Village of Ochopee and area maintain remnants of old Florida's look, way of life

Joanie Griffin can hardly bake her Key lime pies or roast pork each morning like she once did.

Just talking about it, Griffin, 77, expresses a pained look as she describes how glaucoma has nearly wiped out vision in her right eye, keeping her from leaving home to help in the kitchen of her Ochopee restaurant, where she has claimed her stake in Southwest Florida, 45 minutes from Naples.

Although she can’t be there every day, Griffin still tries to make appearances to visit her fans; she has become something of an international celebrity.

“I can’t understand it,” she said of customers coming from all around the world to eat at her restaurant in the swamp.

Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe is a red, wooden shack with screened white doors — that don't seem to close just right — along U.S. 41 East and eight miles northeast of Everglades City. It's a popular stop for passing motorcyclists in leather jackets and hungry tourists after a sweltering day on an airboat, although the only relief comes from a draft through open doors and windows. A red fading sign out front has promised “cold beer” and “good food” in white letters for almost 30 years.

Joanie, her red hair cut short, bounces around the restaurant chatting with employees, who joke they’ll make “I’m not Joanie” aprons for their frequently inquiring customers.

The cafe has become one of the last remaining businesses in Ochopee since the land became protected by the federal government in the 1970s.

Now, the residents’ livelihood depends almost entirely on tourism.

A state of mind

Brimming with backwoods charm, Ochopee has all the expected sights and characters — gators sunning on the dirt roads, Key lime pies at the local cafe, the good ol’ boys frogging deep in the Everglades.

On the western edge of the Big Cypress National Preserve, Ochopee is now nearly untouched. It’s a mosaic of native habitat: prairies, canals, rivers and mangroves thick with biting insects.

A stretch of roadway through the swamp, Ochopee is more like a state of mind than a geographical area.

It's even more desolate in the summertime, though, as businesses adjust their hours to the off-season and residents take advantage of the lull to get their own vacations.

Ochopee’s beginnings date to when families flocked to the area to buy land along the new, 283-mile-long U.S. 41, finished in 1928 to connect Miami to Tampa.

The Gaunt family was the first to settle there, with a sprawling tomato farm a year after the road’s completion. They named their new community “Ochopee” — a Seminole phrase for “big field” or “big farm” — and six years later, it became a booming town with about 50 families.

There were restaurants, boarding houses, hunting camps and general stores, a filling station, garage, hotel and post office.

The land became protected in 1974 with the Big Cypress Conservation Act. The law authorized the federal government to spend $150 million to purchase land that included Ochopee and 700,000 swampy acres, much of it previously planned for development.

Now, the National Park Service regulates the Big Cypress National Preserve.

Ochopee has since dwindled to a few businesses off U.S. 41 just east of Everglades City.

There’s the guy who hunts "skunk apes," the nude photographer and the smallest post office in the U.S., each drawing tourists from around the world.

What's left are the vestiges of the town founded by pioneers who arrived to make their own way, and the generations of families who settled in the swamp years ago and now love their jobs and can’t imagine leaving.

“There’s no place else I’d want to go,” Griffin said.

Five generations

The walls and rafters of Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe are lined with postcards, snapshots from successful hunting trips, coconut heads and other trinkets. The waitress calls you “honey” and “sweetheart” and encourage guests to “help yourself” to a refrigerated case filled with soda cans and beer bottles.

Joanie Griffin brought her family to Ochopee in 1981 from their home in Miami. Before that, they spent many summers in Ochopee at the Golden Lion Motor Inn, a family-owned motel that has since turned into barracks for the National Park Service.

Joanie’s husband, Carl, built the first concrete building in Collier County — a Standard Oil filling station  — in Ochopee. Joanie jumped at the opportunity to open a sandwich shop when the property next door went up for sale.

Carl died two years later, but the blue-and-white concrete filing station remains next door to Joanie’s and across the street from the current post office.

A few years later, the sub shop became Joanie’s Blue Crab Cafe, serving frog legs, alligator bites and beer-battered french fries, which Joanie swears are addictive.

“I never thought I’d be in the restaurant business,” she said, laughing, but it inspired her daughter to follow suit.

Terri Rementaria, 58, opened up her own restaurant in Everglades City, Camellia Street Barbeque and Seafood Grill. Her daughter, Naiara, works alongside her, and her 4-year-old daughter Amaia Mayberry, with a blond ponytail and a pair of pink headphones, plays in the restaurant with Play-doh.

Terri works in the kitchen while Naiara handles the front counter, taking orders and delivering meals, although little Amaia can sometimes be spotted carrying a basket of chips and salsa out to a customer.

“My customers, I love them,” Terri said. “I learned it from my mother. She hugged everybody. She loved everybody. She cried when someone died.

“It’s a wonderful laid-back feeling here. It’s a small, tight knit community. ... The fact that we are able to maintain this old Florida lifestyle, it’s nice.”

But the Griffin family name has been in Ochopee since the town’s beginnings.

Terri tracked the history of her family back to her grandfather, Clarence Griffin, who drove an ice truck in the 1920s, delivering cold relief to the loggers clearing brush to build Ochopee.

That’s five generations of the Griffin family with beginnings in the area, something Terri wants to maintain.

“I would never want to go to Miami to raise kids,” she said. ”I would never want to go back.”

The link between it all

If you blink, you’ll miss it.

Driving east on U.S. 41, a break in the swamp growth is the only indication that something is there. There’s no outrageous sign claiming “smallest post office in America,” no flashing lights, no fanfare.

Yet, it still draws tourists from across the country and the globe. The post office is the intersection between Ochopee’s longtime residents and the curious travelers passing through.

A storage container turned fully operating U.S. post office, the structure has room for only one employee. It operates six days a week, but on Saturdays, Shannon Mitchell is the one behind the counter.

It may not be the most glamorous job — she sorts mail for the carrier, orders stamps when she runs out and sells postage to passing customers — but it’s just enough for the Everglades City resident.

“You do what you love and you love what you do,” Mitchell said. “I love my job.”

Perhaps that's because, besides doing all the regular post office duties, she also doubles as an ambassador for the Big Cypress National Park, and maybe the Everglades in general.

The 7-foot-by-8-foot post office is authentic Americana: blue shutters and wood siding with nearly 70 years’ worth of coats of white paint; in October the building turns pink for breast cancer awareness month. An American flag keeps watch on a pole nearby.

In a former life, the structure was a shed, storing irrigation pipes for the Gaunt tomato farm. A fire burned down Ochopee’s original general store and post office in 1953, so the structure has acted as a post office ever since, serving a three-county area (Collier, Miami-Dade and Monroe), including deliveries to Seminole and Miccosukee tribe members.

Inside, the walls are lined with historic photos of the post office, postcards and all the expected USPS materials — policies, ZIP codes, directions.

There may even be a few gecko droppings.

During the day, though, there’s a constant stream of human visitors. In the summer months, it’s mostly Germans, Austrians and Swedes sending mail back home from America’s smallest post office, with the postmark to prove it.

On one recent hot and sticky Friday morning, Marie Perin, 12, kissed her envelope addressed to family in France before tossing it down the chute.

“It’s neat to see that they enjoy coming to the post office and the Everglades and they’re interested in your town because it’s like, ‘This is my town.’ I’ve adapted to it. It’s nothing new, I guess,” Mitchell said.

“But when you see it through other people’s eyes, you realize you’re very lucky.”

Post run

Six days a week, Brittany Potter drives her white Ford Escape down Ochopee’s back roads, kicking up dust along the way. The side of her car says “US Postal Service.”

Potter, 25, delivers mail to the area’s 900 residents.

She wears yoga pants, Ray-Ban sunglasses and traditional black and white Converse tennis shoes. Surrounded by Ochopee’s hunters, fishermen and outdoors enthusiasts, she’s a sheep among wolves.

“I’m a nerd down here,” she said, laughing, while maneuvering down a dirt road dotted with rusted mailboxes. “There’s very few of them, but we exist.”

When she tells people she’s from the Everglades, they always ask about gators.

“But I’m not an outdoors person, so they’re always disappointed in me,” she said.

Twice a year she travels to comic festivals across the country, but she is happy to return to her Everglades City home and her job in Ochopee.

“I love it here,” she said. “I love my job.”

Romanticizing the Glades

Among the cypresses dripping from an afternoon rain, Tommy Owen shares his passion for protecting his swampy environment and the Gladesmen culture.

“I grew up on this river,” Owen, 29, said while lounging barefoot in the back of a Glades skiff, navigating it down the Turner River with a wooden pole. “I took field trips to the river and as an adult we go frog fishing on the canals. Not only do you enjoy it, but you can survive on it.”

He’s a tour guide for Everglades Adventure Tours, one of several ecotourism businesses in Ochopee. His father is a biologist at Fakahatchee Strand Preserve State Park; a self-proclaimed “biologist brat,” Owen grew up outdoors.

Now, he makes a living educating Ochopee’s visitors about the Big Cypress National Preserve.

“We want to preserve the culture of the land,” he said. “We’re living off the land but not exploiting it.”

Visitors to the preserve romanticize the Everglades, he said, and are dying to leave their hectic lives dominated by technology.

It’s the free-and-easy, no-fanfare Ochopee state of the mind that they’re after.

“We are the Glades,” he said. “It’s save it or let it die and we go with it.”