I was born at The Crossroads, but that was just an accident:  I’m a hillbilly, not a river rat.

 

My parents were of the car generation, and the freedom of the road still boils in my veins although it’s been a long time since I dialed in a cam or rebuilt a carburetor.  There’s something about places and travel, especially if you connect with people or get a sense of places.  And there’s a connectedness and familiarity about certain ribbons that grace the land.  For good or bad, my ribbon is US82:  it’s home.

In Oktibbeha County MS Dad’s parents had been sharecroppers in a window of a few square miles that centered about that road, but in the winter of 1950-51 they secured a lease on some section 16 land that fronted on it and were finally in charge of themselves and their produce.  There would be some good crops, but there were repeated, epic heat waves through that coming decade.

 

In that same window, my mother’s clans had also farmed for well over a century.  Of the heat, she recalls that the ground split open wide and deep enough to receive her entire foot.  Dust rolled in, red and terrifying, a bit after the papers and movies tell us it had ended and 500 miles too far east, but there it was covering everything.  They owned land but barely got by, her father pretty busted up from an accident in his teens, the sort of thing that routinely befalls the people who stock the industries of the field:  farming, lumbering, and drayage.

Dad’s mother died in childbirth before he turned six; her unluckiest child somehow survived that event, another very long story for another day.  A couple of years later Mom’s father collapsed in the field; at the Memphis VA hospital, a fairly experimental procedure would remove a huge part of one lung, and he would manage to keep limping and plodding along another half century, mostly tending gasoline pumps, whittling, tuning engines, and spinning yarns.  Dad’s father remarried quickly and practically; Mom’s mother worked as hard as a man and saved them somehow.

My parents knew of each other and would find each other eventually…and escape together with my sister and me in the same way as, say, Elvis or Oprah or Bobby Gentry or Bo Diddley or a million others.  But I am made of that place, and its nature and decorations speak to me, so, when I poke about that same latitude, I often find pieces of home even when I’m hundreds of miles away.

 

 

Lately a new gig has me on the road in the old way.  I don’t miss the Fortune 500 or the Global 2000.  I get a lot of windshield time in old haunts, time to think, and I’m realizing that I’m not the only one with the US82 tattoo…and I’m realizing I had the tattoo a lot earlier than I noticed.  I cross it more and more, 100 miles on it this week, even.

It scares some people, so I shouldn’t do it, but I don’t mean anything bad or critical by it when I ask whereya from?  Brunswick, GA, a client told me at my office last month; we compare notes on the fish at a café out on the salt flats.  NewWife is from Savannah, only an hour north of there.  He and her father had both worked for the same timber and paper firm it turns out.  US82 ends in Brunswick, refusing to cross I-95, Glibs might guess, over the historic stench of Jekyll Island.  I was there a couple of months ago to look at some work in Brunswick;  Sea Island and St Simons are right there, but, like US82, I’m not terribly comfortable in the land of $50 lunches.

But everywhere else across southern Georgia, US82 traces towns I’ve always known about.  I’m calling on those factories now, new in a way but not entirely.  Red clay is red clay; pines, post oaks, cedars, and sugar gum cover the land; without a map, I couldn’t prove that I wasn’t back on Papaw’s corner of section 16.  You might have heard of Waycross or Albany; my truck has been at the Chevy dealership in Tifton for a month; the bridge is at Eufala AL.  Not far off the track is Plains, home of Mr Carter; close by there is Americus and the carcass of the deer that took my truck out of action.

In my Texas years, after presents were unwrapped, we would take breakfast and then my son would bid his mother goodbye as we took off west to camp the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  It’s cold and crisp out there; few mosquitos, little humidity.  New Mexico is grand for camping and hiking, and we had the Gila Mountains in our rotation.  US82 once went as far as Las Cruces, home of the worst Walmart in the world.  There are hot springs in those parts full of bacteria that will rot your brain, so be careful.  I parted ways with his mother, and the boy outgrew our trips or outgrew me.  Turns out, DFW is full of interesting women, and a really decent one had attended NMSU and knew all about US82…and hatch chiles.  She was great, nothing wrong with her, and then, in her driveway in the suburbs of Dallas drinking beer with the neighbors like a scene from Hank Hill, one day I finally realized I didn’t belong in Texas.  I went online and started fishing for women in TN, hooked one, and was gone within the year.

 

 

From Texarkana, US82 describes the southern edge of the Red River Valley, and it’s also too much like Mississippi to really be Texas.  I was there this week watching the cows go by.  It rolls past WW2 infrastructure:  distribution, training airfields, prisoner of war camps, railheads, all rotting and covered in kudzu.  It’s alluvial, no oil to speak of, a different Texas from the movie sort.  Tex Avery is not from Avery TX (he was from Garland).  No one in DeKalb has any idea who the general was.  They grow angus and pine poles in these parts and not much else.  There is a tiny hamlet thereabouts, a dot on the map, the only town in the US named for my father’s clan; I doubt my father will ever see the place.

Rolling west, you’ll find Bonham.  Speaker of the House, Mr Sam, was born in Tennessee but grew to greatness in Bonham; Rayburn would return to die there, and there’s a nice museum to him there if you ever want to bore the pants off someone who isn’t a political junkie.  I doubt Bonham himself ever saw the town, which is the seat of Fannin County; I doubt Fannin himself ever saw the county.  People have been coming to Texas to die for a long time, it seems; as for me, I’m not looking for any hard ways to get something named after me.

 

I did find an easy way to die in Texas but failed even after several attempts.  All of this happened a few hundred miles further west on US82 in Wichita Falls.  If you were a road cyclist and if you were an idiot, you might have ridden the Hotter-N-Hell 100 with me in that vicinity.  On the hottest day of each year, eight or ten thousands of us would assemble up there and go for a hundred mile peddle, and some of us did not come back.  I tried the loop on eight occasions and finished five, mostly in my forties.  I’m not an athlete, but I am a planner and I am too mean and ornery to quit a thing I’ve put my head to, so I can finish the loop half the time.

 

 

 

 

 

I don’t know much about Arkansas, but the bridge is at Greenville MS.  Jim Henson created Kermit at nearby Leland.  B B King was from Indianola or Itta Bena by most guesses; I don’t think he knew for sure himself.  This story is playing out, so I’ll close with a hat tip to Tuscaloosa; Hank Williams was from Montgomery.  US82 quietly traces these little places and just barely misses a few others like Selma where things happened once.  It’s not very interesting; it’s rusty tractors and pecan orchards.  It’s all so poor and uninteresting that Sherman forgot to burn it…although there is a Sherman TX on US82, but, I’m pretty sure, the general never saw the place.