On the Road with William Walker

Barranquilla III: Donaldo

2009-12-09T16:03:00.000-08:00

“Donaldo, leak the duke.”

Like the duck, he said.

That’s how Donaldo introduced himself the first time he sat down at my table at the vegetarian place in Barranquilla. In a culture whose social currency is it’s grilled meat, the vegetarian restaurant is like a social club for adults with Asperger’s. Colombia was not as bad as Argentina, where downtrodden vegetarians didn’t dare make eye contact with one another as they shuffled through the buffet lines of second floor haunts invisible from street level.

If the patrons here didn’t bear the shame of their Argentine compatriots, they shared in an element of ritual about this restaurant and health food store where printed placemats announced two calendar months worth of daily menus without a repeating meal. Everything else about the place was OCD delight.

The same regulars made up the daily lunch crowd, and they would trickle in to what might as well have been assigned seats, designated by profession. Nurses occupied the two tables nearest the door, the next two tables in the shotgun floor plan were filled in by the secretaries. At the other end of the narrow dining hall, businessmen with suspiciously round bellies conspired underneath the overmatched air conditioner on the back wall of the dining room. Various artisans and professional types I couldn’t quite pigeonhole filled in the remaining tables.

As the only representative for the freelance gringos I took a less desirable table next to the kitchen door. By second week Donaldo, an emissary from the professors table, began joining me for coffee and by the second month I became a part of his lunch crew.

A few days before Carnival, Donaldo unfolded a map of Panama and Northwest Colombia across the table. As he leaned back in his chair a wide smile revealed the gaps between jagged teeth. The way the corners of his lips stretched to his back molars and his small black eyes squinting under thick lenses balanced atop a long and pointed nose he reminded me less of a duck and more of cartoon crocodile.

"El Tapon," Donaldo said, tapping in the space between a broken red line that represented the Panamerican Highway.

"Juan D, ease possible."

I nodded my head to buy the time I needed to figure out what he had said while hoping Julio or Maria might offer a clarifying comment, but our lunchtime companions just sat there staring into the map.

It would have been easier if Donaldo had spoken in Spanish, but he was proud of his language skills. Rightfully so in a city where neither of the two English professors I had met, including Maria at my right, were reluctant to speak more than a few words. Donaldo did not lack confidence, though his inclination for outrageous pronouncements made his arbitrary grammar and thick accent difficult to decipher.

“One day? You are saying I can cross the Darien Gap in one day?”

“Si,” Donaldo’s smile broadened.

As he nodded, wisps of mad professor hair flew in all directions.

“How is that possible?” I asked, “That’s at least 100 kilometers by land.”

I measured a 100 kilometers with my forefinger and thumb on the map’s scale and transferred the pinched off space to connect the only missing link in a network of roads that stretched from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.

“No, leak these,” like this, the old man bit off his smile as he concentrated on the map.

Donaldo then ran a finger past my thumb up the wedge of Northwest Colombia that tapers between the border and the Caribbean coast until the two lines met at point marked Cabo Tiburon, Shark Cape. The top of this little sliver of Colombia was north of the of the Pan American Highway’s terminus at Yaviza, Panama. He pressed his thumb down on a distance half the width of the north-south break between the red line of roadway.

El Tapon means the plug, the 100 km wide swath of jungle clad mountains and treacherous swampland between Colombia and Panama otherwise known as the Darien Gap. The Darien is not only home to some of Earth's least inviting terrain, it is teeming with tropical diseases and all sorts of venomous life forms that creep and crawl and slither.

The noxious plant and animal species are only outdone by the particularly terrifying strains of homo sapien found in the Darien, nominally left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries who have eschewed political ideology for cocaine profits. The variously affilated drug traffickers and arms smugglers contest the few semblances of trails that meander through the Darien Gap.

I expected Maria to interject, or to give me some signal that this man in the gray smock seated across from me was putting me on, that gringos should not think of blazing trails through the jungle. She stared into the blue space that indicated the Caribbean on the map, her far off eyes seemed lost in a daydream. Julio was with us, but the shop teacher wasn’t as worldly wise as Donaldo. He waited for his friend to continue the lesson.

I’m not sure I could have found another three Colombians more consenting of an American making a land crossing of the Darien Gap. While I sat there and watched Donald connect the blue coast to the red line of the Pan American with a single joint of his gnarled thumb, it looked possible.

Donaldo had given me the idea for a trip back up the spine of Central America while looking though a folder of ESL materials I had brought to teach conversation classes to some university students Maria had referred me. He took interest in a wrinkled brochure I had picked up years ago in the Nashville airport. The brochure had become a stock lesson plan, students used it to make an advertisement highlighting the places of interest in their own hometown.

“Nashville, Music Seedy, U. S.A,” Donaldo said, smiling at the words on the cover.

He flipped open the brochure and read from the list of tourist attractions with a voice of mock wonder.

“The home of William Walker”

The grey-eyed man of destiny was definitely not included in the list of Music City attractions. How Donaldo had linked Walker to his place of birth by looking at that dog-eared brochure, I will never know.

“William Walker?” I said, “How do you know about William Walker?”

“El Filibustero, from Nashville Nosh Veal!”

Donaldo knew a great deal about William Walker. He had spent some time living in Costa Rica and Nicaragua, where the name William Walker, was still an incantation used by grandmothers to scare the children at night. Be careful, or William Walker is going to get you!

The crazy professor knew when he had a captive audience. He gave me his widest crocodile grin and told me a story I had yet to hear about my doctor-turned-lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-soldier of fortune ancestor.

“Walker had plans to invade Martinque, he was going to use it as a beachhead to invade Central America. He was going to use the blacks on the island as plantation slaves in Nicaragua. The President of United States had given him permission,” Donaldo said.

His anecdote made about as much sense as William Walker’s motives in his filibustering years, so though I had never encountered this particular rumor, I scribbled it down in my notebook. This just egged him on, and on. He rambled through stories of his time in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras.

The more he spoke the less I understood, until his swallowed Costeño accent washed into the whine of the hopelessly overmatched air conditioner losing ground to the afternoon heat. But I knew I had to go back to Nicaragua to find the other wild haired professors who dug for arcana and yellowing half-truths to spin legends about the little man from my hometown and family tree who came to terrorize a region and personify two centuries of American imperialism.

Natchez Trace XII: Training Days

2009-11-13T13:15:00.000-08:00

On the map day six did not look challenging. Rather than try and make it 77 miles to Florence, Alabama in a day, I booked a cabin at Tishomingo State Park, just 45 miles from Tupelo. I needed every last pedal stroke of my training to not break down on the ride.

Seven weeks earlier, I wrote my friend Adam before leaving Colombia, “Can a guy without much cycling experience train for a 450 mile ride in a month?”

Adam is one of those guys with the fancy jerseys. He is on a racing team and regularly rides a 100 miles in a day, a century, the insiders call it.

“Absolutely,” he replied.

I should have remembered sports enthusiasts are the most incorrigible optimists when it comes to the realm of the possible.

To his credit, he kept the instructions simple. Train as much and as hard as possible before the ride. Don’t train in too high of a gear; better to keep the legs moving at about 90 rpm. He recommended that if I couldn’t train on a real bike the next best thing was spinning. Spin bikes more closely imitate the pedal action on a road bike than regular exercise models. Just as importantly, they have real bicycle saddles. Sure enough, after my first workout a sore butt became the weak link in my training.

If I didn’t find every spin bike between Barranquilla and the Rio Grande, I came close.

I figured I could sneak in 25 training rides to get into shape for the Trace. This regime would shaped the course I took to get back home. I had a few more days in Barranquilla, and Rosita told me there was a gym just around the corner from our apartment building. I thought I had understood her wrong. I had lived in this place for 3 months without noticing a gym not even 50 yards away.

There it was, opposite the concrete park, a dusty little storefront with aluminum grilling over the windows. I had never noticed the Atlas figure on the rectangular sign above the door, or the spin bikes looking out the front windows. It was just a single room with some free weights in the back, and a few worn exercise machines sprinkled around the place. The ten spin bikes were well worn, the resistance knobs were rusting from the years of sweat and humidity in a room without air conditioning. The gym was run by a short body builder with the strut of a silverback gorilla. He’d occasionally stop near the wall opposite his counter for no apparent reason but to steal a glance in the mirror at his biceps.

I bought a weeklong membership to the Atlas. This was my first gym membership, a good place as any to make some novice mistakes.

The first five minutes of my first ride were interminable. I checked the minute hand on the plastic clock above the counter about once every thirty seconds, regulating my rpm, I convinced myself. There were no fans to stir the oppressive tropical air. I thought if I took off my shirt maybe it would be slightly more tolerable in the 90-degree room. There were no women around, just a couple muscle junkies on the bench press.

As soon as I had peeled off my dripping shirt, the silverback bounded over from his habitat near the free weights, one set of knuckles almost scraping the concrete floor, while his other arm wagged a stubby a finger. Next to the bike, he started pantomiming, even though I had negotiated the membership fee in a more than passable Spanish.

I knew what he was telling me, though if I hadn’t, the sign language would have just confused the issue, his bulky arms were not meant for painting pictures.

I gave him a blank stare in hopes he might continue the show. If this were charades I might have guessed he was a studio ape ripping off a tuxedo near the end of a trying day on set. The gesture became more convincing with repetition, two hands grabbing in front of his washboard abs and violently lifting up and out over his head. Then he wagged a finger close in front of my nose.

I’d learn it was a universal gym protocol I had violated—do not remove your shirt. Still, I imagine most gyms are built less like pizza ovens. At least my soaked shirt felt cool against my skin. I’d make some more faux pas on my gym hopping up the isthmus, but I’m glad I learned the basics in Barranquilla

In Monteria, I spun with the wives and girlfriends of some of the most terrifying figures in Colombian paramilitary. This ranching capital is the last seat of power for the AUC, its higher ups protected by President Uribe himself, as he is the owner of a sprawling hacienda north of town. One can guess how important a person is based on the strength of their bodyguard. Collectively, my workout partners were important enough to merit one half dozen AK 47 toting guards at the front door and another half dozen out back. If I had been in some nowhere town other than Monteria, I couldn’t have felt as confident these weren’t just drug henchman. Paramilitaries, mafiosos, and left wing insurgents are all involved in the drug trade, and they largely agree on their assault rifles of choice, the durable and cost effective Kalashnikov. Colombians have told me the only reliable way to know the difference between Paras and the FARC is by their jungle boots. The right-wingers wear leather, and the lefties sport cheaper plastic footwear. Cartels stick to the concrete. Government troops, who could also be anywhere, are easier to distinguish, just look for their Israeli designed Galil rifles.

This wasn’t the kind of gym where one needed a lock for the lockers. It was just me, another silverback trainer--this one probably a eunuch--and a dozen kept women, spandex clinging to their surgically enhanced bodies.

If there was a spin bike in the Darien, I missed it.

Panama City was like an extension of Miami, the athletic clubs notwithstanding. I am surprised they let me enter with my grungy black shoes and bathing suit. It’s amazing what a gringo can get away with sometimes.

In San Salvador I found a gym near the University that would only let me ride if I joined a spin class. They rode like they were always in the mountains. The only reward at the summit was asphyxiation, gulping down San Salvador smog was like jumping into a trench fogged with mustard gas. The air was darkened by eternally gridlocked second-hand American school buses puking black clouds of diesel smoke. The city somehow smelled worse than the diesel fumes; it stank of burning garbage. When I hit the streets after a workout my eyes watered and my lungs burned and I wondered what the hell was the point in exercising in a city where breathing might prove unhealthier than smoking. At least cigarettes come with filters.

Guatemala City might have had a gym, but I’d prefer a week in San Salvador to a night in that cesspit of urban agglomeration gone terribly wrong. The villages around Lago Atitlan were gym free. One of the expat hippies I met there suggested an astral projection class, where, for 40 bucks, I could visualize the challenges of my coming bike ride on a higher plane of consciousness. I opted for a massage instead.

The gym owner in crumbling downtown Veracruz took one look at my black shoes and told me to come back when I found something decent to wear. This exchange came after I had paid the cashier. Oh, and No Refunds.

I found a gym on the back streets of old town Monterrey, where a leathery man outside in a rocking chair let me in for a dollar. The dusty hall had a few weight machines and four rusted bikes directly across from a boxing ring. The instructor was teaching a lesson in counter punching to a teenager. Each time the teenager jabbed the instructor deflected the blow with a target glove and smacked the boy in the face with his other glove hen shouted “again!” After a while he looked frustrated with his pupil and started yelling in my direction, beckoning me to step into the ring. Glass Jaw Wilson knows his limitations. I declined, and rode for an hour one and twenty minutes while the lead-footed kid took a beating. I got off that bike in as good of shape as I’d been in my entire life.

I managed 17 workouts before New Orleans, where I tried my new bike out on the levee. I chose a hybrid, the narrow tires on road bikes made nervous, and though the upright position on my Giant Cypress meant less efficiency, it also meant less leaning over day after day for 450 miles. I figured my back would appreciate it.

The day before I got on the Marty Baskerville I learned that road miles really were different than time logged on a spin bike. After 12 miles, I felt my thighs tightening, so I prescribed myself a beer. I spent the rest of the afternoon alternating riding and drinking. Twenty-five miles and five beers later, I felt pretty good. I was ready for a week on the Trace.

Turned out the 45 miles to Tishomingo would be the most challenging ride of the trip. The undulating hills got steeper, the ascents longer than anything before Tupelo.
Three miles from the park, within sight of the highest point in Mississippi, a hundred yards from the top of the last hill before the park, I surrendered. I got off my bike and walked it to the top.
My legs weren’t broken, so the defeat was mental. Next time I’ll take the hippie class.

My Wal Mart bought dinner was delicious, a bachelor’s recipee I call the Calorie Bowl, baked beans topped with sliced almonds. I ate the last of the French Camp loaf, and ignored my only dinner companion, a deer mounted on the wall across from the bed. I slept for 10 hours untroubled by my insomniac roommate’s disapproving glare. At dawn I was ready for my last morning in Mississippi, my only day in Alabama, and a delicate spring afternoon in southern Tennessee.

Natchez Trace XI: A Death on the Trace

2009-11-06T17:59:00.000-08:00

“Still,” officer James Myers shook his head. “This is the only road for bicycling in Mississippi.”

Even with the grisly wreckage strewn out on the black top behind him, his words rang true. The Natchez Trace was the only road even remotely safe for long distance cycling in the state of Mississippi. Mississippians do not abide sharing right of way with slow moving geeks under foam helmets.

Since mile marker one five days ago, I had totaled less than two miles off the Trace, and twice in that time I was run off the road. That averages to just over one terrifying incident per mile outside the Parkway’s federal protection.

At least both drivers had the decency to honk before running me down. In Port Gibson, a man in a white minivan was enraged at the prospect of waiting 15 seconds before he could safely pass me due to oncoming traffic on Church Street. Then he realized he didn’t have to wait. He laid knuckles into his horn and accelerated. I had been looking over my shoulder and had just enough time to swerve into a ditch.

My near miss in Mathiston was less provoked. I started day five with a quarter mile ride from the motel back to the Trace on a four lane divided highway. I was riding near the shoulder in the right lane when another white minivan approached from behind. Rather than changing to the open passing lane, he slowed down which led me to think he was about to turn. Then he started honking. I held my ground a couple inches from the white line, clear of the glass and twisted metal detritus on the paved shoulder. I waved my arm, motioning him to pass me in the open left lane—we were the only two people on the road. Instead, he dug into his horn and gunned for my back tire. As I swerved into the shoulder my pannier bag dodged his front bumper by a few inches. He gave me the finger out over the roof of his car. Happy Earth Day, mother fucker.

I had a better Earth Day than the cyclist whose mangled bike lay beyond Officer Myers’ car.

I first heard something had gone wrong after lunch when I pulled back onto the Trace and was flagged by a southbound pick up truck.

“Were you riding with a girl back there?” the man asked.

“No, why, is she alright?”

“I don’t think so,” he said as he rolled away.

A few minutes later one, then another police cruisers roared past, their blue and red lights traced the road’s gentle curves at 100 miles an hour. Then an ambulance sped past from the other direction. Without flashing lights or horn, the bulky vehicle marked the silent retreat of a crestfallen warrior.

A few minutes past mile marker 240 I rolled up on a Chickasaw County police car parked horizontally across the road. An officer was directing cars to turn around and take a detour back and around the Trace. I asked her how long I would have to wait for the road to open. She did not have an answer.

It was not clear from the scene behind her what had happened. Carnage from the wreck was strewn 300 feet and seemed improbable to have been caused by a single collision. A white road bike with crumpled tires and busted pannier bags rested on the double yellow just beyond the police car. The guilty SUV sulked midway down the grassy shoulder.

I figured if I waited long enough one of the officers pacing back and forth through the scene would escort me through. After a half hour I asked the traffic officer what was going on, and she deferred my question to an approaching pacer. Meyers had been the first officer to arrive but had since been relegated by his superiors.

"Were you traveling with a woman named Esther?" he asked.

I said I was not.

He told me he couldn’t answer any questions about the collision. He then went on to tell me everything but the suspect’s name and age. The road was blocked because it was a crime scene; they were waiting for a coroner to arrive from Tupelo. The cyclist, a “heavier woman” from the Netherlands, was most likely killed upon impact.

"This is the first fatality in about about three years," Meyers said.

He said most collisions happen at twilight, when it got hard to see bikers on the road. He noted that my bright blue jersey had stuck out nicely as he streaked past.

It was past 4:30. I had a little over twenty-five miles to go, and if I was going to make it to Tupelo before sundown I would need to get pedaling soon. An eight-mile detour wasn’t an option for me. Sixty-five miles was already pushing it today, and there was no way I was venturing outside the relative sanctuary of the Trace. I pointed out to James that I would be faced with a twilight ride if I had to wait much longer.

James agreed, and after a few more minutes he walked me past the roadblock.

A hundred feet behind the mangled bike, the cyclist’s items spread out in a wake, a plastic shopping bag smeared with coleslaw, fried chicken, a can of Budweiser. Further down the road were her extra clothes: a red raincoat, jeans and underwear. Closely bunched at the far end of the plume, a hundred yards from bike, lay a helmet still in tact, a pair of sunglasses, a cell phone, and a streak of congealed blood.

A television crew had set up on the other side of the roadblock. The reporter wanted to ask me some questions. I told him what I had seen when I pulled up and mentioned that sad, quiet ambulance with its lights in mourning. He seemed disappointed with my report, perhaps goading me to elaborate for the audience on the other side of the lens. I had nothing sensational to say to the camera. They went with the footage anyway. I guess I had looked sufficiently aggrieved.

The cars that passed me the rest of way that afternoon did so with extra deference. Drivers were also unexpectedly cooperative on the mile I was forced to ride on a busy six-lane road into downtown Tupelo, where I got the feeling that Esther’s death was all over the evening traffic reports.

I’d learn after watching myself on the news the next morning that the victim’s name was Esther Hageman, a 51 year old journalist from the Netherlands who was on a cycling tour of the South. The driver of the SUV, whose name would be released later, was 58-year old Wendell Blount, a convicted felon who had been high on morphine at the time of the collision.

Natchez Trace X: Kosciusko to Mathiston

2009-11-03T09:38:00.000-08:00

A beautiful Indian woman was working behind the counter of the modern stand at the Days Inn Kosciusko. She and her husband weren’t natives of course, but from the subcontinent Columbus had been trying to find before claiming Hispaniola for his Crown. These Indians had come by way San Jose, California. They had just finished the company’s management program and were now working up the corporate ladder. I couldn’t imagine a lower rung than Kosciusko, MS, though in fairness it was dark when I arrived and I was too tired to walk the mile into the center of town.

My hostess was diplomatic when I asked her what she thought of Mississippi—she dodged the question—though she did tell me she missed living in the Bay Area. She was hoping they would receive another placement within the year. I can vouch for the couple. They ran a clean and friendly operation.

The town of Kosciusko was named after a Polish engineer who had an impressive Age of Enlightement resume. A believer in the promise of an American republic, Thaddeus Kosciusko sailed from Europe to Philadelphia and enlisted with the rebels. His talents were quickly recognized and he was promoted to Chief Engineer of the Continental Army. He designed the defensive fortifications at Philadelphia and Ticonderoga as well as the academy at West Point. Upon leaving America for Poland, he decreed the lands given to him for his invaluable services be used as capital to buy the freedom of slaves.

His work in Poland was no less impressive. He commanded an army that scored successive victories over the larger forces of the invading Russians. Poland being Poland, her Prussian and Lithuanian neighbors sold her out for their own gain. Still, Kosciusko won battles against the encroaching Czarist army and might have triumphed had the Polish King not reached an agreement behind Kosciusko’s back to capitulate and save his own skin. Never having lost a battle as head of the Polish armies, Kosciusko was forced to accept the terms negotiated by his king that reduced their nation to a minor state-let. In a last effort to mobilize the people against the invaders, he abolished serfdom and raised an insurgent army that for a time threatened to repel the Russian forces. This time he was defeated in the field and captured. He was forced to watch from a St. Petersburg prison as Russia, Austria, and Prussia swallowed up the remainder of Polish territory so that politically his homeland ceased to exist.

There is a museum dedicated to Thaddeus Kosciusko just outside of town at mile marker 162. Why someone had chosen this spot to commemorate the Polish hero, a site that was just as much in the middle of nowhere at the close of the eighteenth century as it is today, and why there was an annex with a tribute to Oprah Winfrey, the museum did not make clear.

The weathermen didn’t forecast the cold rain that fell on the stretch between Kosciusko and French Camp, or maybe they did, and figured it not worth mentioning if no one would be there to notice. I only saw two cars that morning.

Even with my legs pumping at 90 rpm the steady rain drove the cold into my bones. French Camp was the only ink on the map between Kosciusko and my destination for the night, and luckily there was a small country restaurant right off the Trace.

The couple from Tupelo at the table next to me claimed this French Camp retreat had the best BLT’s in Mississippi. The bread was homemade, baked by the students at the French Camp Academy who also served in the restaurant. I opted for a thick slice of white bread and potato soup, the perfect lunch to bring some heat back into my hands and feet. After lunch I wandered into town and stopped at the welcome center operated by the school. French Camp Academy was a second chance special education school that emphasized work and prayer. I chatted with some of the students who came from all over the southeast. They were happy to have a distraction and they asked me every question they could think of to ask. The kids were sweet, if not imaginative. They soon ran out of questions and their supervisor put them back to work before giving me suggestions for some bike rides in the area. She sent me off with a half loaf of home made bread.

I finished day four in Mathiston, a one-diner town across the Trace from Pigeon Roost named for the passenger pigeons that had once chosen it as a favorite rest stop. It is impossible to imagine the extinct birds that used to travel in flocks of millions, by some accounts billions. Their flocks stretched for tens of miles, thick enough to blot out the noonday sun when they passed overhead. After landing for the night, they would leave a wake of broken tree branches and blizzards of bird shit.

The stand at Mathiston did not compare with the previous night in Kosciusko. The cinderblock cells at the Mathiston Motor Inn were a refuge for truckers, prostitutes and, from the looks of the corroded sink and tub in the bathroom, itinerant meth chemists. I was too tired to be bothered by the grime, and the room sufficed for bike storage and sleeping. Two hundred miles down, two hundred and forty to go.

Natchez Trace IX: Old Hickory and the Death of the Old Trace

2009-11-02T16:55:00.000-08:00

Though there is no clear beginning to the history of the animal runs and footpaths that became the old Trace, its end is easier to pinpoint. In 1811, the New Orleans demonstrated to a multitude of skeptics the possibility of coupling steam engine to riverboat and pushing up current, past the treacherous sawyers, snags and whirlpools on the Mississippi.

Once upriver navigation became reality, smoke-stacked paddle wheelers proliferated like algae blooms on tamer waters. Within a decade nearly a thousand steamboats plied the Mississippi. By that time even the poorest farmer could afford the third class passage that entitled him a spot on a crowded deck where he would sleep out in the elements. Given the accidents and violence on the river, the water route was no less treacherous than the Trace, but it saved at least a month in travel time and avoided a 500-mile walk back to the Cumberland Valley. It should have meant less business for the Native Americans who by treaty had exclusive rights to operate the inns, known as stands, along the road's desolate stretch through the Choctaw and Chickasaw nations.

Though at the same time the road was losing its northbound traffic, greater numbers pushed south. Unscrupulous characters drove chained men for whom they had no or dubious title. Otherwise they too would have taken the quicker, and more policed, river route to the Mississippi bottomlands where cotton production was booming and the demand for human capital insatiable. Settlers with an eye for this wilderness, now within the boundaries of the young republic, arrived in increasing numbers hungry for land and confident their government would soon wrest it from tribal control.

The Trace was already losing its commercial viability by the time Andrew Jackson earned his most famous moniker on this road. At start of the War of 1812, Jackson led the volunteer Tennessee Militia down river to aid the defense of New Orleans. Yet his troops were delayed, then abandoned, in Natchez due to the perfidious maneuverings of Jackson’s military superior in New Orleans, Major General James Wilkinson. The treasonous Wilkinson, archives have established he had once worked as a spy for the Spanish Crown, wanted no competition from the able Tennessean. Rather than allowing Jackson to join his forces in New Orleans, Wilkinson commanded him to proceed no further than Natchez while he worked to secure orders from Washington that would dismiss the Tennessean from command.

Denied permission to join forces along the Canadian front, and cut off from the government commissaries, Jackson staked his personal fortune to march the 1500 Volunteers in his charge from Natchez back to Nashville. Along the way the commander who was tough as a hickory tree offered his own mount to the sick and encouraging words to the dying. By 1815, the scalawag Wilkinson had stood court-martial for incompetence during the war and Jackson was a national hero for repelling a superior force of the British regulars at New Orleans. Jackson’s march home was a last hurrah for the road that Jefferson had deemed to be of vital national importance a decade before.

Old Hickory would commence with his most villainous legacy along the same road that had catapulted him to greatness. In 1820, at the close of that last relevant decade for the Trace, Jackson arrived at Doak’s Stand, just a few miles southwest of Kosciusko, as an agent of the federal government. There he set the terms by which the United States would claim the rich bottomlands of the Choctaw, who a few years prior had fought alongside Jackson in the Creek War. Jackson repaid his allies by pushing the tribe into Arkansas on the false promise that these new lands lay beyond white encroachment. Within another decade, Jackson had ridden the western vote into the White House and rewarded his constituents with the Indian Removal Actthat pushed the Choctaw, along the with other Indian Nations, even further west. When the last Native Americans east of the Mississippi shed their tears across the Trace, the road no longer held national importance. Nor could it be thought of as a cohesive unit. In the 1820’s the Trace began splintering into a series of local throughways. They would not be fully reconnected until my 29th birthday, the day when the last stretch of smooth pavement was opened to the public, over seventy years after the Natchez Trace Parkway was first conceived as a Depression era WPA project.

Natchez Trace VIII: Gentleman, Scholar, Athlete

2009-10-27T14:52:00.000-07:00

"I am not an athlete," was all I could tell Hank when he asked me a cycling question just before we unloaded my bike near mile marker 102. He must have realized then how hare brained this trip was for me. He gave me his cell phone number in case I got into trouble.

It is true—I am not an athlete. If I managed to finish the Natchez Trace, it would rank as the greatest athletic accomplishment of my life.

I have never belonged to a gym or run more than 1 ½ miles, and that was for middle school cross country. I should be able to claim having run three miles, back in the dark days of MBA intramurals, an athletic program designed as punishment for students who didn’t play varsity sports. The curriculum consisted of rounding up the debaters, drama kids, slackers, and other athletically inept for a three-mile run through the neighborhoods in the vicinity of campus. At a school with the motto “Gentleman, Scholar, Athlete,” we were the short bus kids shoved into the module with the broken AC unit farthest from the principal’s office.

None of us were in a particular hurry on those milk and honey spring afternoons. We’d trail behind whichever teacher drew the crap assignment of babysitting our run. The teacher was usually a jogger who had more interest in maintaining his pace than keeping tabs on the delinquent pack behind him. He would soon stop checking over his shoulder and start pulling away. The slackers had long dropped off, lighting their cigarettes in the first bushes suitable to hide the smoke. The debaters’ jokes would lose subtlety after the first half-mile, the teacher having grown smaller in the distance. After another half mile it was back to argument. The theater kids did, in English accents, whatever it was thespians do on an afternoon walk in the suburbs.

I would have been happy if they had given us a football or basketball and told us to play a game. Yet field space and court time was at a premium at old Montgomery Bell, and this limited the options for the non-athlete. The option was to run, away from campus.

So we schemed. Once we knew what days we’d have which teacher-jogger for our thrice-weekly runs, we could predict the routes he would be taking. Then a couple of us would coordinate in the mornings to stash a car somewhere along the route. This took some creativity in the last generation before cell phones.

Occasionally our taskmaster would catch on that not all of us were coming back from the runs and change up the course. He’d keep tabs for the first mile and a half and jog in a straight line away from campus. At this point the teacher could resume his normal pace and the rest our sorry crew would be forced to complete the three miles, by jogging, walking or smoking our way back to school.

On one of the afternoons we had guessed wrong I found myself stranded almost two miles from my car. I had stashed it along the Latin teacher’s normal running route to the west of campus; he took us south and east. Suddenly I didn’t have so many jogging buddies, and none of these fair weather delinquents offered me a ride to my car once we got back to campus.

At the halfway point the teacher blazed for home. The debaters grumbled, the slackers found a smoking bush, and the thespians traded old Monty Python lines. I didn’t feel like arguing, didn’t smoke during the school week, and didn’t find Holy Grail jokes that funny. I didn’t feel like jogging either.

I stuck out my thumb to the next car that passed. No luck. The second car I thumbed slowed then stopped about 15 feet in front of me. I caught up with the car as the driver lowered the passenger window.

“I’m probably not supposed to do this,” she said.

“Probably not.” I said.

“Get in the back.” she said.

I could hear a couple of the debaters snickering about 50 yards back. The same guys who hadn’t offered me a ride when the route changed. I opened the back door and flipped them a bird.

“I have to go the bank first. My son Charlie has a soccer game on campus.”

She knew where I was headed, the alma mater’s letters were branded across the chest and thighs of our gym clothes. I knew of her son, his dad had been my pediatrician. Like most kids, I idolized my pediatrician. I told her what a swell guy I thought her husband was.

“ EX-husband,” she snarled.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You wouldn’t believe how cheap that bastard is with his own children. A doctor who can’t find the money to pay his alimony!”

In our wait at the bank’s drive thru lane, the EX-wife was determined that I get a fuller picture of the man. I thought about getting out of car, but I was still on the other side of campus from my car, and I was afraid she might figure out who I was and report me for siding with her cheapskate husband. I just sat in the backseat stone-faced, waiting for her to change the subject. She didn’t. Who knew the guy whose jokes kept the shots from hurting and whose amoxicillin cleared up countless ear infections would have…well, Nashville people read this blog.

I kept my mouth shut.

The unforeseen dangers of hitchhiking with a soccer mom—she might smash your childhood idols.

Natchez Trace VII: Beers with Rube and Hank

2009-10-26T15:58:00.000-07:00

I didn’t notice Rube, Katherine and Hank pull into the parking lot. Rube had finally traded in his iconic Volvo station wagon for a generic Japanese sedan. Katherine had long been encouraging the upgrade.

“Now we’ve got to work on his wardrobe,” Katherine said.

Michael Rubenstein was a long time sports broadcaster in Jackson who has founded and for the last 15 years run the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame. Rube’s stentorian voice and cracking wit made him a natural television personality.

Rube went to Vanderbilt with my stepfather, and was the guy I wanted to sit next to at the homecoming games. For one he broke the lawyer, doctor, businessman mold of most of the guys who showed up that weekend, and he also knew what was going on down on the field, whether the coach was any good, and what we could expect in a couple of months from the basketball team, the real Vanderbilt sporting interest. He was also the seasoned traveler and had been just about everywhere in the world I wanted to go.

I got the chance to travel with Rube when he joined Steven, David and I on a trip to China in 2002. Three weeks on the gringo trail is ample time to get to know a man, and Rube demonstrated he was one cool customer.

We were floating down the Yangtze River two months before they closed off the Three Gorges Dam and flooded its namesake valley when Rube realized he had miscounted his pills. These pills weren’t cholesterol regulators or happy candy; Rube was short the medicine that kept his body from rejecting his transplant kidney. He must have been worried, though he only mentioned the oversight in passing one morning at breakfast, casually enough so that it didn’t interrupt for too long our oggling the waitress with the largest chest in China. No, death’s shadow did not stop the man from appreciating the oddity of a humongous pair of boobs on a tiny Chinese girl.

He must have been really worried when Fed Ex screwed up the emergency shipment Katherine sent that night from Jackson. If we had taken this same trip five or ten years before, Rube might have died in central China, or at the least found himself back on a dialysis machine, perhaps for the rest of his life. Fortunately there was a new pharmacy in Chongqing that had the proper medicine in stock.

Hank Klibanoff was Rube’s other houseguest for the night. Hank won the Pulitzer Prize in 2007 for his book The Race Beat. Meticulously researched and masterfully written, his book will become the definitive history of journalism in the civil rights movement. The protagonists in his tale, the small band of enlightened newspaper editors who fought for equality in the Jim Crow south, were the models I looked to when I first sought to be a liberal. No elitist dweebs, these liberals presented an easy going, disarming face to the world, men who personified the good qualities of the southern way of life even while they battled the great majority of their contemporaries to expose and defeat the glaring injustices and inequalities inherent in racial discrimination.

Not even a Pulitzer could shield Hank from the cost cutting blades of the publishing industry; he has since been laid off as managing editor of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Hank’s position encapsulated the vicious cycle ravaging the American press. An editor flush with contacts and germane knowledge of the history and politics of his region is invaluable to maintaining a standard of excellence in the press. Yet the profit model for print journalism today cannot afford this excellence, and continuing decline in circulation must be in part a response to a diminished product. Worse, the stakes are far more serious than profit models eviscerated by the internet. The fourth estate has long been the pillar upholding transparency and accountability in democratic governance. No army of bloggers or TV screaming heads can replace the guild of newsroom editors steeped in the rigorous pursuit of objectivity and civic interest.

Hank is now director of the Cold Case Truth and Justice Project. His center examines civil rights related murders that were never investigated or were dropped by local police departments. Through interviews and the examination of old documents Hank hopes his team can bring conclusive evidence against alleged perpetrators who evaded the slipknots of criminal justice in the Old South. In some cases they seek out suspects from new leads. The aim is not to bring octogenarian defendants to show trials, but to document the many unsolved cases so the stories of the victims can be remembered and the guilty tried in the historical record.

Rube and Hank became friends back when Hank was a reporter for a local paper. They were introduced one night by their respective girlfriends who had planned a double date. They spent the evening talking to each other more than to their dates.

Rube took us to a restaurant on the reservoir north of town. It was a warm night and there was a band playing on the docks. The crab sandwiches were tasty and the cold beer was the perfect tonic to soothe my legs.

Hank told us about why he was passing through Jackson. If my retelling is murky, it is no fault of Hank’s, he was a raconteur in the best of Southern tradition. I was too tired to take copious notes later that evening, and my brain was awash with endorphins and in no shape to nail down details. Two days on the road and I already had the makings of an exercise junkie.

Hank was investigating an unsolved murder from the Oxford riots that erupted when James Meredith arrived in the fall of 1962 to enroll in the University of Mississippi. Before the army could step in to bring back order, the Mississippi Highway Patrol stood idle as a white mob rained rocks, bricks and gunfire upon the campus. Two men were killed in the maelstrom, one a French journalist who had come to cover the Meredith story.

“People don’t realize that a lot of these people came from Alabama,” Hank, The Alabamian, said.

“Our rednecks in Mississippi, they try,” Rube conceded, “but those Alabama rednecks, they’re the real deal.”

Hank had recently received a tip from a man living in Jackson who remembers as a boy one of those Alabama rednecks visiting his house to retrieve a rag-wrapped parcel hidden in the basement. The man believed the parcel might have been a gun. Hank had reason to believe that it could have been the murder weapon used to kill the French journalist.

There are many reasons the boy’s family would have been afraid to speak up. A KKK riddled police department was unlikely to be interested in such a report in the 1960’s, and the Klan had a reputation for brutal retaliation against snitches. Hank wasn’t sure if the story would lead to anything, but the chance was enough to pull him from Atlanta.

That night Katherine left us with the best pound cake on either side of the Mississippi. Rube got the best of worlds, the bachelor lifestyle and a fantastic girlfriend who was always bringing homemade treats to his kitchen, and then leaving. Women have always chased after Rube, and he has always resisted encroachment. He had been with Katherine since before the China trip, but they still maintain separate residences. Katherine has figured out the formula for keeping in the picture, and seems happy with it.

Before bed there was time to absorb what wisdom I could from these esteemed elders. I questioned Rube about bachelor life and asked Hank for his perspective on the state of journalism. I have yet to earn my stripes in either field, but as I yet I am relatively young. There is still hope.

“Last time I heard from your mom and Stevie, you were damn well near married,” Rube said.

“I guess I dodged a bullet,” I replied.

“Good for you.”

“I might not have been so lucky, but I couldn’t pass on the French girl.”

“French girls.” Rube smiled. “It’s something about the way they talk.”

That’s exactly what it was. Even English sounds seductive in a French accent.

Rube told us about the French Canadian girl he met on the beach in Acapulco. It was probably from thirty years ago, but Rube told it fresh, uncluttered with the embellishments that tend to accumulate over time. Wise men knew which memories to preserve. It would have the perfect weekend if he hadn’t gotten food poisoning just before he could get her into bed. Still, he managed to see her a couple more times, once in Montreal, and another time on a weekend in New York City.

“Not bad for a boy from Booneville, Mississippi,” Rube said.

Not bad at all. Rube’s college housemate Steven Fayne, later my boss in San Francisco, told me a story that sized up Booneville. Steven and some Zeta brothers were on a road trip between semesters and decided to spend a night in Booneville. They pulled into a gas station in town with a payphone and dialed Rube’s house.

"Rube, we're in town!" Steven said.

“OK. I’ll come down and get you.” Rube said.

“How do you know where we are?” Steven asked.

“Because you’re at the payphone.” Rube said.

An old veteran from Booneville I’d meet later on the trip was impressed when I dropped Rube’s name. He was even more impressed that a TV personality had hailed from Booneville. He had assumed Rube was a Jackson man.

I wish I had talked less and listened more that night with these heavyweight Southerners from Booneville and Florence, Alabama, but my body was spent and my mind still swimming with those damned exercise opiates.

I had more of Katherine’s pound cake for breakfast, and wrapped up a big chuck that would last half way to Tupelo. I wanted to visit Katherine’s classroom, she worked as a fourth grade teacher at a public elementary school. Her career sounded like an extension of my brief experience teaching in the Delta. That she does her job well, presents a positive and fun loving face to the world, and manages a successful relationship with Rube likely qualifies her for sainthood.

There just weren’t enough hours of sunlight to see her children and get to Kosciusko before dark.

Hank didn’t have his interview until the afternoon so he offered me a ride back to the Trace. We went for lunch at a Greek restaurant where the friendly owner opened a half hour early when he saw us pull up.

As I unloaded my bike, Hank gave me a copy of his book to take with me on the road. Few books were worth hauling 300 miles in an overstuffed pannier bag. I suspected right that this was one of them. The civil rights movement was perfect subject matter for a slow crawl through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.

Just after noon I started peddling north along the reservoir. Fueled with stuffed grape leaves, pound cake and great conversation, I peddled over the bumpiest stretch of the Trace and reached my next stop well after sundown in the last minutes of twilight.

Natchez Trace VI: The Road to Jackson

2009-10-23T14:28:00.000-07:00

There are 61 miles of nothing between Port Gibson and Jackson. That's a bit unfair, perhaps you know more about trees than I do.

At least I had the wind at my back. I decided to bypass the one stop light town of Raymond, known as the site of a skirmish that was one of the last road bumps on Grant’s inexorable drive to Vicksburg. I doubted the lunch counter on the square was worth the two mile detour, and couldn't be sure they would even serve me. It crossed my mind that the woman who told me her restaurant was closed, inexplicably, for dinner on a Saturday night did so based on my dark complexion, greaser mustache and the Spanish lettering on my El Salvador jersey. That border control agent in Laredo had questioned me Spanish, after all.

I hadn’t looked at the map carefully and didn’t think to stop and fill up my bottle at the one rest stop I’d pass. So I went without water for the last 25 miles, dripping with sweat under the afternoon sun. This last third of the ride was one of two dangerous stretches for bikers on the Trace. The parkway straddles the city limits for 20 miles where it is used as a throughway for Jackson residents. It took all my energy to keep a straight line on the shoulder as a steady line of impatient SUV’s and trucks sped past. I had been spoiled the first day when I was saw less than ten cars per hour. Those drivers were not in a hurry as they too were here for the scenery, and almost all of them noticed me in time to pass on the other side of the double yellow.

The man at Western Auto had warned me about this stretch near Jackson and another that ran through Tupelo.

“It is not what this road was meant for,” he said.

With each vehicle that approached from behind, I would look back over my shoulder until I saw them drift to the center and only then would I yield the two feet I kept between me and the white line. This last minute shift to the curb spared me the worst of a passing camper’s strategic release of its gray water. They only managed to douse my shoes.

I called Rube when I got cell phone reception near the city. My legs were rubber and I did not trust myself to navigate any more city traffic, especially when that city is the capital of a state where motorists are awarded as many points in the road kill game for smashing a bicycle as for running down communist hitchhikers. I was relieved when he offered me a ride. I walked my bike down the embankment at mile marker 101 to Millennium Mall we where we agreed to meet.

I gulped down a two-liter water bottle on a bench outside a boutique and watched the women of Jackson circle the discount racks. I saw a couple of the bikers from Oak Square on their way to the mall. I was annoyed by how spry they looked. This sentiment must have been plastered on my face because one the guys made the others pick up my bike so they could all comment on how heavy it was compared to their carbon fiber jobs. They wished me luck and said we’d be running into other the rest of the way, but I knew better. That was the last time I would catch up with any racing shirts on my ride north.

Natchez Trace V: Oak Square Bed and Breakfast

2009-10-19T16:32:00.000-07:00

There were several bikes parked in front Oak Square Bed and Breakfast. I hoped they were just overflow from the group at the Bernheimer House. This was my last bet for a room in town. The wind was clawing through Magnolia branches as the clouds to the west darkened.

The Oak Square mansion was more traditional than Bernheimer’s eclectic mishmash. The columned antebellum stood at the center of a complex that spread across most of the block between Oak and China off Church Street. I rang the main bell a few times, and after a few minutes I heard laughter coming from the back patio. It was easy to pick out the proprietor. Her laugh was the female equivalent of the rebel yell, a rapid fire staccato that struck each note like an opera singer practicing scales. Her tittering would have sent a chill down my spine if I could have felt it after 6 hours on a saddle.

The cackling belle was Deborah. The raven-haired hostess had eyes as sharp as her laughter; try as she might to soften them with a falsetto smile.

Deborah managed Oak Square and lived with her daughter in the old bachelor’s quarters that made a wing off the backside of the main house. Deborah’s mother was the sole resident of the original structure.

Deborah wanted California prices for what she claimed was her one remaining room. I didn’t have much choice as the rain had started coming down. Still, when she motioned as if to hand me the key, I looked off to the side. I could save 120 bucks at the motel a few miles north on old 61. As tired as I was, I was feeling cheap and angry at myself for not having reserved a room at the Bernheimer House, a place with the history and family connection that would have been well worth the splurge and still cheaper than Oak Square. At this point my body would be numb to a downpour.

Then she hesitated, sensing I was about to walk. Women with a laugh like hers know how to read men less transparent than me. Her eyes flashed.

“You said you’re a writer. How about you write something about your stay with us and I won’t charge you for the room.”

At her prices a comped room was more than I could hope to get out of a travel article in this economy and m lowly perch in the pecking order. Somewhere beneath the exercise endorphins still flooding my brainpan flashed the thought that I shouldn’t accept. The backpacker crowd doesn’t spend 165 dollars a night on their honeymoons, and any bicyclist worth his racing jersey wouldn’t stomach advice from an obvious neophyte. I intended to write about my Scarlet O’Hara meets Elvira hostess, but I doubted my flattery would be just compensation for a warm bed and a hot breakfast.

My hesitation melted with the first thunderclap. Less than a minute after Deborah handed me the key, the skies opened. I scrambled to get my bike in the shed outfitted to accommodate a racing team.

I spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for the worst of the front to pass while soaking my spent body in a scalding bath. I walked to the grocery in a driving rain counting the lengthening gaps between lightening and thunderclaps. It felt good to walk on my heavy legs. I settled on a dinner of pimento cheese and Bunny Bread with a box of gingersnaps for dessert and a six-pack of Schlitz to wash down the Advil before a second soak in the tub. I had just burned more calories than in any other eight-hour period of my life, so the cold dinner was delicious, especially the beer. Before that dusty shelf in the back of the Piggly Wiggly, the only time I had seen Schlitz was in movies from the 70’s.

There was a footstool beside the antique four-post bed for short guests and bow legged bikers. I waddled up and over the edge of the mattress at eight thirty and enjoyed a lullaby of far off thunder and the cool air drifting through the plantation shutters. I fought the sweet anesthesia of magnolia blooms long enough to lock in the memory of perfect sleeping weather.

The cycling group was already at work on a breakfast of scrambled eggs, biscuits and grits when I walked into Dixie House, the smaller of the two guest buildings that also housed the breakfast room. With a plastered smile Deborah explained, probably for the thousandth time, the mystery of the grit to a visiting Californian. She graciously segued from grits to plantation breakfasts that the guests were served at 2 am. Sweltering afternoons were for sleeping, not exercise, and the parties did not commence until sundown.

Her practiced nostalgia of the halcyon days before busing, or the 14th Amendment, gave me thoughts of slipping out unnoticed. Instead I chose more coffee to wash down my eggs and Advil, a little more caffeine would help me palate Deborah’s brand of antiquarianism. We shared a common interest in time and place but came at our regionalism from different angles. Deborah had copious knowledge of 19th century family histories and the furnishings and fabrics they imported from the Continent. I had spent my college days studying the minutiae of the Louisiana slave revolts imported from West Africa by way of Saint Domingue.

In Deborah’s South young debs batted eyelashes at dandies who came from across the region to attend the lavish parties at Oak Square. Matrons planned festivities to the last detail and ruled the social scene with iron in their white glove--some things don't change. I couldn’t fault her if her tales weren’t stained with mention of the slaves who refilled the iced tea glasses, or of their even less fortunate family members toiling the fields. That’s the stuff for Marxists, economic historians, African-American genealogists, and me, the jerk thinking politics at the breakfast table.

Besides, the cotton fields would not have been visible from the porch. Oak Square was a town house. The family wintered in Port Gibson so the parents could socialize and the kids could go to school. They lived in the country during summers and harvests.

The big city cyclists lapped up the Margaret Mitchell routine, and why not, how many times will a Los Angelino spend the night on a plantation? The hard-core among the riders had had their fill and were furtively glancing at maps unfolded beneath the table.

Deborah’s phone rang. It was her mother with instructions from the big house.

“Yes mother…yes mother.”

Each yes mother was a little more strained than the last.

“Make no mistake who is boss around here,” Deborah said as she hung up the phone.

After the other bikers enjoyed their strawberry shortcake dessert-for-breakfast, Deborah gave me a quick tour around the property.

Deborah and her daughter Martha lived in the old bachelors quarters, an-add on structure built to maintain the illusion of chastity for the young ladies asleep in the main house. Martha was home on break from design school and eager to show me that the chastity was indeed an illusion. She pulled back a tapestry on the wall revealing a trap door that opened onto a secret passage to the main house. The wily dandies would crawl through the tunnel during the sweltering afternoons or after the shortcake served with 2am breakfast.

I asked about the antique billboard that hung above the stairs announcing the F.S Wolcott Rabbit Foot Minstrels.

“They did blackface shows here in Port Gibson,” she said. “They had the High Brown Follies, the famous mulatto dancers.”

Deborah summed up the show in a couple lines before pointing out the impressive cupola that rose over the staircase. I made a note to find the story of the minstrels.

Turns out that Fred Wolcott was a white carnival owner who had purchased the Rabbit Foot Minstrels from the estate of Patrick Chappelle, a black promoter who had created the show in Jacksonville at the turn of the century. Chappelle’s outfit began at a time when the popularity of the minstrel shows were in severe decline as they long been losing customers to musical comedies vaudeville. Chappelle had an eye for talent, and with the gorgeous follies and the voices of William and Gertrude Rainey, among the earliest singers of the Blues, he drew crowds to a dying stage formula. His refigured model would extend the life of minstrel shows for another 50 years.

Minstrelsy had been one of the most successful entertainments of the 19th century. At first the performers had been white men performing in black face, lampooning Africans as lazy, superstitious and ignorant souls happy to dance and sing about the simple life back on the plantation. After the Civil War the performers were predominantly black, though they still wore blackface, and the variety show followed closely to the traditional three act models.

Chappelle’s touring company had started out performing in opera houses in the South and up the eastern seaboard. Racial discrimination increasingly made the economics of minstrelsy a bigger obstacle than competition from vaudeville. In 1906 the Supreme Court justified the codification of racial segregation—separate but equal—in Plessy v Ferguson. Chappelle had chosen a rough decade to start his enterprise. He needed to fill the Opera houses with mixed audiences to turn a profit, though many of these halls had been built without the thought of segregated seating. The Rabbit Foot Minstrels soon abandoned opera houses for tent shows, and Chappelle was compelled to buy custom made Pullman train cars to carry his performers since third class colored-only compartments would have been intolerable for a traveling show. Then Chappelle had to fight the southern railroad companies in court to secure passage for his cars on their lines. His Pullmans were rumored to have secret compartments in the event of trouble in an era where a misplaced look could foment a lynch mob.

The Rabbit’s Foot troupe became the most popular touring group in the south. Upon arrival in a new town, the follies would march ahead of the large brass ensemble, an improvised parade to advertise the coming performances. Under the tent, cries for encores would follow every song, and the crowds roared approval of the dancing, tight rope acts, and comedy skits that punctuated the show.

I wondered if the later incarnation of Rabbit's Foot had ever performed at the Westside Theater. I wanted to ask Deborah so many questions about the brief sketch of her family history she had given at breakfast. She had lived through much of the recent history of this state that I had only known from books I read in college. When she was a child Mississippians chose to mourn the July 4th defeat at Vicksburg rather than celebrate Independence Day. She had been in the last all white class to graduate her high school, a fact that still curled her lips. Maybe I could have pried some stories of these years while making eyes with Martha, who must be bored out of skull in a town where one needs a klan card to make dinner reservations.

But I had 61 miles between Oak Square and my friends in Jackson and I was already a half hour behind the $5,00 bikes and fancy racing shirts. I thanked Deborah for the undeserved hospitality and got back on the road.

Natchez Trace IV: Port Gibson

2009-10-15T17:02:00.000-07:00

Back uphill and onto the Trace, I was hitting a stride when a train of bikers quickly closed on me.

“Where are you headed?”

“Nashville”

“So are we!”

“And he’s carrying his own gear”

It was a short conversation as they flew by me. But compared to their $5,000 space-age carbon fiber frames, unencumbered by luggage or extra water, I was pumping a battleship. Five minutes later their van passed me hauling their luggage up from Natchez and lunch that would be waiting at the next rest stop. Seems like cheating somehow.

My legs felt strong until mile marker 35, a little more than 40 miles into my day. It was still early afternoon, and the only sign of the front was the steady breeze at my back. By Fred’s calculations the storm was about to cross the Mississippi.

Port Gibson was the first town of any size after Natchez along the Trace. There was a time when the third oldest town in the state was a functioning port. In the early 20th century the Army Corps of Engineers built up the levees and sealed off Bayou Pierre from the Mississippi. A victim of flood control, Port Gibson was left to wallow in its history at the crossroads of old Highway 61 and an even older Trace.

From the southern approach along the Blues Highway, it was not evident why Grant declared Port Gibson too beautiful to burn. Then I noticed the strange site that had been welcoming travelers long before Grant and his men descended on the town. A golden fist squatted atop the town’s highest church steeple with an index finger pointed skywards. This celestial warning would have been a fitting welcome for the generations of gamblers and whoremongers on the southwest frontier. Maybe it gave pause to the old Butcher himself.

The old town was only a few square blocks long, and most of the remaining antebellum homes off Church Street had been converted into bed and breakfasts. The aging daughter of the Confederacy who greeted me at the welcome center just outside of town could not remember for sure which of these houses still took guests. She said it as if she couldn’t remember which innkeepers were still living.

She gave me a couple leads. I had arrived ahead of the storm and was hoping I might yet save a few bucks over the two pricey joints with listings on the internet. Both her suggestions took me on gravel roads that wound up hills on the east side of town. I should have listened to my thighs barking to me that nothing was worth another climb today. My thighs were right. Neither turned out to be inns, nor did they look recently inhabited. I didn’t even bother knocking. These were the kind of creepy old homes that made horror film producers on tight budgets salivate. On the way back through town I checked out Port Gibson’s restaurant. A 45 year-old blonde who looked like she had fallen asleep in her tanning bed came out onto the porch as I crunched across the gravel drive.

“We’re closed,” she said.

“Ok, are you open tonight?”

“No, we’re closed.”

The woman at the visitor center had told me this restaurant was only open on Saturdays. It was Saturday.

“What is open tonight?”

“Nothing in Port Gibson,” she said. “Closest place you’ll find is up towards Vicksburg.”

I looked down at my handlebars and then back up to the porch. Vicksburg was almost 30 miles away, out of reach for a guy with a suitcase on his back tire. I waited for a second, as if she might change her mind, tell me it was ok as long I didn’t bring my Yankee friends. Nothing. She walked back into the restaurant with her UV scorched smirk.

A couple of guys were setting up a smoker outside the Westside Theater, an old Vaudeville place that looked like it would have been shuttered long ago. The guy with a single gold chain and cross and with a gut that suggested expertise in the BBQ arts noticed my interest and invited me to come in and take a look.

I took out my moleskin to make a note of the theater.

“That’s theater with an –ER,” Big D said.

With the help of some other local musicians, Big D had turned Westside into a community center and entertainment venue. He showed me some flyers for upcoming shows announcing rappers from as far off as Memphis. The lobby was decorated in gangster kitsch, with low hanging chandeliers and velvet paintings of characters from Scarface and the Godfather. A plaque with a .38 handgun mounted below a headshot of Tony Montana shared a wall with a life-size poster of the “Dogg Father” Snoop. Hanging in between the chandeliers was an airbrushed portrait of the patron sporting a Big D hat, black shades, and his signature chain.

Party tables were set up on the dance floor of the main hall. Big D explained that they were hosting a wedding party later that night. While they set up he had the NBA playoffs projected onto the big screen.

Big D wanted to show me the VIP lounge. We climbed the stairs and entered a room of faux wood paneling and thick shag carpet. The lounge was empty except for a red velvet love seat and a plush recliner. A balcony looked out onto the basketball game and the dance floor. Big D posed in his recliner, the coolest spot in “PG”. He invited me to come back for the BBQ that would be ready in a couple of hours. I thanked him and said I might.

The past half-hour summed up my two years in the Delta—awkward exchanges with scowling, suspicious white people who hid behind closed signs and locker doors, and chance encounters with black people who invited me for food I was ashamed I couldn’t eat.

I peddled over to the Bernheimer House, named after my stepfather’s ancestors who had built the place back in a time when southern towns of any size had a synagogue. Grant made his temporary headquarters at the house in the spring of 1863. They did not have a room for me. The bike tour that blew past me in the afternoon had made its temporary headquarters here this evening, so after a quick peek into the parlor and the exterior’s whimsical mishmash of old English and colonial styles, I pushed on to the last inn on my list. As I turned towards Church Street I caught another glimpse of fist whose warning now was more earthly than celestial. The finger was pointing to the retreating gaps of blue sky in the east.

Natchez Trace III: Emerald Mounds

2009-10-15T01:18:00.000-07:00

Stumble over serpentine roots and bat away the stinging vines inked in 4 a.m. darkness, claw your way up the slippery stones of an ancient temple straight up through jungle canopy. The momentary exultation of reaching the summit will be fleeting. Soon you discern the outline of the twenty Israeli teenagers who got there ahead of you. Just try to keep their hyena laughter from spoiling what you imagined for months would be the most sacred moment of your trip into the jungles of the Mayan homeland.

If you want to be only guy basking in the mystery of some ancient monument, you’ve got your work cut out for on this planet. There are no sacred moments to be shared amidst the swarms of tourists on day trips to Angkor Wat or the Pyramids at Giza.

Want to find some "undiscovered" destination? Well, adventure travel is for braggarts and morons. Before the ink dries on the next peace accord in a hellhole African province you’ve never heard of, some lunatic Aussie or Frenchmen will have opened a guesthouse near whatever passes for an attraction. If the soon to follow gap-year adventurers don’t get violated by the lingering rebel soldiers whose standard kit includes pouches of palm oil for the occasional anal rape, Lonely Planet will dispatch a writer for a chapter in their next guidebook to the Eastern Congo.

Which is to all to say that I did not take for granted my moment of solitude atop an earthen pyramid in Southern Mississippi. I hadn’t expected to find Israeli teenagers on the top of the Emerald Mounds, but I imagined someone would have been here taking pictures. I couldn’t see anyone for miles in any direction. I wanted to sit here as long as it took for another visitor to break my little meditation on the first wonder I had encountered free of flash bulbs and gift shops. I had to stay ahead of the rain. As I took a rest, I left my mind to wander.

Through a combination of instruction, story time and field trips to Fort Nashborough, my elementary school classmates and I were encouraged to develop a certain mental picture of the lands between the Appalachians and the Mississippi in tune with the legends of the old frontier. The shores of the Mississippi, the Tennessee and the Cumberland gave way to empty forests settled by sparse bands of Indians. By middle school we learned to call Native Americans.

For millennia these tribes had been uninterrupted stewards of the forests primeval, right up to the time Daniel Boone crossed the Cumberland Gap in his deerskin getup. These noble hunter-gatherers, as we learned to describe them, could not fathom land ownership. They had no need considering the bounty at their fingertips. By the time they wised up to the avaricious ways of the Europeans, naïve chiefs had exchanged vast stretches for worthless beads and even more worthless contracts for lands not yet taken by the new settlers. The disparate tribes were susceptible to the Europeans strategy of divide and conquer. The ceaseless flow of white men with their rifles pushed the indigenous people--as we learned to call them in high school--farther west to the barren reservations waiting at the end of the frontier and at the end of that really long movie directed by Kevin Costner we had to watch in history class.

That schoolhouse rubric doesn’t explain the 35-foot high mound I was sitting on. Tribal bands, whether hunter-gatherers or farmers, could not have devoted the manpower and resources required to refashion thousands of tons of earth into this New World pyramid. Of course no one is claiming the Daniel Boone types built them. It would have taken a civilization with a degree of economic complexity not found in our history books to leave a mark this permanent upon the earth. At least that’s how these same books explain the pyramid builders in every other corner of the world. Civilizations based upon thousands of farmers and artisans directed by consecutively smaller castes of soldiers, priests, and chieftains. The kings who comprised the capstones of these pyramid shaped societies built pyramids to remember themselves by.

The plateau below me was still an active religious complex as late as the 1600’s. Abandoned mounds even larger than the one here were found up and down the Mississippi when LaSalle and his men charted the river in 1682. Other mound networks have since been discovered throughout the Midwest. They are the last remaining monuments to an ancient civilization decimated long before the Natchez battled the encroaching French. A collection of trails, of which the paths that preceded the Trace were a part, linked the mound civilizations of the lower Mississippi to the Cumberland valley and further to the other mound civilizations of the Cahokia, the Adena, and the Hopewell. The economies that supported these monuments were based on the intensive cultivation of corn, beans and squash, and extensive trading networks that sustained a population as much as fifty to one hundred times as large as the native population at the time of first European settlement in this region.

What happened to the mound builders?

The mound I was sitting on would have looked about the same to the English, French, and Scotch-Irish settlers who arrived in the 1700’s to fight and to trade with and sometimes to marry into the scattered tribes of the Natchez, Choctaw, Cherokee and Chickasaw. Yet the first Europeans to reach the Mississippi, the gold obsessed Spaniards under Hernando De Soto, saw something much different. The centuries that followed DeSoto and La Salle brought a host of competing theories for the mystery of the lost mound builders. One of these served as the mental springboard to a major new religion.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, the historians of the day recognized the unlikelihood that the mounds were built by the natives as they existed at the time. Some speculated they were evidence of the lost tribes of Israel in the New World. Joseph Smith claimed to find his golden plates in a mound just south of his family farm in Palmyra, New York. The Book of Mormon didn’t just come out of a mound, it was an expansive narrative that explained the history of these ancient monuments in a manner which corroborated the scholarship in Smith’s day.

The non-Mormon world now recognizes these mounds were not the last defensive positions of fratricidal Israelis. The going theory is centered around the Columbian exchange, in which Europeans got corn, squash, tomatoes, cacao, tobacco and maybe syphilis, and the Americas got small pox, yellow fever, malaria, measles, the plague, typhoid, cholera, influenza, horses, and maybe syphilis. Everyone blames the other side for syphilis.

Historians now posit that Cortez and Pizarro conquered with germs that in some cases preceded them. From there the consensus fractures. One of the most intensive disputes among professional historians is just how many Native Americans were wiped out by first contact with these diseases to which their bodies had zero immunity. Those that use models with mortality rates of 95% are suggesting there were more people in the Americas than in Europe circa 1500. This would require radical revisions to the school books over the dead bodies of many a historian who believe the numbers are now being inflated.

Maybe we can call the chapter the First Pig Flu. We know that when Hernando De Soto landed near Tampa Bay to explore what is now the Southeastern United States, he brought 300 pigs as livestock. These pigs had no natural enemies in the New World, and they were free to spread even faster than the De Soto’s men could explore. The pigs carried all the Old World germs familiar to their Spanish owners but alien to the Americans. The Columbian Exchange had a porcine vanguard in North America.

Within months of landfall, the pigs made contact with the natives, and by the time De Soto’s men chanced upon the civilizations of the Lower Mississippi, some accounts at the close of the expedition suggest the possibility that diseases including tuberculosis, whooping cough, trichinosis, anthrax, measles and small pox were beginning to ravage towns along their path. It would not have been a subtle event. Imagine a half dozen Black Deaths leashed upon a population at once. Entire cities would have been destroyed, collective graves, if there was time for them, haphazardly dug to inter the victims of what must have seemed like the end of the world.

The same riverbanks De Soto’s men described as, “thickly set with great towns,” bristling with fortifications were empty stretches 140 years later. La Salle’s French expedition encountered large swaths of emptiness. Where the large population centers once stood, herds of buffalo ran wild over the landscape. Imagine if Joseph had known of the Columbian Exchange and had weaved his narrative out of the tragedy. It probably would have resonated in the burnt over district—only a wrathful Old Testament God could have wreaked such devastation.

My daydream went uninterrupted for nearly a half hour, with this moment all to myself. I got up and shook out out my thighs. Thirty more miles to Port Gibson.

Natchez Trace II

2009-10-08T18:32:00.000-07:00

At two minutes past eight I was the first customer in the Western Auto. A bike shop had a corner in the auto parts store.

The bike guy was out riding, another man informed me. As he sized up my bike I could tell he knew more about it than I did. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind taking a look at the tire. I was afraid it was rubbing against the brakes, but turned out it just needed some grease.

I asked him what I could expect for terrain the first few days. He told me the big hills were past Tupelo but I could expect rolling terrain all the way home.

“I hope you Nashville folks realize you live at the end of the Trace, Natchez is the beginning of the road.”

I don’t know who could argue otherwise. Natchez has always been the start of the road that bears its name. Mile marker 0 was just a few pedal strokes from Western Auto, not far from where Cumberland Valley folk and the Kaintucks gathered for their walk back north after floating their goods down river for sale here or in the larger port of New Orleans.

Their trails followed high ground, along ridge tops where possible, thereby avoiding the worst of the mire and malaria in swamplands below. The natives before them didn’t have to worry about malaria, though their footpaths provided superior defensive positions, and they did avoid the mud. Even before humans traveled the ridges, the migratory animals that first marked the land also choose high ground as they munched their way up and back from the salt licks on the Cumberland.

Some men started back for home on horseback with pockets full of the Spanish gold, the prevailing currency on the Southwest frontier. These men had to be wary of the murderers, pickpockets, and various con artists, many who dressed as preachers and carried a Bible to conceal their daggers. At either end of the trail, merchants who doubled as fencers tipped off bandits to the more lavishly equipped traveling parties. Sometimes they would buy back their own merchandize at pennies on the dollar and resell the goods to the next gentleman brave or foolish enough to travel along the Devil's Backbone.

Most men didn’t have money for a horse and faced a month and half walk back to the rich hunting grounds and fertile valley that would in time become the city of Nashville. The gamblers and roughnecks, many life-long flatboatmen, lived to spend their bottom dollar on the seedy wharves at Natchez-under-the-Hill. These men took to river life for the fire of Monongahela Whiskey in their bellies and a few fleeting hours inside the floating brothels and behind velvet curtains with an octoroon whore. Time offshore was for drinking, fighting and fornicating. The inevitable hangover announced the grueling slog upriver for their next river assignment. Pity the unfortunate families that depended on these men as husbands and fathers. They did not return to put bread on the table. Their only gifts manifested long after homecoming, these the days before penicillin.

I turned onto the Trace a little past 8:30, and peddled northeast. The undulating hills were subtle enough to be unnoticeable in car. I was not in a car. I labored over the slightest inclines and tucked my head into the handlebars on every descent. I didn’t choose this bike for efficiency. I wanted a comfortable seat and my head positioned high to enjoy the scenery.

Mid-April, Southern Mississippi was already deep into spring. Trees and undergrowth blushed deep green, with foliage already as thick as it would be mid-summer in Connecticut. I convinced myself that I had made the right choice in bikes. My upright position was comfortable as the high handlebars allowed me to keep a straight back and afforded a nice view of this lush bottomland forest.

A strong southeast wind was blowing ahead of the storm front. The gusts made a sail of my whole body, a great aid to each peddle-stroke. I was lucky to have the wind as an ally—up to half the energy spent on a bike is spent fighting wind resistance. I couldn’t imagine biking 40 miles into a strong head wind on my first day.

I grabbed a map at first exhibit shelter at mile marker eight. The strip map was folded into panels that stretched out all the way to Nashville. I was traveling one panel today, and was already a quarter of the way. The map noted the mile markers of every historical site and rest stop, I would belatedly learn to make special note of the stops with water. I was still dedicated on this first day to seeing every last historical site on the route.

The first site was a ways off the Trace, but I decided with all the free wind power I could make another half mile and turned left at a crossroad that led me downhill in the direction of the river. It was not yet ten, and sun was breaking through the clouds and the canopy with its rich tapestry of ash, maple, cypress, catalpa, poplar, water locust, bay and magnolia as well as a few solitary pines atop the sandy ridges. The side road bottomed out into a bend with a few trailers to one side and on the other a long bank of earth that made a steep eight-foot rise to a grassy meadow. Two squat hills rose at either end of this plateau. My quads already tight, I waddled up the stairs to the top of the nearer of the two peaks, 40 feet above the trailers across the way.

Natchez Trace I

2009-10-01T23:48:00.000-07:00

Dexter banged on my door and flipped on the lights at 5 am. “We’ll be at Natchez in one hour.”

Cold steady rain was still falling on the deck when I went down to the galley for breakfast. Tiny, the enormous engineer was at the table, his plate stacked high with hash browns, scrambled eggs and flapjacks fenced in by strips of bacon. Terry had made a feast for my last breakfast on the Marty Baskerville. Tiny assured me the crew ate that well every morning.

I learned the ship would pick up a new deckhand at Natchez. I kidded that it would be fun for them having a greenhorn around to mess with. Tiny just shook his head.

“We cant call them greenhorns no more, not politically correct,” He said. “We have to call them trainees now.” As if to support his point, he mentioned by name the term they can no longer use for the black wrenches found on a tow’s bow.

I went up to the pilothouse to say thank you and goodbye to Fred, who showed me on the radar the few patches of rain lurking on the river. I was nervous as I hauled the heavy bike and bulging pannier bag down to the main deck. The bike alone was more than twice the weight of a touring bike.

I was not dressed like a biker. I had jeans on over my bike shorts and decided my El Salvador jersey would make a much cheaper alternative to one of those fancy bike shirts I always thought looked ridiculous on weekend warriors. The polyester would be quick enough to dry and could hold in warmth even if soaked with rain, and as I’d learn later, was bright enough to be seen by cars blazing around the looping curves on the Trace.

Everything else for the next ten days I had stuffed into either side of the pannier: two changes of clothes, a jar of peanut butter, a small Moleskine notebook and pen, two spare tubes, a bike pump, camera, and a paperback copy of the Devil’s Backbone, said to be the best book ever written about the 444 miles between Natchez and Nashville.

The rain was only spitting at 5:45 as the harbor tug pulled up beside the Baskerville. Dexter handed my bike across to the tug’s deckhand, and I traded places with the trainee about to start his first day on the river. He was a big kid, even younger than Dexter, his round face slightly furrowed betraying his nervousness. I wished them both good luck.

Michael, the captain of the harbor pilot stuck his head out from the window of the small wheelhouse one deck above the bow. I imagined he looked something like Blackbeard.

“In 21 years I have never seen anyone get off a boat on a bike before!” the captain yelled down to me.

I explained that I had been a guest on the Baskerville. This confused him for a second, he had assumed I was an employee, maybe a spooked greenhorn getting the hell off the river.

He asked where I was coming from, and I told him Colombia, the country, by way of New Orleans. No, I hadn’t biked from Colombia, but I was peddling my way to Tennessee. With these bits of information he took another look at me.

“Well,” he said, “I bet you’ve lived an interesting life.”

It was still dark when Michael wished me luck as I hopped ashore on the Louisiana side of the river. The start of the Trace was six miles away, across the river on the other side of Natchez, so I imagined mile marker minus six planted in the gravel drive. I was now exactly 450 miles to home.

I was happy to add another state to my bike trip, though starting from Vidalia would add about six miles to the 40 mile trip to Port Gibson from the start of the Trace on the east side of town. Forty six miles was three times as long as any bike ride I had taken in my life, I figured I rode 16 miles on my test run along the levee in New Orleans last Wednesday. And tomorrow I had a 61-mile ride to Jackson. I didn’t know if I was in shape for 100 miles in two days, but I didn’t have a choice. There was nothing in between Natchez and Port Gibson and nothing again to Jackson.

At least I’d be doing most of my first day dry. Fred had told me I could expect a ten hours reprieve until the next front passed through. I made my way to the bridge per Michael’s directions and climbed the first in a succession of rolling hills between the Mississippi and Nashville, this one the man-made incline that put me high above the river. I caught a glimpse of the retreating Baskerville before it disappeared around the next bend. Day was breaking and the bluffs of Natchez were kicking off a patchy blanket of fog down towards the river. I stopped near the top of the artificial hill at the sign welcoming me to Mississippi where the passing tractor-trailers shook the concrete as I took some pictures to celebrate my second state in as many miles. Three hundred fifteen miles before Alabama would welcome me, hopefully in little under a week.

The shuttered storefronts in the old town are museum pieces for a city that once boasted more millionaires per capita than any other town in the United States, men who made their money from cotton and the slaves who grew the cotton. Old Town Natchez is among the best-preserved historic sites in Mississippi, though the history preserved represents a narrow slice of the whole. A park with a partially restored mound is all that remains of the Native imprint on this desirable location above the river’s flood plain, there is even less a trace of succeeding French and Spanish rule. The history that remains is from 19^th century, fortunately the town only saw minor shelling by Union gunboats during the war. In this state it is not necessary to clarify which war, as my view to the top of the courthouse reminded me. The Confederate battle flag, framed with a red, white, and blue stripe, still flies over Mississippi.

I might as well strike up friendly small talk about late term abortions before criticizing the state flag. It is a strident symbol, and I know I am not the only Southerner who has a hard time watching the southern cross fly in an official capacity. Yeah, symbols are what we believe them to be, and I knew people who brought their flags with them to put up in their college dorm rooms North of the Mason-Dixon line. They'd tell you they put it up on their walls because it symbolized their Southern heritage. I might have told you that when my classmates and I bought rebel flags on our elementary school's eighth grade trip to Charleston and Savannah. It took six months before I really looked at thing and saw how ridiculous it was for a kid from the suburbs to have a rebel flag flying in his bedroom. In a penance that was more reaction than realization, I ripped it off my wall and burned it in the back yard.

I know now that the flag was a symbol of resistance to the power of the federal government, a government that within my father’s lifetime had to insist, over the authority of state of Mississippi, that black men and women had the same right to vote as white men and women, that they could use the same stores, eat at the same lunch counters, and ride the same buses, that their children could go to the same schools. Of course these battles were fought all over the South, but arguably nowhere was more recalcitrant than Mississippi--even South Carolina stopped flying the flag over their statehouse almost ten years ago.

Mississippi eventually succumbed to the feds. Now everyone shops at Wal-Mart. And if schools are still segregated it is because of white flight and the desire to abandon cross-town busing for neighborhood schools, not racist legislation. Mississippi still lurks at the bottom of state education tables, but their schools are uniformly second-rate. The disparities among public schools in Jackson and its suburbs do not compete with the disparities that exist between the north and south side of Chicago. Inequity in education is an American institution.

A shiver ran down my spine. I imagined myself alone on a backwoods section of the Trace with I hate the rebel flag emblazoned on my El Salvador jersey. A truck load of rednecks tailgates my back tire. One of them shouts I'm the special ed teacher who couldn't get his brother into the reserves. Paranoid, maybe so, but I could replay the dozens of looks of dirty looks I got from the locals in Helena and Marianna their eyes wary of us carpet-bagging, liberal race traitors.

I did not have time to linger and watch Main Street churn to life on this Saturday morning and remind me this town was full of good people and bad people and smart people and morons like any other town in America, a town more beautiful than most. I still had no idea how long it took to peddle 45 miles, and according to Fred’s calculations I was only nine hours ahead of a heavy storm.

My front tire was squeaking as I peddled between the columned buildings and brick facades on Franklin St. I had no idea how serious a squeak was, but it started on mile two of a 450-mile ride, and it was already annoying. I bought a bike new for this trip so there would be nothing to fix. I come from a long line of mechanically incompetent men and the last thing I needed was to be 20 miles from the nearest town with a broken bike and rednecks howling in the distance.

I laid my bike on the sidewalk and made a pathetic attempt to identify the source of the squeak. Beyond it coming from the front tire, I had no idea. There was another hour before the bike shop at the beginning of the Trace would be open, but it was worth the peace of mind and the extra supplies I might find before I raced the storm front to Port Gibson. I pulled up to an old gas station at the corner of Franklin and Martin Luther King and locked my bike next to a pump the whose rusted meter was stuck at $8.57, the price of a tank of gas in the 70’s. Inside, the station had been converted into a simple diner. The stenciling in the window read Marsaw’s Cafe.

I took a seat at the counter in front of a woman in her late-thirties to early forties, she had the same weary-knowing look of grandmothers her age I had taught alongside at Lee High School. She spoke a clear standard English distinct from her customers’ deep Delta drawls. I guessed she was a teacher, and if not a grandmother, that she was responsible for some nieces and nephews in addition to any children she might have. It was that look, that it really does take a village to raise a child in this world.

She took my breakfast order, the option on the board is whether I wanted the breakfast with or without OJ. The postings to either side of breakfast and lunch warned clients that no one not on shift was allowed behind the counter. To my left an old man named Chicken manned the heavy iron skillets pooled with some combination of oil, butter and pork fat. I tried not to think about the latter as my grits and eggs struggled to stay afloat in the bubbling grease. I declined the patty or link option, which made Chicken pause, his spatula frozen over the skillets, before he reached for an extra biscuit.

A young man slinked in and slumped down on a stool a few seats away from me. He said he did not have the whole 5 dollars for the breakfast.

“Ok if I bring the 50 cents to you later?” he asked.

“That’s fine. Orange Juice is a dollar fifty extra, you still want it?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Chicken walked over and put down 2 dollars on the boy’s side of the counter.

“Can’t work if you’re hungry,” Chicken said. “I should know.”

Other customers, mostly older, all of them black, slowly filled up the counter except for the two seats on either side of the obvious stranger. I could have stayed all morning listening the rapid-fire jokes and easy rhythms of conversation in Marsaw’s. The bike shop was nearly open by the time I finished my last biscuit. I left a dollar in the BAMA Jelly tip jar and shoved off from the counter.

New Orleans to Natchez VII: The Wheelhouse

2009-09-02T18:02:00.000-07:00

PON PON PON PON PON PON PONNN!!!

Something bad has just happened when the Coast Guard emergency signal blasts through the wheelhouse. Perhaps a ship ran aground over a newly formed sandbar or other unmarked obstacle, or maybe someone jumped off the Helena Bridge.

Just my luck that alarms would start ringing the minute I was alone in the wheelhouse. The Captain had snuck downstairs to take a piss. I didn’t know what was happening by the noise, it wasn’t a PONing, and it didn’t sound like any of the alarms I had been warned about on the handouts I was given upon boarding, though I couldn’t really be sure. I hadn’t actually read those things come to think of it, I gave then a quick scan thinking, gee, I hope this one doesn’t sound, the seven short and one long blast for abandon ship. Now a whistle was blowing whose maddening teakettle pitch mocked my lack of diligence.

I got up from my seat to have a look at the control panel that spread out before the captain’s chair, as if I’d be able to figure anything out by looking at the controls. Then the bells stopped. Just me alone in a quiet wheelhouse atop a boat whose converted train engines pushed 24 covered barges that spanned over two and half acres and floating four to a side in six rows ahead of us, some 40,000 tons of chemicals, sand, steel, and individual shipping containers stacked up to 90 per barge. There was a great deal that could go wrong with all that cargo in front of us. I was glad the alarm had gone silent.

I soon heard Fred’s footsteps back up to the wheelhouse. It was a good thing I had gotten up to check out the alarm, he told me. The wheelhouse has sensors in the area around the Captain’s chair, if no motion is detected over a period time, the alarm sounds. If it had been allowed to ring for more than a couple of seconds it would have started calling for a dispatcher, but I had caught it in time.

The wheelhouse has a toilet for these situations, but as I find out later, I had been sitting on it, or at least on the wood paneling that covered it. Back in the day there was nowhere to go in the wheelhouse, and on an eight-hour shift this was a problem. Standard practice was to take a bag and a few bottles upstairs, and, if used, to toss the bag overboard. The EPA mandated that the Coast Guard start cracking down on this practice. They used a scope to catch one of Fred’s friends in the act of tossing his bag into the river, and pulled aside to question him. He confessed and got a $500 fine. If he had lied about it, they would have fined him $5,000. In a river that has absorbs thousands of gallons of oil, pesticides, fertilizers, benzene, mercury, lead, industrial pollutants in all their guises and hundreds of thousands of tons of raw sewage from cities up and down its banks, a few little bags seem like small fry. But the river is cleaner thanks to the tougher standards, and fines for more egregious illegal dumpings have run into the millions and included jail time. There is a long way to go, the Mississippi’s plume of muddy water still creates a seasonal dead zone that suffocates over 8,000 square miles of the northern Gulf of Mexico.

Dusk set in quick as the skies filled with dark and ominous clouds. A steady driving rain began to fall, and the radar picked up a solid band of storms that were expected to last all night. Two cold fronts were rumbling west to east about 24 hours apart. There was a chance there would be a reprieve in the early morning, about the time we were set to arrive in Natchez. The second front was the stronger of the two and due to arrive tomorrow afternoon. I would have to peddle hard to make it from Natchez to Port Gibson before getting drenched.

The navigation instruments become more important at night. A display showed the channel of the river and the locations of the approaching tows. Though floodlights illuminated the rows of barges before us and a powerful spotlight sliced ahead into the darkness and driving rain, I could not make out the green and red lights that marked the starboard and port of oncoming vessels until they were passing our tow. Fred could see them much farther out, of course, though even he told me exactly where to look, it took me a minute until I could see the colored lights through the wet ink of the night.

I asked Fred if he had ever run aground. Everyone who had spent time on this river has run aground, hit a bridge, or lost their tow at some point. The river is just too unpredictable, constantly changing under the water’s surface that rises and falls and quickens and slows with the seasons. No one can steer her perfectly. It’s just a matter of time before the PONs sound and it is your boat that has triggered the alarm.

Bart came upstairs to join us. After a minute he broke into a tale as if it had just tripped through his mind though I suspected he had thought of it after our tour and wanted to give it shot for the book. His story had nothing to do with the river. It was about the day he announced to his father in law his intentions to marry his daughter. His girlfriend had warned the old man was hard of hearing. When Bart arrived at the house, the old man was cleaning a .357 Magnum. Bart announced his intentions. The old man didn’t look up. His then girlfriend kicked him “Speak up!”

“I started again and this time the old man looked up at me with a look… ‘what kind of an idiot are you?’ So I just sat down next to him and picked up a rag and started cleaning.”

And they lived happily ever after.

Bart joked around a bit before he said goodnight and shuffled back downstairs.

“That nut must really think I enjoy his company up here.” Fred said, “I like my time alone.”

But you could tell Fred enjoyed the company and is at home with this makeshift family on the Baskerville.

The navigation systems computer projected a 3am arrival into Natchez. Fred promised me it wouldn’t be that early. We were making about 6 miles per hour, but any time a southbound tow approached it would have the right of way, and the northbound vessel must often slow and linger at a wide enough point in the river for the oncoming ship to pass.

I said goodnight, and thanks for the ride. Fred said I was welcome to return anytime, provided I could steer through the corporate tape to get permission to board again. I told him next time I’d earn my keep and come back as a deckhand. Fred smiled.

“Sometimes it’s nice to have a guest around here.”

I was serious. I don’t know how long I’d last on the river or if I’d be strong enough to navigate the wires out on the tow. I could think of worse gigs than life on a towboat—I’d as soon scrub toilets for a months before taking another job in finance.

Dexter banged on my door and flipped on the lights at 5 am. A cold rain was still falling on the deck outside.

I had time to go down to the galley for breakfast, for a spread of eggs, hash browns, and pancakes. Terry wished me luck on my bike trip and offered some snacks for the road. I told her the crew was lucky to have someone like her to take care of them.

“I come to think of them as my kids,” Terry said. “I spoil ‘em.”

Everyone on board was concerned with my safety on my bike trip. The Natchez Trace has its share of desolate stretches, the only gas station on he 450-mile route is a now boarded up curiosity.

“I don’t mean to scare you, but aren’t you worried about being alone out there?” Fred had asked.

Fred suggested I check in with the troopers who patrol the route so someone will know my whereabouts. I was more concerned about how heavy my legs were going to feel when I got trapped out in a cold, heavy rain.

I was not worried about being alone. I was looking forward to some time to myself. I’d been alone more or less since I crossed into Panama. It had been nearly impossible to find solitude on a month long sprint through Central America, there was always someone squeezed in next to me on the bus, or sitting down to share a meal or a beer if I was alone at a table or a bar. I thought about the hours I would have in solitude, I could have whole conversations with no one weigh in except for my past and my future, the ghosts of my ancestors and a few critters in the trees.

New Orleans to Natchez VI: Engine Room

2009-08-31T17:52:00.000-07:00

Ear protectors hung on hooks outside the thick doors that seal off either end of the passageway to the engine room. It was only a 10 second walk along the bridge above engines, but the ear protectors were a necessity. The roar was enveloping, it penetrated into my bones.

This time I wasn’t just passing through to the galley, so I twisted in some earplugs in before I put on the protectors. Chief engineer Bart Stayton had offered me a tour of the ship’s bowels that I did not want to pass up.

The engines were as hot as they were loud. They smelled of metal and heated oil. It was the pleasing odor of a well-run mechanics shop, the smell of healthy machines.

Bart was leaned back in his work chair when he waved me into the control room.

Bart said something.

“What?” I thought I said. But I couldn’t hear myself.

Bart was wearing his protectors above his ears near the top of his head. I took mine off to hear what he saying. Even behind thick glass and the shut metal door, the noise was deafening.

“You could write a book about what goes on on this river,” Bart said.

I get the feeling Bart, like some the other crew, had been practicing his tales because someone told him I was here writing a book. Bart wasn’t the storyteller that Ricky was, but he made up for any lack of narrative with his enthusiasm for the material. He was a friendly man, about my age, from northeast Arkansas near Jonesboro. He has a thick and ruddy face under his blonde goatee, the kind of guy who wouldn’t mind teaching you a thing or two about fishing or duck hunting.

He knew needed a hook to get my attention, so he pitched a tale about bodies in the river. A couple of these bodies were casualties from collisions with the tow. The Coast Guard does its best to keep the river’s channel clear of pleasure boaters, yet every once while small craft will get in the way of a fast approaching southbound barge.

A pontoon boater once cut in front of Bart’s tow and had the not so bright idea to jump off the boat.

“Some people get ignorant when they are drunk.” Bart said.

A tow’s engine turns the wheels under the boat at 160 RPM, with an intake of thousands of gallons a minute. The presumed drunk disappeared. The Coast Guard closed the river for 12 hours while they searched for the body. They didn’t find it. The body surfaced only later when they were servicing the tow. The body of the man who thought he could out swim a 1,500-ton boat had been trapped under the hull.

Bart kept glancing at my little notebook, and seemed nervous when he noticed I wasn’t taking notes on his man overboard tales. He paused a moment, as if to recollect, then grinned. He looked like a poker player about to show his ace card as transitioned into his last body recount.

“We came up on Mud Island one morning and the pilot spotted long hair and shoulders floating above the surface.”

They fished the woman’s remains from the river. Her throat slit, her hands chopped off and her teeth knocked out, she appeared to be the victim of a gangland style execution. There was no way of identifying the professionally disposed of body. Side-wheel riverboats may have disappeared, the remaining captains may no longer booze, but death on the river was as seedy as in the days when Mark Twain chronicled her.

I jotted notes while Bart told the Mud Island story, which seemed to put him more at ease. He again offered a tour of the engine room.

If I had an inkling of mechanical knowledge, I am sure his explanations would have made perfect sense. Machismo did not allow me to ask certain questions that I knew I should know by now, a bit of Latin America had rubbed off on me over the past months.

Bart was a thorough guide and took pride in his engines and his responsibilities as chief engineer. He started out with the gizmos in the control room, explaining what the various blinking lights and gauges were measuring. One set of dials that were bigger than shinier than the others monitored the RPM of the three engines, train engines converted for marine use. One of the needles trembled more than the others, it showed a reading a little lower than the other two. Each engine turns a nine-foot wheel under the boat. One of the wheels is slightly bent, thus the drag on the needle, and the vibration that rattled the boat.

The more notes I took the more Bart explained. He described the mechanical features of the two-stroke, turbo charged diesel engine. I nodded after he shouted each sentence over the din of the machinery outside and below us. Bart explained how the engines are gear driven up to 700 RPM at which point they becomes turbine driven. In total they consume about 9,000 gallons per day, as a tow averages about 120 miles per day upstream, this boat gets a mile for every 75 gallons.

Bart had a great appreciation for the power plant of the boat.

“The guys who designed these engines were geniuses.” Bart said.

There is a reason the engine room is 120 degrees even in the winter. The engines run at over 1000 degrees. I asked Bart how it was safe to run an engine complex at such high temperatures. He drew me a diagram, called the fire tree. Each corner of the triangle had a label: fuel, air, and source. It takes all three to make a fire. With 130,000 gallons of fuel and 1000 degree temperatures, the only triangle point that can be eliminated is air. This is accomplished by powerful vacuums that keep air from rushing into the controlled explosions in the engines.

Bart pulled on his ear protectors and led me outside of the control room. There was no audio aside from engine’s constant roar, I did my best to lip read what Bart was yelling to me for the remainder of the tour. I kept close to engineer and was careful not to touch anything since some of the surfaces were as hot as 900 degrees. The engines were cased in enormous housings with pipes above and below, though which ones carried the fuel or expelled exhaust I hadn’t a clue. Spigots like little udders dropped down from the sides of the casings. The covers above them for all I knew were the lids of industrial barbeque smokers.

Bart walked me down the length of the three rooms back to the stern so I could see how far the turbines extended past the engines. They spun faster than the eye can perceive motion, though I imagined their revolutions accounted for the lightest and sweetest smells amongst the mingling scents of petroleum.

We climbed up to the pump room that regulates the steering and flanking rudders. Black hydraulic pipes worked to push thick metal rams that turn the rudders. Parts of the floor were covered in yellow paint to designate the pinch points, places where the dull edges of the heavy and powerful equipment could snap a man in half.

Back in the control room I thanked Bart for the tour, though I caught myself hanging my head the way my students in Marianna did after a new algebra lesson. Bart was proud of this equipment, machinery we both agreed was designed by geniuses, and he seemed to relish his responsibilities as the steward and doctor to the boat.

“All in all it’s a pretty good life,” Bart said. “Been at it for 16 years.”

New Orleans to Natchez V: Captain Shinley

2009-08-28T13:43:00.000-07:00

After a few minutes with Captain Dwight “Fred” Shinley in the wheelhouse of the Marty Baskerville it made sense why this tow was so well run. Shinley was a good commanding officer, a guy who is comfortable giving orders and maintaining authority in a friendly non-nonsense sort of way. A good manager can define expectations and then get out of the way while the people under him do their jobs.

His accumulated experiences on the river help Fred be such a comfortable manager. He knows every job on the boat outside the kitchen because he has done them. Fred has spent his working life on the river and worked his way up from being a deckhand. He knows what it is like to work out on the tow under a scorching August sun or with a February wind lashing his bones, and when a mate asks a deckhand to scrub a toilet for the first time, he remembers the humility involved. The instruments in the wheelhouse were just an extension of Shinley’s instincts, the river is constantly shifting and the maps drawn by the Army Corps of Engineers are only an approximation of what lay beneath the murky brown waves.

Knowledge and experience helps a good commander, but it also takes people skills. By all accounts this seems a genuinely happy crew, there is family warmth in the rhythms of their day.

When he was a boy, my father took a trip on a tow boat up that was supposed to take them St. Louis until a death in the family cut the trip short. The detail he remembers most clearly out of the machinery and all the sights and smells of the river were the hands of the river boat men. Almost all of the crew was missing a finger or two.

“There was a time when this used to be one of the most dangerous jobs in America,” the Captain said, “now it’s one of the safest. There used to be a lot more people falling off the boats.”

I asked him if that’s why they prohibited alcohol on riverboats. He remembers a time before the regulations.

“Twenty years ago there’d be a bottle of whiskey in wheelhouse and cases of beer stacked up to ceiling in the galley,” the Captain said.

Then they started clearing out the drunks by banning booze on the river and through a rigorous testing.

For a time the cook was exempt from the tests. Shinley recalls his boat’s cook from that era.

“You picked up her suitcase and you could hear the empty bottle clinking around. She’d come out of her room in the morning with a big smile and an ever bigger glass of OJ.”

Now, when a deckhand is injured on the job, the first thing a captain must do is administer a breath test or alcohol swab.

“Someone could lose an arm and I’d be out there with alcohol kit. It’s probably not something that would hold up in court, I’m not an expert with those things.”

Medication is also strictly regulated on the river. I filled out the standard forms when I arrived on the Baskerville and for some reason I listed a couple of tabs of Immodium that had been with me since Mexico that I had forgotten about until then. Ricky asked me if I had declared them before getting on the river. I hadn’t. He immediately called the dispatcher. He made it sound like he was covering for me on a potentially serious screw up. “He has a tablet of Immodium… you know what that’s for… he does not plan on taking it.”

I wandered up to the wheelhouse after breakfast to check when we’d be passing by Angola. I had wanted to see if Walker Percy’s descriptions still rang true. Shinley told me that unless the river was extremely high, you couldn’t see anything above the banks, the levees were a half-mile from the river in most places. A few towns and bridges, and Old River Control Structure were among the few sights on the Lower Mississippi.

Fred was right about Angola, there was nothing to see except a few rooftops and a tower that could have been anything. There were no prisoners sweating in between rows of cotton. The April fields were patched green and brown, and there was no sun to sweat under, just and endless leaden sky.

Fred did not try to sell me on river life. The tow was hard work, monotony and lonely nights away from your family.

“It’s kind of a double life out here. You have your life at home and your life on the river. You can do what you want back home but out here it is serious,” Fred explained. “There are always jobs for deckhands, most don’t last too long. It’s tough. It can be 110 degrees out on the tow during the summer and cold in the winter. Some will quit the first time they are asked to scrub a toilet, things they don’t do at home and have a hard time accepting the job.”

Captain Shinley leaned back in the command chair and looked out on the drab brown and gray horizon, another overcast morning on the river.

“The toughest part is accepting that this is your life, this is what you’ve chosen for yourself. You’ll be out here for a month away from home, your wife might call because there’s a water leak, what can you do about it on the river? Then one day you’ll wake up and there are your kids, older than you remember them,” the Captain said.

Then he almost betrayed a smile.

“My wife doesn’t call me when there is a water leak. She fixes it herself.”

New Orleans to Natchez IV: Ricky Goes to Africa

2009-08-24T13:27:00.000-07:00

Though it took almost a month, Ricky and his crew had delivered the vessels safely to the African shore. It seemed like everyone in the fishing village turned national port had come out to greet them.

“There was a crowd of people who had come out see our ships, it was like a hero’s welcome,” Ricky said.

They were a spectacle, if not exactly heroes. The businessman who had purchased the boats from Thibodeaux was in fact a chief. He was the leader of one of Ghana’s ethnic minorities involved in a slow burning dispute in the north of the country. The people crowding onto the docks were there in protest. It was rumored that the chief had bought boats in the United States in order to smuggle arms to fuel the conflict.

Ricky nor anyone aboard his boats could fathom what was going on. A detachment of the Ghanan army boarded the ship for the customs inspection, and Ricky walked them through the ship’s log and declared the contents of the hold.

The chief sent emissaries to bid Ricky and crew to disembark and took him to meet the businessman. Though he did not explain the situation that was unfolding, the chief assigned a shadow to Ricky, as he explained that this man would be able to help him with whatever he needed. He treated Ricky to an elaborate lunch of fresh seafood, grilled meats, and French wine. He promised Ricky would live like a king as long as he chose to stay in Ghana and all would go smoothly with the training of the new crew.

After the long lunch, Ricky and his new shadow went back to port to fetch his belongings from the boat. They were stopped by the same army detachment that had performed the customs inspection that morning. There had been a second search that afternoon, and this time they had found contraband in the ships’ holds. Ricky was now an arms smuggler.

Ricky steamed. They hadn’t found anything that morning, and with none of his crew was aboard the ship the army had suddenly found the rumored contraband.

Ricky was arrested on the spot and taken to the port’s jail. He hadn’t seen any of his crew before he was carted away, and all of his documents including his passport were on board the now impounded ship. He hadn’t checked in with the embassy, so there was no one who could account for his whereabouts. For a second time in a fortnight, Ricky knew he was fucked.

He wasn’t told anything further about his ship or his men. At least he was given his own cell. The door was solid, but he did have a single barred window set just above eye level that let in light from an interior courtyard. Ricky sat on the mattress they provided—no doubt as a luxury for the foreigner—and listened to coming and goings in the prison and to the birds in the tree near his window. Not counting his detour in Jamaica and unexpected detention in Barbados, this was Ricky’s first and what he vowed to be his last experience on foreign soil. He prayed that he’d survive to tell the story. Long after dark, when the jail settled down and last neighborhood radio switched off its rumbling bass, Ricky could hear the faint sound of surf in the distance..

At dawn of the following morning a pebbled skittered across his floor. Then another. He looked up at the window and whispered, “who’s there?”

In another moment he spotted young man the chief had appointed to be his shadow pulling himself up onto a branch in the tree near his window.

“I have no idea how he got inside that jail,” Ricky said.

Perhaps he bribed someone. In any case, this dedicated body servant, hired by the man who was likely responsible for Ricky’s imprisonment, wanted to know how he could be of assistance.

Ricky needed him to get his passport to the embassy so that someone in a position to help would at least know his whereabouts. The problem was that his passport was on the boat impounded by the Ghanan army. Still, he explained to the young man where the passport could be found in his cabin. It was the only thing Ricky could think of that might help.

Ricky had no idea how long they planned to detain him, what the official charges were, or whether his crew had also been detained. He had no one to talk to and nothing to do other than watch the shadows move across the floor. A guard came to fetch him in the afternoon. He was taken out into the courtyard and across to another room for his meal before being returned to his cell. Someone would have to figure out he’d gone missing before too long, he kept thinking to himself. If his shadow could get inside the jail to talk to him, surely he’d be able to get word to the right people.

Ricky spent another night alone in his cell. He had been too nervous to sleep the previous night, but on his second night he was tired enough and bored enough to get a good night’s sleep. He woke up to the sound of the key rattling in his cell door. The guard marched him to where he had lunch the previous day. At least he was now on the breakfast schedule. But this time the guard walked him past the canteen and into the jail’s office, where a suited official greeted him with a handshake and a smile and explained there had been a small misunderstanding. Ricky credited his new body servant.

“Somehow that bugger got my passport to the embassy,” he said.
There was no more mention of arms smuggling, so either the original accusations were bogus, or the chief had paid off the appropriate officials.

His shadow brought him to the chief, who apologized for the misunderstanding. They had another lavish meal together. After dinner, cognac and cigars, the chief offered Ricky one of his women.

“I think I insulted him by not taking her,” Ricky said.

But his head was still spinning was from almost disappearing on his first trip abroad, how could he be expected to pick up on the finer points of African etiquette? He and the chief could call it even.

Ricky agreed to follow through with training the chief’s new shrimp boat crews. They did things a little differently in Africa. The Ghanans managed to fit 25 people on a boat designed for a five-man crew. At night they set up hammocks in every cranny of usable space on the boat. And the crew worked almost for nothing. They were paid in trash fish, the bycatch that got scooped up along with the shrimp. They would trade their trash fish at the market for other goods.

Back in port from training the crews, Ricky had another run in with the same army officer who had arrested him on his first evening in Ghana. The officer accused of Ricky of not having the correct papers, and threatened him again with detention. This time Ricky snapped.

“Hell if I’m going back to jail in this country. I’m an American.” Ricky said, “I’ll take your biggest guy and your next biggest on, right here, right now.”

Ricky went back to jail. Apparently the officer had no appreciation for his John Wayne impression. This time Ricky did not get the VIP treatment—there was no mattress on the floor or courtyard window for his next five more nights in jail.

Though they hassled him at customs, Ricky did manage to get back home. In the end, tre trip was not a total disaster, he got some good stories and his father managed to break even on the deal.

That was 20 years ago. Ricky has no plans for leaving US shores again. He his happy running up and down the inland waterways, occasionally telling his tales of adventure on the open sea.

New Orleans to Natchez III: The Stowaway

2009-08-21T19:34:00.000-07:00

A calm day’s sail followed the detour to Montego Bay. Ricky plotted a course that would take his vessels to Trinidad before heading south then west through the Doldrums, the equatorial waters known for their lack of winds or storms. Perhaps it was a good sign, Ricky thought, to survive a storm as intense as Gilbert so early in the voyage, whatever went wrong the rest of the way, it would surely seem minor by comparison.

Then Ricky got a message from the captain of the other ship.

“Ricky, they are going to kill somebody!” the captain said.

The other boat’s crew was talking mutiny. This wasn’t the worst news. Possible cause for the discontent was that second boat had taken on a stowaway.

“You’ve got a what?” Ricky shouted into radio.

In the confusion surrounding the aftermath of the storm, a man either slipped into the hold of the second boat or bought his way on board by bribing a couple members of these mutinous merchant marines.

Ricky saw no easy solution. The stowaway put him in violation of international maritime law, and he would be in serious trouble if customs in the next port of call discovered a passenger not accounted for on their logs. The heavy fines and inevitable delays would wipe out the profits the Thibodeaux had dreamed of making on this venture.

The best Ricky could do was to tell the other boat’s captain to make the stowaway a deal. If the man kept silent and out of sight when they refueled in Barbados, they would supply him with an inflatable raft and put him to sea off the coast of Trinidad where he could make landfall without detection by the coast guard. The stowaway consented.

Ricky held his breath as they put into port in Barbados. Everything went smoothly with the inspection as the boats refueled and took on supplies for the final leg of the voyage, though there was also the problem of the mutinous crew.

Ricky had informed his father of the new troubles and the elder Thibodeaux was rounding up new sailors to be flown to Barbados. He ordered Ricky to fire the existing crew and advised his son to investigate whether a compromise might be reached with customs agents to solve their other problem.

Perhaps coaxed on by one of the soon to be fired crew, the stowaway forced the issue. He emerged from his hiding place and made a dash for the docks. He was nabbed by customs. The game was up. Ricky was fucked.

The customs officials threatened exorbitant fines for the presence of the stowaway, that in addition to the money Ricky had to pay on the spot for the man’s lodging while in detention, his court costs, and his return airfare to Jamaica.

The threatened fines would have made for a money-losing venture. They were already taking haircut on additional costs of flying in a second crew. Ricky’s only hope of salvaging the business deal was by reaching some sort of agreement with the customs chief.

But how would he manage this? Bribery involved its own set of risks, and Ricky wasn’t skilled in the arts of international diplomacy. If he was too blunt in making the bribe he could find himself in detention right alongside the jackass stowaway that put him in this predicament. He needed an angle, but he had no contacts in Barbados and was a long way from Southern Louisiana.

Then Ricky got his first break in weeks. He was escorted to the customs house to fill out paperwork on the stowaway incident. Inside, he noticed a Masonic symbol in one of the offices. Masons! Now he had his hook, and a plan tumbled into place. Before long he was able to negotiate new terms of release.

Ricky’s father was a high order Mason. Ricky set to work on finding the relevant official, then got his dad to place a phone call.

Two days later a Masonic sword arrived with the new skipper of the second boat, a token of apology for all the trouble the Thibodeaux’ ships had caused. (The sword must have been of more value to the Barbadian Masons than the bidders on Ebay.) Ricky found himself free to go after settling the detention fees for the stowaway.

With a new crew and a second fish tale in hand, Ricky sailed for the West African Coast. They crossed the Doldrums without drama. A week later Ricky set anchor off the coast of the fishing village turned port town of Tema, Ghana.

N.O. to Natchez II: Shrimp, Hurricane Gilbert, and the New World Order

2009-08-20T17:20:00.000-07:00

Ricky Thibodeaux, the pilot of the Marty Baskerville, knew his hurricanes. While I sat in my childhood living room glued to the Weather Channel, Ricky was busy surviving what at the time was the strongest hurricane in recorded history.

I first met Ricky in the galley as he was tucking into some chicken pot pie. It was my first meal on board, and I had managed to fill up my plate in a way I thought might pass inspection.

As soon as I sat down Ricky took one look at my plate and asked me if I was a vegetarian.

“I eat seafood,” I said in my defense, “just no land critters.”

Ricky chuckled. Terry the cook overheard and declared that we’d be having fish tomorrow. Ricky assured me this was a treat.

Just like that the situation was diffused. I hate being a difficult guest, especially among strangers, but my confession went much better than I had feared. Turns out Ricky had a quite a few opinions about seafood. Once we were out of earshot of Terry, Ricky advised me on the next meal the flounder was the fish to go for, it had tastier meat than that on the catfish.

Ricky was a river pilot by trade but a fisherman, or more accurately, a shrimper at heart. Though I’ve never really cared for Winston Grooms or his Forrest Gump, I have to give the author credit for doing his research on shrimpers.

Finally I had met someone who might be able to demystify the world for crustaceans for me. Though I felt I knew my share about the varieties of edible fish, I knew almost nothing about what makes for good shrimp. I asked Ricky how could I tell if a place is serving high quality goods, aside from its proximity to the ocean?

Ricky reflected for a second, I had struck on a good topic with a guy who could have run a shrimp seminar. I was already anticipating holding court with my foodie friends during our next trip to Pacific Cafe.

“You’ve got many kinds of shrimp, you’ve got Brown Shrimp, White Shrimp, Rock Shrimp, Dry Shrimp, Red Shrimp, Tiger Shrimp, sea bobs…You know the size of the Shrimp by how many make a pound. 10-12’s mean ten to twelve shrimp a pound. 16-20’s mean…”

And on. The shrimp topic had unleashed Ricky’s inner Bubba.

After the impressive list of varieties, size and descriptions, Ricky gave me some useful guidelines. White shrimp typically is of a higher quality than brown shrimp, and when rock shrimp make the menu they are a must order. Though if it’s true crustacean delicacy you seek, according to Ricky, then look no further than Louisiana crawfish.

The November to June crawfish season represents Louisiana’s gift to the world (though I am also eternally grateful for Crystal Sauce). Almost all of the crawfish in the United States, and up to 90% of the world’s catch, are harvested in Louisiana. Creole state natives consume 70% of this total. Ricky’s eyes grow distant in his fleshy, bearded face that reminds me vaguely of Paul Prudhomme. He recounts one of the epic crawfish boils of his youth, large pots where crawfish, potatoes, garlic, corn, and sausage mingle before they are dumped out directly on the table in a delicious free for all. Maybe I am missing something in my diet, my eyes don’t roll back in my head when I talk about tofu.

There is a lot of time pass on the river, especially for a guy like Ricky who spends eight hour shifts alone in the pilothouse. We passed the hours talking hurricanes, seafood…and creeping world government. I had been in South and Central America for four months and missed the conservative backlash to Obama. I hadn’t yet heard of the tea parties that had been staged on tax day.

Ricky told me all about the tea parties. He was a rabid Ron Paul enthusiast who identified the coming world currency as the next step in the New World Order’s usurpation of American sovereignty. At a company conference in Nashville last year Ricky had cornered Xxx Ingram to ask him what he thought about the Federal Reserves’ complicity with the Chinese in fomenting the push for a global currency.

“He didn’t even answer me, he just looked at me with this smirk like I was a complete idiot.” Ricky said.

Right then I was hoping I wasn’t looking at Ricky like I thought he was an idiot. I didn’t think he was an idiot. Even if he bought a little of what talk show radio was selling, Ricky didn’t regurgitate the moronic half-logic of a Rush Limbaugh program. He was articulate in his small government, live-free-or-die conservatism, and if he fell in with the latest N.W.O. theorists, he did so with realization of his own limited knowledge. That’s why he asked Mr. Ingram the currency question, figuring surely a rich guy like that would know something about currencies.

“I don’t normally talk politics,” Ricky said. “But I could tell after talking to you that here’s a guy that knows what’s happening. I knew we had a lot of views in common.”

I nodded. It’s funny how people assume you share their views as long as you are willing to shut up and listen. Even if we didn’t have that many views in common, I found Ricky’s take on the world fascinating.

Ricky had spent most of his life on inland waterways, but his greatest story involved the one time he ventured into the open sea, almost 21 years ago. That one trip was enough for a lifetime.

“I’m done with open water. And I know you can never say never. But I am never going back to Africa.”

A shrimper might not make the same exaggerations as his fishing cousins. Still, this pilot knew the art of the fish tale.

Ricky perked up as he settled into his story. The long Louisiana vowels filled the spaces left by the gaps in his memory.

His father, a shrimp boat captain, was looking to sell his two shrimp boats so he could update his fleet. The best offer he received was from a businessman in Ghana. The elder Thibodeaux was skeptical, but the African was willing pay a huge premium for Thibodeaux to sail the ships across the Atlantic. There was also money in deal for the Thibodeaux to outfit the boats in Louisiana and train a local crew on how to operate and maintain the vessels once they reached Ghana.

The African, whom Ricky called the “Indian chief”, was offering too much money for the father and son to turn down. They agreed to the venture, and the chief flew to Louisiana to purchase the boats and oversee their outfitting. Ricky helped procure new equipment for the vessels, the nets, resin and maintenance items the new operators would not be able to buy locally in West Africa. The holds in the vessels, designed for large shrimp catches, easily accommodated the nets and other supplies. The Chief filled the remainder of the space with durable goods hard to come to come by Ghana—Mercedes Benz tires and empty baby food containers according the Ricky.

The boat was loaded in Morgan City and the Thibodeaux had their crews lined up ready to depart at the beginning of September 1988. Ricky would captain the first boat and his father had hired another captain to man the second.

The voyage was ill-fated from the beginning. The morning of the third day it became clear that a tropic depression off the Windward Islands was gaining strength at the eastern edge of the Caribbean. There was nothing but the warm, shallow waters of the Sargasso Sea between Ricky and the gathering storm. By the next evening Gilbert had reached hurricane strength and from there rapidly developed into a major category 3 hurricane. Luckily, Ricky had been tracking the storm and had time to harbor his boats in Montego Bay, off the northwest coast of Jamaica.

On the morning of September 12 Gilbert’s eye began its east to west assault along the backbone of the island. Before the tempest reached Jamaica’s western edge, Gilbert had strengthened into a monster category 5 storm.

Ricky docked the boats behind a large containership that had also made an emergency stop in the harbor’s partial sanctuary. Tucked in behind the broadside of the larger ship, Ricky’s smaller boats would be shielded from strongest volleys of the on coming hurricane. As the winds continued to strengthen, sustained gusts of 150 mph, Ricky heard a sickening screech that sliced through the hurricane’s jet engine roar. Ricky listened as Gilbert’s inner storm bands twisted and ripped the container’s metal ties. The winds overpowered the moorings that bound the larger ship in the harbor. As he feared, the container ship became unbound, and thrashed about as Gilbert hurled it across the harbor and into the shore. The shrimp boats were lucky the larger ship hadn’t plowed through them, but now they had lost their shield from the worst of the winds.

“Then we really took a beating,” Ricky said.

Local shanties were flattened by the onslaught. Corrugated metal roofs stripped off into deadly frisbees. Flying coconuts struck with the force of cannonballs. Glass shards were also a danger—the winds knocked out every window in Montego Bay.

By the time the tropical force winds resided, the 12-hour nightmare had claimed 43 lives on Jamaica. The 19-foot storm surge had swept away boats and deposited them as tree houses in surrounding hills. The infrastructure of the island lay in tatters, but the Thibodeaux’ vessels were still afloat, and after some repairs they were able to set course for Barbados.

Hurricane Bill

2009-08-18T20:26:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Bill is approaching the Leeward Islands today.

I am a weather enthusiast, and hurricanes are the Super Bowls of weather watching—up to two weeks of build up for the diehards before several hours of sustained violence watched by the masses, a few actual spectators but most from the safety of their living rooms. Sometimes the hurricane never shows, kind of like the Buffalo Bills in the early 1990's.

There is no other weather event that approximates the excitement surrounding a hurricane. Tornados can wreak similar havoc at a local level, but never threaten entire cities, and they strike with little forewarning. Tornados lack the build up of a powerful hurricane.

As a child I spent hours glued to the Weather Channel, back in the day when they still had isobars on their weather maps. My father was convinced I’d become a meteorologist, and he set up this weather station on our roof where I could monitor wind speed and direction, temperature, humidity, and barometric pressure.

During childhood there was a weather event that eclipsed the hurricane, the snow day. The afternoons when the temperature started dropping and a bulge of isobars backed a front on the horizon, I start working on my own forecast for the neighborhood. The nights when the weathermen concurred with my predictions for snow, I'd sneak out of bed and tiptoe downstairs to my weather station. Was the air temperature right for freezing rain (surefire school closure), would the ground be cold enough for the snow to stick, would the pressure fall enough for likely precipitation? With so many variables at play a boy could not sleep.

I have only experienced one hurricane in person. I was nine years old on summer vacation in Naples Florida when Hurricane Bob took a turn in the Gulf of Mexico that put Naples directly in its path.

These were the days before overzealous parenting, the kind that robbed the generation below us of fun times like pressing your nose to the plate glass of the beach house to watch hurricane force winds howl through the palm trees and lob bits of branches and debris into the windows. The adults even let us in on the betting pool, how high would the tide come in, to the yard, the porch, over the foundation of the house? A grade school friend had been through a major hurricane in Jupiter, Florida and told the class at show and tell how everything suddenly got calm and the sun came out for a moment when the eye of the storm passed over town. I was hoping we’d get to see the eye. I imagined swimming in the back yard after the storm.

In my parents’ defense, Bob turned out to be less than hurricane force over Naples. The yard didn’t fill up with the sea, though when we went for dinner some of the parking lots along the inland waterways were under water.

I can’t tell you how long I’ve waited for a hurricane in my name. A college friend informed my that in July 1997 there was another hurricane Bill, but it was a fleeting storm that did not reach land, and that was before the days of ubiquitous internet. I didn’t even have a television that summer of night shifts at the Aloha club, day games at Candlestick Park, and lunches of booze and Ben and Jerry’s. 97 was the summer of my Junior 30.

Bill isn’t forecast to make landfall, and will likely be soon forgotten. Tomorrow back to Baskerville and the story of Ricky Thibodeaux and Hurricane Gilbert.

New Orleans to Natchez I: Deck Hands on the Mississippi

2009-08-14T13:14:00.000-07:00

At 2 pm Downtown Baton Rouge was a ghost town. The city center with its drab office buildings and vacant storefronts, any of a half dozen of which could have been the old Woolworth’s, reminded me of the 70’s even if my memory does not quite stretch back that far. The empty sidewalks and those southern skyscrapers that do not scrape evoked memories of taking the bus with Laura on one of our trips to the Shoney’s in downtown Nashville. Those rides were as early as 1979 or as late as 82, it doesn’t matter, I choose to think of that time as a connection to my birth decade.

I used to love riding the bus. I still do when they aren’t crowded with commuters and I’m not going anywhere in particular. I’ll take the bus on 10 hour trips when I’m anywhere outside the USA—Greyhound is dreadful. If I didn’t have a boat to catch I’d take a few buses in Baton Rouge, sit on the last row and watch the elderly, the domestics, the veterans, the DUI’s, and perhaps the occasional commuter catch the bus home from work. You can learn a great deal about a town from the people that ride the bus.

Baton Rouge had gotten stuck somewhere long before the 70’s, maybe in those bullet holes still etched in the marble halls of the state capitol. I wouldn’t be all that surprised if Huey Long himself waddled out of one of these squat towers, his entourage in tow.

The Ingram port was upriver from the bridge over the Mississippi and just a couple blocks down North St. from the center of town. Jack dropped me off at the gravel drive that sloped over the levy and down to the river’s edge. The office looked like a barge from the land as the office is on the water. As the guy with a new bike, an overstuffed saddlebag, and a south of the border moustache, I must have looked ridiculous to the deckhands waiting for their tow ride to work.

I tried not to think too much about the kind of figure I cut out here. If the bike and my back-story weren’t enough to do me in, I was hoping I could get through the next 48 without anyone noticing I’m a vegetarian.

The dispatcher in the office was a friendly guy. He had me sign the standard waivers that said I wasn’t taking any medication, wasn’t drunk or planning to booze, and would abide by the rules of the river. It’s a good thing I didn’t buy a bottle of scotch for the captain. All the presents I had thought to bring on board had been bottles of something, some stereotypes die hard. It hadn’t occurred to me that a riverboat captain might be prohibited from drinking.

I asked again about the bike.

“As long as you don’t try to ride the bike on the boat you’ll be fine,” he said.

I had to take a fleeting boat out to the Marty Baskerville. One of the crew checked my ID and I signed into the logbook. They had one stop before delivering me, to drop off a brand new deck hand on a tug bound for Houston.

I sat in the kitchen with the giant mate who had signed me in. I was hoping to make some small talk, to figure out what people talked about out here before I got on the bigger tow where I’d be spending the next 40 hours, but the mate made himself busy smoking and playing a computer game.

I went out on the deck and up to the bow where the tow’s deckhand was talking to the guy about to start his first day on the job. The new guy couldn’t have been a year out of high school, if he had finished at all. He couldn’t have been more than 18 as he still did not have cause to shave. The greenhorn was already taking the older deck hand’s lead, when the older guy took a step back or pursed his lips to spit, the new guy followed whether by good instincts or good sense or both. He was well behind his partner in looking the part, he hadn’t put in the same hours growing his biceps or padding his beer gut, and he lacked evidence of any spontaneous tattoos.

I was nervous at the prospects of spending a couple of days with these guys, or guys like them on the tow. Country boys don’t scare me as much as they make me uncomfortable. I was born in the South, which might give me a slight advantage over any of my New York or Boston born Wesleyan classmates in the same situation, but I was born in suburbs, went to private school, and never killed anything bigger than a crow. My best attempt at a southern accent probably just gave me away for a rich boy.

I must have made them uncomfortable too. The younger hand deck was probably just a step behind in mimicking his partner’s hushed tone as I approached them at the front of the boat. I couldn’t blame him. I’d be suspicious too of such an obvious city slicker carrying a bike on a riverboat. I tried to strike up a conversation. This didn’t go anywhere, so we stood near the bow and watched the tow cut through the carpet of brown wake shook out by the large tows pushing up the muddy Mississippi.

We wished the deckhand good luck, and before long we pulled up to the larger tow I’d be taking up river. The veteran deck lifted my bike over the railing and down to he other deck with arm, and he wished me a good ride.

It was a great relief when I got aboard the Marty Baskerville. The tow was three times as large as the fleeting boat I had come over on, and to my relief, the deck hands weren’t white. I don’t know why this should have mattered, but it did. I already had something in common with the junior deckhand on the Baskerville. Dexter had come from Elaine, Arkansas, a Delta town just a 20 minute drive from where I lived in Helena the year I taught special ed.

If the guys on the fleeting tow had suspected I was a weirdo, Dexter knew it. Who in their right mind would choose to live in Helena? At least he could place this weirdo somewhere in time and space. Dexter was a polite young man and like me didn’t have anything else to do for the next couple of hours so we couldn’t help but get along.

As former residents of Phillips County we had plenty common ground to cover: the King Biscuit Blues Festival, a few teachers whom I remembered having taught at his old high school (incorrect on my part, my roommate had taught at a school north of Elaine), and the eternal twin cities debate, West Helena vs. Helena, Wal-Mart vs. Kroger, Burger Shack vs. Burger Ranch. We were both punched straight tickets. Dexter was a West Helena man, which put him in the Wal-Mart and Burger Shack camps. As a Helena partisan I supported Kroger and the Burger Ranch, though it took all my Helena allegiance to block out memories of the produce rotting in the bins at Kroger and the urban myth about Helena high’s missing lab rat later discovered in the fryer at the Ranch. The latter episode, if true, was clearly a West Helena sabotage.

Our conversation reminded me of the song my homeroom students at Lee High School sang some mornings. The first verse was “Wal-Mart,” then they’d sing the name of another local store, say “Sonic.” The verses would continue to alternate between Wal-Mart and something not Wal-Mart, “Wal-Mart… Dollar General…Wal-Mart…Cleo’s…Wal-Mart… KFC…Wal-Mart.” It is a song but also a bit of a contest, who can keep the beat going by thinking of enough businesses that aren’t Wal-Mart every other verse.

Once my homeroom managed to keep the Wal-Mart song going until the bell, though they had to reach beyond Marianna to the businesses of West Memphis and the Helena twin cities. They threw in an extra Dollar General or two to keep afloat, a legal move because any town like Marianna too small for a Wal-Mart was sure to have a Dollar General. I only got 15 minutes in the mornings with my homeroom of regular students, the rest of the day I taught special ed. Maybe it was by contrast that I found their song so clever.

Because what else do you have to talk, or sing, about in a small and beaten Delta town besides the stores and the people? There were stories to tell about the people, but we were both being polite. So we talked Wal-Mart. I had to dig for some Helena standouts, my only regular was the Pizza for Less inside the gas station just on the Helena side of the twin city line.

Wal-Mart.

If he had brought up the Chinese restaurant next door to the Pizza for the Less on West Helena’s side of the line, I might have conceded West Helenan superiority right there. I was leaning over a plastic dish of Kung Pao canned peas and carrots at the August Moon when the only good idea I ever had in Delta flashed into my brain, a plan for a working bong made entirely out of kitchen supplies—from Wal-Mart. Even my Pizza for Less experience involved the younger twin city, and Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart was only place in town to buy Kalamata olives, until I noticed, one precious jar and agonizing week at a time, that I was the only buyer in town. By January there were only 4 jars left. I went to the customer service counter the week before the Super Bowl to add a suggestion they restock the olives. I didn’t have much going for me that year, those olives were one of my few creature comforts aside from the grocery bag of weed I bought from a friend of a friend in Memphis. I finished my one man run on decent olives by groundhogs day. They never restocked.

Wal-Mart.

The twin city debate was a matter of taste. I preferred Helena’s ghostly beauty, the abandoned big houses swallowed up in Kudzu. Dexter preferred West Helena’s newer ranch houses, the apartment buildings, the Wal-Mart.

You see Dexter and I had real stuff to talk about. I had no common ground with the rednecks.

It’s the people that make a place, and I wouldn’t have lasted six weeks in the Delta if hadn’t been for the immediate acceptance from my colleagues at school, an, “it takes a village and we’ll take all comers” approach. If Dexter had a lower opinion of the people of the Delta, he didn’t want to disappoint me, “They’re ok down there.”

Dexter had been an honor student at Elaine and followed his girlfriend to the University of Pine Bluff Arkansas. College classes were tough, and after a semester he dropped out and moved to West Memphis.

“Hard to meet somebody down there,” he said.

Being an honor student in Phillips County is no guarantee of adequate college preparation. In my first year at Lee High School, only six seniors met the State of Arkansas’s test of basic proficiency in English, Math and Science. I would imagine that the definition of honor student in Elaine was similar to that at Lee High School, or to the standard in Tom Wolfe’s fictional South Bronx school Jacob Ruppert High from Bonfire of the Vanities—an honor student attended class, wasn’t disruptive, and did all right in reading and arithmetic.

Dexter was well aware that he hadn’t received the best education in Elaine.

“I wasn’t good at English, I talk the way I write, which ain’t good,” Dexter explained. “It sounds right, but it don’t look good.”

Though college did not work out for Dexter, he was a Phillips County success story. He got out of the Delta by way of employment and not incarceration.

Dexter wanted to know if I’d been to Brazil, he had heard the women are beautiful. Though I had admitted I had never been to that part of South America, I told him I had never heard a traveler’s tale that didn’t confirm Brazil a country of beautiful women. I told him about Colombia. He smiled and said he’d like to visit there one day

Dexter was 23, with the prospects of a life on the river ahead of him. I asked him if he ever worried about getting injured in an accident. He smiled again and shook his head.

“I’m going home if that happens.”

I wondered if disability was as good a deal as Dexter imagined. Apart from living with a serious injury, how long would checks continue to roll in? Dexter wasn’t sure either.

Dusk was settling in on the river and the Marty Baskerville was facing up to the 24 barges she would be pushing upriver. This meant that Dexter and the other deckhands now had plenty of work to do, checking the wires that secured the barges to the boat and to each other, checking and rechecking the convoy of covered containers so there would be no mishaps that might send Dexter home early to southern Phillips County.

I hopped up to the second deck where I was staying in the guest cabin, accommodations far better than I expected. The cabin was like a hotel room, with twin beds, television, and an en suite bathroom and shower. Next-door was a rec. room with a computer, a weight lifting machine and a couple of lazy boys in front of a satellite television.

It was still quiet when I lay down the first night on the boat. I had been warned about the noise and rumble of the engines, but we wouldn’t be heading upriver until midnight, and though the noise would be considerable, the tow wouldn’t rattle so much now that it was weighted down with a full load of fuel. I looked out the windows for a last view of the Baton Rouge skyline, the capitol tower its only icon. When took off my glasses I could imagine the casino on the river with its paddlewheel and twin smokestacks was docked just for the night and would join us in the early morning as we churned north through the swirling brown waters of the Lower Mississippi.

Mormons XIII: Saints Along the Watchtower

2009-08-10T14:44:00.000-07:00

I am finished with the Mormons. If you found the series interesting, then I highly recommend this article by Josh Levin in Slate Magazine. Josh has just finished an excellent series that ponders various long-term scenarios for the decline of the United States.

In the article linked to above, he contemplates American decay alongside that of Ancient Rome and speculates that the Mormon Church may be the institution best positioned to preserve aspects of American civilization after the fall. The Mormon Church would serve a function similar to the Roman Catholic Church as it preserved literature and culture through the Dark Ages.

I don’t have much to add here, other than I agree with notion that it is a good bet Mormonism will outlive the American state as we know it, not just as an institution, but as a time capsule for values once considered, for better or worse, American. While the rest of us slide into degeneracy or fractal out into ever tinier splinters of Protestantism, those guys wearing the black and white name tags will be out there going door to door with a handshake, a smile, and another testimony of Jesus Christ from a new and promised land once called the United States of America. Their settler values and strong connection with the Exodus of Biblical times will steel the Saints in their struggle through any of the calamities Mr. Levin presented.

Make sure you also check out the Choose Your Own Apocalypse application. Fun times.

Sign Up and Join Me On the Road!

2009-08-06T18:23:00.000-07:00

If you are a regular reader of this blog, please register by clicking the subscription tab to the right and entering your email as instructed. You will be notified of new posts once they are ready. You can also become a fan of of this blog by clicking the tab to the right.

I appreciate your support.

WW

END OF POST

Mormons Twelve: Prophets and the Printing Press

2009-08-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

As I parted ways with Zarate—her partner had long since wandered off, probably down the street to the mall—I felt a creeping depression. I sat under the statue of the seagulls and tried to think of what did make me different from those condescending BBC fucks who seek out the bizarre to mock it.

Then I remembered the dream, that dream of the tempest, my question about the one and true faith, and the answer in a bolt of light that struck me with the force of a1000 orgasms. That was six years ago. It had taken me four years to admit the story to anyone, and then another year to get that nonsense down on paper.

Even then I wasn’t comfortable with the episode.

Though I believe in the value of artistic license, I consider myself a journalist who happens to be a storyteller and rarely just make something up. At the end of my last Mormon cycle, I did exactly that. I chronicled the highlights how they happened (as best I could from my own perspective) right up to the point Elder Lee declared I should be baptized.

I wasn’t comfortable with the truth of what followed. I will try again, that summer afternoon now a year farther in the distance is no less hazy.

Elder Lee had been emphatic about my baptism. Yet there were no fanatics in Temple clothes waiting in the room behind. I imagine now the white robed Mormons were inspired by the dancing clansmen number from the Jerry Springer - The Opera. When Elder Lee said I should be baptized immediately, he had meant as soon as possible, not that same afternoon. It wasn’t Lee who had shaken me, I expected he would have gone to great lengths to dunk me in the water.

It was the persuasiveness of his quiet partner that had thrown me into spiritual vertigo.
Elder McFadden’s rebuttal to my objections was thorough and heartfelt. I was a pretty good debater in my day. It used to be that my words came quicker the bigger the hole I had to dig out of. But this quiet boy from Idaho had left me without a clever escape.

All I could do was say, “I’m sorry, I just can’t do it.”

Then I got up and left. I don’t recall either of them bothering me after that day. All three of us had reached the end of that road together.

Absolutely nothing about the Mormon Church has called to my wakeful self since, not the über social conservatism, the authoritarian theocratic structure, and certainly not the teetotaling. No, none of it appeals as a framework for understanding my life’s purpose.

But what was it about that fucking dream, and where did it all come from? Maybe my first missionary friends had planted a seed through some sort of subliminal trickery, or maybe there was a subtext I was missing—the storm and the bolt of light could have represented something other than the obvious message from God commanding me to become a Latter-day Saint.

Why else would I be here, in Salt Lake City, almost six years to the day of my nocturnal vision, the creepiest, most irrational episode in my adventures to date?

I am still looking to close this chapter and move on. In a way Sister Zarate was the person I had been waiting to meet. Here was a young woman who believes in a book that tells her she still bears the mark of God’s curse on her ancestors. Here I sit, in the Zion of her religion, learning about a spirituality that may or may not have called me through vision, not accepting this curse, or any of the tedious rubbish written by a charlatan, however charismatic.

I recollected my thoughts in a safe space, a shabby used bookstore a few blocks south of the square. Peter, the 50 something shaggy haired man behind the counter, looked something like Ron Kovic without the wheelchair, though he looked a bit too young to have served during the war. I browsed the shelves of second hand Mormon offerings, Discourses on the Holy Ghost, The Aaronic Priesthood through the Centuries, Faith Like the Ancients Volumes 1-8. With a few of these titles on my bed stand I would never need another sleeping pill. I asked Peter if he had any controversial books on Mormonism, and he waved me away.

“Whatever I got is on those shelves,” he said.

I was surprised by his surliness. Surely a place like this housed some worthwhile reads on the Saints. When I got to the back of the store I found Peter’s real interests were comics and vintage pornography, not scandalous religious treatises. He had an impressive collection of old Hustlers that included Larry Flynt’s bizarre Christian period, who else but the Horatio Alger of porn would have thought it possible to market an evangelical skin magazine? Peter knew his market. The June 1978 issue with the iconic cover of a woman torso deep into a meat grinder was priced at $35 bucks.

I opted for a five-dollar paperback from the science fiction writer Orson Scott Card talking about his relationship with the LDS Church. I bought it for the chapter where Card objects to the western world’s defense of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses on the grounds that a man from the Muslim background who deliberately defames Islam should know better and deserves what is coming to him. Blood atonement, anyone?

I had the pleasure of hearing Rushdie speak in Cartagena this winter, and because he always gets the question, he spoke at length about the fatwa against him and his great joy when the writers of the world and the defenders of free speech rallied to his defense. Who would have thought the creator of Ender’s Game would abandon humanism and side with the jihadis seeking a return to the dark ages.

When I got up to the counter a guy was unloading boxes of his comic collection from his truck to sell to Peter. The guy said he was just out of the service, and showed us a couple of psyops comics he had brought back from Iraq. I asked the soldier about the psyops comics and he explained that the DoD had servicemen draw them and then had the language experts translate them into Arabic.

I asked Peter if I could take a look at one. He shook his head and said not until he had sorted through them. I had just asking out of respect. I gave him a “what is wrong with you?” glare. He changed his mind and let me look at one of the psyops comics. They seemed pretty dark, gritty stories where the good guys looked just as scary as the bad guys. Probably a good pitch as Iraqi kids have seen more than their share of grit in the world.

The soldier said he needed 200 bucks for his collection. Peter wasn’t buying, so the soldier reloaded his truck with the boxes. Before he left he came back into the store and handed me one of his psyops comics. I followed him out of the store to shake his hand and give him five bucks.

I still had several hours before the train, where I’d spend my last night on the road. It was too early for dinner, so I hit the free Imax film at the Lion House, Brigham Young’s other palatial residence a block from the Beehive House on the corner of Temple Square. The film covered the life of one of the more fascinating characters from the 19th century. But it left out all the good parts: his early days as a diviner and treasure hunter, his ingenious if fraudulent real estate and currency scheme in Kirtland, Ohio, his trials with infidelity and eventual revelation of plural marriage, his run for President of the United States of America. The massacres were tedious affairs, so predictably one-sided. Granted these were the original Saints, but the filmmaker didn’t have the decency to color them human or paint their adversaries as anything more than God hating mongrels.

After an hour of pious cheek turning and a meticulous preparation for martyrdom, the heathen mob finally graced the screen. I wanted to cheer as they stormed his second floor cell, not because I didn’t feel for the real Joseph, but because this piece of shit was almost over. The film had the gall deny us the gratification of Joseph’s bullet ridden fall from his cell’s window. The frame froze just before he plunged to a mortal death, and the image tilted skyward to where God was waiting to welcome his lamb home.

When the screen went black I sprung from my seat, earlier than appropriate judged by the sour looks I got from the withered church ladies on the way out. How can they watch this bilge three times an afternoon, five times a week?

An old man seated outside the entrance asked me what I thought of the film. I told him I was disappointed.

“It’s a great story, but they left so much of it out,” I said.

“Yeah, there’s a lot to cover,” he said. “I sure am glad I’m not the one that has to make the decisions on what goes into those pictures.”

What did I expect from a free IMAX feature? Of course they couldn’t make Joseph Smith an interesting character, the church has to deify him. In this respect the film did a pretty good job creating a religious story that fits into the America's own national myths. The brawny, blue-eyed leading man guided his flock to build godly communities. Their cities on the hill out shined the evils inherent in the New World wilderness surrounding them. It was Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown pumped with steroids and stripped of irony and ambiguity.

But LDS is a young institution, and must get the most out of modern media as it builds upon its foundation myth. It has got its hands full on this one. It’s an uphill fight creating myths in the age of the printing press, lot less the internet.

Joseph Smith knew this as well as anyone in his time. The irony—one we won’t see portrayed in a church sanctioned film—is that the lynch mob pursued Smith for the sin of destroying a printing press. Smith the presidential candidate could not palate unsavory truths about the church elites and their polygamy then being published in his fiefdom of Nauvoo. Joseph’s greatest political miscalculation, that he could get away with destroying a press in a city where he was more powerful than the sitting President, ended up providing the miracle by which Mormonism survived the loss of its prophet. Rank and file Mormons, many of whom had crossed the Atlantic to be with the great Joseph Smith, were horrified when the polygamy of their leaders came to light. Smith’s martyrdom was the glue that held the church together in the face of the ugly truths the press exposed in the month of Joseph’s death.

Mormonism is not the only religion to come out of 19th century, but it was arguably the most successful. The Bahai, the Unitarian Univeralists and other transcendental churches, the new religions of Japan, none of these faiths were as successful in grafting contemporary struggles onto the framework of ancient practices and beliefs. Ages of economic and social upheaval beg for spiritual tonics, and there was no better snake oil salesman to deliver them than brother Joseph Smith.

Perhaps the Mormon God does have a streak of the Old Testament in him. I had contemptuous thoughts all through the shitty movie, and I was not a block away from the theater before I notice a sharp pain in the back of my throat. I started coughing. I never cough. There was nothing I could do but medicate with some Indian food that I ordered South Asian hot. The spices along with an excellent Chai seemed to keep the Mormon wrath at bay.

I managed to cough and wheeze my way back to the station in time for last leg of the Zephyr. Worn down, (was this pig flu?) I went in for my first sleeper cabin. I coughed myself to sleep above the syncopated rhythm of a passenger car clanking over the aging freight rails laid on the same track as the first transcontinental rail road. 18 hours to summer in San Francisco.

Mormons XI: Jesus Speaks Spanish

2009-08-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

The Economic History Department at the London School of Economics takes pride in the international scope of its department. They have had students from just about every country in world over the past twenty years. Over beers at department’s local near Holborn Station, trade historian Patrick O’Brien explained why the program would likely remain one country short on the global map.

“I doubt we’ll ever have a student from North Korea. It’s hard enough finding one qualified student from a country like that.” O’Brien said.

North Koreans cannot leave the country without an escort. Students only travel in pairs, and must constantly keep records on their partner, the only place free of mutual surveillance is the toilet. The Economic Historians are not willing to ask the LSE to spend its scholarship funds subsidizing a spy.

Mormon missionary teams work much the same way as the North Korean travel partners. Missionaries are paired in teams where the two individuals must eat, sleep, work, and pray together. Like the Koreans, they are only permitted alone time to use the restroom.

This makes for trying situations when two poorly matched personalities are paired together, or when one missionary begins to have doubts about his calling.

Part of the mission experience is about building character through hardship, and whether or not it’s an intended corollary, many missionaries come home and immediately seek a spouse. It is an overwhelming sensation to be alone after two years of constant companionship. Intentioned or not, a missionary returns to fulfill the Mormon commandment—go forth and multiply.

For all its secondary benefits, this buddy system is designed to provide young missionaries mutual protection from an intimidating world of unbelievers. Whatever doubts an impish skeptic like this chronicler might sow, and I’ve dropped them all—details of the racist recruitment tactics used by the LDS in the Civil Rights era south, the timing of the prophet’s proclamation that God had downgraded caffeine from prohibited substance to personal choice just in time for Coca Cola’s sponsorship of cash strapped Salt Lake City Olympics—the youngsters have each other to buttress their faith.

I have come across some poorly matched missionary pairs, but nothing like the two who were to be my guides for a second tour of Temple Square. Sister Zarate hailed from the south of Mexico. Zarate radiated wholesomeness, and not just the typical salt of the earth aura of Mormon missionaries the world over. Zarate hailed from a poor village in Michoacan where years ago two young Americans, from Boise and Provo, cornered her parents at the market and baptized them when she was a young girl. She still remembers her parents’ baptism, and the reflection of her first crush shines in her midnight colored eyes. She had never seen blonde hair or blue eyes before meeting the two Americans. Now she was the first person in her immediate family to travel outside of Michoacan. If Zarate was the pride of her village for serving in far off Salt Lake City, she bore the honor with humility.

If I had met Sister Guinare on the street, only her name badge would have kept me from guessing the tri-Delts at Berkeley had dressed her like a missionary and dumped her on the square as some sort of sorority prank. She was the first missionary I had met who was wearing make-up, her hair looked like her kidnappers had taken her to a salon as part of the Utah ruse. Her thin smile did not reach her eyes. However Guinare had begun her mission, she no longer wanted to be here.

Though their personalities, well, Guinare’s personality, might have challenged their partnership, the two young women also suffered a language gap. Zarate was still studying English and though Guinare said she had taken some Spanish she didn’t want to speak. When I asked her a question she simply shook her head. She was content to be the nail examining silent partner on this tour.

For me meeting this pair was a stroke of luck. I finally had a missionary all to myself without having to corner one in the bathroom. There is just no way to corner a girl in the bathroom without being a creep. I got the feeling Zarate would answer any reasonable questions I put to her. She didn’t have her partner taking mental notes about her responses, and there was very little risk of another Saint eavesdropping.

As we made our way through the visitor’s center, my second trip through the Prophets’ Hall of Fame in an afternoon, I asked Zarate about her conversion to Mormonism. There was no story. Her parents had converted and when she was eight she followed. I got the impression they were among the few families to stick with Mormonism in her region.

“How many Mormons are there in your community?” I asked.

“There are still several Mormon families,” she said.

“But before the ward was larger? Why is that?”

“There were a lot of baptisms the last time we had missionaries that visited our village,” she said.

“Are they not still with the Church?” I asked.

“Some yes… but there are many sects in Mexico, especially among the poor. When the Mormon missionaries come there were many that wantrf to be baptized. When the Jehovah’s Witness come, many of these people want to join them. These people take communion when the priest makes his visit. But there are some who understand. With them the Church will always be strong.”

“Do you think the other sects follow false prophets?” I asked.

Zarate thought about her answer, I looked over at Guinare who lifted red nails over her matching lips to cover a yawn.

“I know that Joseph Smith was a true prophet of Jesus and the Holy Father.”

Zarate seemed to speak from the heart. She was certainly not speaking from the script I had heard so many times in my encounters with LDS abroad. I had put the same question my missionary friends in Slovenia and Elder Lee had given me the official line. That the Latter Day Saints were unique because they were the only religion with a direct covenant with God maintained through a continuous line of apostles dating back to the prophet Joseph Smith. The Jews, along with the Roman, Eastern, and Protestant Church in all its denominations, had lost their direct link with Jesus.

Mohammed, I asked? Mohammed was not a prophet, according to Lee. And the Jews are no longer special. The Latter Day Saints are God’s new chosen people.

But Zarate was more reflective on the subject of a one and true religion. She had grown up witnessing the various missionaries competing in the marketplace for souls. Her family had chosen well, but their choice wasn’t any better or worse than the family that signed on with the Baptists or stuck with the guilt plagued Catholicism of the Spanish and their gold-lusting, small pox bearing conquistadors.

We ascended the wide spiral staircase to the celestial room with the Jesus statue. This was my chance. The statue had been silent on the last tour, and I had been too embarrassed to ask if the statue could talk. A girl in San Francisco had told me about a talking statue in Salt Lake City, I’m pretty sure of Jesus, and I recalled that the story ending up with security guards asking her friend for the film in her camera. That conversation had taken place well after last call. In my experience any story told in San Francisco after 2 am interesting enough to remember the next morning is a good bet for the urban legend file.

Before I asked the question I thought about how I could play this one off, “I mean, if he could talk, what do you think he would say?”

Then again, it wouldn’t be that weird a question for a sister who came from a land where the statues of saints are expected to perform miracles.

So I asked. Zarate motioned to Guinare, who looked bored as she walked out of our little solar system to toggle a hidden control panel.

I sat on a waiting room couch directly in front of the statue. Jesus welcomed me to Temple Square and explained something about his father’s miraculous creation of the cosmos painted on the walls around us.

The Jesus statue talks! I was in awe. I’d like to relate the details of his revelation, but his words escaped me. A giant marble Jesus speaking Spanish in the middle of Utah, and it all washed over my head as if he had been speaking Aramaic. I thought about asking if there was an Aramaic button. But I only had 12 minutes left to interview Zarate, so I took a quick photo with JC and followed the sisters into the next room.

Zarate seemed impressed with my questions. I decided to go a little deeper.

“These are the plates that Moroni showed Joseph Smith?” I asked, pointing to a wax reproduction of Mormon writing out his book before burying it in the woods of upstate New York.

“These are reproductions of those plates,” she said.

“Where are the real plates?”

“The originals were taken back by God,” she explained.

“The Book of Mormon speaks about two tribes in the New World,” I said.

“Yes, the Nephites and the Lamanites.

“The Lamanites were wicked, they turned away from God,” she explained.

According to the Book of Mormon, these two groups were both descended from the lost tribe of Israel that sailed to the Americas 600 years before Christ. The Nephites remained true to God, the Lamanites strayed. War ensued, and evil triumphed. The last good guy, the prophet Mormon, chronicled this ancient America and buried his work in upstate New York. God punished those wicked Lamanites by darkening their skin.

This was the Mormon’s historical explanation for the origin of the indigenous peoples of North and South America. It provided convenient explanation for the cultural inferiority of Native Americans, African slaves, and later for Jim Crowe blacks. In accounts from the old days the Saints seemed to really got off on this skin color business. If Brigham hadn’t had so many wives to please—the biography by his one ex-wife details his miserable failure as a lover—I’d say that all that Stanley, Livingston and Conrad weighing down the upstairs bookcase doubled as a porn collection.

As I looked into a face that might have given Cortez pause had girls, not gold, given him a hard on, I wanted to ask the next question. She lacked the defensiveness of the other missionaries constantly on guard against their godless inquisitors. If she saw where I was going, the serenity of her expression kept the knowledge of my wickedness well hidden.

I couldn’t do it. I felt like one of those Channel Four journalists who seek out the perversities of America by befriending fat swingers, leeching invites to their parties, and then laughing at everyone the moment the subjects are off camera. Sorry as they may look on camera, the fat swingers are at least honest about the whole thing. It’s the journalist with his mocking asides who grates my nerves. Those smug English pricks.

Was my curiosity about sister Zarate’s faith no different than the cheap-shot voyeurism passing for documentary on British television? It’s not my business how she reached spiritual resolution with a book that says her dark coloring was a curse on her people. Though if her brownness was the ancestral mark of Cain, how do any of us think we should get born with white skin?

She probably would have given me fascinating, soul-searching answers for any of the questions my sudden false-politeness would not allow me to query. They weren’t questions for her, or anyone else, all esoteric works have their shortcomings. That the Book of Mormon has so many of them need not concern our last minutes together.