previous book, the wonderful snake-handling memoir "Salvation on Sand Mountain," with something equally and scarifyingly vivid.

He buys a gun. With the aid of a Global Positioning System personal navigator, he does his own surveying. And to fortify his legal claim (by a maneuver known as "notorious" or "open" or "noteworthy" possession), he chooses a design from a book by Lester Walker called "Tiny Houses" and plunks down a cabin (wooden floor and frame, canvas walls, zippered windows and doors) on the site. He even joins the aforementioned Hunt Club. "They were like my people back in Alabama," he writes, "and maybe that's what scared me the most." In no time at all, the cabin is destroyed. And then . . .

It's a rip-roaring story, artfully shaped and bristling with detail, making its way from here to there, then to now, in a way that, you realize afterward, has been toying outrageously with the reader's expectations. This author is a very shrewd customer.

Before we arrive at the book's final sentence, Covington insinuates into his narrative a wealth of observations about real estate (plottage, paper developments, limited partnerships), Southern history (Polk County's per capita lynching rate in the 1920s had exceeded that of Mississippi or Alabama), armadillos, conservation, landscape, cars and highways, and the surging affections and disappointments of family life. If this book is a rhapsody, it's one that's built like a steel trap.

Open the book at any page and the eye lights on sentences that whisk you away. "Peanut's daughter, a barefoot teen with waist-length hair, finally talked us into taking the discussion out to the freezer, where she'd laid the snake out on a bed of ice. Its eyes were fixed under a patina of ice."

What is the real subject here? We'd say that it was the gamey seductiveness of putting yourself in harm's way -- those are real snakes and real bullets, and that's a real fear that one is trying to keep down -- along with an embarrassed awareness that the whole thing must look awfully silly at times. However that may be, the man writes like an angel. By turns funny, brutal, tender, and exhilarating -- and sometimes all at once -- "Redneck Riviera" proves to be one honey of a book.