The Characters of the Backroads
The Tractor Guy. The Porch Storyteller.
old-world Florida-style wrap-around porch, adorned with lush greenery and vibrant Camellia flowers in full bloom
There are highways in Florida that move like a bloodstream.
Four lanes wide, impatient, humming with rental cars and ambition. Then there are backroads.
Two lanes if you are lucky. One, if you are honest. Backroads do not rush. They linger. They eavesdrop.
They collect characters the way oak trees collect Spanish moss.
If you drive them long enough, you will meet two figures who seem to have been assigned by the state legislature of destiny itself.
The Tractor Guy.
The Porch Storyteller.
They are not elected. They are installed.
The Tractor Guy
You will not see him coming. You will feel him.
The first clue is the sudden deceleration of your plans. The second is a slow, metallic chugging that sounds like a washing machine chewing gravel.
Then, around the bend, there he is. Seated high on a faded green or stubborn orange tractor,
moving at a speed best measured in chapters per mile.
He is not in a hurry. He has never been in a hurry. The tractor has three speeds: slow, slower, and “we’ll get there.”
In places like High Springs, Frostproof, or the sandy outskirts of Chiefland, the Tractor Guy is less a person and more a traffic condition.
He is the unofficial speed limit.
He wears a cap that has seen more seasons than the live oak. The bill is curved as if it has been thinking about things.
His shirt is sun-faded into a color that might once have been blue. Or red. Or patriotic.
His tractor is a biography on wheels—scratches from fence posts.
Mud baked on like pottery glaze. A cooler bungeed to the back with the confidence of engineering learned the hard way.
You might be tempted to sigh. You might check your phone.
You might briefly calculate whether you could pass him before the double yellow line begins to judge you.
You will not pass him.
Because just when you think you have a clear stretch, he raises one finger.
It is not an angry finger. It is not a rude finger. It is the universal sign of “Hold on now.”
And you hold on.
Sometimes he turns into a driveway that looks like it was negotiated with the land rather than carved from it.
Sometimes he continues for five miles, pulling an invisible parade behind him.
Pickup trucks. A minivan. One optimistic out-of-state SUV that thought “scenic route” meant “efficient.”
But here is the secret: he is not in your way.
He is your reminder.
On these roads, the citrus groves do not care about your calendar. The cattle are not impressed by your email notifications.
The sky over a flat pasture near Arcadia is going to be enormous whether you are early or late.
The Tractor Guy understands something we pretend to forget. Motion is not the same as progress.
He stops sometimes in the middle of the road to talk to another truck coming the opposite direction.
Two engines idle. Two men lean. The conversation appears to concern weather, fencing, and a cousin’s boat motor that “ain’t right.”
You sit behind him. At first, irritated. Then curious. Then, strangely calm.
You notice the way the wind moves through the saw palmetto. You notice an egret lifting out of a ditch like a scrap of white paper reconsidering gravity.
You notice that your jaw has unclenched.
When he finally pulls off, he does not wave dramatically.
He gives a small nod in the rearview mirror. A quiet benediction. Go on now. You have learned what you needed.
And you drive on, a little slower than before.
“We specialize in the Florida you won't find on a postcard. Keeping these stories 'unwritten'—but not forgotten—takes plenty of caffeine and even more bug spray.
If you loved today's tale, you can buy me a brew to help keep the lights on. I'm glad you're here for the
Ride.
The Porch Storyteller
If the Tractor Guy governs the road, the Porch Storyteller governs the air around it.
You will find him on a porch that sags in the middle, as if it is listening closely. The house might sit beneath a pair of camellias.
Or under a tin roof that conducts rain like applause. In towns like Micanopy or Wewahitchka,
porches are not architectural features. They are stages.
He does not chase you down. You come to him.
Maybe you stopped for boiled peanuts.
Maybe you were looking for a spring down a dirt road that lost its signage sometime during the Carter administration.
Maybe you just looked lost enough to qualify.
He is seated in a chair that creaks conversationally. There is usually a dog at his feet. The dog is not asleep. The dog is evaluating you.
The Porch Storyteller does not begin with the story.
He begins with a question.
“Y’all headed somewhere, or just wanderin’?”
There is a difference.
If you say you are headed somewhere, he nods politely. You will get directions. Possibly accurate.
If you say you are wandering, his eyes sharpen like a blade being lifted from water.
That is when the curtain rises.
He tells you about the time the river rose so high it tried to borrow the front steps.
He tells you about a panther sighting that may or may not have been a large housecat with ambition.
He tells you about a dance hall that once stood where the Dollar General now hums under fluorescent resignation.
In a place like Apalachicola, the stories taste faintly of salt. In Brooksville,
they carry limestone dust and Civil War echoes. In Monticello, they drift beneath moss that looks like it is eavesdropping.
The Porch Storyteller has never fact-checked himself.
Accuracy is not the currency here. Texture is.
He stretches a moment until it becomes a legend. He adds a detail because it deserves to exist.
A storm becomes biblical. A fishing trip becomes a duel. A stubborn mule becomes a philosophical opponent.
You find yourself leaning forward.
Cars pass. Time rearranges itself. The afternoon thickens into honey.
He might gesture toward a distant field and tell you that a movie crew once tried to film there and left because the mosquitoes unionized.
He might claim he shook hands with a governor.
Or a ghost. He might insist that the old bridge down the road hums at night because it remembers the weight of Model Ts.
You do not interrupt him.
Because what he is offering is not information. It belongs.
On a backroad, GPS signals fade. Cell service flickers. But the Porch Storyteller remains.
He is the living archive. The oral footnote. The reason the place feels layered instead of flat.
When he pauses, it is not because he has finished. It is because he has given you enough.
You thank him. He waves it off. The dog decides you are acceptable.
As you walk back to your car, the porch creaks again, already preparing for the next
traveler who looks like they might understand the difference between heading somewhere and wandering.
The Gospel of the Two-Lane
The Tractor Guy and the Porch Storyteller rarely appear in the same scene, but they operate from the same scripture.
Slow down.
Listen longer.
Let the place speak.
On the backroads of Florida, between the billboard-free stretches and the ditches stitched with wildflowers, these two keepers of tempo guard something fragile.
Not nostalgia. Not resistance.
Rhythm.
They remind you that a road is not just a line between destinations. It is a corridor of encounters.
A stage where patience performs. A porch where stories ferment like sweet tea left just long enough to deepen.
You can measure Florida in theme park attendance and condo permits if you want. Or you can measure it in tractor miles and porch hours.
One makes you faster.
The other makes you present.
And if you are lucky, on some forgotten stretch between Cross City and wherever you thought you were going,
you will get caught behind a slow machine. You will find yourself asking for directions you do not entirely need.
You will sit. You will listen.
The backroads will close around you like a hand at your shoulder.
Not stopping you.
Just reminding you that you are here. 🌿
Florida Unwritten is a weekly letter about the quieter side of the state.
Springs that stay cold in July, towns the highway forgot, and the kind of places you only find by slowing down.
Every Friday morning, one good Florida story.
Earl Lee
Florida Unwritten
