December 17, 2020 Davis Bayou Campground
The thing about this kind of travel is what puts the move in you to get started? And once you get going, when does the itch stop? I thought last night and the night before when in fact I did itch, that maybe it was time to go home. Those little ‘noseeums’ that come out in the damp morning and evenings love one’s ankles, wrists, and the back of the neck; I liked to scratched to death. And then I wondered if maybe the moon was full, why couldn’t I settle down? First too chilly, then too hot, put me in mind of the Nightmare song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe that I memorized in the fourth grade:
When you’re lying awake with a dismal headache, the blanketing tickles, you feel like mixed pickles, you tumble and toss…Of course that’s a very abbreviated version.
A man from Memphis just wandered by and started to chat. He and his wife are wandering around in an uninsulated van, full of camping gear, water jugs, foldable blue chairs, hatchets, red coolers. He said they wanted to visit the National Parks. “Do you have your Senior Access Pass?” I ask. “What’s that?” he replied. So I explain. “It’s the best deal in America, are you 62 yet?”
“Way more than that,” he says, chuckling.
“Well once you have it, you and your passengers can get into any National Park, it lasts a lifetime. Hop to it,”
I said. “Why I’ll hop over to the office, right now,” he said, chuckling some more. He doesn’t know it, but he just won a great prize, there’s nothing more wonderful than visiting our National Parks.
Davis Bayou sustained quite a bit of damage from the fall hurricanes, mostly from the surge of water, the wooden walkways around the bayou are badly damaged, the Visitor’s Center is closed and so are a number of trails. The alligators and the turtles are asleep, too cold for them. The sun shines today and I had lunch outdoors and should get going for a bike ride before the sun creeps low and it gets cold again, the shadows of the live oaks are already long. Or perhaps I’ll walk and let my leg muscles get a different sort of exercise. Were my friend, Debbie, here, I’d never be allowed to be so sedentary. “We’ve only gone uphill three miles….” No hills here I might add.
Here comes a manly man with a tiny white dog under his arm and an even smaller Yorkie on a thin string of leash. Many of the couples at this camp have little tiny dogs, gives them something to talk about I think. Those without a dog often have one partner who needs to talk and how they find me is anyone’s guess, but they do. “Why don’t you go out and take a walk, honey.” She’s probably said it every morning of their retirement.
A few days ago a neighbor camper fussed around outside his rig until he saw me sitting in a patch of sun; he wandered over to ask me if I’d visited with some other neighbors, “No,” I said.
“Well, you should,” he said, “They are thinking of buying a different kind of vehicle, not like yours, yours is real nice, I don’t want to imply that it isn’t but they want something bigger.” And he went on to tell me I should talk to them and find out what they wanted. Did he think I was an RV dealer? Then he went on to ask me about the man who came to do the repair work on my water leak from the freeze up in Parachute, “Do you think he does good work? Do you think he’s reliable?”
“I don’t know; he hasn’t done anything yet.”
He gave me a rundown of RV repair work in Gainesville, Florida where they live. Did I need to know this? I’d already told him I was going west, not east. “But it’s real expensive there,” he said. I didn’t dare ask him any questions. The next day I had to move to another campsite and while I poured a cup of coffee I could hear some rustling around of sticks and leaves outside, a raccoon? Oh, no, I looked outside and there he was, the same man again, with his coffee mug. He’d walked clear across the Bayou to find me. “I just wanted to ask you about the repair work you had done,” he said.
“I haven’t had any work done yet,” I repeated from the day before, “He had to order a part.”
“Do you think he’s reliable? You know, it’s expensive to get things done in Gainesville.”
Good lord. Then he proceeded to tell me everything, how long he’d been married, their big house, “It’s too big really what with my knees and everything and Gainesville it’s nice but we’re thinking of having a house built here in either Pass Christian or Long Beach, but it couldn’t have stairs and who would want that big house we’ve lived there 35 years can you believe how fast the time goes? Well you are patient to listen to me and I don’t want to keep you, but I’m getting old; my mother lived to be 105 and she was in good shape but one day she slipped on a magazine ad, it was an ad for mattresses from the newspaper you know how slick those ads are and it fell out of the paper on the floor and she slipped on it and broke her hip and that was the beginning.”
I wanted to say, do you know anything about punctuation? instead I muttered, “That was probably not the beginning.” He didn’t hear me. “Yes, she just went downhill well you are so patient to listen to me I don’t want to keep you. I’m 73, you are probably younger,” I shook my head. “Well you probably dye your hair.” This man had a lot of nerve and he had that beautiful white hair that we’d all like rather than this mousey mess I’ve been cutting myself since the pandemic began.
“Well,” he said, “I used to dye my hair it turned white in my forties before my knees went out I worked with young people in the mortgage broker business and they didn’t want some old guy’s advice so I started dying my hair but they still didn’t want advice so I gave up, dying my hair. You are so patient to listen to me and I don’t want to keep you.”
Thank goodness he didn’t want to keep me and his wife probably didn’t want to keep him either and maybe I should suggest they get a couple little tiny dogs so they could walk them together and talk to them and leave the rest of us alone. “So long,” I said smiling cheerfully through my teeth.
Last evening my friends across the highway in Ocean Springs invited me for barbecue, it’s the best ever, John said and we went to a place called Pleasant’s and picked it up taking a sunset tour of the beach, the Christmas lights and the thick traffic. It’s nice down there by the Gulf of Mexico, a rosy sunset, houses that look like giant decorated wedding cakes. During dinner there was a lot of discussion of how good the barbecue was and Ginny rambled through old family anecdotes, and what were my favorite Christmas foods, John wanted to know. On Saturday evening we’re going to have alligator and shrimp gumbo, (when in Mississippi).
“First you have to make a roux, stir it for a long time until it gets dark or you can just put the flour in the oven until it turns brown,” he said. I never heard of that, but then I’m new here. Sure hope I don’t get addicted to the alligator meat wonst I taste it. After dinner we watched the British sitcom, Geraldine the Vicar. I didn’t have my hearing aids in so I missed most of the dialogue just as I did during the dinner talk of Uncle Lloyd from Nawfock and Aunt Charlotte or was it Great Aunt Charlotte? from someplace near Jamestown where at their first Thanksgiving, or whatever, they didn’t have turkey not like those Puritans who came later. And she continued, “My second cousin Ida Mae she never let me forget that during World War I, or was it II, we had prisoners of war billeted in our barn and they had to eat one of our horses, but my mama kept in touch with one of them, he was just a kid then, but maybe they ate one of the hogs.”
“You sure it wasn’t an alligator?” I ask. “Mama said there were no alligators that far north but her great uncle Victor who lived in South Carolina or maybe it was his brother, gee I can’t remember, caught one once in a trap but they wouldn’t let me see it because I was only three and it might have wanted to eat me, mama said.”
Hearing aids are sometimes overrated. My host friends keep offering me some of their batteries, but I’ve continued to decline their kind offer. Hearing aids are expensive, they get tangled up with my mask and glasses, I don’t want to lose them, so I’ll enjoy this gentle fog while eating the best barbecue. It was really good.
My neighbors from Memphis have moved to another campsite and camp host, Don, has made the rounds in his golf cart. He didn’t stop at my spot so I wasn’t able to tell him that I’m scheduled to eat alligator gumbo on Saturday. Should I have flagged him down? Oh well.
I’m sitting outside in the warm sunshine, it’s a lovely day, and my heart goes out to the Northwest in the rain and the Northeast in the snow. Once when my son, Nicholas, was just three, we were snowbound in Flushing, New York for three days at a friend’s house. That was the first time I’d met a Newfoundland Retriever. After the blizzard stopped, the whole neighborhood walked around outside in silent awe at all the snow. Nicholas, all bundled up, stood in front of the Newfie, they were eye to eye; the dog put his big paw on his chest and pushed him backward into a soft drift. Laughing, Nicholas struggled to his feet and the dog did the same thing, again and then again, Nicholas laughing until his cheeks were as red as his snowsuit. See, I think there is something contagious in this southern story telling atmosphere. One thought leads to another and before you know it, you have no idea where you’ve gone. Once I met a woman who said her husband frequently had to say, “Where are we going now, Margaret, Richmond?”
I don’t think of myself as a chatterbox, my daughter says I’m horrible at small talk, but put me in front of the typewriter. I always liked that line from the play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart, You Can’t Take it With You, first published in 1936. “My mother writes plays because ten years ago a typewriter was delivered to our house by mistake.”
My friend here says in the south a story starts like this: (and I might add, it never really ends).
Just before Martha Sue shot her husband she put on her red wool coat with the gold buttons, only one was missing, that her cousin Violet had given her older sister Charlotte, but she outgrew it so the coat was worn just one season because she sprang a growth spurt like one of those butter bean plants in a hot June, so she gave the coat to Martha Sue who was a lot smaller and she wore it for years when the weather dipped below 50 which wasn’t often, but her husband, Jiminy hated that coat like he hated Violet because it reminded him of the time her sister, Charlotte, who everyone called Candy Lin, refused to eat the alligator fritters that he fried with okra and onions after browning the flour in the oven like his mama told him never to do.
This is what can happen in Mississippi which is one of those words that is fun to spell out loud like you did in the fourth grade and you had a teacher like Martha Sue who would dance around the classroom getting the kids to spell out loud in a Cajun rhythm like her husband Jiminy did before he dropped out of the band because he suffered from dropsy when he drank which is the reason Martha Sue went to buy the gun.
I’ve got another week here; who knows what could happen next? A text just came in reminding me about the gator gumbo tomorrow and that at Big Lots they have electric blankets for sale. I don’t need an electric blanket, I prefer the slippery blue counterpane that slides to the floor and leaves me feeling like a cold pickle until, shivering, I manage to retrieve it.
You know, there are a lot of mystery foods. In college we ate mystery meat. But I’ve never eaten rattlesnake or gator or kangaroo. I don’t even drink Gatorade. Eating a mysterious vegetable or fruit seems a lot less worrisome. Just east of Sedro Woolley there’s a town called Concrete where there used to be a restaurant called Road Kill Pizza. I never wanted to go there.
Once a friend and I went to Vancouver BC though and bought a Durian fruit, we’d never see one before, and we made a whole slide show about it having various adventures and we put the story together to the music of a group called Ancient Futures. If you want, I could show you the pictures. Well, that’s enough for now. Wish I could sit around here naked in the warm sun and let it bake off my pale imperfections, maybe brown me up a little like a gumbo roux, and to think it’s almost Christmas.
One more thing, I went into Rouse’s grocery the other day and in the produce section they had a Durian, a double Durian, it was as big as my sleeping bag when it’s loosely stuffed in a pillow case, although kind of prickly. There were four or five people hanging around looking at it with their jaws hanging open, below their masks, I might add. “Buy it,” I suggested, but there were no takers. A Durian tastes just fine, but it does not smell divine, in fact quite the opposite. Come to think of it, maybe we could have a socially distant Durian potluck and invite the rangers and the camp host, the one who likes to eat alligators, and Martha Sue and Jiminy, but we won’t let him drink. John and Ginny would like to come, too, they could bring a little roux, perhaps some barbeque, just for you.
With thanks to Ginny Dugaw for the joys of southern story telling.
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