December 2015: Georgia, Nth Florida, Alabama, Mississippi

The 26 or so posts preceding this are some stories from a trip we undertook in December 2015.

We rented an RV from Cruise America in Atlanta, then drove east to the coast, down to the Golden Isles and then into Northern Florida.  We spent some time along the Gulf Coast, then travelled up by the Mississippi river as far as the Winterville Mounds site near Greenville.

We travelled east to Northern Alabama, then back to Georgia, leaving Atlanta on New Year's Eve.

The wood that wouldn't - Lake Guntersville to Cheaha

We were a little sad leaving Cathedral Cavern. Our friends from the night before seemed like such a team, grumpy disparate group though they were. 

When we pulled out, Lemar was trying to haul a dead side by side, a wheelbarrow full of leaves on its back, out of the cave with his truck. 

Jimmy, an eighty year old Native American who worked there as cave guardian, was pushing mud out of its mouth on top of a small engine attached to a big plough blade. Robert and Cheryl were power washing the mud off the steps into the entrance.  Lynn was in the office arguing with someone on the phone. Nobody was talking to each other much after three days of mud, but everyone was focused on saving the cave.

We swung down the hill in the sunshine and cruised through Guntersville, closed tight on a Sunday. We didn’t want to leave the lake, so we made our way along the opposite bank to the Guntersville Lake State Park, pearl of the Alabama State Park system.

Mary Beth was manning the Country Store and Registration Centre. She was just back from four days off. She hadn’t had four days off in a row since her daughter had the baby. She couldn’t mind nothing. We ambled through the registration. It amazes me that although the registration for every state park in America is a long tortuous paper-based affair, with a sign for the car and a sign for the site, and a code for the gate and a code for the bathhouse, I am nonetheless meticulously entered into a database in which I will be forever Noraine Glendening, because a woman six years ago couldn’t spell my name.  Every receipt is the same.

It’s interesting how well they track me.

We spent the rest of the day sleeping and eating. It has been a long trip. Driving an RV is different to a car. You go so bloody slowly most of the time. And when you are State Parking, you are always dealing with complicated mapping. Garmin has the State Parks in its database, but it’s tortuous trying to extract them.

It was warm with just a nice breeze though, so when the sun set, we got out the two huge bundles of wood we had bought and settled in for a lovely lakeside fire.

Green wood.  Dripping with sap.

No kindling, on account of everything being wet from Saturday’s rain.

We used all the peanut oil.

We started on the barbeque fuel.

We soaked toilet paper in a blend of peanut/ bbq oil/ pepper. (No really).

I was ripping pages out of my journal.

Finally, I spent forty minutes lying on my stomach blowing on the wood that wouldn’t and by about nine, with the moon high and Orion in the sky, we got an ember. I refused to go to bed until I had an inferno, that yes I know was a little pointless in the humid air.

Next morning, the lake was grey and tufty and the gulls who lived on it were wheeling and crying and we thought, best go south.

We were headed for Cheaha State Park, just off the I20, on our way back to Atlanta. But we had no idea where we were going. Finally, we pulled into a Jacks Chicken Shack and had a pancake breakfast so we could use the internet

I forgot to ask for no gravy on my pancakes so I didn't get to eat mine, but I got the address for Cheaha and checked the weather and saw it was to be a bit stormy. I noticed a paragraph at the end of the site about how Cheaha was the highest point in Alabama at 2,400 feet.

Cool.

We pulled out onto the I20.

It started to FUCKING POUR.

BIBLICAL MONSOON RAIN.

I dunno. Siri was getting her period maybe. She brought us down the I20. We drove through Gadston, 14 miles of strip miles. She circled around. There was a road closed. She recalculated. It seemed like we went through the same town but the Chicken Shacks weren’t in the right places.  

Down through another conurbation of commercial hell.  Through some place called Anniston.  Then suddenly, out of the city and down a nice paved country road.

Then left onto a country road. A bit narrow, but peaceful.

Then we passed a sign saying “County services end here”

“That’s new”, I thought.

Then the pavement ended.

Then we started going uphill.

I remembered reading that Cheaha was on top of a mountain.

I remembered those folks who followed the GPS a couple of years ago and died in their minivan in Utah.

We passed a house.

We passed a guy in a plumbers truck.

The road narrowed.

It was fucking POURING.

Finally, we got to a gate blocking the road so there were no more questions.

We reversed back down the mountain.

We reversed back down the mountain.

We reversed back down the mountain.

Finally, we got back on the I20 East and after 60 seconds there was a sign for the park.

I have a profound dislike of the machine that has taken over my navigational duties.

Thirty miles of 75 degree angle motoring later we reached the highest peak in Alabama. 2,400 feet. Mount Cheaha, from the Creek word Chaha, the high place. It was a place of pilgrimage for them.

It was mysterious and gloomy with trees looming out of the thick cloud covering the mountain.

We managed to find our site and got changed into warmer clothes and then headed out for dinner at the park restaurant.

It was a lovely stone building with high vaulted ceilings, built by the CCC during the Depression. Huge windows looked out onto the valley below Cheaha. In the very west we could see a ribbon of pink that was the sun setting somewhere where it wasn't raining.  The restaurant had three huge deer antler chandeliers.

We were the only people in the restaurant. There were two young women serving us and a young man who appeared to be a cook.  There was a second young man dressed in cowboy gear who was just hanging around. None of them were more than 22 years old.

We ordered the pork wings. Peak BBQ at the peak of Alabama.

While we were gnawing our way through the massive plate full of pig's legs that emerged from the kitchen the grumpier of the two servers appeared with our entrees.  As politely as one can when one is trying to eat a pig's leg dipped in BBQ sauce I asked her to keep them warm until we were ready.

Eventually the pig's wings settled a bit and our steaks came out.

I had ordered a baked potato. I don't know what the hell they did with the potato but I am Irish and I have eaten every imaginable kind of badly cooked potato over the course of my 45 years and I could not eat that one.  Undescribably disgusting mush.

The steaks were so bad we were in tears of laughter at the end. The lodge sold Alabama wine (apparently wine is a bright new industry in the state), so I ordered a glass of cabernet sauvignon.

It went very well with the steak.

That's putting it mildly.

After a while I went to find the ladies and the entire staff plus the cowboy were cuddled up on the couch watching tv in the foyer of the restaurant. When they saw me coming they scattered like teenagers when the cops arrive to the party.

Even though it was nice and warm in the restaurant, we agreed we'd leave them in peace so we paid our bill and left them enough of a tip to get some beers if they needed it and headed back to our site. It had stopped raining but the wind, which was still warm, was moaning and groaning over the mountain and through the trees.  We sat and listened to it for a bit and were glad it wasn't bearing snow.

Next morning the sun was streaming gloriously through the trees and we got to walk the trail to Bald Rock and see the view from the top of Alabama. Then we got in our little motorhome and headed back to Georgia where we will sit under some pine trees in the sun for a day or two more, and then head back to snowy Nova Scotia.

It's been a trip though.

An evening with the cave dwellers - Cathedral Caverns

We drove from Mississippi back into Alabama a while northwest of Birmingham, and the landscape went from farmland to woodland almost immediately. A mix of pines and hardwoods.  Driving through little towns like Millport and Fayette, the uptick in prosperity was so immediate and so noticeable I started looking around for a pulp mill. As in Canada, it is generally these mills that bring money into isolated rural areas.  

Sure enough, we passed two or three.  The whole area gleamed with civic pride. Neat police stations and new looking courthouses.  Housing authority homes in every community. Little parks with fountains and war memorials. Churches everywhere of course, and they all gleamed too.  Between towns, off the highway, two and three storied houses perched on large lots carved into the hillsides, with ponds and gazebos in front, pool patios and horse paddocks behind them.

Starting here, but all throughout Alabama, a lot of the houses appeared to be clad in that crazy paving style fake stone that was popular in Ireland for a while in the seventies. Here it was all a strange faded yellow colour, based on some local rock perhaps.  Whatever it was, it made the houses look like a giant bear had pissed on them repeatedly.

Anyways, a cheerful juxtaposition to the poverty we had passed through in north east Mississippi. We had driven through some of the poorest districts in the USA that morning. You can know intellectually how dependence on one natural resource is a recipe for disaster in a community, but those couple of hours on the road demonstrated the before and after in a very uncomfortable way.  Much to think about in rural Canada too.

After we crossed the I22, which connects Memphis to Birmingham, the landscape changed again and we were back to cattle farms and rundown little towns with Dollar General stores at each end and a church beside each pay day loan office until eventually we got to the Natural Bridge, the longest natural rock formation east of the Rockies. Apparently.

It was raining lightly as we paid our $3.50 to what looked like a family operation that had built a welcome centre in front of the pathway to the site.  Often in America an individual will have bought the land surrounding a strange geological phenomenon and their family still makes a living from it. In this case, a teenage girl was tweeting furiously about something in between taking our money and advising us not to get lost on the trail. Outside, two wet, sullen looking teenage boys in camo were shoveling mud out of a patio. It must have stormed in Alabama too.

The NATURAL BRIDGE was a bridge-shaped piece of rock with iron sediments in it, so that it stayed in place when all the rock around it collapsed.  It arched high over a limestone grotto.  There was a path around it. Himself did the walk and I mooched around the edge trying to find something to photograph.

The interesting thing about the site was that it is in Winston County. When Alabama seceded from the Union in the events leading up to the Civil War, Winston County voted to abstain and to remain neutral. Thus attracting everyone’s ire, no doubt.

The teenagers either didn’t know anything about what happened to the peaceable folk of Winston County, or they were so pissed at having to work on Stephens’ Day they didn’t want to tell me, so we gave up and moved on to our stop for the night at Corinth Recreation Area in the WIlliam Bankhead National Forest.

It was closed.

The GPS didn’t have any suggestions.

We looked at the map.

We figured we’d push on to Cathedral Caverns State Park.

We started going uphill.  The land got poor and rocky, the cattle standing in mud chewing at mouldy hay.  The road got cracked and bumpy and the towns more and more ramshackle and dreary, devoid of anywhere to eat or even get a coffee. We drove through Addison. I have marked it in the map as The Arsepit of Nowhere.  We were hungry and grumpy and I wanted to be anywhere but northern Alabama.

Then we suddenly emerged onto a hilltop to see a vast lake spread beneath us.  Little boats were dotted all around, people fishing in the late evening sun. The road widened and sped up and as we weren’t far south of Huntsville, this looked like the city’s weekend playground. We passed marinas and hotels and cabins and Guntersville was a throbbing hub of humanity and joy compared to what we had come through.

This is why rural America amazes and delights me. You just never know what’s around the bend.

We weren’t far from the park, so we pushed on into the twilight and up a winding road through the hills above the lake and finally made the park just before nightfall.  We passed a man in a truck on the way into the park.  He stopped and I spotted him waving at us.

We reversed back to him. Bluegrass music was blasting from his stereo.

He was a gangly ball of energy. Hopping from foot to foot. 

“We got eight inches of rain yesterday”, he yelled at us over the music.  “The cave’s flooded.”

We must have looked really upset, so he said we could park overnight anyways, and maybe the water would go down some and maybe he could sneak us in a bit.

“Just go on up the hill there. There’s two trailers. One is Lemar’s. The other’s me and my wife. We all work at the cave. Park in between us. I’m going to Scotsboro. Y’all need anything?”

He tore off (to catch the liquor store as it turned out) and we found the trailers and a very grumpy Lemar who was standing in front of an enormous collection of damp Christmas inflatibles beside his trailer, and who finally agreed the ground was firm enough that we could back into a spot next to him.

“Firewood all got washed down river last night”, he said.

"You must have had a hard couple of days", I crooned.

"Ah well, Momma Nature. She's looking at us, sayin' 'who all put you on the side of this mountain anyways' I guess." He shook his head at his lot in life.

Never mind. It was a warm night. We hauled out our campchairs and I hauled out my Yellertail supply and after a while our other neighbour, the gangly enthusiast - Robert - arrived back with dry wood and beer and sausages.

Then his wife turned up and we had a right old evening talking about how we all ended up at Cathedral Cavern on 26th December 2015.

They were originally from Virginia. He had been a Marine, then had drifted a while after he left, and she had been a park ranger at Lake Okeechobee in central Florida when they met a few years ago. His daughter had bought three acres on top of the mountain we were on, and they had come up to visit, then decided to stay because a grandchild was on the way.

They worked at the cave giving tours. They had a small greenhouse behind their trailer where they grew bonsai trees.  They had a chocolate labrador who was beside herself at the idea of company.

Next morning I woke early to the sound of truck doors slamming and went to the bath house and made my coffee and sat listening to the birds until Himself hauled his ass out of bed.  He slowly showered and shaved and had a coffee and was in reasonable shape when Robert came back to tell us that they were going to close the gate to the Cave so if we wanted to see it we should come up now.

We upped stakes and tore up the hill.

It was a huge opening in the hillside.

I went in to the office and paid for our campsite and bought a teeshirt and then Lily the manager softened a bit and said we could go in a ways to see.

Our new friends brought us in with just a head light.

I’ve been in a lot of impressive caves around the world, including Ailwee in Ireland of course, but I’ve never been in a huge cave like this in the dark.

A Mr. Gurly bought it in the 1950s, for $4000. He moved his wife and family here and opened it as a tourist site for the new American middle class families with cars and weekends off to come visit. He went bankrupt after a while, and eventually the state took it over.

The cave goes almost the whole way through the mountain and is almost 300 feet below the surface at one point. It has the biggest stalagmite in the world, Goliath, and some impressive limestone formations and other geological aspects to it that I don’t remember because I spent the whole time they were talking to us about the cave thinking “I am in an enormous hole in the ground in the almost complete dark and he’s going to turn the light off at some point. I know he is. Don’t freak out, Don’t freak out.”

Then Robert turned the light off.

The darkness was absolute. All you could hear was the sound of water rushing through the sections of the cave further back that were flooded. The roar intensified in the absence of any light. It was cool and a little damp.

I didn’t make a sound.  

Eventually he turned the light back on and led us back out to the light and the heat of the glorious motherfucking day with nothing above me but sky.

A stormy Christmas in Starkville

We said goodbye to the Mississippi and pulled out of Warford Point on a humid warm Christmas Eve and headed east to Starkville, a few miles from Miss State (football college) where we had booked a private campground so that we would have internet and human interaction on Christmas.

The drive was again through the wide open farmland of Mississippi, tillage mostly, cotton, soy and corn, interspersed with little towns that straggled along the highway. Mostly feed stores and machine shops, with pay day loan companies and barber shops huddled into cheap little strip malls. And the ubiquitous car dealerships. Along this road more than any other on our trip though, Himself oohed and aahed over old cars ‘just laying around’.

There were classic trucks from the fifties and sixties lying in people’s yards.  There were little car cemeteries in fields in the middle of soybean plantations.  There was an occasional auto shop with 50 parked in a field behind it.

“No rust, no rust”, he kept whimpering to himself, being from Nova Scotia where rust destroys everything precious in just ten years.

“The trick would be getting them to sell me one”

We passed a Walmart.  I nipped in to get a bottle of the nice Columbia Valley pinot noir I’d been drinking, for Christmas dinner.  

The Walmart only sold fruit wine.

As did the next one.

And the next one.

Three towns later I had resigned myself to a boring dinner when Himself spotted a large sign in Greenwood, down by the river past the cement plant. It was in the shape of a bottle with BOTTLE SHOP inscribed along it.

I went in. A woman stood behind a massive glass case.  Behind her in the gloom I thought I could see bottles of wine.

“What kind of wine y’all want?”

I pressed my face against the glass the way I used to do against the glorious Brown Thomas windows of childhood Christmases.

“What kind of wine do you got?”

She reeled off a list of Australian and Californian chart toppers

“I got Yellertail Cab Sauv, I got Yellertail Mer-loh, I got Woodbridge Cab Sauv, I got Woodbridge Mer-loh, I got…..”

Eventually she stopped. I picked the least worst one.  

Wine in hand, and with some steaks for the big dinner, we got to Starkville about lunchtime.  It was a beautiful sunny day.  The campsite was deserted except for a couple of trailers with no accompanying vehicles.

There was a note on the door of the office, saying that Hobie Our Host had to go to town but he’d be back soon.  We got out a couple of beers and sat in the sunshine and watched three squirrels fight over who owned the tree we were sitting under. We were on a nice lake front and there were folks fishing off a bridge nearby.

By and by a couple of trucks pulling big trailers rumbled in and parked nearby.  An extended family got out and hooked up and gathered in one of the trailers.  I could see the tv flickering in the window.

Soon enough it was 5pm and the sun was setting over the lake, so I wandered out onto the little fishing pier and took some pictures.

Eventually, a truck pulled up and a big man got out and walked slowly over to the office door.

Hobie Our Host! I bounded over. I noticed he had a fuel pack in the back of his pick up. A woodsman. He was huge. He looked like Michael Madsen, if Michael Madsen had spent his life logging north east Mississippi.

“Hobie?”

“Hobie’s gone to some family aways, for Christmas. I’m a friend of his, just keeping an eye on the place.”

He headed back to the truck.

I broke my stunned silence just in time.

“INTERNET PASSWORD?”

He stopped. “Oh Jeez, I can’t remember.”  He scratched his chin a bit. “I’ll text Hobie.”

We waited a while. “He’s deaf in one ear, sometimes he don’t hear the phone if it’s on that side.”

I stood in front of his truck in a manner that indicated that he was going nowhere until I got my internet password and eventually he called Hobie, who sounded a bit loaded but who gave up the goods.

“And firewood.” I stood my ground in front of the truck.

“There’s a pile over there by that dumpster, y’all take what you want. Murry Christmas!”  And he was gone.

We had a bottle of wine.

We had a couple of steaks

We had the Internet.

We had firewood.

Christmas sorted as far as I was concerned.

The day itself came dark and gloomy with a warm wind over the lake that brought us the loudest thunder and lightening storm I have ever heard. 

It held off long enough for the family group to emerge from their trailers and have a prayer circle before clambering back in to worship the television gods for the day. The storm rumbled and banged over and back over our heads for most of the day then suddenly cleared after dark so we were able to sit out under the full moon and enjoy the warm night air.

Next day was hot and humid and we hung around enough to figure that Hobie was still sleeping it off so we left without meeting him and drove east to Columbus, MS and then over the border into Alabama.

The Winterville Mounds and the Texas Trump Man

Such a day today. The two extremes of America - the first peoples and the newest peoples juxtaposed and still churning in my head.

After a stormy night in Vicksburg we left early to head north to Greenville, to visit the Winterville Mounds site. This had been on my To Do list for a number of years now, and I was never going to get a chance again most likely.

We headed north under cloudy skies. We have been avoiding the news, so we were not aware that we were heading into a tornado warning. As it happened, it landed in Clarksdale, about 100 miles north of us, so we were blissfully unaware of our luck.

It took us a while to get out of Vicksburg, even with the GPS, as the road signage was still designed to confuse Northerners. The National Miilitary Park weaves over and back across the I10, so we saw most of the 16 mile route even though we had decided not to. My tolerance for American military monuments is rapidly declining as I become more aware of the impact of nation-building on its original peoples.  However we passed through the woods where the Confederates held their line during the infamous siege. And we passed innumerable statues of moustached heros of one description or another and that was enough for me anyways.

Once we got clear of the city, we were out on the Delta.  The sun backlit the clouds in the wide sky and made the wet ground shimmer. It was wide flat farmland; cotton, soy, corn.  The soil was almost black, rich alluvium.  Snaking alongside us, about a mile west of the road, was the levee that separated the Mississippi river from its callows.  Now and again, a small ribbon of cottonwoods marked a farmhouse or a cluster of trailers. The road got noticeably worse.

Suddenly, an old store appeared out of nowhere. We pulled up.

The Onward Store.

Behind it was an old wagon, with a billboard depicting two hunters and a large black bear.

We went inside.

A giant stuffed bear wearing a Santa hat stood beside a revolving Christmas tree.

“Are y’all here just to look around or do you want to dine in?”

“Dine in”, we both chimed.

A young man led us through an archway into a museum with tables dotted here and there.

We ordered the all day breakfast and while he went to get us coffee I poked around in the dim light.

A giant alligator skin, head intact and also wearing a Santa hat was nailed to the far wall.  Behind me a bear, Santa hat perched jauntily to one side, leaned out from under Fox newscast murmuring from the plasma tv screen.

I read the back of the menu.

Turns out this is the spot where Theodore Roosevelt went on his famous bear hunt. The hunter went ahead with his dogs, who cornered a large male bear. The bear was wreaking such havoc on the dogs, the hunter knocked it unconscious and tied it to a tree.  Then he led old Teddy down there and invited him to take the shot.

President Roosevelt refused to do such a dishonourable thing and the story made such headlines that we’ve all had teddy bears in respect for decades and decades since.

The restaurant cum museum was full of wonders, like Frog Jam and Bear bells and raccoon tail keyrings and a large collection of teddy bears.  In one corner there was a collection of toy chihuahuas and they were so lifelike I almost thought they were stuffed.

The all day breakfast didn’t match the delights of our surroundings unfortunately. Still, we enjoyed our stop there.

We were about a mile down the road when I realised I’d left my camera bag in the store.

We turned around.

“I was just getting ready to get the car and chase you down”, the store manager said when I reappeared.

A tall man about my age with a small child perched on his shoulder was standing at the counter waiting to pay for something.

“Never mind her.  She’s was just putting it on eBay’, he said.  “Another minute and she’d have sold it on up to Clarksdale.”

The poor woman was apoplectic.

“Get on now. Get outta my store” she yelled at him.

We rolled on through some more little towns and also the larger town of Rolling Fork, which had beautifully preserved nineteenth century two storey homes with deep porches and fanlights over the doors. Relics of a more prosperous time when the railroad came through and brought with it opportunity. There didn’t appear to be any sort of economic activity apart from farming though.

Despite that, Greenville was a large bustling town, full of beautiful old cars from the fifties and sixties, being driven about with families in them going about the happy chores that you have to get done two days before Christmas.  

A few miles outside town we saw the first mound rise thirty feet above the flat land of the delta.

Winterville was a religious and governance centre for the people who built the mounds and so the number and height of the mounds are unusually high.  About thirty have survived the land being developed for agriculture.  At the nationally preserved site, there are eight mounds arranged in an oval around two large plazas.

The rain stopped as we arrived and the sun was hot. We walked along the grass pathway to the site. A flock of Canada geese watched us from a creek nearby.

In the second, larger plaza there was a bench. We sat down. Behind us was Mound A, over fifty feet high. The main religious site.  

Along the Mississippi, indigenous people settled and cultivated farmland in the black soil and grew the Three Sisters - corn, squash and beans - and created the kind of food surplus that enabled them to build significant centres of spiritual leadership and governance.  The mounds were an act of community, it is thought. Individuals brought baskets of earth to the site and tamped it in and built the mound layer by layer. Wooden buildings were erected on top. Excavations have shown that those buildings were burnt to the ground every now and then. More earth was placed on top of those buildings and a new structure erected on top of that.

Regime change, maybe? Or a rhythm older than that?

We sat for a while in the warm sun and tried to imagine the plaza full of people after a good harvest.  Singing and dancing and the smell of good food cooking.   Ceremonies on the mounds and the comfort of kinship around them.  Centuries of community ripped apart when the millionaire Fernando de Soto set off on his ridiculous trudge through the swamps of South Eastern America in search of yet more gold to add to his South American haul.

In the little museum near the site, there was an excellent collection of artifacts found in various excavations of the mounds.  Elegantly curved clay bottles with geese heads for lips.  Squat, sturdy pots on three stumpy legs with geometric patterns inscribed on the surface. A passing similarity to the Celtic lozenges of my history, but not quite the same.  Carved pipe stems that appeared to be animals or creatures of some sort.

There was a case of delicate shell necklaces. Another of gleaming hoe heads the width of my hand.  The centrepiece of the museum was a perfectly carved cypress canoe.  It was so narrow I would have never fitted into it. I wondered if perhaps it had been carved for a child eight hundred years ago or so.

After we had looked at everything, even the small section of the museum entitled Putting De Soto in his Place, which was in a dark corner by the mens room, we had to leave and find a place to stay for the night.

The curator gave us directions to a camp ground a few miles away on the banks of the Mississippi. The road in was narrow and bumpy and we passed what looked like a power station and some other industrial sites. Then we turned in by the sign that said “Welcome to Warford Point” and passed through a high fence topped with barbed wire. We were welcomed by two young men wearing the bright green and white striped trousers of the Mississippi Corrections Service. They were waving a leafblower around in a way guaranteed not to blow leaves into a pile. There was no one else around.

“Manager’ll be by in a minute”, one of them offered.  Then, “where y’all from anyways.”

I was trying to explain where Nova Scotia was when a car pulled up and a very large very angry looking African American man got out and strode over. The leafblowers jumped into action again while I was interrogated about who I was and what I wanted but eventually we got it all figured out that we just wanted to stay one night and we didn’t need anything except a site and so he could get off now to visit his momma before Christmas, and by the end of it he was positively almost smiling at us.

By and by a van came and picked up the leafblowers who waved at us and blew a kiss at me and then we were alone by the Mississippi except for a couple of other RVs.

Our nearest neighbour was soon over to check us out. A wiry little bantam of a man, pushing 70.

“You want to turn that RV around so you can watch the barges go by” he barked.

He waited till we obeyed and then stayed on to chat for a while.

By and by he mentioned that he couldn’t enter Canada and Himself had a brain fart and asked him why.

“Well sir, I C-A-R-R-Y and my wife she C-A-R-R-I-E-S and up there in Canada y’all have some strange ideas about how to live and so we can’t go there.”

I felt along my tongue for the ridge I use to bite on when I need to. I clamped on. Put on my Canadian expression of interested but non-judgemental concern.

“We left everything behind one time and drove up in the truck and when we got to the border we had the spray….. and they didn’t like the spray, so we just turned round and came back.”

His accent was East Texas, Louisiana border. They had sold their home 18 years ago and had been on the road ever since. No family, no friends, better that way. No ties.

He wandered off for a bit, but we must have passed some kind of sniff test because he was back a number of times over the next 16 hours or so. Never has a man tested my patience so much.

As we talked and his views emerged, one by one, it was clear that I must not offer any of my own dearly loved opinions under any circumstances.  As Himself figured this out, he took great pleasure in drawing the little man out on a range of topics dear to my heart.

Trump was a great man that was going to get this country back on track. “He’ll get rid of government”, he said as he surveyed his $250,000 motor home sitting on a State Park lot for $13 a night, “government has ruined this country.”

The media were a bunch of liberal nancies. Canadians a bunch of gubmint loving’ pussies.

He didn’t have much time for his neighbours to the south. I won’t repeat his remarks.

He held a special place in his cold mean little heart for the EPA.

“Climate change”, he spat out.  “Job-killing hippies working together to put families out of work.”

Himself raised the subject of Obama.

He stood up on his toes and stuck his head out on his scrawny old neck and gnashed his brand new false teeth at the thought of him. Just like a rooster.

Eventually we got rid of him and night fell and we lit a fire under the trees and watched huge barges being pulled up against the tide by little tug boats and wondered at how their captains steered the immense length of them up the river. Each barge carries the equivalent of 87 container trucks and they are up to 600 feet long. It was our last night by the river so we stayed up late listening to the water and the trees and counted our blessings that we lived in a country where such petty meanness and hate as we had listened to was not in power any more.