Outdoors – Mississippi Sideboard

Every childhood has a Radley house, a Boo around the corner that opens our eyes to a world that doesn’t appear or work the way we thought it does or will.

Old Rain spooked my little world. Some said he was a freakish child abandoned by a troupe of carnies, others said he was a lost baby Bigfoot come south. When he wasn’t brooding in a boarded-up house in Pittsboro, he haunted the woods and hollows feeding the creeks and streams that make the Skuna River. I don’t know why we called him Old Rain, but what else is the Skuna–or any other river in Mississippi–save rain that’s found its way from the hills to the bottoms and over-wintered in owl-hooted sloughs, distilled and aged, steeped in the character of the land, an inspiration of earth itself?

We bury imaginary monsters under the baggage of adulthood, so I folded Old Rain away after finding far more frightening things than whisperings, thumps, and shifting shadows on lonely pathways, but I’ve grown to believe he was a faunus of the little river bottoms and low wooded hills that my Choctaw ancestors knew and loved. They would call him a thrower, a poboli of the hidden people of the woods; my Welsh ancestors would call him a woodwose, both beings living vestiges of the vital, spirit of the old forests which were themselves a manifestation of divinity on earth.

Old Rain is now–in mind and memory–a companion in those places I still cherish most: bright spring hills, close, dark summer woods, and open fields in the clear cold horns of winter.

March 21, 2026

Parking

December 26, 2025December 29, 2025

Eden on the Apalachicola

Ever since the Expulsion man has searched for the Garden of Eden, and we shouldn’t find it at all surprising to know that among the many who claim to have found it, one was a bespectacled, God-fearing lawyer from Weogufka, Alabama, who declared in 1956 that “the Garden was in the Apalachicola Valley of West Florida.”

Elvy Edison Callaway was a man of faith who fell under the influence of Dr. Brown Landone. Among the books Landone wrote offering advice to ordinary mortals is Prophecies of Melchizedek in the Great Pyramid and the Seven Temples. Callaway describes his meeting with Landone as a “calling,” and promptly abandoned his family.

While surveying his Panhandle land, Callaway found the inspiration for his mission from Melchizedek: the Torreya yew tree, which Callaway, through the teachings of Dr. Landone and his “Teleois Key”, identified as the “gofer wood” from which Noah built the Ark.

After that revelation, everything fell in place. Abandoning his once ardent faith in Christianity, Callaway, through “teleology”, fused what he knew of evolutionary theory and Scripture and decided that “because all informed geologists admit that it is the oldest land mass on earth”, God created Adam about a mile outside Bristol, Florida. He then created the Garden of Eden along the Apalachicola River there and filled it with citruses, magnolias, hydrangeas, mountain laurel and of course the majestic gopher yew (one of the few trees in North America considered “critically endangered”).

E.E. Callaway’s Garden of Eden is protected today as part of The Nature Conservancy’s Apalachicola Bluffs and Ravines Preserve. Accessible via Garden of Eden Road, the preserve has a Garden of Eden Trail leading through the site. The scenery is spectacular; clear, bubbling streams flow through the bottoms of the steep ravines, which support rare plants and animals, some found nowhere else in the world.

Callaway’s southern Eden might not be the original–who are we, or who is anyone for that matter to say–but it’s still a little bit of paradise in this fallen world; God knows we need more of them.

November 12, 2025November 12, 2025

Odom’s Redfish on the Half Shell

It’s hard to imagine the redfish that currently swim in bountiful numbers among our coastal waters going the way of the dodo and the mastodon, but it almost did, and it wasn’t seafaring Neanderthals with primitive Shimanos that nearly caused their extinction.

It was Paul Prudhomme.

Prudhomme created a recipe that was so obnoxious and novel with over-the-top flavors and clouds of noxious smoke that it had to be cooked outside. But for all that, blackened redfish became so popular that redfish was actually threatened with extinction, and the federal government was forced to step in and invoke catch limits before we could make a salad to accompany the very last of its kind.

But be at ease. This prized game fish is back and has been back. In fact, the local anglers in Destin, Florida call the huge “bull reds” a nuisance fish. I myself saw tens of thousands of them attacking bait fish in one football field-sized school near Ship Island.

Folks who don’t saltwater fish only assume that an angler like me would surely target a redfish to throw on ice, but to their dismay I tell them I don’t fish them intentionally for the table. There are a couple good reasons for this: when you clean a redfish, the filet yield seems oddly low for such a large fish to be culled, and secondly it’s about as easy to clean a redfish as it is to filet an armadillo.

But as all starving anglers do we develop a plan: Instead of filleting the meat clean off the fish why don’t we just cut off one side of the red’s body, lay it scales down over a charcoal grill, drench the meat side with garlic butter and slam the lid till it’s done?

This technique accomplishes a couple of things and one by default. First, it ensures all the meat is eaten. Secondly, you don’t wind up in the ER getting stitches fooling around trying to fillet an armadillo and by default this recipe is far more delicious than blackened redfish simply because it’s about the fresh fish and not spices.

The dicta of “Gulf to ice to knife to fire to plate” for this recipe in particular has anxious dinner guests staring in amazement at the cooking process. Redfish on the half shell, as this technique is called, is the best way in my opinion to pay homage to this beautiful bronze resident in our coastal waters. Next time you have a chance to eat fresh redfish, try this particular preparation.

Heat your gas grill or charcoal grill to a medium high heat. In a saucepan heat a stick of butter, juice of a lemon, minced garlic and Tony Chachere’s to taste for a drenching baste.

Grease the grill a bit; lay on the redfish halves scales down and apply your drench liberally. Close the lid, but reapply the drench a couple of times in the cooking process. Remove when the meat is firm to the touch, add more fresh lemon and serve immediately.

David and Kim Odom are anglers par excellance along the Mississippi Gulf Coast.