December 8, 2020, Davis Bayou campground, Gulf Islands National Seashore, Mississippi
I left my daughter’s in Annapolis a week ago and headed round the block and back again to pick up my old traveling companion. “How could you forget Raggedy Ann?” Zoe says. We have another tender goodbye and as soon as I hit the highway Siri obliges me and puts on some Willie Nelson songs. How they go right to the bruise is anyone’s guess, but they do. “It’s not something you get over, it’s something you just go through.” And I think, yes, yes; we’re on the road again.
When my son, Jeff, joined the Navy we left home early in the dark so he could be at the Military Entrance Processing Station by zero dark 30. He was a silent kid; and, now, he’s still quiet, a gentle man; that morning I’m not sure we said ten words to one another. When we got there the room was full of sleepy young men and women about to sign up for military service. They seemed a ragged bunch, hunched over coffee, Fritos, and donuts, disconsolate almost. I was working at the time as an intermittent correctional officer in a minimum security prison; the men there, some no older than these recruits, were clean, well shaven, fit; it seemed an odd contrast, these ragamuffins - those tidy cons. I was only one of several parents there; my heart full, ached. There was some crackling from a loud speaker and Willie suddenly sang, “Good morning, America, how are ya?…..Don’t ya know me, I’m your native son…..”
We all have bruises and we can’t predict when they’ll throb. Listen here, Willie dear, I’m heading south, on the road again.
With one’s head in the sand, not knowing what’s ahead, we start many a journey. To be a traveling hermit is one way to live in a time of pandemic. Self-contained, enough groceries stashed to compromise the gas mileage, I roll in my small RV, as if downhill, through Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South, a night stayed in each, chilly campgrounds, early starts, frost on the windshield. Rhiannon Giddens sings in my mind, “I don’t know where I’m going, but I know what to do.”
Memories unravel with the landscape; the oaks and pines, a strobe of bright sun and shadow makes me squint, I’ve been here before, across the Rappahannock River. “On this road two miles south is the Garrett place, there John Wilkes Booth, Lincoln’s assassin was found by Union cavalry and killed while resisting arrest. April 26, 1865.” Port Royal, Virginia, at least 70 miles from Ford’s Theater. I have a photo of that post office; if I haven’t told you, one thing I do is photograph post offices, now more than 500 are in m travel collection.
Out the window we see the rolling expansive, expensive farms, but also the inequities, the inequality. It is one thing to read an article about poverty, but when we travel we witness. Look, below the highway, in a soggy ravine, battered mobile homes, gray metal siding peeling off, stacks of used tires, a green rusted lawnmower as if there were any lawn to mow. Mud. Who can live here?
Thinking of John Wilkes Booth brings to mind Dr. Samuel Mudd. Once I went to his house, preserved now that you can see the actual sofa on which Booth sat to have the doctor cut the boot from his broken leg. It’s worth reading, if you haven’t yet, the book by James L. Swanson, Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, published in 2007.
Oh, keep me tuned to travel and history. I refuse to live only in a protected bubble, my bubble is the earth, earth soak me in and let me hear your heart’s core. Sometimes I get a little carried away here.
Suddenly it’s Georgia and it’s not on my mind to stay but it is the only alternative, I’m not driving
through rush hour Atlanta. I take the road off the freeway and on all sides the ground has been turned up. Red, red, is the color of the soil as if the earth is bleeding. “All torn up around here, we’re getting expanded, remodeled,” says the woman at the campground registration desk. “Probably no water, everything is iffy, it is. Where you from?” She peers out the window at my license plate. “Oh, long way.” Not as far had I gone to the Dry Tortugas, which is still on my list. Dr. Mudd was incarcerated there at Fort Jefferson, now part of Dry Tortugas National Park, it was rough there indeed, off the coast of Key West, Florida, yellow fever.
It’s a murky twilight and the gray rain is about to plop out of the blanket sky. I drive around searching for my site, why lookee here it’s in the red mud and just as I hook up the electricity, down she comes, the drenching wet. I look around camp, at the derelict RV’s and think, Deliverance, as I lock the door, I don’t even want to think about that book or the movie.
But the morning shines brightly; I’m alive, slipping in the mud to unplug and soon, I’m on the road again. Atlanta, a piece cake to the jambalaya of Salt Lake -6 lane 80 miles per hour - traffic, smooth through Montgomery, just south is Spanish moss - which isn’t Spanish and isn’t moss. I listen to the whole of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, every note true, aligned; say it again, the heart’s core, oh, those Chorales. What makes us sing, who are we together? Why divide when we are all hungry? I cross the Escalawpa River, Oh, the water is wide, I cannot get over, and neither have I wings to fly………
Over the Pascagoula River to Ocean Springs, Mississippi; as the sun sets I pull in to a friend’s yard and supper is still hot; in the morning coffee comes to my door. Then to the Davis Bayou campground where the ranger says, “Hello sir.”
“Ma’am,” I say.
“Oh, I don’t have my glasses on,” he says.
“Well I don’t have my hearing aids in so that makes us even.”
Settled in at my campsite, it’s not long before Ranger Skip shows up in a golf cart with the seasonal volunteer campground host, Don. “Yer from Washington?” says Don, “I used to live in Washington.”
“Where?” I ask.
“Sedro Woolley,” he says.
Holy smokes, I live not ten minutes from Sedro Woolley.
“Where in Woolley did you live?”
“On Prairie Road,” he says.
“Did you know my friend, Chris Littlefair? How about Rich Prange?”
“Yep, I knew Rich.”
“He was my bird watching friend when I was the Swan Lady,” I pipe up.
“That so, well I’ll be darned, that was you?”
I nod, and ask Ranger Skip where he’s from, “Near Pensacola, up north.”
“I like it there on the panhandle of Florida, the Suwannee River and the Okefenokee Swamp,” I say.
“It’s naace there,” says Ranger Skip.
“I used to hunt alligators there,” says Don. “Yup, I did”.
“What did you do with the alligators?” I ask.
“Et ‘em,” says Don grinning. “ They’s real good. You know gator is like halibut. Don’t taste like halibut but same textter, real good. Wonst you ate it you like it, you do, you want more.”
My eyes open wide, but my mouth stays shut.
Ranger Skip says, “My wife, my wife to be, she’s addicted to it, she really likes it, really, she’s addicted.”
You sure you want to marry her? I think, but ask instead, “Do you like it?”
“It’s good,” he shrugs.
A few more words about travel and National Parks and I say, “You’ll have to visit the North Cascades sometime.”
“It’s real nice,” says Don, “they got real snow up there, real snow, yep. Wonst I fell in about 4 foot deep liked never to get out, good thing it weren’t 5 foot deep I’d still be there. Now listen,” he says pointing to me, “You gotta try gator, it’s real good, wonst you try you like it.”
Ranger Skip tips his hat to me, hops in the golf cart and off they goes.
I’m in the Mississippi mud now; thank heavens, it’s too chilly for the alligators, they still be sleeping. I’ll have a can o’ red beans for supper, and maybe a dry tortuga with a side of Willie Nelson.
With thanks to Michelle Griffin for history trips to Ford’s theater and Dr Samuel A. Mudd’s house.
Comments