3:58 p.m. - 2002-04-06
He WHUPPED the Devil!
What more perfect way to spend Easter weekend than getting chomped by alligators? Yes, last weekend Bruce and I went on our long awaited trip to the Okefenokee Swamp. Bruce and his fellow North American Native Fish Association associates had been planning this fish-collecting foray for months, and I decided, quite at the last minute, that if he was going to go play around with alligators and cotton mouths and swamp demons and voodoo priestesses I sure as hell was going with him.
So Friday morning, really early, we set out. The first three hours are boooorrrrring because it's all familiar territory from here to Birmingham and a little beyond. But once we get to Montgomery things are more interesting. Well, maybe not more interesting, but at least, well, different...
Montgomery is right on what I think of as the "Spanish Moss Line" or the "Really Deep South Line". It's the beginning of agricultural zone 8, where summer comes in February and the vegetation is straight out of those 1950's jungle terror movies. It's also where the people change as well, with half of them living in tar paper shacks and rotting plantation houses.
It's the Deep South. Hallelujah.
And it's hotter than hell.
I peel off my sweatshirt as the wisterias and azaleas roll by. Finally the heat gets so bad I make Bruce stop so I can splash in a gas station bathroom and put on a T shirt. Then there are hours and hours of drinking endless sodas and driving through little, burned out towns with signs like "God Bless America! Free Lighter With Three Packs of Cigarettes!" and "Oil of Joy Ministries" and "Walking on the Moon Animal Hospital". A town called Pike Grove has a huge, green sign announcing their historic district. I'm expecting Tara, but what we find is exactly two dilapidated brick buildings, one of which is boarded up. The rest of the town consists of fallen in houses and tar paper shacks.
And a lot of the other towns we drive through are the same, or they have slums full of beat up Victorian houses , huge, beautiful homes down on their luck. Filled with worn out looking women and skinny kids playing with broken toys and overgrown azaleas in the yards and wisteria, great snaking masses of wisteria trying it's best to smother the wreckage.
I would love to buy one of those old houses for a song and fix it up and love it, but then I would have to live in it and put up with all those around me living their hard lives and I'd probably wind up working in the office of a car towing company and putting up with some redneck boss calling me "honey" and blowing cigar smoke at me, and I'd come home to pork chops and boxed mashed potato flakes. And I won't do that. I walked away from that kind of life years ago when I left New Hampshire, and I won't embrace it now, not even for a cheap Victorian house....
We've driven hours and we're starving. It's time to start looking for cemetaries. Bruce and I have this thing about picnicking in cemetaries. They're a quiet place to eat without having to worry about trespassing and irate property owners with guns. However, once we decide to stop and eat, a weird thing happens. Suddenly there is not a cemetary for miles around. We literally drive for another hour or two without seeing a single one. It's hot, we're tired and the sardines are whispering to me. I am about to give in to my inner bitch.
And then we drive into Eufaula. Eufaula is a town full of Victorian mansions. When we started driving through I thought I had died and gone to heaven. There are at least thirty of them lining the main street, all immaculately kept up. Two of them were for sale. Yup, for $625,000 you, too, can own a Victorian mansion.
Eufaula also has a restaurant called "The Cajun Corner". The minute I spot it I completely lose control, and start whining in such a way that, in between rolling his eyes and sighing heavily, Bruce agrees to pull over and eat lunch there, if only to shut me up. This was a good thing, because I ate one of the two best meals I have ever eaten in my life at "The Cajun Corner". I had a crawfish etoufee that was otherworldly. Big, huge hunks of fresh crawfish swimming in a spicy butter sauce with a mound of first-communion-white rice in the center. We're talking Uncle Ben's here. None of this fancy brown organic stuff. This is real southern cooking.
And Bruce's Po Boy was delicious, too. I know, because I kept sneaking bites of it. I couldn't help myself.
On the way out we helped ourselves to a free bumper sticker ("Food so good you'll think we stole your mom". Evidently they don't know my mom's cooking.) and a free "Bible Study" tape. "Take One and be Blessed!!!" the sign says, so we take one and listen to it on the rest of the way to Georgia. It turns out to be an ignorant Fundy preacher whose every other words are "Amen" and "Praise God!". I idly wonder if he says "Amen" and "Praise God" like this when he's talking about his laundry. He states, quite seriously, that one bit of evidence for the superiority of Christianity is that nowhere in the Bible are there any quotes from the Koran.
Huh??
Preacher Fundy also tells the story of how Jesus whupped Satan. Did you know that Jesus didn't just whip the Devil? Nosirree, he didn't just whip him. He WHUPPED the Devil!!Amen! Praise God!
The tape has the positive effect of giving us something to laugh about in the remaining hours it takes for us to get to Waycross, where we decide not to camp but to stay at the hotel where the other NANFA-ites are staying. The room is cool, the bath water is hot, and the bed is king size. We fall into it immediately and get ready for the seven am fish alert.
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