Road Trip 2
continued from below
On the edge of Eatonton in central Georgia stands the Uncle Remus Museum. It's a little collection of woodcarvings and 19th-century artifacts, hapazardly catalogued, housed in a log hovel built from material from two slave cabins.
A kindly matron from Atlanta, who moved to the countryside after retirement, explained the place to us from behind the glass counter which held books of "Uncle Remus" stories translated into dozens of languages. The tales from a plantation up the road belong to world folklore now.
Bre'er Rabbit is the Dogon trickster in backwoods Georgia garb. But I wonder how well the stories are received today among the descendants of those who created them. Joel Chandler Harris, it seems, never regarded the fables as his own literary productions. He was recounting what he was told in the quarters on the plantation, and he always said so. The "dese" and "dose" dialect in which they are written seems to me not to degrade the narrator, but to keep a respectful distance between the white author and the African creations he was passing from the slaves' firesides to the wide world.
Harris was a man painfully shy -- ashamed of his origins, perhaps (his mother was a grass widow and wealthy neighbors paid for his schooling) -- who worked as a teenaged printer at a Georgia country newspaper before the Civil War. As an outsider, he seemed to feel more comfortable in the company of the slaves than of the wealthy white planters around him.
The only other visitors we saw in the museum in Eatonton were a young white couple, storytellers.
Alice Walker also is from Eatonton. Different media, different ages, different goals, different voices, but the two writers are rooted in the same soil. It is an open question, to me, whether black folks, especially the men, come across in better light in the works of one or the other. Certainly Walker's creations are more complex, more human, just as Aeschylus' are moreso than Aesops'.
We spent the night in Milledgeville, then drove down into Florida. We stopped for lunch at an excellent Cuban place in Gainesville, where Amy lived for a while long ago, and watched a gator watching us in the pond beside the campus. Then we pushed on, to New Port Richey, on the west coast above Clearwater, where my parents had rented a place.
I hadn't been to the West Coast of Florida since 1969. Nothing's changed. It's still the Geriatric Riviera. Six-lane highways crawl with traffic, past mile after mile of chain drugstores and restaurants and billboards for funeral homes, cancer treatments, and botox. The weather was lousy, too; only in the 50s and rainy all the time. Above, Luke and my father sit on the dock behind the rented place, during the exact 20 seconds when the sun shone while we were there.
Sun, palm trees, ocean! We're in Florida at last. But why isn't it warm?
One result of the bad weather was that I had some time to read. I skimmed through The Right Nation, a book about the rise of conservative America in the last 20 years, written by a pair of British journalists. They aspire to be modern-day de Tocquevilles. Their analysis is unprejudiced and anthropological, and they have an obvious affection for their subject. Yet it's definitely an outsider's view, and a European one to be exact, and as such they clearly feel more at home in the blue parts of the U.S. map than the red ones.
That aside, I thought it a fair and penetrating look at the situation in both historical and current-events terms. Their conclusion won't sit well with the Bush-haters. The coalition that steers modern America along the conservative shoreline is uneasy and loose, but the left keeps it focused by being clueless. I also enjoyed their puncturing of the paranoid myth of neo-con wizards who, so we have been told, work Bush's strings from the White House rafters.
And major props to these two authors for doing what few foreign pundits do in the U.S.: They left the Beltway and actually went out to the Southern small towns and the Midwestern suburban communities where conservatives live. That gives their observations some spice. They're able to describe people and places, not just ideas. Odd, though, that after listing characteristics of Red Staters, emphasizing a fondness for big buffet restaurants and bulging waistlines, they segue into a dramatic contrast with the other side, starting with Michael Moore.
So after visiting with my parents and reading their books, we pushed on south.
Crossing the Tampa Bay bridge.
Now it started to feel like Florida at last. Passing Punta Gorda we still saw much evidence of last summer's hurricanes: pines all snapped in one direction, headless palms, lots of blue tarps on roofs, and neon signs blown out.
But southwest Florida is growing faster than any place I have ever seen. I thought Chester County in the '80s was bad. This is on a whole different scale. You drive for two miles past a single swath of torn-up swamp, where an entire community is under construction; hundreds of homes, shopping centers, entertainment multiplexes, hospitals -- all at once, all under one plan, rising up like a re-born lost continent.
We dropped in (invited) on Marc Schulman of American Future, and met his lovely wife and had a talky lunch at a nice Italian place. I've met online people IRL before, but this is the first time I shook hands with someone I know primarily as a blogger. Same for him, and it was an affirmation that people who are decent in writing are good company.
Then it was back on the road and across the Everglades. At last, at nightfall, we crossed into the Keys. Odd how you can drive down Florida for nine hours or so and see essentially the same thing, and then you cross that little drawbridge at the edge of Lake Surprise, and hit Mile Marker 110, and you're in a different country, a different world. This can't be America. Where's the Ruby Tuesdays? And the next one, five miles down the road?
We hit the hotel and then ducked across the street for a raucous late dinner at The Island, amid rich boat-owners, scruffy old hippies, Russian tourists, Spring Breakers who got detached from the mobs, and a general Whitman's Sampler of amiable hedonists. I love this place.
The next day, we drove over Seven Mile Bridge down to Bahia Honda (that's Luke there, above) and threw our road-weary selves down on the white sand and stared at the blue water and sky and pretended we'd never been, or done, anything else, ever. It's the best beach in the Keys, for my money. They are blessed with many things, but good wide sandy beaches aren't one of them.
Snorkeling didn't yield any spectacular shells that day, just a few crabs and dead sponges that looked like monstrous hands. But the thrill is in the search, and in finding yourself swimming in the company of sting rays and barracudas.
The next day we spent in Key West. Here's Amy and Luke shooting pool in the Green Parrot Cafe, one of the places that has more locals than tourists. Key West has the right idea: give the tourists a big blow-out on a couple of main drag streets, and then let the real people in the place live in relative peace off to the side. We did our obligatory shopping and dining (at the Iguana, across from Hemingway's bar) on Duval, then took strolls through the Bahamian-bohemian sidestreets and ended up here.
We noticed we're not very good trip documentarists with the camera. Especially on the days when Luke has it; then all we get are National Geographic-like pictures of bugs, lizards, moss, and plants. As well as embarrassing movies of dad. Whole days and places are missing from our photo file. We're out here living it, not documenting it.
And aren't travel pictures always inaccessible anyway, except to the people who were there? You look at this and see a blurry photo of a kid and a woman and some green felt. But I look at it and I can breathe again the salty, hot air even while I sit here in chilly, gray Pennsylvania. And I can taste the local brew Key West beer, and hear the conversation of the sailors at the next table and remember how they got into a game later with a couple of barefoot bearded hippies.
Drinkie-poos, of course, are as mandatory as the casual dress code. Amy is searching for the perfect Margarita. We never found it. Or maybe we did. I forget.
The sun gets all the credit for setting. But the Earth is the one that has to roll around all the time to keep it moving. The earth needs better PR.
Ah, paradise. I've got to start playing the lottery again, so I can look forward to living like this every day.
to be continued
There's more of our trip pictures, including Luke's artistic shots and bigger versions of some of these pics, in this album.
On the edge of Eatonton in central Georgia stands the Uncle Remus Museum. It's a little collection of woodcarvings and 19th-century artifacts, hapazardly catalogued, housed in a log hovel built from material from two slave cabins.
A kindly matron from Atlanta, who moved to the countryside after retirement, explained the place to us from behind the glass counter which held books of "Uncle Remus" stories translated into dozens of languages. The tales from a plantation up the road belong to world folklore now.
Bre'er Rabbit is the Dogon trickster in backwoods Georgia garb. But I wonder how well the stories are received today among the descendants of those who created them. Joel Chandler Harris, it seems, never regarded the fables as his own literary productions. He was recounting what he was told in the quarters on the plantation, and he always said so. The "dese" and "dose" dialect in which they are written seems to me not to degrade the narrator, but to keep a respectful distance between the white author and the African creations he was passing from the slaves' firesides to the wide world.
Harris was a man painfully shy -- ashamed of his origins, perhaps (his mother was a grass widow and wealthy neighbors paid for his schooling) -- who worked as a teenaged printer at a Georgia country newspaper before the Civil War. As an outsider, he seemed to feel more comfortable in the company of the slaves than of the wealthy white planters around him.
The only other visitors we saw in the museum in Eatonton were a young white couple, storytellers.
Alice Walker also is from Eatonton. Different media, different ages, different goals, different voices, but the two writers are rooted in the same soil. It is an open question, to me, whether black folks, especially the men, come across in better light in the works of one or the other. Certainly Walker's creations are more complex, more human, just as Aeschylus' are moreso than Aesops'.
We spent the night in Milledgeville, then drove down into Florida. We stopped for lunch at an excellent Cuban place in Gainesville, where Amy lived for a while long ago, and watched a gator watching us in the pond beside the campus. Then we pushed on, to New Port Richey, on the west coast above Clearwater, where my parents had rented a place.
I hadn't been to the West Coast of Florida since 1969. Nothing's changed. It's still the Geriatric Riviera. Six-lane highways crawl with traffic, past mile after mile of chain drugstores and restaurants and billboards for funeral homes, cancer treatments, and botox. The weather was lousy, too; only in the 50s and rainy all the time. Above, Luke and my father sit on the dock behind the rented place, during the exact 20 seconds when the sun shone while we were there.
Sun, palm trees, ocean! We're in Florida at last. But why isn't it warm?
One result of the bad weather was that I had some time to read. I skimmed through The Right Nation, a book about the rise of conservative America in the last 20 years, written by a pair of British journalists. They aspire to be modern-day de Tocquevilles. Their analysis is unprejudiced and anthropological, and they have an obvious affection for their subject. Yet it's definitely an outsider's view, and a European one to be exact, and as such they clearly feel more at home in the blue parts of the U.S. map than the red ones.
That aside, I thought it a fair and penetrating look at the situation in both historical and current-events terms. Their conclusion won't sit well with the Bush-haters. The coalition that steers modern America along the conservative shoreline is uneasy and loose, but the left keeps it focused by being clueless. I also enjoyed their puncturing of the paranoid myth of neo-con wizards who, so we have been told, work Bush's strings from the White House rafters.
And major props to these two authors for doing what few foreign pundits do in the U.S.: They left the Beltway and actually went out to the Southern small towns and the Midwestern suburban communities where conservatives live. That gives their observations some spice. They're able to describe people and places, not just ideas. Odd, though, that after listing characteristics of Red Staters, emphasizing a fondness for big buffet restaurants and bulging waistlines, they segue into a dramatic contrast with the other side, starting with Michael Moore.
So after visiting with my parents and reading their books, we pushed on south.
Crossing the Tampa Bay bridge.
Now it started to feel like Florida at last. Passing Punta Gorda we still saw much evidence of last summer's hurricanes: pines all snapped in one direction, headless palms, lots of blue tarps on roofs, and neon signs blown out.
But southwest Florida is growing faster than any place I have ever seen. I thought Chester County in the '80s was bad. This is on a whole different scale. You drive for two miles past a single swath of torn-up swamp, where an entire community is under construction; hundreds of homes, shopping centers, entertainment multiplexes, hospitals -- all at once, all under one plan, rising up like a re-born lost continent.
We dropped in (invited) on Marc Schulman of American Future, and met his lovely wife and had a talky lunch at a nice Italian place. I've met online people IRL before, but this is the first time I shook hands with someone I know primarily as a blogger. Same for him, and it was an affirmation that people who are decent in writing are good company.
Then it was back on the road and across the Everglades. At last, at nightfall, we crossed into the Keys. Odd how you can drive down Florida for nine hours or so and see essentially the same thing, and then you cross that little drawbridge at the edge of Lake Surprise, and hit Mile Marker 110, and you're in a different country, a different world. This can't be America. Where's the Ruby Tuesdays? And the next one, five miles down the road?
We hit the hotel and then ducked across the street for a raucous late dinner at The Island, amid rich boat-owners, scruffy old hippies, Russian tourists, Spring Breakers who got detached from the mobs, and a general Whitman's Sampler of amiable hedonists. I love this place.
The next day, we drove over Seven Mile Bridge down to Bahia Honda (that's Luke there, above) and threw our road-weary selves down on the white sand and stared at the blue water and sky and pretended we'd never been, or done, anything else, ever. It's the best beach in the Keys, for my money. They are blessed with many things, but good wide sandy beaches aren't one of them.
Snorkeling didn't yield any spectacular shells that day, just a few crabs and dead sponges that looked like monstrous hands. But the thrill is in the search, and in finding yourself swimming in the company of sting rays and barracudas.
The next day we spent in Key West. Here's Amy and Luke shooting pool in the Green Parrot Cafe, one of the places that has more locals than tourists. Key West has the right idea: give the tourists a big blow-out on a couple of main drag streets, and then let the real people in the place live in relative peace off to the side. We did our obligatory shopping and dining (at the Iguana, across from Hemingway's bar) on Duval, then took strolls through the Bahamian-bohemian sidestreets and ended up here.
We noticed we're not very good trip documentarists with the camera. Especially on the days when Luke has it; then all we get are National Geographic-like pictures of bugs, lizards, moss, and plants. As well as embarrassing movies of dad. Whole days and places are missing from our photo file. We're out here living it, not documenting it.
And aren't travel pictures always inaccessible anyway, except to the people who were there? You look at this and see a blurry photo of a kid and a woman and some green felt. But I look at it and I can breathe again the salty, hot air even while I sit here in chilly, gray Pennsylvania. And I can taste the local brew Key West beer, and hear the conversation of the sailors at the next table and remember how they got into a game later with a couple of barefoot bearded hippies.
Drinkie-poos, of course, are as mandatory as the casual dress code. Amy is searching for the perfect Margarita. We never found it. Or maybe we did. I forget.
The sun gets all the credit for setting. But the Earth is the one that has to roll around all the time to keep it moving. The earth needs better PR.
Ah, paradise. I've got to start playing the lottery again, so I can look forward to living like this every day.
to be continued
There's more of our trip pictures, including Luke's artistic shots and bigger versions of some of these pics, in this album.
