I had the thought that I would write every day while on my trip.
That did not happen, naturally.
What a whirlwind it was. But in its own special way.
6 days, 6 states, 2,303 miles.
I rarely went inside places. I only had two conversations that were not idle small talk with hotel clerks or gas station attendants. And one of those was on the phone.
Most of that time out in the wilderness was in the actual wilderness. Beaches, forests, swamps, bayous, rivers and lakes and streams.
I took the coastal roads from New Orleans all along the gulf coast through Pensacola along the coast of the Florida panhandle before landing for a night in Jacksonville. I saw dolphins. No alligators though. Looked hard for alligators.
I made my way from there up the Georgia coast before turning west towards Athens. Where I walked through the now lonely campus of the normally bustling University of Georgia.
The Confederacy is strong in the south. I drove by countless Confederate flags and Trump flags and Blue Lives Matter flags, but, I noticed, not a lot of American flags. On my drive along the coast, I stopped in Biloxi at the "presidential library" of the one and only Confederate president Jefferson Davis where I literally pissed on the grave of a Confederate soldier.
But I also took the civil rights road from Atlanta to Birmingham to Selma. Holy sacred places. I listened to speeches and songs from the Civil Rights movement. I listened to a podcast on epigenetics and another one on the failures of reconstruction.
As my co-worker at the bookstore (who also works as a historian) said, we "won" the Civil War, but we never "finished" it. My grandfather was right. The south will rise again. We are now bearing witness to its rise. I hope this time we kill it at its root.
But the south is beautiful. Truly lovely country. To watch it all unspool before you as you follow the black line of asphalt is an amazing experience. Humbling, clarifying, reinvigorating.
There was also the experience of the woman in New Orleans and how I woke up in a still drunken haze, missing my driver's license and $200.
But that, I think, can wait until my next installment.
9:16 a.m. - 2021-02-02
Recent entries:
The Letters - 2021-03-13
The Last Time - 2021-03-04
The Lady of Louisiana (it's long, but hopefully readable) - 2021-02-17
Snow Week - 2021-02-15
The Walls of the Church - 2021-02-08
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