Notes on the Drive '04: Covington to New Orleans
- Twin spotlights in the sky are saying to the drivers at night: "Don't be lonely." And wouldn't it be nice if we put Don't Be Lonely signs along the expressways? Like the town in AL called Good Hope.
- You Can Tell the Brightness of the Light by the Strength of the Shadow It Casts. <-- That's the title of my next short story.
- The cop hiding in the speed trap with his lights out.
- The boy in the rest stop restroom with the dyed yo boy hair, just standing looking in the mirror in silence, not running the water, maybe not looking in the mirror at all, I don't know. He was behind me while I was urinating. Finally he turned the water on and then left.
- The sun starts coming up around Decatur, AL about 20 or 30 miles south of the border. It took four and a half hours to Nashville, six to the AL border.
- Road advertisement in Hartselle, AL: The Huddle House.
- The AL morning is gray, sprinkly, and foggy. The air has a chill.
- Sing from your chest. Open your mouth and open your throat. And really open your nose. Push the air from your stomach. Gives a bassier tone to your voice.
- There was a surprising amount of traffic for an all night drive. Then driving into Birmingham in morning rush hour traffic it's just me and the Tri-Oil Tanker. From whence they came I do not know. And toward sights they've seen I do not know.
- Arkadelphia, AL. A sign for a shrine of the Most Blessed Virgin as well as a sign above it that said Colony. (?)
- Warrior, AL. Xena's cousin. But before that we have Garden City and Blount Springs. Pronounced "Blunt," that one being my personal favorite. And it slows to a 20 mph crawl near Blount Springs where they have orange barrels taking it down from three lanes into one.
- Next comes Hayden Corner, then Warrior. And a sign for Warrior Robbins. Xena's incestuous cousin. And Kimberly Warrior-Morris, their feminist file clerk.
- A stretch of highway heading into Birmingham is called The Hero's Way. A sub sandwich?
- On the way to Tuscaloosa: I'm not there but I'm still on my own / With the tall red weeds outside Blocton. That's West Blocton. There's fog in the pines, and the rain is steady on the road to Tuscaloosa.
- On the way to Meridien: a sign for Fosters, AL. Australian for sharecropper.
- It rains all the way down 20/59. Just as I write these words the rain picks up and comes down harder.
- Near the Black Warrior River, the land looks like Holland, flat and green and below sea level, criss-crossed in brown trails.
- I see a four foot carved Woodchuck atop a car-towed moving trailer on the road to Meridien.
- Next comes an exit for Demopolis, the dreaded place where all garage band demos go to die. At the same exit is a hospital and near them is a rest stop.
- The tree-lined drive through Mississippi is like a spreadsheet table with green fuzzy borders.
- The rain stops a half hour from the MS border.
- As we cross the border into MS the sky is pale blue all over and what clouds there are are white and wispy.
- The rain tracks on the highway impossibly converge forming an elongated Jim Morrison head.
- A sign (sighin?) for Cuba / Demopolis.
- A squirrel took five hops to cross two lanes in South Enterprise, MS.
- The trees look like frilly green lining in an overcoat.
- I start getting seriously tired in Ellisville, MS, still an hour and a half from the LA border. I'm starting to see shapes in the trees and I can't get to my caffeine pills.
- Rows of stumps are shaped like the bones on a stegosaurus's back. And burst tire treads curl like snakes on the defensive in the emergency lanes. Like Nessie sticking her head above the Loch.
- Two sets of orange jumpsuit prison day laborer gangs so far in MS.
- What should we name our county? Well, what have we got here? Well, we got Pearl River. I know! Pearl River County!
- Pearl River also has its own community college, which is nowhere affectionately known as the PRCC.
- Coming into LA we have low-hanging clouds, big white puffy mountain clouds. I could be on a mile-high plateau, instead I'm in a sub-sea level swamp.
- Tall thin pines with purple trunks and bare mid-riffs, like a porn star in a halter top.
- The mountain clouds gather and join in LA, the sun is shaded. Only patches of blue. It could rain.
- LA has the worst roads in the country. All the bumps and dips, jostles and jiggles. And some of the strangest drivers, drivers you wouldn't be surprised to see going 35 mph on an expressway, in the middle of three lanes.
- Lake Pontchartrain on the shorter of the two bridges, which have camel humps near each shore to let the boats pass. They look like ramps that will launch you into the clouds.
- The Bayou Sauvage National Wildlife Refuge also has swamp tours. (Look up what kind of bird that is.)
- 20 min from NO dragonflies buzz the roadways taking the place of the cicadas on opposite end of the trip.
- LA drivers are aggressive. They dart around you and never signal. But then, everything is a legal U-turn.
- Past the city now heading west to Metairie. More blue sky opens up. The clouds lighten, no longer looking so threatening.
posted by ds @ 10:56 PM
5 Comments:
I try to read a lot of your blog when I can but never seem to comment. I had to after reading this. Having made this same trip to come see you when you lived in NO I can visualize it very clearly. What a strange, yet plain simple trip it was. Your words captured both sides of the equasion. The simple absurdidty of everyday life in other places can seem so foreign yet familiar at the same time, it just has a different t-shirt on than what you are used too.
Thanks for risking your life and writing these notes while driving, I would have done the same but I had your brother in my car and we were cruising at speeds of 110mph+ with semi-trucks surrounding us doing the same. They drew us into their protective womb and said "come along lads, pull along side us and set your cruise control for the future...but don't lag behind cuz we'll run your azz over".
wow, that last line i wrote above is true to life in general.
Fall in line and take the safe, slow, easy path to death with everyone else, or get out of line and you will suffer greatly, then we'll kill you. I choose the latter because I can put up a good fight. I'll go down kicking and throwing some elbows with a grin (while clutching a bottle of gin).
Yeah. I had a mini tape recorder and then I transcribed it when I got back. I was looking through some old files and found this stuff. I'd intended at the time to use them to build an article, but then going back I liked how the note form reads by itself. That's cool you did too, thanks.
It was the summer when the 17 year cicadas reemerged. They were everywhere that wasn't a new development but never in pestilent swarms. When I crossed into Louisiana it was dragonflies buzzing the highway. The insects have gotten a lot worse down there since Katrina.
I deleted one entry about how I kept it at about half your speed, Speed Racer. That Mardi Gras was the shit. Life ran me over. But I'm back up now.
2001 was just on TCM this evening and 2010's on now. Icon appropo. 'ere.
excellent movies, watch them often and remember them well for you need no other knowledge to get through life than what is taught by the Sri Lanka captain himself
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