Heath Langston

There are two mullet fishing philosophies within the confines of the small town of Sopchoppy, FL.  And, they both emanate across the road from each other.  One is what I call the “Lawhon” method.  That’s where you gather up a gang of like-minded men and go to the harbor together and work as a team to harvest the mullet.  The other I call the “Porter” method.  The Porter method is pretty much every man for himself.  Get together any size group of men you want, but when we get down to the water, you go your way and I’ll go mine.  My formal training in mullet fishing came from the Lawhon side of the road.  

When the Lawhon gang goes mullet fishing, a group of anywhere from between three and twenty men and boys go down to the water’s edge, pile into impossibly small jon boats and ply the quarter of a mile distance to the far side of the harbor before bailing out into the knee-deep water to form lines of net blockades working up the channels and creeks.  It is very important to watch the tides and fish on the appropriate tide.  If the tide goes too low, the boats can get stranded in the shallows until the harbor re-floods a few hours later: a not so uncommon situation.  The water up here is sometimes painfully shallow, and the mud can be more than knee deep.

When the Porter crew goes, most likely a boat will not be necessary.  Most of the crew will wade out from the beach or shore into water that is mostly about waist deep, and await the fish coming by.  They will park their pickup trucks along the water’s edge on the nearby road or highway.  The water in the top end of the bay, where the Lawhon’s prefer to fish is murky and grey.  At the top of the bay, the fish almost never can be seen - even a few inches below the water’s surface.  Where the Porters usually fish, the problem can sometimes be just the opposite, and if the fish can see you, they will avoid you.  Where the Porters fish, the bottom of the bay is almost always firm and sandy, but the water is normally deeper, and requires a much heavier net – one that will travel to the bottom of the bay quickly once thrown in order to pin the fish before they have a chance to swim out from under it.

Rarely, to my knowledge, over the years, has one crew invited the other to fish together.  

So, when the call came one day from Bobby Porter to invite me to fish with them, I was eager to go.  On the phone, Bobby, said they were on their way to the harbor, asking if I’d like to join them.  I dropped what I was doing, drove straight to the house, threw my net in the truck, along with a cooler and some ice, and drove straight out to the harbor.  I checked with Bobby a couple of times via cell phone to make sure I knew where to find his crew once I got down to The Point.  He had several other men with him, including his son and grandsons and a couple of other men from Sopchoppy.  Each man had his own pickup truck, and as the crew moved around the area looking for the greatest concentration of fish, the group moved as a caravan.

I caught up with Bobby’s crew on the inside of the long sand spit that forms Alligator Harbor.  One side of the spit is the open Gulf of Mexico; the other is the shallow and highly productive beloved harbor about which I love to write.  On this side of the Harbor, long boat docks leave the shore and extend hundreds of feet out into the bay.  At the end of the docks are large wooden boat houses and mechanisms for raising boats completely out of the water.  Most are well maintained, and nearly all are decorated with no trespassing signs.  Mostly, we were blind-casting.  Blind casting is act of throwing a net into the water in front of you in hopes that there might be a fish somewhere underneath the net.

We fished in a number of different locations, and, for the most part, did pretty well.  As the lone representative of the Lawhon gang fishing with the Porters, I did respectably, catching a fair number of fish with my ultra-light custom net. By the end of the evening, we were all tired and ready to pack the fish in coolers and head in.

As we gathered up and said goodbye for the evening, I offered my fish to Bobby, and he mentioned for the first time, that our fishing effort was actually in support of a fish fry that was to be the following day at the home of a mutual friend whose son was on death’s doorstep.  This young man had been laid low fifteen to twenty years prior by an infection most commonly associated with mosquitos.  However, in his case, the sickness was brought about by an infection that his body was unable to conquer.  Having fought a good and brave battle, his body was now shutting down after all these years. It appeared that there was no way to stop that from happening. 

Bobby told me that I was welcome to come out to the cookout; it was to be at the home of our mutual friend.  He told me to bring my wife with me.  But, knowing the pain that the family was dealing with, with the eminent death of their son, I instead told Bobby that I just would not feel right, coming out to hang out and eat.  Instead, I offered to come to the event and DO something, like cook, or clean fish, or help with the other items that would be prepared with the meal.  He insisted that all of that was handled, and he just wanted me to come eat.  Again, I declined.  It just did not feel right.

The story is told that Heath Langston was about seventeen years old when he contracted meningoencephalomyelitis, which is a combined inflammation of the brain, spinal cord, and meninges.  The odds of getting a disease like this one are astronomically low, but that meant nothing for Heath. Heath was like a rock star in our county.  Everybody knew him, or knew of him.  Everybody knew at least some of the story of Heath’s illness.  He still made public appearances right up until the last year of his life.  His wasted body was wheelchair bound, and his skin looked like it was stretched tight over his bones.

Despite living in the county for a dozen years, I only met Heath for the first time just a few months prior to his passing.  There had been a change of command at the local sheriff’s office, and the new sheriff was a member of my church.  As such, our church sanctuary was used to hold the swearing-in ceremony.  It was a Wednesday evening, a night when I am normally found in church.  The building was packed with well-wishers and family members of the various sheriffs’ department dignitaries.  Heath was the son of Under Sheriff and former pastor of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church, Maurice Langston, and as such, was counted among those present to watch the proceedings.  At some point during the course of the evening, I noticed the lanky young man in a wheel chair near the dual back doors of the sanctuary.  He was gaunt looking; yet, it seemed that every person in the room was intent on shaking his hand and speaking to him.  That had to be Heath.

Maurice Langston had been my pastor for a number of years.  He and his wife, Judy, were extraordinarily faithful and devoted to their flock at Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church.  Occasionally, I would hear of Heath’s battles with his disease, and some of those stories were pretty horrifying.  There were stints in the emergency room of one of the big hospitals up in Tallahassee.  There were whispers of Heath doing worse, then doing better, then doing worse.  There was muted discussion of all of the harm that was being done to his body by the disease that ravaged him.  He was known to occasionally have to spend days on end in the hospital.  All the while, the Langston’s continued to serve their flock, and to smile warmly and hug and minister to the rest of us.

Rather than allow their own personal situation to dictate their outer demeanor, both Maurice and Judy always seemed to graciously accept their family’s misfortune.  Rather than allow their own troubles and problems to steal their joy and the focus, they instead relied on the guidance systems supplied by God and His Holy Scripture to navigate the terrible waters that no parent wants to sail.  I once heard Maurice deliver from the pulpit, within one of the myriad sermons that he preached, a pithy one-liner that I felt so appropriate from a man who carried burdens like his:  that there is a heartache on every pew in the building.  I felt, as soon as I heard him utter the words, that if there were a man on the planet who had the credibility to make that statement, it was Maurice Langston.  Maurice and Judy had long ago given their troubles and their son to the Creator of the Universe.  But, nevertheless, they were left with the problem of how to give each day to that same Creator.  Each new day brought new challenges in their fight to save their son.  Each new day brought new battles that they knew they’d eventually lose.  Each new day, the war became a bit more desperate and the outcome a bit more certain.  You see, it’s one thing to lose a child.  Losing a child is a terrible and horrific event.  It’s quite another to lose one a little bit more each day – to know that the ultimate end is defeat.

That ultimate end was close at hand when Bobby Porter offered the invitation to go mullet fishing with him.  Six months prior to that invitation, at the Sheriff’s swearing-in ceremony, there he was - meeting and greeting the hundreds of people present for the event from the seat of his wheelchair.  His mom stood proudly by.  I got in line to shake his hand and introduce myself.  When it was my turn, he gave me a broad smile and an iron-grip of a handshake.  He said that was good to meet me, and the look in his eye made me believe that he meant it.  People were lining up to speak to him; well-wishers crowded around.  When he shook my hand and looked me in the eye, I could tell that his dad had trained him well.  Us dads, we want our boys to be able to look another man in the eye and greet him in a polite, yet manly way.  Men who are strangers, extend the hand, grip the hand of the other, square our shoulders, and tell them that it’s a pleasure to meet them.  Successful dads know that their own sons will navigate through life in much better fashion, once having mastered this simple paradigm of manly etiquette.  Heath Langston had obviously been taught by the best.

Word was whispered around Sopchoppy that Heath was not doing well.  This time was different.  I knew not to ask questions.  Was it that he had gone through the last of line of defense for a certain type of anti-biotic?  I wasn’t going to ask.  Was it that the disease had taken some new, more dire and threatening turn? I wasn’t going to ask.  Perhaps a sympathetic and opportunistic co-disease had presented itself?  Not going to ask.  Bobby’s invitation to me to provide fish for the fish fry, and to attend, was incredibly kind of him.  And while I did not feel that attending the fish fry was appropriate, I was so wonderfully touched to have been a part of the crew that caught the fish that was used as fare.

That same weekend, Heath passed.  He went back to the Creator.  Remember, you heard it here, we don’t own our kids.  We only rent them.

…

Heath’s funeral was the following Tuesday.  Of course, it was held in the sanctuary of my church - the same sanctuary where I’d shaken for the first and last time, his frail, yet manly hand, just a few months before.

Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church is a large congregation nestled in a very small community in one of the most rural parts of Florida.  Southern Wakulla County is nearly an hour’s drive removed from the confines of the large metropolitan area of Tallahassee, the state capital of Florida.  Tallahassee, suave and sophisticated, with a very large state university, a smaller, but equally well-known university for minority students, and other institutions of all sorts that are known around the region, is a bustling area of nearly a half-million people.  But, down along the Forgotten Coast, where the land meets the marsh, eventually giving way to a thousand square miles of sea grass beds in the gentle northern Gulf of Mexico, life is fifty miles – and fifty years – removed.

Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church was birthed out of the upheaval brought about by a different church – one that I am very well familiar with.  I lived and worked for 20 years in the Brownsville area of Pensacola, FL, home to a large church called Brownsville Assembly of God.  My office was almost directly across Cervantes Street from Brownsville Assembly of God.  My next-door neighbor was the well-known Oscar’s Restaurant, one of the best mullet eateries on the Gulf Coast.  It was Oscar’s that gave this Kentucky boy his love of fried mullet.

My office secretary was a life-long member of Brownsville Assembly and she graciously offered numerous times to escort my family as Sunday morning visitors to the church.  I always politely declined her invitations, being a devoted member of one of the other big churches in Pensacola, Olive Baptist Church.  Through her, I had opportunity to meet the pastor of Brownsville AOG on several occasions.  When the beginnings of the well-known Brownsville Revival (or Brownsville Awakening) first began to rumble in the early to mid-90’s, that entire area of Brownsville, including the business community, was impacted.  I was made especially aware of the events across Cervantes Street because of my daily interaction with my secretary, Marilyn.  The Revival eventually came to the attention of the local daily newspaper (derisively referred to in Pensacola as The Mullet Wrapper), and then began its meteoric rise to national and global fame.

Apparently, not long before we moved to Wakulla County in 1999, Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church came about due to a split in the former First Baptist Church of Sopchoppy, when the church leadership of FBC Sopchoppy, having visited Brownsville AOG, decided to implement some of the doctrines taught at the Brownsville AOG revival in their hometown church, thereby upsetting the long-standing status quo.  Many a Baptist church has split down through the eons, and most were probably busted up for similar reasons.  The new churches became Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church and River of Life Church.

So when my family moved to Wakulla County in 1999, we could still feel the aftershocks reverberating from the big split in Sopchoppy.  We initially joined First Baptist Church of Crawfordville, but migrated to Sopchoppy Southern Baptist in 2003.  That means that we spent a total of three years under the wonderful pastoral ministry of Maurice Langston prior to moving to North Carolina for three years.  The outcome of the split in the years since it took place has resulted in two vibrant and growing congregations, both working hard to serve the spiritual needs of the citizens of Wakulla County.

Over the course of time, families will tend to feud and fuss, and then come together at the moment of a crisis.  That’s what happened in Wakulla County when Heath Langston passed.  The congregations and leadership of both churches collapsed together in and around and on top of the Langston family in a show of love and support.  The entire community personally felt Heath’s loss.  And, there we all were the day of the funeral, stuffed shoulder-to-shoulder into the sanctuary of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church.  My wife and I grabbed one of the few remaining seats left inside the sanctuary in the balcony, crowded against the right wall of the building.  It was otherwise standing room only.

Henry Jones, the current senior pastor of River of Life and former pastor of the now defunct First Baptist Church of Sopchoppy, and the current pastor of Sopchoppy Southern Baptist Church, Dr. Bill Jenkins, co-led the service, both delivering condolences and both delivering timely, thoughtful and prayerful sermons.  The hushed congregation listened intently to both men.  The mood in the building was not one of sorrow, but one of joy.  The entire community was together again, just as they had been before the split years ago.  You simply cannot hug that many necks in one day and not feel the love and support of the community – and the resultant joy that comes with it.  As I mentioned, a family might fuss, but we give a lot of neck hugs after it is all over.

From the pulpit, Henry Jones carefully recounted Heath’s final days to the crowd.  He also, carefully wove the story of Heath’s grand life and purposeful passing.  He pulled together the painful strings and threads of a life so severely impacted by disease, yet so touching of others.  He was able to weave a whole cloth from those strings and threads, and presented that cloth to all of us in the congregation during that sermon.  His humor and good nature caused us to at once laugh and cry.  We were unified as a community and the Spirit of God was glorified by the gifted speaking and leadership of both Jones and Jenkins.  As Jones closed his remarks, he mentioned that Maurice and Judy’s friends had come together the weekend before to host a fish fry in Heath’s honor.  And, with a flourish that only a really good preacher can make, Henry Jones capped his sermon with the humorous remark that “only in Wakulla County, will a young man like Heath Langston automatically desire that for his last meal, he wanted to eat the local delicacy, fried mullet”.

And, at that moment, seated in the balcony with my wife, with Henry Jones speaking those words, it completely came to me.  Forgetting the grave nature of the proceedings, I looked at her and loudly exclaimed with unabashed glee:  “HE ATE MY MULLET! --- HE ATE MY MULLET” !!   Angela grabbed my arm and told me to sit back down.   I left that building walking six inches off the ground.  I didn’t care if I’d embarrassed her or anybody else. 

I told her as we exited the service that I was going to find that Bobby Porter and thank him for the invitation to mullet fish with him that fateful afternoon.  It was, after all, the first time that Bobby had extended that invitation to me.  It was also, as far as I knew, one of the few times recently that the “outside the harbor” guys had reached across the road to us “inside the harbor” guys.  He was nowhere to be found.  So, after a bit of futile searching, I abandoned the plan to find him, and just figured that I’d catch him that next night at Wednesday evening services.  For reasons unknown, he was not to be found Wednesday evening.  So the next day I called him, and told him that I wanted to thank him for the invitation for that specific mullet fishing trip.  He acted like it was no big deal.  I told him that if I never went mullet fishing again for the rest of my life, it was OK.  He asked “what do you mean”?  I replied to him that the trip to catch fish for the Langstons and for Heath for that last fish fry for him … if I never went mullet fishing again, Bobby, you got me in on the one trip that - more than any other that I’ll ever go on - really mattered.

We only rent our kids.