Jackson, Mississippi to Tupelo MS

Yesterday I had no agenda other than visit Jackson, so my driving day began. Jackson was less than an hour from Vicksburg so a quick drive. I knew I would visit the Mississippi Civil Rights museum  but I was not prepared for the enormity of that visit.

The museum is only a couple of years old and it covers the history of African Americans for over 400 years. The exhibits are so intricate and woven so well together, the entire thing is so well curated and complete that you could visit it over and over and still not see everything. Audio, visual, primary source material,  video, interactive displays, there is so much that it both amazes and breaks your heart at the same time. It amazes because the amount of work and research the exhibition displays is enormous. And heartbreaking because of the documentation of the horrors, struggles and injustice the black race has had to endure.

It was, needless to say, a profound experience. And it was just Mississippi's part of this history, each state in the South its own separate but similar story to tell.

From Jackson I meandered northeast, drove up part of the beautiful Natchez Trace Parkway, through some small towns, had a nice pork sandwich at a small BBQ spot in Starkville and finally pulled in to Tupelo around 5:30. By then it was raining. Two hours later it was storming: thunder, lightning, pounding rain and high winds. From my fourth floor hotel window I had a good seat for the weather's fierce show. Since my lunch had been late, I skipped dinner in favor of staying dry.

Today I think I will head northeast again back into Tennessee or maybe Alabama. I have a hotel secured for two nights in Nashville starting on Tuesday, then it will be back down south to Louisiana. Following the Mississippi River will be easier there and I will get to spend some time watching it travel to the Gulf of Mexico.

More to come, of course.

Driving through the Mississippi Delta

Driving along the Mississippi River should be easy, it certainly isn't discrete, but it is elusive from the road.  You know it's there but it is always just behind that berm or just a little too far away to actually see. When you finally get a glimpse, it's worth the miles you have spent searching for it: it is pretty massive.
I covered a lot of territory yesterday and saw the river a few times and ended up in Vicksburg, which is on the river. Along the way were crazy billboards for everything from Survival and Gun Conventions to Finding the Voice of God to dozens of billboards from lawyers promising to get you money or land or custody of your kids.  I saw a dead warthog (or maybe it was a wild boar) and a flock of white cranes. Houses standing in water up to their front porch railings, not to be on dry land for months to come. In a large flock of blackbirds there was one brilliantly red bird, maybe a cardinal, that made me exclaim out loud.

I drove mainly small back roads so there were hundreds of broken down cars, broken homes, sad looking old men on rickety chairs sitting on corners. For a while I was on Hwy. 61, Mississippi's Blues Highway, and I stopped at a visitor center for the Blues. A charming woman pointed me to a small cafe for breakfast where I was treated like a local and had good coffee ("what? No cream or sugar?") and good food. The road was bordered on both sides with miles and miles of cotton fields, the historic product of the Delta and the years of slave labor.

Being in the South does remind you how white California really is. I don't mean that to sound negative but it is easy to forget what the rest of America is like.

The coffee in hotels is always bad and there isn't the coffee culture in the South like there is on the coast. I haven't seen a Starbucks since I left the airport in Memphis so this morning I am on a quest for a good cup of strong coffee.  While on that search I will see a bit more of Vicksburg and then visit Jackson and after that we'll see where the road takes me.

Thursday Road Trip report

In the last two days, I have been in Texas for an hour, then in Tennessee, Arkansas and Mississippi. I didn't count California in there, of course. Tomorrow will be more Mississippi and I don't know where else. Louisiana perhaps? 

Yesterday was a limited intro to the southern states. It started when I got onto the flight from Dallas to Memphis. As usual, I was the last person to board the plane (my choice) but right behind me was a pilot who was deadheading on that flight. He smiled nicely, as Texans do, asked me if I lived in Memphis, and when I said no, I lived in Northern California, his smile turned into a skinny tight mean line. He said, and I am not kidding, "We don't want those California values coming into our state."  I countered with something about how I always found people in Texas to be so nice and welcoming. He said nothing, just continued with his skinny   lips. Finally I said as I was walking onto the plane "I believe that people with different beliefs can live together." He looked like he wanted to slap me. 

Yay for that. Then there was an hour wait to get the rental car because no one had shown up for work to clean the cars coming in that day and the only reason I got a car is because a cool guy just took things into his own hands and handed out keys, I am not kidding, just to get the eight of us waiting a car. So I ended up with a very large SUV kind of car. I maneuvered my way out of the Memphis airport and onto an interstate and after two hours I realized I needed to stop and hang out and figure out a plan. I checked into a hotel, read the maps and decided on a plan for today. Then I went out and had a crappy dinner, came back and went to bed.

Today I got on the road about 9:00 with a general road plan and I am now in Vicksburg, Mississippi in a fine low cost hotel having had two cocktails and a pizza with Brussels sprouts, bacon and harissa sauce which sounds questionable but is amazingly delicious, and all the details of today leading to that pizza with be forthcoming tomorrow.  

"The Mississippi's mighty, it starts in Minnesota......

...at a place that you could walk across with five steps down. I guess that's how you started, like a pinprick to my heart...."  (Thank you, Indigo Girls.)

For years I have wanted to drive the length of the Mississippi River, from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, south of New Orleans. It's about a 3,000 mile drive if you take the winding road that parallels the Mississippi. At this time of the year starting in Minnesota is not really feasible because it is still frozen there, or at least it is now. That could change this week as temperatures rise and snow melts.

Next Thursday I fly into Memphis.  Two weeks later I fly out of Memphis, back to SFO. For those two weeks I will attempt to see as much as the Mississippi as I can, crossing it, driving the Great River Road as much as I can, rain and flooding being the deterrent, I suppose. I don't know how it will go, but I am doing it just the same. If need be, I will simply drive another route but seeing the Mississippi empty into the Gulf of Mexico is sort of the end game for the drive.  There will be a detour to Nashville for two nights because Lucinda Williams is playing at the Ryman Theater on April 2, celebrating the 20th anniversary of the release of "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road," one of her finest albums in her long productive career. And the Ryman! Iconic! I am quite excited about that.

No other hotel rooms have been booked, it is a seat-of-the-pants sort of trip, just me and my rental car, a bucket of maps and off I will go. I hope to write about it, so please stay tuned and I will post photos on Instagram as well. I am finding small parkways that run for hundreds of miles through state and national forests, in Kentucky and Tennessee and Mississippi, so there will be no lack of beautiful roads to explore.

If you know me at all you know that the thing I love most (after my kids) is travel. There are no funds for this trip other than my old-age savings account but as I feel my body slowly eroding from the encroaching older age, it's do it now or don't do it at all. The next two or three years will hopefully find me going to as many places as I can. Money be damned!  (Well, not really.....) My job is realistically on hold for another two weeks anyway and no one knows how well Autocamp will bounce back from the floods (or "high water event" as we have been instructed to say) and thus how many hours I will be needed in the next two months is up in the air. So I take to the road.....


Get your motors running, head out on the highway, looking for adventure, whatever comes our way. 

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On and on in the muck.

There is no doubt that disaster brings chaos. The cleanup after any disaster is also unpleasant, unorganized and unproductive and it takes a while for that negativity to dissipate. 

Let's leave it at that. It is sufficient to say that great headway has been made in getting my place of employment ready to reopen on April 1.  It certainly looks better than it did ten days ago.

Since there isn't really a plan in place and because the work is so spotty, I have decided to take two weeks off and go on a road trip. The details are still being worked out (well, it's just me so those details are still lodged in the small parts of my mind) but I should be able to report on this forthcoming road trip in a couple of days. I have a plane ticket, that's about it.

More to follow soon..... wow, is the suspense making you tap your feet?  I hope so.

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When stymied, READ!

With things on hold at work, with the grime and the muck to deal with, with very little income, what one does is READ.  Yes, I read a lot, more than a lot, but right now, when my life is sort of like being retired but with no retirement money, sort of like being unemployed but with little benefits, I read All. The. Time.

A couple of books I just finished: "Kingdom of the Blind" by Louise Penny. If you read reviews of Penny's books they sound like typical police/detective novels. They are far from that. Yes, there is Armand Gamache, head of the Canadian Police Force. Yes, there is a tiny village, Three Pines, nestled in the outback of a small Canadian town and yes, there is murder.  But her books are so much more. They are, like my next contestant, ruminations on the human spirit and the human condition. Penny writes so well about family, feuds, revenge and hope and despair, love and hate. She wraps her philosophy in the cloak of mystery but that cloak never truly covers what she is really talking about: life, death, joy and sorrow. 

If you read this blog now and then you know I am a big fan of James Lee Burke, creator of the Dave Robicheaux novels set in Louisiana. His latest novel, "New Iberia Blues" is all over the map character and plot-wise. Sometimes a bit too much, but no one reads Burke simply for the detective story. (It's far too dark and gruesome to be defined as a detective story.)  One reads Burke because of his mastery of the written word and his overriding philosophy of life and death. "The fall sky was such a hard blue you could have struck a match against it, the yellow light so soft it might have been aged inside oak."  He talks in this book about the dead traveling with us, not really gone. I love starting one of his books and I hate finishing it.

Currently I am reading a rather amazing book by Yuval Noah Harari titled "Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" and it is that. Totally readable, engaging and incredibly smart and informative, it's basically a narrative about history past and current, society, politics, religion, culture, biology, economics, evolution....... and on and on. Sounds dry but it is anything but that. You can read it start to finish or simply open up the book and read whatever stares up at you. It's a book to find in a used bookstore and have around for years.

Other than that, just reading some junk, weeding out stuff from my life, tossing clothes, shredding papers, using this out of work time somewhat wisely.  Somewhat. This shifting of the sun an hour in the morning makes me crazy, I always feel like it's earlier than it really is and then I look at the clock and WHAT???  It's already 7:00 pm?  Why we have Daylight Savings time is a mystery to me, who are we kidding? We aren't saving anything, the hours of daylight are exactly the same, just moved an hour so we can get an extra bit of daylight in the evening and sacrifice that hour in the morning. Does not work for me but no one asked my opinion, so it goes.

More in another day.

Just because this was one of my favorite movies of 2018, possibly my total fave:  Isle of Dogs photos.

Russian River flooding at Autocamp

Last Tuesday it was apparent that the storm was going to be a big one. The GM at Autocamp spent hours in the morning contacting as many tow truck companies as possible to see who had the ability and the time to tow out the custom Airstream trailers that would flood if left on the property. Mind you, we all expected some flooding, maybe a foot or so, but the Airstreams needed to be out of there by the end of the day just in case the water was higher than expected. The property borders a small, seasonal creek. That creek was getting higher by the hour and it was that creek, not the Russian River, that would do the damage.

The towing began around noon and continued until about 10:00 pm. Finally, with five Airstreams left, the towing companies had to leave. The water was already too high to drag the last of the trailers out. Flooding was expected, maybe a couple of feet.

By Wednesday night those five Airstreams were almost totally under water. The clubhouse, a large concrete and wood structure, is up a flight of stairs from the parking lot. We had no idea that the clubhouse would, at one point, have six feet of standing water and sludge in it. The Russian River crested at more than 13 feet above flood stage. The creek in back of Autocamp had nowhere to go except over its banks.

It was, as has been mentioned, an epic flood. Being a novice to this kind of a flood up close, it is such a reminder of the power of water and the flippancy of nature. With the amount of rain we had in the north bay, the prediction of flood stage was totally underestimated. I went to Autocamp on Friday but didn't get out of the car because only a fool would have done so without boots. I went back, with boots, on Saturday and worked a couple of hours, dragging soaked merchandise out of the shop and loading it into commercial garbage bags to be hauled away. Do you know how heavy a dozen soaked sweatshirts are?  Two dozen soaked tee shirts, piles and piles of wet cardboard? And we aren't talking just soaked, but contaminated with the toxic mud and silt left behind when the water finally receded. The gunk on floor was slippery and gluey and disgusting. We had to muck around in that stuff.

Yesterday, Sunday, I spent almost four hours power washing random furniture that never did get clean. I could get the mud and dirt off but as soon as they dried they looked filthy again. That silt is so fine; the only way it will come off is by sponging it off with soap and water.

Autocamp is closed for the month and it is a long-shot that it will be open by April 1, although we are all doing our best to help that occur. But when you think about all the components, the electrical, the water system, the toxicity of the surfaces, the landscape, the garbage..... there is so much to do.

I have mentioned before that to me Autocamp is just another job and it is, pretty much. But it is sad to see something that was lovely be trashed as it has been by the forces of nature. The good thing is that everyone who works there is a good person and we are all mucking it up to get those Airstreams back and get guests again.

If you haven't, look at their website and you can see how cool it was.  autocamp.com

Below is a photo of the back of the clubhouse. You can see it is up some stairs..... and the ceilings are very high. Imagine it half way filled with water.