Southern Thoughts
I like to find the edges of places, where the land dwindles to nothing...
*Note: Paul, Santo and I are currently on a winter road trip. We were in Florida for most of last month and now we’re in Louisiana. It’s a true luxury to drive south in the winter, just as weather turns brutal up north. We didn’t get to make this trip last year, and my memories of last February’s multiple consecutive ice storms are still painfully fresh.
So, because we were able to leave this year, we left. And I have to say, it was a sweet, sweet feeling when we hit the South Carolina border and I could take off my coat. Everything just feels a little easier when it’s warm outside. Even thinking, somehow. I’ve collected more road notes in the past two months than I did in all of last year.
The following notes are all from the last few months, jotted down at truck stops, in Waffle House parking lots, and while passing crawfish stands along lonely bayou roads.
I sincerely believe that some thoughts will only come to you if you’re riding along with the window open… TM
You always see those people at gas stations in their pajamas. Every time, I wonder what the story is. If they’ve been in the car since morning and they’ll be in the car until nightfall, then maybe the pajamas are a logical expedient. And who am I to judge? Especially today, which is Christmas Day. We’re at a Love’s truckstop outside of Dylan, South Carolina, and a young woman in fluffy pink pajama pants is wrestling with something in the backseat of a car. Her friend or maybe her mother is standing by the passenger window in skinny pants and high heels, looking in the side mirror to adjust her bright red ponytail. She’s satisfied with it now, so she’s just reached through the window and and now she’s eating something out of a paper bag. No one should really be observed at moments like this.
At another pump, a whole family just piled out of a Range Rover, mom, little girl and teenage boy all in slippers and flannel pajama pants. Dad got the gas going and the rest of them trotted into the station together looking like they were rushing into the kitchen for breakfast.
I wonder about these people, all of them traveling on Christmas Day. Are they driving somewhere to be with their families? Do they have families? Do they have a place to go? For our little family—Paul, the dog, and me— today is just the second day of the drive south. It isn’t really a holiday. Except that it’s warm here, which makes it a different kind of holiday.
Pale bark. Pale branches. Red grass.
We’re in Savannah for a couple nights, and I’m realizing, though I’ve stayed in this city more than once, I haven’t really been here. I haven’t landed, not yet, in the Savannah I’m looking for. I can begin to see how it would be, though. How it would feel to slow down here for a few weeks or a month. Walk to the grocery. Walk to a cafe. I am starting to recognize the streets where I could get comfortable, along the upper edge of Forsyth Park. Away from the action of the tourist strip by the river. There are a lot of places in America where I could never get comfortable, but I could see being comfortable for a little while in Savannah. On the right street. With the right trees overhead and the right bookstore nearby.
Why is hotel room art so awful? More importantly, why am I so upset with this particular painting? The pale, empty adirondack chair is casting its long afternoon shadow across the porch. The blooming annuals are overflowing their pots. Then, of course, the temptation of the white beach, past the bushy dunes, and the inevitable blue water.
I am frustrated with other things right now, but the painting is here. It is unavoidable.
It’s such a deathly place in this painting. It’s like a limbo, a pleasing blankness at the far corner of eternity. The flowers never fall. They never overflow their pots. The sun shines and keeps shining. The chair, the porch, the steps to the dunes, will never decay or even get dirty.
It’s worse because it’s a print, an even deader thing. An old, fading print in a cheap frame. An objet d’art meant to exist at the periphery of your consciousness. It isn’t meant to be stared at, which, unfortunately, is what I’ve been doing. It’s just meant to suggest, from the corner of your eye, that you are at the beach and not where you really are—two miles inland in the Florida suburbs. It’s meant to put the beach in your mind. But I don’t like to be told what to do or where to be. I keep looking at it, and it all tastes like sand.
A guy at a gas station in Orange Beach, Alabama just called over to Paul, “I bet you get a lot of compliments on that Lunar Rock.” Which is the official name for the shade of green paint on our car. Paul laughed and went on to tell him the story of how we bought this car in Buffalo, from the only Toyota dealership selling at below-MSRP prices during the pandemic. And somehow the guy at the other pump had bought his truck at that same dealership, in Buffalo, despite the fact that he lives in Alabama. And then the two of them proceeded to have a ten-minute long conversation about how great the dealership was, and how great Toyota cars are, and on and on. There was a whole bunch to do with engines, and which was the right engine to have and which was the wrong engine to have, and why both of them had chosen their engine so well.
This is the only way men have conversations with other men. They can talk about gear. Cars. Guitars. Cameras. Probably other things too, but that’s the gear that Paul tends to have on hand and so those are the conversations I’ve witnessed.
I thought about jumping into tonight’s conversation. I had a 1996 Toyota 4Runner for years when I was younger. I drove it until it had 398,000 miles on it. More than 398,000 miles, actually, but I can’t remember the exact number. And I still regret trading it for a truck I didn’t like and didn’t keep long. The 4Runner was running great, even at that mileage, and it probably ended up on a freighter with a bunch of other junk cars, headed for some overseas backwater. Anyway, I considered piping up and earning some cred in this completely male conversation, but it was more fun to just watch these two with each other. The shyness and the generosity of men with each other, knowing how it costs them something (time, vulnerability) to say anything.
On Magazine Street tonight a woman was digging through a box of clothes set out next to a telephone pole. It was obviously left out for people like her, to get some warm clothes, in advance of the cold snap coming this weekend. The woman held up a large sweatshirt, then threw it back down into the box. She said something, which I couldn’t quite hear from across the street, and began to walk away.
I saw her face as she looked up from the box. I connected to her, just for a moment, without really meaning to. My heart contracted. Her eyes were unfocused, her hair was a mess. She walked at an angle to the street. But I could see a flash of how she would have looked, if only the universe had never done whatever it did to her. She could have been pretty. I wish that my empathy weren’t this shallow, but it was worse to me that she was pretty. She’d thrown back the sweatshirt with a funny jerk to her head. Like, can you believe this shit? I had begun to care about her, just from that gesture. And then I felt much worse, knowing my care didn’t mean anything and it would go nowhere.
She was just one more face in my gallery of lost faces. Paul came out from the convenience store to say they didn’t have any milk. We’d find a grocery store instead. By the time I’d agreed and looked back to the window, she’d turned the corner and gone.
There is a small crowd in white robes standing on Orleans Street. It’s mid-afternoon. They’ve congregated outside a closed old movie theatre, beneath the marquee, looking like they all got lost on their way to the river to be baptized.
There are so many churches in New Orleans, it’d be impossible to keep track of them. The glorious cathedral in the quarter, all the other Catholic churches, the tidy old-school Protestant congregations, and then the endless proliferation of storefront offshoots. Just now, I caught sight of three different Missionary Baptist churches in as many blocks (somehow I imagine they all must hate each other.) On the map, I see the Israelites Baptist church, the New Zion Baptist church, the First Agape Baptist Church, the First Mount Cavalry Baptist Church, and the Ebenezer Baptist church, all within walking distance. Plus, if you get burned by the Baptists, there’s the unaffiliated Tabernacle of Prayer, the Morning Glory Fellowship and the House of Eternal.
Eternal what, of course, is the thought that comes to mind. But I guess it’s one of those, “If you have to ask…” situations.
I like to find the edges of places, where the land dwindles to nothing and the roads are like pencil lines on the map, fading into the water. Today we drove south to Houma. We found a surprise of a bookstore there and both Paul and I came out with a stack of books. They had a JM Coatzee book I’d never read. An Annie Dillard book. I noted a small section on Wicca and a shelf of LGBTQ+ books. As I checked out, I noticed they’d prominently displayed One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This on the counter.
I took my books and thanked the woman behind the desk, thinking she was pretty brave in this small town. I noted the store on my map, so I’d remember to detour for it again.
We traced Louisiana Highway 57 south, one of those pencil roads into the bayou. As we drove, I opened my window and thought about what it would be like to grow up here, along the road to Dulac, Louisiana. Was there a girl in one of these incredible trailers perched twenty feet into the air, reading her books and dreaming? If I were a little girl growing up here, I’d be at that bookstore in Houma every week. I’d be carrying the dust from its floor on every pair of pants.
Someday, if that little girl comes down from her family’s stilt house and makes it out into the world, she’ll find out that, thanks to this place, she’s something special. Her funny accent. Her strange kind of knowledge. The way she talks about snakes. Bird calls. Shrimp boats. The way she loves the smell of burning sugarcane. She’ll come out with funny stories at parties. Men will find her exotic, and it’ll never stop surprising her. After all, no one ever thought she was a great attraction back home. In order to be special, she’ll find out, you have to leave. Still, she’ll never quite belong to anyplace else.
She’ll carry around that stark bayou beauty the rest of her life, along with a hurt kind of sympathy that will surprise her whenever someone ignorant insults her people. Even if they never did feel like her people at the time. Especially.
I am nursing a little self-pity tonight, driving up Carrollton Avenue under the big, shiny Full Snow Moon. I saw a woman coming home a few blocks ago. She was carrying groceries from her car to her front door. I don’t know anything about her, but I imagined she was tired after a day of work. I imagined she had a family waiting inside. And then, at another house, I saw two couples sitting out on a front porch. They had a small firepit burning. They were just sitting there, talking, looking out at the cars passing.
I get this feeling when I travel. And it’s a little worse tonight, because I keep worrying about things back home. I start to think of all these people around me wrapped up in their lives, taking care of their babies and jobs. Sitting out on their porches drinking beer with the same friends they see every Friday night. They’re so cottoned up in the details of their lives, I know some of them are just sick of it. Some of them are itching to find an escape. They’re watching my car go by and thinking of where a long car ride could take them. And here I am, looking back. Not exactly envious of them. But wishing for something they have. I’d like to have a place in things. On the road, I can feel too much like a ghost.
I do have some good memories of Kansas. I woke up this morning thinking of one of them. Summer mornings, alone in bed. That scent of dew in the air and the quiet of the street below.
I remember waking up in Kansas to the sound of birds. On nights when it wasn’t too hot, we’d leave the windows open and the breeze would touch everything in the house through the night, carrying away all the old day’s air. By morning, the house was sweet and fresh. And outside, there were birds. Mourning doves and robins and meadowlarks. Sometimes a woodpecker pecking at the elm tree outside.
My then-husband woke up early every day, before six. He would go downstairs to make coffee. I was usually conscious of him waking up and gathering his things. I heard the creak of the stairs. But I didn’t open my eyes until I was alone. For an hour, I would doze and think about my day. In the summer, I would listen to the birds. I saw the sunlight catch the edge of the window frame, then stretch, slowly, along the floor toward me.
I woke up this morning in New Orleans, years removed from Kansas, remembering that feeling. Was it the sound of birds? We have crows nesting outside the little apartment we’ve rented for the month. I can hear them barking this morning, one to another.
It was something to do with sunlight. Something to do with summer. I wanted to smell the air, the way it smells in the summer, full of cut grass and flower petals. And, with every window open, how the house turned itself outward toward the new day.
We’ll go outside soon and there will be sunshine, though it’s cold sunshine. And I do love the decaying, mismatched sidewalks here. Some brick, some concrete, some flagstone. All cracked and deadly to your ankles, and relenting at frequent intervals to thick scruffs of grass. I like all the spooky old houses, all the romantic porches we pass on our walks. I especially appreciate that it isn’t 9 degrees here, which is the temperature in New York City right now. At home, the ferries have stopped crossing the East River due to all the ice clogging the water.
I should be happy to be here, where it is only just freezing and not thoroughly frozen. Instead, I woke up with my heart set on summer…
Sometimes I think about Wendell Berry on his farm in Kentucky. I think he leads a wise kind of life. And I can almost imagine how it might be, waking up each day to the same beloved place and your daily tasks and your own people. The sharper you hone the blade of your life, I can see how it would blossom, the way that time blossoms when you drive your attention down into the details. That single freckle on the flower petal. I can see how a sense of the infinite is there, in that kind of simplicity.
But where is the train whistle in that life? What happens when you hear the train passing by?
Tonya Morton is, among other things, the publisher of Juke.
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My god, Tonya, I wish I could write like you. Your imaginings and connections with the strangers you see and watch; the scenarios filled with sensual details. Somehow, the depth of humanity comes through your words. This was exquisite. Every word of it. And these are just your notes???
this is so so good, love the speculation that the robed figures got lost on the way to the river to be baptized! fabulous!!!!