Downtown Clarksdale was a near-seamless integration of the chic pseudo-poverty and actual poverty. Down near the Delta Blues Museum, a dull redbrick building with green awnings that I would have taken for a retirement home were it not for the unassuming sign out front, there was nothing much around but a railroad spur, where ferns [...]
Archive for June, 2008
Blues town
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Clarksdale, Delta Blues Museum, Mississippi, poverty, tourism on June 30, 2008 | 1 Comment »
New junk
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Clarksdale, Hopson Plantation, junk, Mississippi on June 27, 2008 | 1 Comment »
The vintage-model mechanized cotton picker sitting on the front lawn of the Hopson Plantation at the edge of Clarksdale, Mississippi looked like a heap of scrap metal that might have been carted off to the dump if anybody cared enough to bother. Its rust-orange frame resembled that of a primitive tractor, amended with a cage [...]
Memorials
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Alabama, Birmingham, black business district, Civil Rights Institute, Martin Luther King Jr. on June 25, 2008 | 1 Comment »
I like to believe that the negative extremes of Birmingham’s past will resolve into the positives and utopian extreme of her future; that the sins of a dark yesterday will be redeemed in the achievements of a bright tomorrow.
-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
The words were inscribed on a dark, marble wall in the rotunda [...]
Road to Birmingham
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Alabama, Birmingham, Swann Covered Bridge, urban sprawl on June 24, 2008 | 3 Comments »
The sprawl lining the road from Hazel Green south toward Birmingham had more personality than the formulaic strip malls that barricaded in the highly-trafficked corridors outside Atlanta and Charlotte and everywhere else, though this is not to say they were necessarily less ugly. The Wal-Mart and Lowe’s empires still had feudal outposts here, but the [...]
Dragging that weight
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Alabama, Cook's Natural Science Museum, creationism, Decatur, Hazel Green, John R. Cook Sr., natural science, Tractor pull on June 22, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
In Alabama, we have finally found a land entirely strange to us.
At first glance, it didn’t look much different from southern Tennessee. It had the same rustic farms with tightly-wound spools of hay, the same aged signs advertising local roadside eateries, the same cattle pastures and cornfields and single-floor brick houses with well-mown lawns alongside [...]
Life and casualty
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Nashville, Nashville skyline, street muscians, Woody Guthrie on June 20, 2008 | 1 Comment »
When Bob Dylan released his album Nashville Skyline in 1969, the cluster of buildings for which he named it was less crowded than it is now. Back then, it was pretty much just the SunTrust Building, the Parkway Towers, the newly minted Andrew Jackson State Office Building, and the sinister-sounding Life and Casualty Tower, which, [...]
Crossing over
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Chickamauga, Civil War, Cumberland Plateau, Georgia, Tennessee on June 19, 2008 | 1 Comment »
We crossed into the Central Time Zone somewhere north of Chattanooga on I-24, which in the low evening sun had become suddenly beautiful, carved as it was into the Cumberland Plateau. It was around this time that we passed our first cornfield. There were other fields, too, golden squares abutting the green ones and making [...]
Road to Rome
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Georgia, Martha's Skillet, Rome, Rome News-Tribune, strip malls, urban sprawl, Wal-Mart on June 18, 2008 | 1 Comment »
We headed north late the next morning, setting our sights on Nashville. It was only three and a half hours away, so we decided to take our time on back roads.
The first stretch of US-41 was a corridor of ceaseless strip-sprawl, with the same clusters of chain restaurants and big box stores lining the [...]
The Happiness Factory
Posted in The Southeast, tagged Atlanta, Beverly, Ciel Aquarius, Coca-Cola, Georgia, Happiness Factory, Inca Kola, Smart Apple, World of Coca-Cola on June 17, 2008 | 2 Comments »
Atlanta is the Coca-Cola capital of the world. Visitors who manage to breach the city limits without knowing this will deduce it in no time—the brand’s calligraphic emblem is nearly as ubiquitous here as the Confederate battle flag was in South Carolina. And while we considered trolling for Americana in some of the smaller towns [...]
The sounds of nature
Posted in The Southeast, tagged insects, Lake Aire RV Park and Campground, South Carolina on June 15, 2008 | 1 Comment »
Feral ducks notwithstanding, the Lake Aire campsite was certainly livable. Our place at the end of the peninsula allowed us to enjoy the isolation and earthiness that makes backwoods camping so pleasant, without having the deal with the lack of indoor plumbing that makes it occasionally unpleasant. There were bathrooms, laundry machines, shower stalls, and [...]
