Gator Bend

A swamp-edge outpost deep in Grassrivers, built on stilts and bad decisions, where the airboat is the car and the local bar sells bait and beer from the same cooler.

Gator Bend is the kind of place that looks like a location scout invented it — a swamp-edge settlement built entirely on stilts and boardwalks, where the main road is a waterway and the nearest paved highway is eleven miles of airboat ride away. The permanent population of about a thousand is a mix of multi-generational swamp families, burned-out Vice City expats who drove as far from the skyline as the road allowed, and a nontrivial number of people who moved here specifically because process servers can't find them. The economic center is Old Ruby's, a combined bait-and-tackle shop, general store, bar, and post office that has operated under various names for almost a century. The annual frog-gigging tournament draws a surprising number of competitors, and the weekly fish fry has developed into a genuine social institution. Law enforcement visits Gator Bend on a strictly must-have basis, and most of those visits end the same way — boat trouble at the last mile.