in tay-ux-as...

Hi all. Hope this posting finds everyone well and healthy…
Let me start with a couple of observations about the south. First of all, the kudzu is taking over the world – first the South; next America. For those who don’t know, kudzu is a plant that was imported to stabilize the banks of the Mississippi River. It quickly escaped that area and is now growing wild throughout the south – I even saw it in the everglades. It’s a viney sort of plant that grows up the trunks of trees (or shrubs or guy wires or whatever) and quickly suffocates the trees by not allowing their leaves to get any light, effectively killing them. I’ve tried to get a few photos, but it’s almost comical to see these areas where it’s completely taken over – it looks like topiary – like someone had sculpted a scenery of trees and rocks and shrubs with hedge trimmers.
Secondly, and in the same vein, they imported some flying bugs (informally called love bugs) that were supposed to eat mosquitoes – but they don’t, and the birds won’t eat them because they’re too acidic, and they proliferate like crazy (they’re called love bugs because they are usually flying while coupled – at first I thought it was one bug, until I saw a few ‘solo’) and they’re only known enemy is…the windshield. And supposedly their guts will destroy the finish on a car quickly, which is why I need to get to a car wash soon.
The moral is, don’t mess with Mother Nature unless you know what you’re doing.
And: I know where your Christmas tree comes from. Driving through North Carolina, Tennessee, South Carolina, and throughout the south, I saw huge Christmas tree farms, where they’ve cleared the land of native trees, planted Christmas trees and then harvest them after 4 years and, in most cases, leave the land fallow. (Lots of native stuff regrows, but not the forest.) So to summarize: cut down trees to plant trees to cut them down. Is it any wonder I went to an artificial tree several years ago? Pathetic…
I was in Tallahassee when I last wrote, waiting on new tires for my chariot. After that was done, I headed west on the interstate (yes, I admit it) for about 80 miles before turning north up a highway to Montgomery, Alabama. The rain had let up and the weather was getting hot, so I was hopeful for a dry night in camp. The drive was uneventful; a lot of the same scenery I’d seen throughout the rural south – lots of thick forest, farmland and rangeland, interrupted by a small town about every 5-10 miles along some river or other. I arrived in Montgomery in the late afternoon and went to the Rosa Parks Museum downtown near the state capitol. It was fantastic – every bit as inspiring (and yet horrifying) as I’d expected. The museum basically set the stage by demonstrating segregation in the south in 1954, re-enacted the events leading up to the 13-month bus boycott (her refusal to give up her seat) and showed what happened both during and after the boycott. This event was the birth of the passive resistance civil rights movement and Dr. King’s involvement, and it was interesting to hear some of his early oratory and thoughts about how to pattern the struggle after Gandhi’s efforts in India decades earlier.
I found a good camp spot that evening on some backwaters along the Alabama River between Montgomery and Selma. Although there was no swimming allowed due to alligators, none bothered me as I set up near the waterline (but on top of a steep bank!) There weren’t too many other people and thankfully, none of the RV’s was running a generator, so it was quite peaceful. I roasted hot dogs for dinner, a change from fast food and insta-food, and enjoyed the quietude. I must have been tired because I slept in until almost 9am! And it did stay dry.
Fortunately my next destination, Selma, was not far away. I wanted to visit the site of the so-called ‘Bloody Sunday’ events, where civil rights demonstrators had attempted a march between Selma and Montgomery (a distance of about 50 miles) but were brutally beaten back on the bridge outside of town after going just 6 blocks. They were protesting the death of another activist weeks earlier who was killed during a voting rights demonstration in another town. A couple of weeks after the beatings, Dr. King came down and led a 5-day march to the state capitol, hoping to get an audience with Governor Wallace. About 3000 started the march but there were 25,000 at the end. There’s an excellent museum along highway 80 dedicated to these events. I came away with a newfound appreciation for President Lyndon Johnson and his role in pushing through voting rights legislation. I’ve always thought of Johnson in terms of the Vietnam War and its acceleration under him, although he’d campaigned promising withdrawal. I see now that he was a real champion for civil rights – one quote from him, just a few days after the beatings and before Dr. King’s march, showed that he already completely understood the events in Selma as a turning point in American history, comparing it to Lexington and Appomattox. Great stuff!
After leaving the museum, I headed into Selma proper and walked over the bridge to the memorial below. The main part of the memorial park is well kept-up, but the lower portion had a lot of trash. I picked up some of it but wished I had about 10 trash bags. That would’ve been my small contribution, so that when school kids visited the site they’d see it nice and clean. Missed opportunity…
I headed west again, out towards Philadelphia, Mississippi which is another civil rights site. In 1964 three voter registration activists were murdered here, and the case went unsolved until just a couple of years ago. I don’t know what I expected to see, but the only acknowledgement of the event is that they named the highway into town after the three men. There’s no memorial or even plaque that I could find. I tried to imagine what it was like for two young Jewish college kids from New York City, who’d never been in the deep South, to come down and volunteer for a just cause - and lose their lives almost immediately. Tough to swallow, what we Americans have done to each other.
I headed north out of Philadelphia towards a national forest campground, on my way to Memphis where Dr. King was slain. This campground was also very quiet, along a lake with some good hiking trails (populated with many spiders, of course). I took my spider-whacker stick and wandered through the forest for about 4 miles and then hit the road. In Memphis, they’ve converted the Loraine Hotel (where the assassination occurred) into the National Civil Rights Museum. It had a lot of what I’d already seen, but of course concentrated a lot on Dr. King’s works. It was a good synopsis of all the work that had gone on in America and what’s left to do.
Since I’d picked up another hour in the day (because of moving into the Central time zone) I had time to drive all the way to Arkansas Hot Springs without missing too much because of darkness. The campground was pretty crowded, as this is a popular destination year-round, but I found a lot of great hiking nearby. It was the best hiking I’d had since hitting the AT in Tennessee over a week ago – I got some serious climbing and heavy breathing! The trails were well-used and not too many spiders had chosen to weave their webs across the paths. I hiked down into the village where the hot baths are but was too cheap to pay for the ‘spa treatment’. Guess I’ll have to come back with Naomi, who enjoys that sort of thing. I did add to my t-shirt collection, as I’ve been buying cheap t-shirts for the students in my upcoming class in Shanghai.
I headed south and east towards Louisiana. I know that’s the wrong direction but I hadn’t really stuck my toe into the Mississippi River, so I had to do that. I kind of made a Z down to the southeast corner of Arkansas and back west a bit towards Alexandria, where I spent the night in Chateau Prius when I couldn’t find the campground in the national forest. The sections of Arkansas and Louisiana I was driving through are very flat and agricultural, and I could have been driving through the central valley in California. There were some forested areas in Louisiana, and I actually encountered an armadillo (a LIVE one for a change!) along a forest service road. He walked sort of slowly and ponderously across the road – until I approached him with the camera, at which point he zipped into the bushes. Didn’t know they could move that fast…
Being a Tabasco fan, I decided I had to take the factory tour, which was down on Avery Island in southern Louisiana. It was pretty interesting, especially the jalapeno ice cream. Picked up a couple of souvenir bottles and headed down through the swamps towards Texas. I’d been waiting to see some actual swamps with cypress and alligators and such, and I wasn’t disappointed. There were a couple of wildlife preserves with lots of birds and enough reptiles to satisfy me too.
I managed to make it all the way down to Galveston, Texas, which is a beach town (and port) on the Gulf. I got one of the last campspots (fortunate I had a tent rather than an RV) and got a chance to walk along the beach in the dark as well. This morning I got up and broke camp and headed over to the beach so I could “bathe”. I suppose the EPA might have gotten after me for water pollution but they didn’t catch me. I’m sitting in a Starbucks writing this up and waiting for my car to be washed (volunteer car wash at the business next door – hopefully they will remove my bug collection.) I’m going to San Antonio to visit a cousin this evening and then on down to Big Bend National Park along the Rio Grande. Time’s running short, as I need to be back in Sacramento by October 10th, and I still have a ways to go…Hope all’s well with everyone reading this. Take care!