Is this guy Florida's Thoreau? Every state claims its Thoreau. John Muir, the Thoreau of California. John McPhee, New Jersey's Thoreau. And so on.
Klink's love of Florida has never wavered. He grew up in Miami, in a home without AC, tromping the 'Glades as a dateless teen, hunting down snakes. His 40 years with the old St. Petersburg Times chronicled a forever vanishing "Real Florida," the land of gators, hermits, fishing legends and a stripper who survived the Holocaust.
Klink has gathered his best columns into four books, each volume better than the last, as the Times gave him increasing license to craft his long features — until the paper started phasing out the slow journalism for which it had become famous.
The writer in me wanted to know how Klinkenberg worked. We have been friends for over a decade. I wanted to steal from him while I could.
We started down a shell path, through a thicket of replanted wild coffee, and headed towards the swamp.
"Go somewhere with someone," Klink told me. "Let that person guide you through the landscape, let them show you the place through their eyes."
Boyd Hill is Klink's place. When he lived in nearby Bahama Shores, he jogged the trails early mornings, hopping over coral snakes and stopping to admire ospreys perched above the adjacent soccer fields.
We paused on the boardwalk at Lake Maggiore. A yearling gator slithered through the duckweed. In the background, bright November sunlight bounced off the St. Pete skyline.
"What makes Florida special," Klink will tell you again and again, "is the blend of wild and tame." We share our cities with apex predators; "you can still get eaten by a dinosaur."
Like Thoreau, Klinkenberg mastered the art of staying put. (Walden: "I have traveled a good deal in Concord.") He has lived in Florida his whole life, he knows what should be here and what's out of place.
"Weird Florida" irks him. A good story may start as caricature, then it deepens.
Klink gave me the backstory on the Levy County Quilt Museum, a column reprinted in his most recent book, Alligators in B-Flat.
Winnelle Horne, then 87, founded the museum. She showed him almost every quilt in her collection, surely testing his patience.
Klink let her talk. Winnelle Horne's Florida was a mean place. Her daddy was run out of town "for touching little girls." In the final story, anything but quaint, quilts kept her warm at night. They held off darkness.
Let a person guide you through their landscape.
As we walked from the swampy lakeside into pine flatwoods, I pumped a mentor for material. He rambled through 40 years of real Florida. He wished he could have profiled Jimmy Buffett (yawn) and Carl Hiaasen. He knows the novelist from his Miami days. Hiaasen refused. "I probably would have pried," Klink confessed.
Writers like to control the story. Klinkenberg is no exception. Jeff Klinkenberg is Florida sunshine, wrapped around a clam shell.
In the piney scrub, I asked what stories got away. He told me about Sulphur Springs and the water tower we pass on the interstate. The city kept the white brick tower closed for decades. One day, he ventured inside with city workers. Flying cockroaches swarmed them.
They fled.
The workers later bug-bombed the tower, and without a reporter, climbed the rickety ladders to the top, where they found graffiti from the 1940s and 50s. "There's a story for you," Klinkenberg told me. Track down the names. Where are they now?
Go into the landscape. Find the story buzzing in everyday place. (Thoreau's mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, called this buzz the "Oversoul.") Thoreau's denuded nature included wood choppers and railroad cuts. He chronicled the invisible everyday.
Near the preserve's aviary, our walk ended. Klink gave me one last story from Real Florida, about an old guy in Homestead who fished for goliath grouper with a cane pole. The fisherman taught him how to call for barred owls.
The barred-owl is now Klink's ringtone. I dialed up his cell.
Klink held his iPhone up to the cage. The phone rang out, who cooks for you.
An owl turned to us, cocking one wing to the ground. He searched for a friend or enemy or potential mate.
The reporter laughed, then offered a Catholic schoolboy's apology. "That was mean," he said, putting the phone back in his pocket.
This guy knows his Thoreau, I thought. If you stay put long enough, your voice becomes the landscape. It will call you on the phone.
This article appears in Dec 8-15, 2016.