Progress brought people like Leon Johnson to apply for jobs in the boat-building company where I worked. He came from Louisiana, where he had been a farmer all his life. But something went wrong, and he could no longer make a living in the country. He and his wife sold their farm and moved to Florida.
His wife’s parents lived there, and he soon found some cheap land where he could plant his trailer and let his dogs run free. At his in-laws’ house, the dogs had been chained up, he told me, because there was no yard. They were good dogs, he said, all strays that nobody else wanted. There were ten of them.
