Notes from The Road II

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Jared took another hit of cheap beer and firmly planted his feet at shoulder length. His friends call him Lumpy. “I dunno what part of Jackson y’all went through,” he slurred, “but when I drove down I was thinkin’ I ain’t neeever comin’ through here again.”

“They gonna get this on tape man,” his older friend warned, leaning against the bed of his pickup truck. Lumpy just grinned and looked into the lens. “Let me put it this way,” he said earnestly. “I hate niggers.”

We cringed. Noticeably. Just typing the word now makes me uneasy, even carefully contained between quotation marks. “But aren’t there…” My mouth fumbled for words. “Black people… around here?”

“Yeah,” nodded his friend, “but they keep themselves straight.”

It was an awkward point in a wonderful evening. We’re not used to hearing such things spoken so casually, as undisputed matters of fact. But the entire conversation was littered with what we’d been taught was the ugliest word in the English language.

And they all seemed so nice. But then again we were young, white, American, and fishing. Probably straight and Christian too. The men marveled at our roadkill collection and eagerly shared fishing and hunting tips, even driving back to their homes to bring us supplies. One of them gifted us necklaces he had made, and another tossed us beer without hesitation. When we expressed gratitude, we just heard the muttered mantra, “Southern hospitality, man…”

The sun shot brilliant orange over the trees as we rolled in the previous evening, spotting two laughing locals drinking next to a rather blunt ‘no camping’ sign. We figured we’d ask anyway. “Well hell man,” murmered one under a faded camo baseball cap. “I don’t see why y’all can’t just set up right here!” We spread our roadkill collection out to dry—the numerous wings, pelts, and snake skins we’d collected over the last week were starting to stink—and fell asleep to the soothing lull of the Pearl River.

Morning hit softly. We ate breakfast and prepared to catch dinner, clumsily fashioning poles out of bamboo shoots, fishing line, and some bobbers we found on the side of the road. It isn’t as if we’d never been fishing before. We spent our childhood pulling food out of the Gulf of Mexico with our dad, but that was a full-scale military operation. We’d jet out with a double prop, armed to the teeth with sonar, GPS, and all manner of technological trickery. The goal was to extract fish from the depths as quickly and efficiently as possible. And it worked—we returned with more than we could possibly eat. Almost every time.

Our feet sank slowly into the muck at the water’s edge as we positioned a few rocks for make-shift seats. The worms squirmed violently around the hooks, lowered into the slowly rippling reflection of the river. After a day of steady relaxation, two little red bellies populated our bucket—barely enough for a snack. But somehow the meager catch felt like a massive accomplishment, even next to memories of overflowing coolers of grouper and snapper. Fishing this way was meditation.

Dusk began to creep over us, and locals started gathering for the nightly ritual of riverside drinking. Collin pulled a whetstone from his truck and sharpened our knives, and we decapitated and scaled the fish. We skewered the little guys with sticks and slowly roasted them over the crackling fire that our new friends jump started with half a can of WD40—it seemed to have burned off by now. But just as the brisk scent of fresh fish crept up into my nostrils, a firm hand shoved 32 ounces under my nose. “Here! I thought this might taste better’n them fish!” A white paper bag followed.

We munched blissfully on the fish and lustfully at the double cheeseburger extra value meals. Slurping up soda, we absorbed the group’s wisdom. How to start a fire with dry cow shit. Training a raccoon to sit on your shoulder for a motorcycle ride. Cooking up a tasty turtle soup. Tim and I told stories about camping out in the winter, roadkill squirrel dinners, and wild foraging. It felt like we were from different worlds, but somehow this river connected us. Their eyes blazed open every time they talked about the land, and they seemed oddly nostalgic for a time before they were even alive.

“There ain’t no outlaws anymore,” complained one. “I wish I coulda grew up back in John Wayne’s time. Be a lot better’n now. Have a dispute with a sonbitch, take care of ‘em. Saw someone you didn’t like just shoot their ass be done with it. You didn’t have all this bullshit around.”

“And everything’s getting so expensive,” said another, grinning sternly. “I’m poor fuckin’ poor. Broke. Done with. Ain’t got a dollar in my pocket. Ain’t got no bank to go to to get a dollar…” he trailed off into his beer can.

“How’s life?” I asked. He took a slow sip and looked square into my eyes. “Life’s great.”

We hadn’t planned an evening with a friendly pack of Louisiana rednecks, but these things have a way of happening on their own when you’re rambling about on bicycles. They were almost walking, breathing stereotypes, seemingly the opposite of what we’ve been looking for—people who somehow escape cultural conventions and blaze their own trail. In an American era that’s largely settled into an ethos of comfort and security, it’s the freaks who most embody the spirit of individuality, innovation, and revolution that gave birth to the American ideal.

And we’re finding no shortage of freak cultures kicking around The United States. Many have roots in cities and cyberspace, but a yearning to build their own world seems to pervade the subcultural spectrum. To rediscover farming and foraging. To fish, hunt, and build homes without relying on an endlessly impersonal global society. Each movement manifests with its own sense of urgency and relevance, but going back to land is nothing new in this country.

There’s a tendency to trace it to 60′s counter-culture, but it was going on long before dread locked, chakra talking communes started dotting the American landscape. The settlers who trudged west and southward were perhaps the country’s first back-to-landers. Freaks of their time, they left the confines of the Northeast and Europe to homestead land and give birth to a new world. It was these unlikely radicals who slowly built a country of rambling roads, small towns, and expansive farmland where communities could thrive on their own terms, away from the heavy hands of government and industry.

And just as many urban and suburban dwellers today are rekindling their relationship with the Earth, country folk all over are lamenting a time when localism was nothing revolutionary. People raised chickens because they were hungry. They farmed organically because petrochemicals didn’t exist, and lost a good deal of their crop in the process. Cooperative living and radical self-reliance weren’t luxuries of the hippie class. They were necessary to survival. And the many days it took to get from town to town in a wagon or on foot was a grueling journey, fraught with danger. A far cry from the feathery romance of our bicycle trip.

But who were these people? We hopped on The Natchez Trace Parkway up in Tennessee to find out, heading south and finally escaping the relentless noise of billboards and strip malls. The steady tunnel of quiet trees seemed to breath with us as we rolled through forest and modest farmland. Spring hit quickly, sending us into still-icy streams and slowly browning our skin. But as our own bodies began to wake up, the blessings of winter started fading. Our two main sources of food—roadkill and dumpsters—were quickly going out of season.

But it turns out some of this green stuff growing everywhere is food. A forest begins as a forest—a mysterious heap of growth with no beginning and no end. But as you go deeper inside, it morphs into a subtly interwoven organism and an elusive buffet. Yes, some of the dishes are poisonous. Most of them are indigestible or unpalatable. But on that rare occasion when your eye catches a patch of wild mustard greens or oyster mushrooms, the taste of the forest creeps all through your skin.

This forest was once foraged by large animals, and the Native Americans who followed them blazed the first footpaths of The Trace. As settlers flooded the region, the path was widened drastically, and wagons slowly trudged through the mud to trade and build. The interaction between the natives and the transplants swelled with conflict, until tensions finally culminated in the mass exodus of the tribes to land that is now Oklahoma. Many didn’t make it.

We were eager to absorb ourselves into the land’s history, but the endless nuances of our inheritance had been reduced to paved roads and painted signs, written by the victors. We read about disease and war. About the ‘education’ and displacement of natives, and the painstaking establishment of new settlements. Some signs even had the audacity to inform us that if we had arrived a couple centuries earlier, we would have been offered a hot meal and a warm bed.

Pre-industrial life in the countryside was hard, and as globalizing technologies advanced, small towns accepted them with open arms. Automobiles meant faster and easier travel. Factory farming meant cheaper, more diverse food. Television was a window to the outside world. But it was all embraced in short sight, and the ruins of rural America are haunted with regret. Blinded by the promise of comfort and availability, people failed to appreciate that their entire culture was at stake.

After a couple hundred gentle miles on The Trace, we needed to taste the grit of civilization again, so two days south of Jackson we woke up to the sound of traffic over our heads. Carefully rolling out from under the bridge, we headed right into Georgetown, Mississippi. At first glance, it seemed like just another depressed dot on the map, forgotten by even the locals. Downtown had been reduced to crumbling buildings adorned with fading shop signs, and vegetation was beginning to fill the cracks, slowly returning the town’s corpse to the Earth.

But right across the street, a modest white building breathed slowly. An older man with dark, oily skin stood outside holding a steady grin in his eyes, attentively setting up a welcome sign. “We don’t have breakfast,” Henry told us with a humble lull, “but we open at 11 for lunch… probably the best lunch you’ll find anywhere, in fact…”

He quietly went back to work as Tim and I glanced at each other. We were skeptical—we hadn’t had much luck with food lately. Sitting down at most diners in the region, you’d never even know you were right in the middle of expansive farmland. Finding fresh food is next to impossible, and buying food from local farms is often illegal. The best meals we ate were always those we cooked ourselves, usually huddled over a fire, away from the communities we were so intent on connecting with.

But the lunch here was a slap in the face, a stark departure from the instant potatoes and canned vegetables we had come to expect. Even the building itself felt eerily authentic. The décor was mostly scavenged from garbage cans and curb sides, and the tables and chairs were borrowed from customers who fondly remember when such a place wasn’t an oddity, when towns boomed, food was slow, and community gathered for a good meal. The whole patchwork felt vaguely human, a tiny but fertile oasis in the expansive desert of sterile chains and processed foods.

“That’s what i mean by love….” Caroline, Henry’s wife and the restaurant’s owner, said through a radiant smile. “People have lost what’s here. We talk. We eat. You at home. I want the tables and chairs to be matchin’ like the other restaurants you go into, that’s my dream…” She trailed off into a chuckle. “But this is just the best I can do. And they like it just the way it is.”

“Sets it apart from all these glamorous restaurants,” added Henry with a nod. “That’s the appeal. Food can bring people together. If it’s good food, it really can. Might go to different churches and different schools, but once they here they all the same.” He paused for just a moment as the words sank in. “It’s hard to find home.”

Those five words speak volumes. It’s somewhat shocking that this place is even worth mentioning, that a restaurant in the south that serves southern food to southerners is somehow relevant to any kind of bigger picture. But it was the only one of its kind we found on the entire ride, despite the people’s deep longing for what they took for granted growing up. It’s mostly all gone now, the nuances of small towns that once pulsed independently burned off by the ferocious flames of multinational industry.

It’s a rather clever process. In the modern example, McDonalds moves in, boasting jobs and hamburgers sold at lower cost and at two in the morning. But then the restaurant with a personal investment in the town goes under. Most of McDonald’s revenue gets sent elsewhere, the town becomes poorer and unhealthier, and in the end they’re living worse than they were to begin with. McDonald’s isn’t really any cheaper if its very presence impoverishes a community, but the illusion persists just long enough to get its foot in the door. By the time the town sees through the hustle, it’s already too late.

It seems to have happened everywhere. Small businesses couldn’t stay afloat and small-scale farming became economically unviable. Families spent their evenings at home watching sit-coms filmed in Hollywood rather than dancing to a jukebox downtown. As needs became fulfilled by organizations based far far away, local economies dried up. And with nowhere to take root, community and culture were short to follow. The options available to ambitious youth today are grim. Either get a job as a cog at The Dollar General and work your way up, or move away to chase bigger dreams.

These bikes have yanked us right from our comfort zone directly into worlds we never would have collided with otherwise. Barreling down the highway in a car, you can easily ignore the noise on the other side of the window, only exchanging pleasantries when paying for gasoline or asking for directions. But bicycles force you to feel every inch of every mile, and each little town you crawl through becomes a conversation waiting to happen. Most everybody seems thrilled to meet a couple of curious strangers rolling through town, and are eager to help out however they can.

Like the little league coach who spotted us in the park on a cold night and unlocked the heated concession stand. And the stern cop who woke us in a cemetery. He just apologized for the disturbance and wished us well. And there was the morning on the Pearl River in the ‘no camping’ zone when we were asked to move our site closer to the diner. They wanted to make sure we were safe. People would buy us meals and tell us their life stories, inspired by our journey and intrigued by its mission.

And through it all, the one truth that hits us over and over again is that everybody’s more or less human. The flimsy walls we build up between conservative and liberal, old and young, between redneck, punk, hippie, yuppie, and hillbilly, burn down quickly over a hot meal.

It’s easy to snicker from the sidelines at the backwardness of the South. But these people have deep roots, and yearn for many of the same things as the more progressive groups we’ve documented. Only rural Southerners aren’t holding it all on a pedestal as an elusive utopian ideal—it runs deep in their blood. And if we can ever learn to get past the rhetoric, see under the surface, and join together in solidarity, we might just stand a chance against the much more powerful forces that weigh down on all of us.