Road Trip

The road trip is this near-mythical American concept, born of equal parts Manifest Destiny, Henry Ford and evocations in popular culture. To me, those two words conjure Kerouac’s On the Road, which I haven’t read. Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley, which I have, and Paul Simon’s song America—the latter having been revitalized in my memory by the recent discovery of an improbable version by the British prog-rock band Yes that I found on an added-tracks CD of 1971’s Fragile.

In Simon’s bittersweet Vietnam-era travelogue there’s the line “Michigan seems like a dream to me now.” Well, so, too, does my own April 13-19 journey through the American South. While it was happening I took daily notes, with the intention of ending my self-imposed blog hiatus with an amazing, revelatory addition to the Great American Road Trip canon. In my mind, this idiosyncratic yet deeply insightful piece not only would elicit gasps of admiration from my tiny but loyal readership, but somehow would find its way to a wider audience, leading to a book deal or at least to an invitation to blog for pay on some hotshot website.

But when I came off the road, it seemed as if there were many demands on my time more compelling than sitting down at the PC in a protracted struggle to shape my experiences into something literarily memorable. There not only was that pesky paying job that again was taking up so much of my time, but there were newspapers and magazines to read, e-mails to write, texts to send and TV shows to watch. Indeed, even though the editing project that had been the putative cause of the hiatus was done, not even an automotive odyssey trip through seven states and across 2,400 miles in six days had changed the fact that blogging is work, and that my work ethic isn’t the best. Would I like to be known far and wide as a brilliant writer? You bet! Am I—have I ever been—willing to put in the time and effort to hone those skills and truly develop whatever talent I might have? Not so much.

Still, there are certain things I want to relate to you about what truly was a memorable trip—one that came about because Lynn’s and my friend Julie Smith wanted to show her English second cousin Danny Pickwell a bit of America on his first journey stateside.

Now, if I were to have written the rich and multifaceted travel opus I’d originally conceived, there’d have been a lot in there—in a much longer post than this one—about the many charms of the tireless Julie, who got stuck with the vast majority of the driving because I can’t (physically or legally) drive a stick shift, and because Danny didn’t feel entirely comfortable driving on the “wrong” side of the road. I would have tried to convey, too, why and how much I enjoyed the company of the affable Englishman, who runs a bed and breakfast back home and surely is the perfect host.

But, for the purposes of this lazy-assed abbreviation of my road trip story, suffice it to say that I can scarcely imagine two people with whom I’d rather have shared close quarters for multiple days while constantly snacking, singing badly to various musical genres, and popping in and out of truck stop megastores so jam-packed with junk foods, automotive supplies and electronic gadget as to make one simultaneously awed and appalled to live in a nation whose carbon footprint is so grievously outsized.

So, let me first related the itinerary, then bullet-point the highlights.

We set off from Julie’s house in Sterling, Virginia, and reached Nashville, Tennessee, that first day. We subsequently traveled through Memphis, the Mississippi Delta, the Mississippi city of Hattiesburg (where Julie’s English mum incongruously lives), and New Orleans, then headed back via the Gulf Coast all the way to Pensacola, Florida, through Alabama to Athens, Georgia (home of Julie’s adult son Tanner), and back to Sterling.

Highlights:

Graceland. In the 19th century, cotton was king in the South, but by the latter half of the 20th century the King was Elvis Presley. So, we hardly could take an English tourist through the region without paying tribute to the King at his home in Memphis.

I’d never been to Graceland, but I thought I knew what to expect: Kitsch overload. Ostentation, tacky furnishings, an onslaught of gift shops bursting with tacky souvenirs. An ambiance that was in keeping with the man himself: a huge talent who wasted and prematurely lost his life in an excess of food, booze and pills.

What I saw and discovered, much to my surprise, delight and sorrow, was a moving memorial to a devoted family man and generous philanthropist whose descent into dissolution was tragic, but which didn’t negate all that was admirable in his musical and personal legacy.

I was surprised by the modesty and lack of grandiosity of everything from the house and grounds to the portrait of the man painted by the audio tour and the photo-rich memorabilia. Yes, I know that Graceland, as a money-making enterprise, is dedicated to burnishing Elvis’s image, but I learned a lot that added dimension to the flat and rather clownish image I’d had of a sultry superstar gone fat and stoned. Particularly moving were the joyful reminiscences of her dad by Lisa Marie, who’s always come off in public as a rather cold and unsympathetic figure.

There is what only can be described as a riot of gift shops, however. And my Graceland umbrella, purchased in response to that day’s downpour, lasted fully one day before it fell apart. And no, Elvis’s decorating style wasn’t the classiest, as evinced by the carpeted walls of the stairwell leading to the King’s faux-safari room.

Clarksburg, Mississippi. You know that Cream song “Crossroads”? It’s not a Cream song. It was written by Delta bluesman Robert Johnson in 1936. The crossroads to which he was referring are in Clarksburg. We stayed there overnight, at a great ramshackle cluster of lodgings called the Shack Up Inn. Julie found it for us on the Internet. The owners have moved and refurbished a collection of old sharecropper shacks. Mine was named Pinetop in honor of bluesman Pinetop Perkins.

While in Clarksburg, we heard live Delta blues at Red’s, a bona fide juke joint that is dumpy, tiny, smoky and wonderful. There, I happily burst my eardrums and washed down my two coleslaw sandwiches (there was nothing else vegetarian on the menu) with an 18-ounce Budweiser.

Clarksburg also is the home of the Delta Blues Museum, which we toured, and the Ground Zero blues bar, which is partly owned by Mississippi native son Morgan Freeman. We lunched at Ground Zero, where I feasted on a soul food vegetable plate that included one of the best pieces of cornbread I’ve ever eaten.

Also in Clarksburg, I added Mississippi to the list of states in which I’ve run for one uninterrupted hour. It was chilly and windy that particular morning, and I got no sense that passing motorists had any inkling of the history being made on their roadside. But I was psyched, and afterward I allowed myself a few mini-doughnuts from the Shack Up’s version of a continental breakfast spread, which was limited to a few pastries and coffee.

New Orleans. This wasn’t the stuff of Mardi Gras. It was a cold day; the parade of naked women Julie had assured us we’d see failed to materialize, to Danny’s and my bitter disappointment; and our streetcar ride was intermittent and confusing due to construction on the trolley line. But we got a great walking tour of the French Quarter that included a raised cemetery and the House of the Rising Sun, I snapped pictures of Danny stuffing his face with crawfish, and at Julie’s urging we went that night to a dueling-piano bar that was so cheesy that, with the aid of a few ridiculously alcoholic hurricanes, it was fantastic. Four female pianists alternated taking pop-song requests from the audience and reducing each to its two-minute essence. A sloppy cross-section of America enthusiastically if not tunefully harmonized.

Photographs. This was my first road big road trip with an iPhone, so I took a lot of pictures. This was a highlight for me because of the ability my phone afforded me to indiscriminately shoot, and the gratification of being able to instantly view every single poorly composed, badly lit and blurry image.

Actually, some shots turned out pretty well. Among my favorites were interior shots at Graceland and exterior shots of the rustic and rusty Shack Up Inn grounds; a fish skeleton on the beach in Long Beach, Mississippi; a line of urinals in rainbow colors behind  a casino in Biloxi where construction was being conducted; the juxtaposition within a Gulf Coast strip mall of The Wireless Center and End Time Ministries (enjoy broadband access while awaiting Armageddon!); close-ups of a pelican and a heron at a downtown Tallahassee park; and shots of Danny modeling cowboy hats at a huge discount store in North Carolina on our journey’s final day.

So, that was my road trip. It wasn’t bawdy like Kerouac’s, or topical like Steinbeck’s, or lyrical like Simon’s. It was personally memorable, though. And Danny has promised us Road Trip II: The English Leg when we can get over there. Maybe that will be the road trip that I’ll immortalize in brilliant prose. A Maryland Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, or some such.

But I dunno. Sounds like a lot of work. Probably not.