Southverve

Just wanted to thank Laura and Linda and Teresa at the Blue Elephant for having me out to read and sign books.

I’m heading to Atlanta for tonight’s reading and book signing at the Blue Elephant, Wednesday, August 26 at 7:15. If you’re in the area, come by.

It is cool this morning, but shouldn’t be. Cool mornings don’t happen in South Georgia until late September. It is still August, but the Atlantic storms have gone west and northeast. What has been left in the vacuum, a dry wind sluicing down from Canada.

And it is beautiful here – the trees, the expanse of sky and land – but in summers the weather is so hot and the humidity so sticky, that it’s difficult to enjoy. You have to hurry through the landscape. This morning with my run over, I’m walking the field road that turns by the cotton my brother planted in spring. The cotton is blooming now. The road leads to an irrigation pond and in the dry breeze, in the coolness, something unexpected happens – the beauty of this place becomes sharper and lingers.

As if to make the point, out on the pond, in the center, perched on a dead limb, is a crane. Its gray wings are striped white and black and spread out to catch the wind. Its long neck is hooked outward as it makes a deep caw. It, too, cannot believe this morning, and like me wants the wind to rush down in wave after wave.

I walk on the bank, then out to the short dock, then by the red-green lilies and into a pasture where I want to move the town’s old depot and restore it. At the moment, the depot sits in another field on my father’s property. I size up the spot the house will eventually be, then back to the pond with its stand of sycamores and pines.

Out on the pond now, the sun bends the current, blinds me. Not like the quick flash of lightning. The reflection here is unending and I have to close my eyes. I don’t want to. Don’t want to walk home like you wouldn’t if you found by accident, a place and a moment this full of life.

Want to thank Vera and Suzi and my pop for setting up the book signing in Pitts this past Sunday. I’m heading out tomorrow to Atlanta for a book signing and reading at the Blue Elephant. If you’re in the area, come by.

Just wanted to thank Annette Wise and Michael Mallard and everyone at the Plains Historical Society for having me over to read from Snakeskin Road last night at the Old Bank Cafe for their inaugural Chautauqua. Today I’m signing books in downtown Pitts.

All night there has been sheet lightning from the tropical storms and hurricanes that keep circling Georgia, heading further north or west – Claudette, Bill – none have come here directly, but the remnants of clouds and rain stirred out of the Atlantic and the Gulf form sheet lightning, wide reflections of light that flash up whole quarters of the sky. If you’re driving 280 or walking the sand roads of my father’s house, it’s like watching a distant war.

Used to, when I was younger, and in the middle of a dry summer, I kept waiting for the sheet lightning to close in. We needed rain, and somewhere, someone was getting doused. All night, the lightning played across the sky, a trick of weather. The next day, the ground was dry as the last day, the sky empty-blue and still and parched.

I used to wonder what it would be like to run the black sky in that way, along those sheets of light. As soon as one flash ends, another starts up and rumbles, and you, running, have to catch the next flash and the next, chasing.

Tonight is no different as my father and I come home on 280. Except for the rain. This time we have rain, and I want to be up there in the relay of flashes until I’ve covered the whole expanse, breathless, blinded, ready to sleep and fall into the black sky.

Just wanted to thank Phil Streetman for having me on his show today on local channel 55. I’ll be doing some local events this weekend: Saturday, August 22 I’m reading in Plains, Georgia at 7:30 in the Old Bank Cafe for their Chautauqua, and on Sunday, August 23 I’m signing books at my father’s store in downtown Pitts at 2:00. If you’re in the area, come by.

All day I’ve walked the French Quarter with my father – Canal Street and Bourbon and Toulouse and Royal and Jackson Square. I’ve been doing my tourist duties and taking more pictures than anyone should be allowed to take.

Whenever I ask shop owners about the city, how it’s doing since Katrina, the response is this: The city isn’t itself still; too many people have been lost—those that died, those that didn’t come back after the hurricane, those that couldn’t afford to come back. The rents here are so high now. As one man put it, “What makes a city, what gives it it’s soul, it’s identity are the people who inhabit it. And we’ve lost a lot of those people in New Orleans.”

In the French Quarter everything is alive and all us tourists are roaming with our cameras. Even now on a Tuesday in late August with the summer season over and college students back in school, even now there are people. It’s been seven years since I’ve been in New Orleans, and it looks as I remember. My father came here not long after the storm and said many of the shops hadn’t reopened, but now he says, it’s more like it used to be.

Yet stop and talk to anyone who lives here and their expression changes. The reflexive smile goes and an anxiousness takes over, a weariness. They all have friends who didn’t return, and still so many other parts of the city in need of repair.

My father has noticed that, too, and right after he says New Orleans is back, he follows with, The city isn’t quite the same.

Katrina marked and changed the city, but what the change will be is still in the process of happening.

At night now there are marquee lights, jazz competing with southern rock on street corners, people walking up and down with Huge Ass beers and a drink called Grenades, unwinding in a city that is all about unwinding. Tomorrow, the day after we’ll be gone and more tourists will appear to take our place. We are one part of the city’s rhythm.

The breeze comes through and just dies. In the still air you can smell the oldness of the city, the Mississippi River, the different foods being cooked in the restaurants, what will still be here once we’ve left. A city recovering, waiting.

It has rained all day along US 280. We’ve driven through Cordele, Albany, Plains, Preston, Columbus, and Phoenix City. I’ve come across church after church, fields, and a homemade sign for joining the Sons of the Confederacy – that past legacy will unfortunately never rest here it seems.

The rain from tropical storm Claudette slips over us and stops in gray-white patches, light rain, slips on. In the north I found a hole of blue in the clouds – every aspect and depth of the sky is here, endless on all-day drives, my father and I heading to Montgomery.

Two weeks ago, when my kids were with me and we were running State 159 from Amboy to Pitts, I would say to them, “The sky, just look at the sky,” like it was something never seen before, not to be believed.

In our city the sky is truncated by house roofs and businesses. Like the Ohio River, the sky can only be viewed in ribbons.

But here, it stretches on in every direction pulling on you, no matter which way the highway pulls. So I take picture after picture just as my daughter had taken pictures of a storm.

On that day, we stopped the car on the side of 159, leaned on the trunk, laughing and watching the gray clouds and winds come over and cool us, just watching to see what the clouds would decide to do. There was another storm in St. Simons, but today’s weather doesn’t carry the same violence.

The pictures won’t be enough: memory can never reconstruct what is before you, happening now. And here it is, never seen before, not to be believed. I am down inside it, inside the cab of my father’s truck heading west on 280, the sky covering everything.

Wanted to thank Cheryl and Eleanor at Capitol Book & News for the book signing on Tuesday in Montgomery. Wonderful bookstore, wonderful people. I’m in Orleans now, will be here for a day before heading back to Georgia.

I’m heading out for Montgomery, Alabama where I’ll be signing books at Capitol Book & News from 4:00 – 5:30 on Tuesday.  If you’re in the Montgomery area, stop by.  Hopefully tropical storm Claudette will be done by then.

It’s a phenomenon here like everywhere, towns whose identity becomes solely tied to highway travelers.  What I call Interstate Cities.  I-75 runs north and south right through the center of Georgia, and along its exits, you’ll find this.  Fifteen miles away from where I grew up is one of those towns, Cordele, a stop-off place for people traveling to Florida or leaving a Florida beach to return home.  I’ve included some pictures here (a little blurry) coming into Cordele from highway 280, which passes under the I-75 bridge.  

There’s a Denny’s, a Day’s Inn, a Shell gas station, a Chevron, a Titan missile erected next to a Krystal’s, a sign for the lottery, and a billboard promising more hotels and places to eat just a few blocks ahead.  Beyond those few blocks are small businesses and banks and the biggest Wal-Mart on the planet; then a movie theater, video stores and pharmacies until eventually, you hit highway 41 (the highway made famous by the Allman Brothers’ song Ramblin Man).  Take a right on 41 and you’ll come through Cordele’s downtown, a few businesses open, the police station and chamber of commerce, but the majority closed down.  I know this is nothing new, but it’s weird to me that a town’s identity can be summed up as catering to tourists.  

What most people will remember of Cordele is an Exxon station or maybe the Titan missile.  It would be one thing, if the interstate commerce fed the downtown commerce, but it doesn’t.  It just takes all the customers away.  Growing up, my family shopped at a downtown department store called Ruben’s, and a local barber cut my hair – these businesses are gone.  I’m not nostalgic for these places, but the downtown is a city’s identity, what makes it unique, shops you won’t find elsewhere because even if it is a hotdog stand or a seed store, it’s owned by different personalities, and housed in buildings with their own personalities – not a carbon copy of a Shell convenient store or a corporatized McDonalds.  But it’s also how all these stores work in conjunction with one another – a few blocks north and south, a few blocks east and west – anchors, a town’s hub, it’s root, and soul.  

What is it in our culture that desires to homogenize everything?  It’s nice to find familiar brands when you’re traveling – the familiar can be comforting – but it’s also boring.  At least it would be nice to find a mix of local places and standbys.  Nothing exists around the interstate except restaurants, gas stations, hotels with well-known marquees – interstate cities are pit-stop beacons for the familiar. 

As a kid, as a teenager if you wanted anything or needed anything you pretty much had to go to Cordele.  It’s where the grocery stores were, where the movie was and the strip for driving, looking for girls, sneaking beers.  And all of us locals existed just beyond that bubble of people stopping off for gas.  Occasionally, we’d drive through Krystal’s with its Titan missile, dipping slightly into that traffic world and read the license plates from Ohio, Missouri, Michigan, then back to the Burger King or movie theater. 

The division is no different now, just more pronounced.  I recognize that in many ways, Cordele is lucky.  My hometown of Pitts is dead because there’s no commerce coming through.  Cordele thrives as an Interstate City.  I just wish there was more. 

Wanted to thank Dean Swift and everyone at Swift Books for the book signing this past Saturday afternoon. I’m back at Swamp Hollow now, heading to Montgomery, Alabama on Monday.

I just spent time at the Georgia capitol building and will be writing about that soon. Right now, I’m heading to Columbia, South Carolina to take photos and notes about South Carolina’s capitol building and grounds.

Tomorrow, I’ll be at Swift Books in Orangeburg from 1-3 pm for a signing. Come by if you’re in the area.

I just finished up an interview with Georgia Public Radio, and I wanted to say thanks to Jesse Freeman.  I’ll post a blog here when the interview is broadcast.  I’m heading to Columbia, South Carolina this weekend for a book signing at Swift Books.

One time when I was thirteen, not long after we’d come out of a field, a rattler was right on the center yellow line and saw us, heard our truck, or maybe it felt the tires coming, could sense the heat of the engine.  

It coiled up to strike, that rattler out-beating my heart.  My brother swerved but missed the snake with the front tires and under the truck it went; the rattler sounded as if it was echoing in a deep cave.  Then the head struck the undercarriage just as my brother slammed the brakes and my head thudded against the back. 

Back and forth my brother ran over the yellow-brown diamond skin until the snake was crushed, the nerves in its body trying to coil but unable to. 

My brother got out and flung the snake over the tailgate, and we turned around, no more heading to the gas station for sodas.  Instead we headed home.  My brother showed the snake off to my mother and father before he cut the rattler off – five rattles and a button – for his collection.  He kept snake rattles in a pickle jar lid, and whenever I was in his room when he was gone, I’d shake the lid, watch goose bumps rise on my arms. 

**** 

My father used hoes every time a snake showed up in our yard.  I’d make sure to be somewhere behind him, and he’d raise the hoe up, doubling his height. Then swiftly, the hoe would come down.  Rise up, come down.  Sometimes the snake bodies rose up from the force of their heads getting cut into the earth. 

**** 

We fear snakes so much that the only thing to do is kill them, get rid of them.  Even the snakes that aren’t poisonous.   For some reason, snakes are dangerous to look at. 

****  

When I was ten I came across a king snake, black and yellow striped, coiled around a lizard.  I stood watching until finally the lizard got away.  The king snake hadn’t known what to do with me, and I cost him a meal.  I picked up a few rocks and threw them. I missed, except for one that caught its back.  The snake jerked and crawled off.  I went the opposite direction. 

**** 

A friend of my brother’s was hunting next to a patch of briars, waiting for doves to circle around.  That’s when he heard the rattler.  He sat there, yelling, and pissed himself.  Everyone came over and someone fired on the snake, killed it.  “I was afraid to move,” the friend said.  He wouldn’t look anyone in the eye, ashamed of how he had reacted.  

**** 

Every time I walk on the family farm, I keep my eyes on the ground, looking everywhere for snakes. 

**** 

There would be those stories every summer of two crews working a watermelon field – one coming in from the east, one coming in from the west.  The moccasins and copperheads would shift east and then shift west trying to get out of the way.  In the end, they’d wind up in the middle.  

Sometimes someone would get bit, and the venom would shoot a yellow-purple streak up their arm.  Whether someone was bitten or not, the snakes were circled and killed. 

**** 

I’ve seen a diamondback stretched over the whole length of a two-lane highway, working it’s way from one farmer’s land to another.  It took a while for him to clear that road, but no one showed up to run over him. 

**** 

We were in the woods behind the barn, my brother and me, and we were running.  I don’t know why.  But we were running along the old train embankment.  The rails, ties, everything had been taken off, but the sandy embankment was still intact, and my brother was racing me.  He had a pine stick in his hand.  I don’t know why he had that stick, but he was outrunning me.  Just barely.  I thought maybe I’d get him this time.  I was getting older, I was eight, and getting faster. 

Then suddenly he flung the stick.  I stopped, thinking he had flung it at me, thinking he had hit me, but he had thrown it just in front of me, and where it landed, the stick broke open on the center body of a black snake.  A barn snake. 

It kept shifting and shifting.  It was hurt there where the stick had cut its skin.  But we had nothing to finish the snake off with so we left.  

Next day I came back and looked for that snake.  Looked and looked, but couldn’t find it.  I found the two pieces of the wooden stick, looked for snake blood but it wasn’t there.  I fitted the pieces back together.  I tried throwing the stick, but half of it fell to the ground, and the other half went just a few feet more. 

I wished we had killed that snake because we might run into it again.  Better to get rid of as many snakes as we could.  But it wouldn’t be me to do the killing.  I was too scared.  I’d let other people do it – my brother, my father, people I knew – I’d stand back and watch them.  And later I’d come up and watch their bodies twitch and move as if all they wanted was to still be alive, and what did I do about it?  What did I do?

I’ve written two entries on driving south, but there is another way to enter: Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson Airport.  Getting off the plane, you walk through the short corridor until you’re in the main hallway of a concourse, and suddenly swimming in people.  

The people hurry in lines like strings of current, and my body never gets used to this.  Maybe it’s because I grew up on a farm where neighbors perched themselves on distant tractors or porches or in AC-sealed trucks and cars.  They waved, but that was the extent of contact in summer heat. 

I had the same feeling at the University of Georgia between classes.  The buses unloaded everyone around Sanford Stadium, and students formed rivers of walking traffic.  

The only other place I can compare it to is Times Square in New York City.  Inevitably you hit shoulders with people.  They aren’t angry bumps; they aren’t threats; it’s just what happens when so many people are crammed together on a sidewalk not big enough, moving against each other.  

To be inside these currents is a kind of drowning, which makes me anxious.  But it is also a solitude.  Everyone’s mind is on the place they’re getting to next, not the person next to them.  I admit, I’m one of those people who finds solitude in crowds and will sit in restaurants to write while everyone around me talks and laughs; their conversations swirl in and out of the characters I’m creating on the page. 

This rush of airport bodies is typical in the south now, how it has transformed, the direction it is going.  At least, in Atlanta. 

At the end of the concourse, I get on a train and the people have winnowed out.  I sit in the front and stare down a long boxed tunnel that stops at the next concourse and the next until we’ve reached the end, and it’s time to go up the last escalator under a large poster of a girl with her arms stretched out, smiling.  Above her arms, the words Atlanta Welcomes You. 

The escalator stairs close up like bent teeth and slide under the floor.  Everyone steps forward and out into the city.

I’ve been here for three weeks now.  Three weeks of driving to dead-end swamps full of mosquitoes and flat sandy fields full of corn because of ethanol, because every farmer believes this will be the cash crop that pays their banknote, allows them to farm forever without the stress of owing.  Every farmer has a story of someone who planted the right crop at the right time and made it rich.  These are the farms of Pitts and Chula and Rebecca and Albany and Vienna.  

Three weeks of heading north to the Georgia mountains, the beginning of the Appalachia, then to Athens and its red clay that stains the ground boards of every house, then to St. Simons, driving through a corridor of pines.  In every direction, thunderstorms followed by heat followed by thunderstorms.  It’s been that kind of summer where the temperature spikes in the 90s and the storms knock it back to the 70s.  Here, drastic shifts in weather are routine.     

And always this whole summer of traveling through Georgia, I come back to the question, What is the south?  I was born in the south and return here because my family is here.  But each time I arrive, the familiar becomes more of a mystery.  I’m certain it’s because I don’t live here any longer; I’m not set in the daily rhythms of weather, the rituals of those who do live here.  I rely on my past, but the past is too blurred and fragmented to be a guide, to be truth any longer. 

So what I want, what I’m searching for – new angles of knowing.  Like staring through the underbellies of branches of great oaks and sycamores with their leaves rattling and river birches with skin peeling, staring through at cut pieces of sun that change when the wind shifts.  

What is the south?  It keeps haunting me.  Each time, I think I’ve grabbed hold of something tangible, there is a shift, and I have to keep looking.

(Below is another blog about my trip to the Smoky Mountains in June)

Coming up on Grotto Falls, the sound of the creek rushes stronger.  Then we come around the last turn of gnarled roots and wedged boulders.  It’s not the highest falls in the Smoky Mountains, but a great sluice of water comes down into a shallow pool for swimming.  A warning if you choose to swim: the water is cold.  The air, too, is colder – the wind brushes up from where the falls pound the rocks.  

I’m always amazed by this.  I’m used to the cold water streams of New England – the Deerfield, the Cold, Millers – put your feet in, and the iciness burns.  But I’m in the south, and everything should be warmer.  The high altitude, however, keeps the stream cold.  It’s where you want to be in this June heat, our bodies drenched from the climb. 

We stop for Gatorade and paydays – all you need for a day-hike – and I’m still thinking about the diving-flight Dylan had mentioned coming up the trail.  My body sinks on a long slab of rock, the sweat turning chilly, pressing my shirt to my back.  Then slowly one by one we slip behind the falls. 

Here the sound of water is the loudest, so intense, that I lose pieces of myself as I go in.  My relationship to the world around me becomes fragmented, then lost.    

So I hold under the back of the falls, try to find a clear view of the trees, rocks and sky just beyond, or at least I try to reconfigure the world out of the blur of pouring water.  If I can do this one thing, I’ll refind my balance.  This is where I put my faith, what I tell myself over and over.  But the water breaks on the rocks, and the sound is too overwhelming to grow accustomed to.  It isn’t until I walk a few yards away that the crashing subsides, and I’m cognizant of my own skin.  

It’s a strange feeling – the water rushing in front of you and erasing you.  I head up the trail, shaking the remaining numbness out.  It reminds me of the change in seasons if you could encapsulate that change into seconds.  Summer now and I can’t remember anything about winter, but as soon as the days get into a pattern of cold, summer and it’s broad greenness will vanish.  How easy the mind forgets, let’s go of seasons,  forgets conversations as soon as they’re over, lets go of small pains like a splinter removed, until finally in death, the mind lets go of your entire existence.  All of our grounding, how confidently we move through the world is fragile, which I know, but forget until something like this happens. 

My son goes under and stays there.  I wonder what he’s thinking, what he’s looking for through the sheet of falling water.  My son, you have to understand, is daring to be as tall as me now (on his toes), and we sound the same on the phone.  But what does this place hold for him?  Does he see that same blur of sky when he looks through Grotto Falls?  What does that sound and moment hold inside him?  take from him?  

He comes out and it’s my wife’s turn to come through, and then we go further up the mountain.

I’m in North Georgia now.  Tomorrow I make the drive to Cincy, and then on Monday a return flight to Atlanta for a radio interview with Georgia Public during the week and a book signing at Swift Books near Columbia, South Carolina.

My body has ached all day from sitting and driving from the Georgia coast.  The phrase my mother uses is “stove up.”  Man, am I stove up.