My Southern Journey Read online

  But here, there is no stripe down the side of the asphalt, just the wall of black trees, and the voice of the GPS is just one more Yankee lost in the woods. You are fine as long as you stick to the roads you know, past the fields and rolling pastures. Even at night there is enough moonlight to hold your imagination in check.

  But now and then you tell yourself you will try a new way to get over the mountain, and make that turn that changes everything. It is worse this time of year, when the weather does not know whether to be hot or cold and storms transform the trees from sunbursts of orange and gold into naked, jagged spikes.

  I blame my people, who will not use main roads. They insist on the shortcut, as if anybody has ever really been late to the dollar store. Are they going to run out of onion dip, or Roll Tide-themed polyester shorts? They say it is because they are saving time, but it is really because our ancestors could not drive through town or down a main highway because they did not have a driver’s license, or a tag, or more than one headlight, or sufficient sobriety to do anything except creep along a forlorn road, drifting till they hear the whippings of Johnsongrass against the bottom of the Rambler.

  I have my people’s proclivities, but no sense of direction. Plus, I have been gone from here a long time. So I drive, forever, headlights on high beam, so I can see the ghosts peeking from the ditches, and though I have lived in these hills all my life, I do not recognize a thing, just trees and black and an occasional sign that seems to read “Dead Lake,” or worse.

  But I do not panic, because I know my part of the scary world is only so big, and I know that at least some of the spirits swirling around me have my last name, because where else would they wander but on some road to nowhere, and they would not let anything happen to me.

  It is foolishness, but sometimes I even smile when I see a car with a missing taillight far ahead, or a one-eyed truck rattling toward me. And I always find my way home.

  THE ETERNAL GULF

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: July 2012

  To pick one day on this water, one above all the rest, is like trying to hold on to the white sand with your scrunched-up toes as the receding waves pull it from beneath your feet. The Gulf occupies a shining place in our memories, of rushing, crashing blues and greens against a shore so white it hurts our eyes, of flashes of silver through shallows clear as branch water, of pink babies screaming with laughter as they outrun an inch-deep wave onto safe, dry sand, as if winning that race was the most important thing in their lives, till the next one. And when they are old it will still be that way, because waves are always waiting, one more summer, to race again.

  I wondered if we would lose it all that spring and summer of 2010. Some old men, who know things like tides and the habits of fish, told me not to fret, that there was too much water out there to be killed by even such a gout of oil. Other old men, tears in their eyes, told me the Gulf only seemed eternal, that mankind could kill it like any other living thing. Now, two summers after, the crisis fades in our memories: The highways south are busier, the waits for a shrimp platter drag on a little more. And it is easy to believe again that it will always be there, a cradle for the fish, or just a place to ease our souls.

  I will never forget the hopelessness of 2010, because little has been done to ensure it will not happen again. But it is not what I choose to remember.

  I will remember a day when I was a young man in a small boat, drifting on the currents where the flats of Tampa Bay flow into the Gulf, water changing to a deeper blue, shadows of sharks in the shallows, me cursing at cormorants who snatch my bait as it hits the water. The Captain, Joe Romeo, told me fish stories as rays glided like flying saucers across the bottom, till it was time to unwrap a Cuban sandwich and open a freezing can of Coke. I could stay, I remember thinking, stay and fish and tell stories and live on speckled trout and grits. But I would not. I would give in to ambition, and give this up. But before we quit that good day, I hooked something different, a glittering silver torpedo that, even now, remains one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen. “Lady Fish,” Joe Romeo said matter-of-factly, as if some other fool had caught a fish this pretty and it had not made the newspaper. We let it go, but I never let go of it. I catch it, in my memory, over and over again.

  Or maybe I will remember the day my mother, aunts, and little brother came to see me in Clearwater, bringing fried chicken cooked in an iron skillet and homegrown tomatoes and five plastic Purex jugs of water from Germania Springs, because everyone knows Florida water is not fit to drink. They got up the next day before dawn because they just do things like that, and we drove to a deserted beach. A pod of dolphins arced through the calm, flat water, and my mother hollered for me to get back because she believed them to be sharks and believes that to this day. When I told her they would not stroll ashore and get me even if they were sharks, she told me I might not ought to be so full of my little self. I watched my family drive away, waving from a butternut-colored Chevelle.

  Or maybe I will not remember a day at all, but a night in Pensacola. After hours wide awake in a hotel bed, I dragged the bedclothes out on the balcony where the Gulf wind rattled the palm fronds and shifted the patio chairs. I made a bed from a comforter and a 99-cent air mattress, wrapped up in a giant beach towel, and let the rhythm and rush of that water, invisible in the dark, sing me to sleep.

  DONKEY BUSINESS

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: May 2015

  I am a miniature donkey rancher. Wait, let’s begin again. That makes me sound like a tiny man, with tiny donkeys.

  I am a rancher of miniature donkeys. No sense in making it sound worse than it is.

  It all started with cows, with a whole pasture full of noble cows. Purebred, white-faced, rust-red Herefords, including a bull or two, fed in the mountain pasture below my mother’s house. A man with cows on his property is a serious man. A man who has bulls on his range is even more serious. No whistle-britches will even climb in a fence with a bull.

  They were already on the land when we bought it, but I loved having them there. You see, I have always been just a little ashamed of being a writer. To my people, it is not serious work, not something a real man would do. On airplanes, it seemed I always sat next to an oil driller, or a welder on the pipeline. When I told them I was a writer, they looked at me like I cut out paper dolls for a living.

  But when we inherited those cows, I would merely squint at these rough men, and mumble:

  “I raise bulls.”

  Eyebrows lifted.

  Respect did, too.

  Then my mama made me get rid of them.

  She called me and told me a bull had chased her when she went down to the stock pond to feed her fish. I had told her she did not have to feed the bass and bream there. She ignored me and, every day, took them a loaf of white bread, leaving us with the only fish in the state of Alabama with diabetes. But that is another story.

  According to her, one of the bulls chased her out of the pasture, so of course we had to get rid of my cows. Not long after that, she told me the pasture looked lonesome.

  “I sure would like to have two of them miniature donkeys,” she said, and because she dragged me on a cotton sack when I was a baby, I got them for her.

  Bucky and Mimi.

  The day they arrived, from a miniature donkey conglomerate in Baldwin County, Mimi snuck up behind me while I was scratching Bucky’s nose and bit me on the tendon behind my knee. Bucky kicked me so hard I staggered. Things have pretty much spiraled downward from there.

  But my mother loves them, calls them her little “dah-lings” and talks to them like they are people.

  “They love me,” she said.

  “They love you more with a feed bucket in your hand,” I said.

  But there is a kind of magic in them. It is impossible to look at them, with their potbellies and big heads and tiny legs, and not smile, not feel better.

  So, I am in the donkey business. That mostly means I buy feed. A lot of feed.
And call the vet. And, when no one is watching, rub them on the nose.

  I am a jackass man. I am a muleteer.

  And on the plane, when one of those rough ol’ boys asks me what I do for a living, I look them in the eye and hiss:

  “I’m a writer.”

  ARMADILLO

  I am 55 years old.

  I have seen, roughly, one million dead armadillos in my life.

  I have seen, at most, three live ones.

  I think maybe it’s time someone started pulling for the armadillo.

  This is a kind of love story, I suppose, for an unlovely thing. I am not a fan of invasive species, on the whole. The South, in its wildest places, belongs to the bass and bream, and perch and catfish, and, yes, even the vile water moccasin. It belongs to the yearling deer, and the rabbit, and squirrel, and black crows as big as fighting roosters. It belongs to the fierce red-tailed hawk, and mosquitoes the size of a paper airplane, and fat groundhogs, and mockingbirds. It belongs to the bull alligator, with its eyeballs glinting red and orange just above the dark water, and the blue heron, the brown pelican, and snapping turtles that bite down like a bear trap. It belongs to the gopher, and the possum, and the raccoons that are at least as smart as we are.

  But, just in my lifetime, invasive species have made this their paradise, and I am not just talking kudzu. Killer bees hum in the trees. Fire ants have conquered this region from the rocky tops to the red clay to the Gulf sand. Our waterways, some of them, are clogged with carp. The fanged snakehead fish, the most repulsive of all, can walk on dry land; not even a Southern drought can kill a snakehead.

  Python, if you believe the nature channels, are eating the American alligator down to its teeth and claws, and moving on Miami itself, slithering up the canals. Monitor lizards, like something from a Roger Corman film, devour the native species of the Keys, and silence the birds.

  The South is their buffet. They have, mostly, no natural predators, so they flourish here, kind of like that Yankee third cousin from Michigan who takes up residence in a motor home in the side yard, wears out your washing machine and eats all your Popsicles. Some people, Yankees, mostly, say the solution is to eat the carp and snakehead and the rest out of existence, a kind of farm-to-table solution. That will never happen until the South runs out of sausage biscuits. You can make jelly out of kudzu; it hasn’t made a dent.

  But the armadillo does not seem to do much harm to anyone. Its main talent seems to be for getting run over.

  It is, I believe, the most singular creature I have ever seen at the side of the road. Their name means “the armored one” in Spanish, and across the ages their carapace of horn-covered bone protected them from wildcats, wolves, and bears. But the Creator must not have counted on a speeding Chevy Tahoe loaded down with lawyers on their way to catch red snapper in Panama City.

  The Aztecs called them “turtle rabbits,” which seems to fit their modern-day fate a little bit better.

  Hating them would be like hating a speed bump.

  You see them, it seems, every few miles, usually toes to the sky. Armadillos die ugly, and often. But there has to be more to them than this.

  I realize the armadillo is hardly exotic to, say, Texas. I know y’all of the big hat and beef barbecue South have lived amongst the humble armadillo forever, so long that it is a native species. But my childhood would have passed in ignorance of them, if not for the writer of the great children’s books Old Yeller and Savage Sam, Fred Gipson. In his writings, set in the Texas hills of the 19th century, he paints a picture of how the young scamp, Arliss, tries to drag a determined armadillo by its tail out of a hollow log, but the armadillo puffs itself up and plants its feet and plugs that log like a cork in a whiskey bottle.

  That story was the beginning of a lifelong fascination with armadillos, if a lifelong fascination meant I went to the library at Roy Webb Elementary and looked them up in the World Book.

  I learned that they came from South America, and had migrated northward, into Central America and then Mexico and finally the roadside ditches of the United States, as far north as Nebraska but at home in the South, particularly. I would learn that the armadillo came in several exotic sub-species, including the tiny pink fairy armadillo, which is less than 6 inches long, and the giant armadillo, which can grow to almost 120 pounds. If I saw a 120-pound armadillo, I would ask my physician to adjust my blood pressure medicine.

  But here, we have only the pedestrian nine-banded armadillo, about the size of an obese house cat. It is armored with solid plate across its shoulders and hips. Its back and sides are protected with hard bands connected with leathery skin, which to me makes them look a little like a Slinky.

  Their belly, oddly enough, is not armored, but since most of the Deep South is fresh out of bears, wolves, and cougars, I reckon they don’t really need it. If it wasn’t for highways, we’d have more armadillos than Carter’s got pills.

  The armor would seemingly be inconvenient, as to swimming. Like a conquistador who falls off his horse in the middle of a river-crossing, the heavy plates make conventional swimming hard for the armadillo. But even in this, it is remarkable. The armadillo can, before entering the water, fill its stomach with air, blowing itself up like a beach ball, to compensate for the weight, and float across to dry land. Or, because it can hold its breath for several long minutes, it sometimes just walks the bottom like a kind of submarine.

  They are timid, harmless. You never hear someone say, “Yeah, little Tater Bug was out in the yard playing with her Taylor Swift action figure and she got attack-ded by that vicious possum on the half-shell.”

  They do have teeth, and sharp claws, which they used for digging up grubs. There used to be a 500-pound armadillo here, a rhino-like creature that roamed the coastal South some 10,000 years ago, but its modern-day descendant is more likely to run or curl up in a ball and play dead if threatened. But who would want to abuse an armadillo?

  You can eat them, I guess. But who would want to? Though I guess they do come in their own pot.

  Their sole purpose on this earth seems to be to perish on the blacktop. But that is not true, either. The armadillo has long been used in the medical research of leprosy. The microbe that causes the disease is difficult to grow in a laboratory culture, but the armadillo is oddly susceptible, a kind of walking petri dish. Research involving the armadillo at the Hansen’s Disease hospital in Carville, Louisiana, helped in the science of leprosy, and helped improve life for the people who were once shunned in their own communities and closeted on the hospital grounds. If that is not a noble creature, I don’t know what one is.

  I have never struck an armadillo, and I hope I never do. I have never placed a bumper sticker on my car, though I think if an “I BRAKE FOR ARMADILLOS” one is out there, somewhere, I would consider it. It seems to me, with all the good the armadillo has done mankind, right here in the South, it should not be considered an invasive species at all. Maybe we could bump off one of our indigenous species, to make room for it. I would be willing to give up the chigger.

  DIXIE SNOW

  Southern Living, Southern Journal: January 2014

  The yellowed photograph, the size of a playing card, is tacked to the wall in my mother’s house, right above my desk. It shows a tiny frame house blanketed in white. An old woman, my grandmother, stands in the open door. You need a magnifying glass to read Ava Bundrum’s expression, but on her face appears to be a look that is part fascination, part suspicion, as if she is trying to decide whether to step off into this alien stuff or duck back inside and wait it out till the thaw.

  No one here seems to remember how that picture came to be, but I fixed it to the wall because I like looking at it, because it makes me smile. It is proof of the Southerner’s never-ending wonderment with snow.

  Ava never went north of Lookout Mountain. She lived her life in the low hills along the Alabama-Georgia line, and seldom saw deep snow. Though, one year, a late snowfall did all but cover the buttercups she had planted
inside an old tire at the edge of the driveway. And because it was so rare, it was always wonderful and, in a way, maybe even a little frightening.

  She had sayings for the weather. If thunder shook the house and a big rain turned the air around her to gray, she would mumble: “Ole devil’s beatin’ his wife.” But she had nothing for snow. It was too infrequent. She would merely stand and look at it, through the thick glass of her spectacles.

  When enough of it had fallen onto the cars and trucks in the yard, she would wrap a shawl around her head and slog through it, a dishpan in one hand and a spatula in the other. She would scoop a gallon or so of the snow into the pan, then hurry inside. Working fast, she would mix in sweetened condensed milk and a little sugar, and maybe some vanilla flavoring. Then she would portion it out to us boys, her grandsons, and announce to us: “Snow cream.” And it was good.

  The Yankees say we don’t know how to drive in it, how to walk on it, or even stand. They may be right. But if they had not come down here to live among us, abandoning the tundra of home, they would not be here to know.

  I like that people here are not used to it. I have walked hip-deep through the dirty gray snow of New York and Boston, and have seen whole cars disappear under grimy snowplowed ice, along with my fascination.

  I still feel it, some, when I see children rush into a snowfall that could not cover pea gravel. I see them using spatulas and spoons to scrape up enough snow to make the saddest snowmen you have ever seen, more red mud that anything else. They last a day, or a morning, and then become forlorn lumps. I have seen children make snow angels in what, mostly, seemed to be slick gravel. But I love to see them try.

  Ava never went to a place where such things were mundane. The snow was always exotic, and if the Yankees had any sense they would recognize that she was exotic, too, a kind of hothouse flower, surviving in this one special, humid place. I miss her all the time, but more when the ground turns white.