Florida: what do you think of? Your grandma in Boca? Bikinis in South Beach? The wild chickens of Key West? I didn't know what I was missing until I fell in love with a native Floridean who was determined to show me what she loved about her home state. Sure, we walked along the white Atlantic-side sands of Cocoa Beach and Delray Beach, and picked up shells from the Gulf of Mexico on the panhandle side. But mostly, we went inland, to explore the swampy, cypress-y, egret-y beauties of Central Florida, from the St. Marks Wildlife Refuge to Wakulla Springs (not to mention the Weeki Wachee mermaids, of course, but that's another story).

I'd read The Orchid Thief, by Susan Orlean, but I didn't realize how spot-on her reporting was until I watched a couple of sandhill cranes cavorting in a ditch alongside the highway. Lush nature was everywhere, creeping in between suburban developments and strip malls. Huge bushes of hibiscus and poinsetta. Stubby sabal palms. Anahingas perched on telephone wires, drying their wings. Alligators sunning themselves like piles of old tires.

I still hold an appreciation in my heart for the hidden treasures of this quirky, complicated state down at the bottom of the country, which meant I was instantly intrigued upon hearing about Hayley Downs' film Swamp Cabbage: A Dark and Sweaty Survival Guide, made with Bay Area artist Julie Kahn. Downs is a self-described "half-cracker," born and bred in central Florida, taught to hunt and fish alongside her dad in a place where hearts of palm don't come in a can and wild boar and venison are what's for dinner. "Spooky, dark, weird, unpredictable, beautiful," she calls it.

So what better way to raise completion money for such a film than to get help from the Bay Area's own huntin', fishin', and foragin' culture? This Saturday, you can support the film while grazing on unique eats you won't find elsewhere, at the 2nd benefit party hosted by Kahn and chef Ali Ghiorse of Savory Thymes, to be held in a private garden tumbling down a hillside in one of the posher bits of Marin. Part of the fun is in the discovery of different stations are set up throughout the garden for your nibbling pleasure.

Think Fatted Calf's beef jerky is the ne plus ultra of chewy dried meat? Well, the Jerk-Off Jerky Tasting might change your mind, offering everything from Maria Finn's salmon (the defending champion of last year's jerk-off) to Keith and Damon's Headlands caribou and Gator Bob's smoked alligator, all dried to a savory tooth-pulling chew. Prefer pickles? You can prattle about pickling with Sandor Katz, the father of the wild-fermentation movement, presiding over at the Pickle Party Smack-Down.

The menu, like anything based on wild foods, tends to shift until the food's actually on the table. (Last year, for example, wild boar was promised, except that the Sonoma hunting expedition to source it came up empty-handed; grilled lamb took its place.) But so far, meats promised include Devil's Gulch rabbit; Mendocino wild boar proscuitto; wild-caught raccoon stew; and Rocky Mountain elk chili; and Ryan Farr's puffy, crackly chicharrones. No shortage of vegetables, either, from wild mushroom soup and wild nettle pasta to Tierra Vegetables' purple Rio Zape beans and corn bread made (appropriately enough) from Bloody Butcher corn. And on the desserts table, I'll be offering up my own foraged-fruit turnovers. (Which reminds me: if any readers have extra backyard or farm fruit to offer, I'll be happy to come around and turn it into a donation to the arts.)

Of course, the real fun comes from the unexpected. Last year, after sunset, word went round the campfire that honest-to-Pete Tennessee moonshine was on offer in one of the darker corners of the garden. A perfectly respectable-looking couple, a doctor and his wife, had smuggled, inside their luggage, the product of a friend's backyard still. Now they were pouring tots of white lightning for any curious takers. It was surprisingly smooth, potent but definitely more Woodford Reserve than Copperhead Road. What will happen this time? Come and find out!

Wild Game & Foraged Feast, Sat., May 21st, 6-9pm. Tickets $75 and up.

Last year, the night after Christmas, or more specifically, the very early morning of the day after the night after Christmas, I left the house where still nothing was stirring -- save for ripped ribbons and scraps of tissue paper skittering across the wood floors from gusts of central heat. I found myself drinking beers and small glasses of Jim Beam on ice with a friend on the damp, cold patio of my favorite bar in my hometown of Louisville, Kentucky. The Back Door hugs the side-alley edge of a depressing strip mall in an otherwise lovely neighborhood. Despite a few relatively recent attempts at renovation, Mid-City Mall remains a wan collection of establishments: a husk of a supermarket, a huge basement thrift store, a small gym, a wizened bakery, and a movie theater -- all save the latter permeated through and through by the distinct, inescapable odor of old cigarettes mingling with doughnut glaze. I sat in my uncomfortable plastic chair, letting crushed ice suffused with liquor melt in the back of my throat, compulsively checking the time on my cell phone again and again. I was listening to a friend of my friend I'd just met -- an aging, chain-smoking rocker lady who claimed to have once managed The Jesus Lizard. Curly-haired, shifty, and fast-talking, like a nervous auctioneer, she chattered on through the chill -- upbraiding her absent housemates, flirting, guffawing weirdly, talking about drugs, touching repeatedly on a failed attempt to bed Chris Cornell in the early 90s. The party is over, I thought. My flight was in seven hours. I hopped up to order another whiskey, my last.

When I returned, a man wearing blue overalls was hunched over our table. His hair was gray, but he could have been any age. It was hard to tell. An amazing Witness-style beard jutted out from his chin like a grass-tipped rock formation. He may have been wearing a hat. I'm not sure. I was intoxicated, and staring at what he was holding in his gnarled hands: a broad wicker basket filled with plastic baggies marked with indecipherable paper stickers containing what looked, in the dark, like shards of dried seaweed or the worst weed in the world. My friend had already bought a bag. He was stuffing bits of the stuff into his mouth and chewing deliberately, somehow grinning at the same time. "Jerky," he said. "Get some." I don't actually remember if that's what he said -- I was in my cups, after all -- but he informed me in some verbal form of expression what he was so intent on devouring. I got some -- two bags worth -- and started tearing away, balancing the sharp jolts of bourbon with salty strips. This jerky was the first beef I'd eaten since elementary school. I'd get a full-blown inauguration in Kyoto several months later, but this was an ideal re-introduction: consorting drunkenly with a rich, ancient-seeming flavor, as if my vaguest recollection of steak had been realized, condensed, and boiled down, and then -- in some dazzling Wonka-esque process -- rendered slim, portable, and hard as sheet-rock.

I don't actually remember that the vendor's hands were gnarled, but the adjective suits the smoke-cured paws of a bearded Kentucky jerky-man. He didn't give a name; he just left -- trudging down the steps, disappearing into the shadowy reaches of the bar's tree-covered parking lot with what I'd like to imagine was an affected hill-country whoop. My friend's friend seemed to know him, but unlike us, she didn't want to talk about jerky, much less the man who made it. "It's low in calories!" she'd bellowed, sort of throwing up her hands in exasperation at our lack of interest in her preferred topics of conversation. "It's a great source of protein!"

I brought most of one bag back to San Francisco. I ate it all the following morning, while sitting at the kitchen table in my Mission District apartment, surfing the Internet. When it was empty, I stared at the bag, a little forlorn. "I've got to get some more of this shit," I said to myself. The jerky salesman was the real deal, I thought, a Kentucky classic, an intrepid street food hustler in a lean and largely cart-less land. I wanted to meet him again, to interview him perhaps, to most importantly get my hands on some more of his delicious wares.

I told my friend back in Louisville that I wanted to re-up. He had his own agenda. In exchange for sniffing out the traveling jerky-man, he wanted me to send him a large quantity of marijuana -- some good medicinal stuff with a fantastic name. From my perspective, no amount of jerky joy was worth the potential consequences of stinking up Fed-Ex with a sativa-spiked Folgers can. Imagining how hard a judge would laugh at me, I declined, putting down the phone and casting aside my longing -- temporarily.

Today is Friday, October 2nd. I arrived in Louisville yesterday afternoon. I came here to see my mother and my brother, to get some work done, to read a little, and to watch football on a big television. I also came to look for jerky.

While San Francisco, my city of residence for the past seven years, remains in the grips of a giddy street food obsession, Louisville, an over-achieving restaurant town boasting the likes of 610 Magnolia and Proof on Main, has little in the way of pavement cuisine -- although my Saturday morning trip to the neighborhood farmer's market revealed a lively scene. In a June 2009 article published in Velocity, one of Louisville's local weeklies, Marty Rosen assailed the perceived deficiency as one of several standing in the city's path to gastronomic greatness:

"We live in a temperate zone...We have sidewalks. We have sidewalk dining. We have folks who walk on sidewalks. What we don't have -- except for a few downtown exceptions and a few taco trucks -- is an entrepreneurial crew of sidewalk vendors hawking falafel, chaat, shawarama and sausages..."

I haven't really lived in Louisville since I was in high school. My sense of the changes time has wrought on its physical and cultural landscape arrives in swells and swoops, when I'm back for pockets of time, around holidays mostly. On every ride from the airport to the house where I grew up, my mom rattles off a reel of news -- which shops have closed, major construction projects of note, the revitalized waterfront, the new basketball arena, the growing art scene -- as if I'd been gone for a decade. Then I realize, when you're used to looking closely at a smaller place, such shifts are more palpable, and they can seem so major. Me, I don't even remember how to get around town anymore. Most of my friends have left. Hunting for jerky, I had no leads beyond knowing where I'd first had it.

I started my search on the computer. Googling is an unromanticizable form of sleuthing -- no stake-outs, no disguises -- but it often works. First, I uncovered a 2006 night-on-the-town chronicled in LEO, Louisville's other, more venerable alt-weekly. A drinking party wound up at The Back Door, where a bag of beef jerky made the rounds as closing time approached. Next, I came across a 2004 piece in The Courier-Journal running down the 50 coolest things about Louisville with, at #39, a likely reference to the man I had encountered: "Rusty Sturgeon's homemade varieties [of beef jerky]...are a well-kept secret among meat-o-philes."

After that, a Courier-Journal article from two weeks ago popped up, a short list of favorite local foodstuffs offering more details to corroborate my fleeting experience with what I'd already read:

"Rusty Sturgeon is a Louisville food artist. The overall-wearing gentleman wanders the Highlands selling homemade beef jerky to Louisvillians after a night at the city's myriad clubs and drinking holes. Sturgeon is a friendly guy, but some folks might be (understandably) concerned about buying food off a guy on the street. Don't be. Sturgeon's jerky is way better than anything you'll get at the convenience store. May we suggest the flaming ass, a particularly spicy jerky strong enough to shake you out of a bourbon stupor."

I knew the trail was flaming ass-hot when I tracked down Sturgeon on Facebook, or at least a page someone had created in his honor. A benevolent face sprouting tendrils from the chin grinned out at me, frozen in a streetlight's unflattering glow. I immediately became his "fan."

Of course, I still wanted to find the dude in the flesh. His Facebook page didn't link to Twitter -- or otherwise suggest he ever announced his intended schedule prior to hitting the streets, basket in hand. Later in the afternoon, I called The Back Door to ask when he usually came through. "Speak slower, please," a deflated female voice yawned on the other end. I repeated the question. "Oh yes," she said, perking up just the slightest bit. "Sometimes he's here during the day, sometimes at night, sometimes during the day and at night as well. He's everywhere."

That didn't help. At 10:00 p.m., I walked out the front door of my mom's house and hoofed it over to the bar. I had a drink. I waited for an hour. I saw a guy who'd taught me history in middle school, but no one selling jerky. When you're hunting for something, I wondered, as I drained my whiskey -- are you more likely to find it if you keep moving, or stay in one place? The problem with Sturgeon being everywhere, of course, is that, while he may cover a lot of ground, he's nowhere until you actually see him. Street food vendors tend to show up when you don't expect them, or when you need them most -- when you're, say, one tamale away from fainting. Maybe I shouldn't have eaten that pizza for dinner, I thought -- then I'd have needed him more. I got up, and left. I'd be back in December for another try.