#4: Jackson Lake Island and Corn Creek Park

To write about the waterways of Alabama is to wade through converging streams of fact and fiction, reality and lore, what’s actually true and what’s just a good story.Let me give you an example: a few weeks ago, on an oxbow of the Alabama River just downstream from its confluence, I swam past an abandoned film set. It’s a film set that was built to appear like a town once thriving and then run down. A stretch of houses halfway completed in order to appear halfway to ruin. Facades and porches finished and then weathered; floorboards unlaid and back doors never hung. The director of the film had come across the island while scouting for locations here in Elmore County, Alabama. There wasn’t anything on the island then. Or nothing manmade, anyway. So they built it, weathered it, and left behind a new old town on the island.The movie filmed here was Big Fish — a story of a son’s quest to parse the truth from the fiction of his father’s tales.The town is called Spectre; the town is called Jackson Lake Island.The island is privately owned but it’s open to the public and has become something of a tourist attraction since the film’s release. You can pay $3 and drive across the causeway to wander the film set. But it seems more popular as a recreation area. A place to camp, fish, boat, swim, or feed the herd of wild goats who have taken up residence on the island.On a Sunday in August, that herd of goats descended on every car to park at a campsite. Ours was no exception.We — me and Shaelyn and Ozzie, that eternally game and up-for-anything crew — made for a site on the far side of the island to spend the afternoon. After greeting the goats, I swam out into the channel. The water got deep quickly and I had to plunge earlier than I might have preferred, all things being equal. But you don’t go wild swimming on your own terms, so I plunged and dolphin kicked and came up paddling a good ways out into the channel. Early enough in the day that the water was still crisp, refreshing if not bracing. The water was like tea — a little tannin-y without feeling at all viscous or algal or gross.About halfway into the channel, I noticed what turned out to be a tree branch emerging from the water’s surface but which at first and second glance I’d mistaken for a water snake with its head raised. After a moment’s panic, I swam over to get a closer look.The branch was still connected to the rest of the tree, which must have fallen from the opposite bank. Winded from the swimming and treading, I tried to stand on the trunk but its angle proved too steep, its surface too slick to get any purchase. I slipped, barely avoiding a faceplant on the log. Had anyone been watching from the bank, the Benny Hill theme song might have come to mind.The felled tree was likely lingering damage from the tornado that touched down here last May. Another tree caved in the roof of the campground’s pavilion. The storm spared the film set, though. The feigned ruin still intact; the felled trees now submerged.While I’d been swimming, Shaelyn and Ozzie had been tracking the goats across the island. I swam back in and caught up with them and the three of us headed over to the film set.As we approached, a child was tossing a pair of shoes into the air, trying to snag them on a line stretched between two poles — the makeshift gateway to the fictional place. The boy couldn’t have been older than seven. He was immersed in his task. The shoes on the line, it’s a reference to the film. If you wandered through the forest and wound up in the town, they’d take your shoes and string them on the line. The grass was so soft here, who needed shoes? And if they’re gone, well, you couldn’t leave.Stories are seductive like that. Tell a good enough tale and you might never want to leave it.But this kid, he hadn’t tied his laces together. There was nothing to catch the line. He was just hucking his shoes into the air and watching them fall. After a few throws, though, he’d figured it out and after his successful throw, immediately took off.We did a lap of the one-street ghost town but I hung back a ways. I watched Ozzie and Shaelyn walk through these fictions made real. They peered up at the shoes — all those wishes to stay in the enchanted town — then crane their necks around the doorways of the abandoned homes. I was being visited by a memory I don’t think I’d ever before recollected. I’d been relying on Shaelyn’s memory of the film until it hit me: I’d seen this movie too. On a date; we’d rented it from Blockbuster. That was back in 2005, when Alabama existed in my mind hardly at all, what I did know came mostly from fictions, exaggerations. And now Blockbuster has long since closed and my life has taken shape here — a husband, a father, an itinerant documentarian — and less than an hour from this fictional world. Jackson Lake Island is ju