Tristan Spinski

I got an assignment to photograph the reopening of the Smallwood Store, a historic landmark and trading post that’s been catering to the residents of Chokoloskee for over one hundred years. Chokoloskee is a small island and fishing village in the Ten Thousand Islands off the coast of southwest Florida. It’s history is steeped in long periods of stillness with intense punctuations of lawlessness and vigilantism.

In 1910 several dozen men from Chokoloskee shot dead fellow resident Edgar Watson as he moored his boat ashore. Watson was a mass murderer who lived a life of contradiction: he payed his bills, went to church, ran a business and killed 57 men. Peter Matthiessen wrote a book about it: Killing Mister Watson. It’s a must read.

In the 1970s and 1980s Chokoloskee and Everglades City, another fishing hamlet just three miles up the road, became drop off points for inbound loads of marijuana and cocaine from South America bound for Miami. As the fishing economy dried up, many of the men who navigated the porous coastline of the Ten Thousand Islands turned to running drugs across the state on airboats. It is said that 80% of the towns’ men went to prison for drug running.

Now Chokoloskee is a sleepy village that swells in the winter with snowbirds escaping the cold up north. And the Smallwood Store, despite a six-month closure after a developer severed public access by fencing off the one and only road leading to the historic landmark, has reopened following a court order to remove the fence and restore the road. My editor’s instructions read: “Be there early and meet the Smallwoods. Nice people. I’m going to ‘share’ the location via iPhone. It’s basically at the end of the earth.”

I was hunting for a feature photo the other evening and stumbled across a horse getting a shower. Nice light + water+horses = blog post.