Off the beaten path

Charlie Doss and Charlie Doss, the father-son owners of Williams Hardware.

Sometimes poets, who don’t look like they can do much more than stare in vacant gloom out the window, pull out a hammer and nail a few English words hard into the frame of our lives, bracing the structure against a century or two or 10 of shifting winds.

Robert Frost did it once with a short poem called “The Road Not Taken,” written in 1915.

If you don’t know the poem by heart, you certainly see the idea, and you’ve heard the language. It’s been nailed to you, too, not just by the poet but by the American culture he braced with it. The last verse goes like this:

“I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.”

I found myself rethinking those lines behind the wheel the other day while sashaying along Palm Beach Boulevard from way west in the City of Palms to way east in Alva.

Then I saw this social media post: “I took the road less traveled, and now I don’t know where the f*#! I am!”

Brothers Trevor and Tyler Baer at Roosters. ROGER WILLIAMS/FLORIDA WEEKLY

Yeah, that. If you can’t get lost sometimes, I mean f*#!-ing lost, you’ll never get found, anytime. You just have to get off the beaten path.

So here, in what may become the first of a sporadic series, I recommend three places you might go on a Saturday to get off your beaten path — all on Palm Beach Boulevard.

Start with Futral’s along the train tracks, a “feed store” celebrating its 80th anniversary. Thank you, Jesus, Thank you, Lord, as Janis Joplin sang, that a slicked-up urbanity like the City of Palms still has a feed store.

You step into a bath of once upon a time — scented air redolent of sacked grains, chicks and ducklings, and baled hay. You can find many things: not only tools, equipment and tack, or special large-animal feeds, but the finest cat and dog food with prebiotics and probiotics, for example. The place may be a throwback, but it has sophisticated contemporary utility. Here, the past and future are joined almost seamlessly in a world of animal care and use.

Roger Williams

Futral’s opened in 1944 when the country was at war. Eight years later, in 1952, about a mile to the east and just 50 or 75 yards beyond New York Ave., Williams Hardware came into the world, now the most classic such luminary in the region.

Owned in recent decades by the two Charlies — retired Army Command Sgt. Major Charles Doss and his son, another very capable Charles Doss — the place welcomes people from all walks of life.

If you live in Lee County, you should meet one of them at some point.

Just to smell and see an old-time family hardware store, with its tincture of tool oil and paint, its vast assortment of tools and equipment, its tidy aisles and seemingly endless boxes of essential merchandise, is now a rare privilege.

Most people come in to pick up things they might not get elsewhere without having to store-hop. A long bolt helpful in repairing a railroad bridge over the Caloosahatchee. A hot-water heater for a better than box-store price. A pipe threaded, a key cut, a lock re-fit, glass cut to size, or screens in frames made to order by expert screen maker Jimmy Laconte — none of which Amazon delivers.

They have meat lures for fishing prized by old-timers, waiting in bottled brine for 30 or more years, still ready to be used. They sell rifles, handguns and shotguns, chainsaws, weed eaters, blowers and edgers. They have the tools of the trade, nearly any trade, or the whole nine yards, take your pick.

If they don’t have it in stock, they can order it while you study wall-hung antiques: a mule’s yoke, a cowboy’s bandolier loaded with .38 rounds, an antique scale, corn-planting equipment, an ancient bottle of Neat’s-foot oil half full (rendered from the shin bones and feet, not hooves, of cattle, to soften leather).

The “good old days” are often either a misinterpretation of what life was like or plain flat wrong. But when you walk into Williams Hardware, the expression seems right as rain.

East of Williams a few miles — past the FPL power plant and Manatee Park, past the sprawling intersection at Buckingham Road with its shopping plazas, past the entrance to the huge River Hall golf community, you’ll find Rooster’s, the perfect farm stand.

Operated by two unfailingly friendly brothers, Trevor and Tyler Baer, Rooster’s is a community center of sorts. Passersby from near and far stock up on an extraordinarily diverse selection of fruits and vegetables, as local as they come in season. The place has zero kitsch but a wealth of Florida extras: home-made ice cream, a slew of local honey and sauces, a sizable selection of singularities such as gator tail, fresh Gulf shrimp, stone crab claws and the like, plus a wide range of potted flowers, tomato plants, sprouting vegetable plants and herbs for sale. The goats penned outside are child-friendly.

And then there’s the staff. When they smile at you and help, you’ll be as lost on the road less traveled as ever you can be, just in gratitude that you drove out there. ¦

The post Off the beaten path first appeared on Fort Myers Florida Weekly .