Winters Summers Home

30 January, 2013

Bowling Green, Kentucky

Well Shakespeare he's in the alley
With his pointed shoes and his bells
Speaking to some French girl
Who says she knows me well
And I would send a message
To find out if she's talked
But the post office has been stolen
And the mailbox is locked
Oh, Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck inside of Mobile 
With the Memphis blues again.

-Bob Dylan

We left Russellville twice, leaving early the first time, and forgetting Kaya’s bed. We were 20 minutes towards little Rock when I asked her if she had slept well on her bed, when it hit me. We had to continue another ten minutes before finding an offramp, and turning around in Morrilton.

As we came into Little Rock, passing through Maumelle, I was glad to be moving on. The bizarre shifts in State policy were weighing heavily in light of discovering a dry county broadcasting volumes of God Radio: we had come from Virginia, where beer and cigarettes are promoted, and marijuana is illegal, to Northern California, where beer and marijuana are legal, and cigarette smoking is illegal…to this dry county where beer and marijuana are illegal and cigarettes are promoted, and everybody seems weirded-out, after an evangelical fashion. All we needed was a nearby town with no smoking laws, and we could be prosecuted for any of the three.

We passed Toad Suck Park in Little Rock, angling highway 40 towards Memphis. The wind, which had become persistent in Texas, though not unpleasant in 73 degrees, had blown us about through Oklahoma and into Arkansas. On the flooded plains East of Little Rock they prevailed, often disturbing the trajectories of tractor-trailers.

I snapped a couple of photos as we crossed the bridge, and recollected how the quality of the travelogue was changing as we headed east. The dimension of camping, of embracing the landscape over thoughts warming with coffee, had fled with the oncoming winter. We had been blessed with Summer’s extension, not only through Texas and Oklahoma, but clear through Arkansas, Tennessee and Kentucky. The carefully assembled photographs were dissembling into shots out the window…

Last night’s weather got intense, with the winds howling and things crashing as they were carried, airborne, into nearby buildings.  There was an interlude or two where it took on a low, rumbling resonance, and I feared we had met our tornado. Though we had scrambled our way north of the daily tornado warning zone, nothing was really immune.

Kaya’s spirits have remained high, though she shows more of this when we stop for a break. As she began shedding a week before we left California, she seemed to show some prescience, maybe an awareness that we were headed into the desert. She continues to shed in high style, but today the temperatures will drop 20 degrees, and as we regain our home in Virginia, it will again be winter.

Today, God Willing, The Creek Don’t Rise, we will cross over the ten thousand mile mark and return home.