A Quick Hello

Greetings from Xocenpich, in the Yucatan. Here I am trying to find a new face. I´m okay and will write more later next week when I am back home (at which time I´ll catch up with everyone´s blogs.

Inappropriate Cards (today and yesterday)

I left North Carolina late in August, 1986. A change descended as I left the world of fulltime work and home ownership to return to school. Looking back on it all, it was either an act of faith or great stupidity. After all, I was rather comfortable in my life. I'd had a succession of girlfriends, a house with apple trees, a canoe with streams of white water just out of town, my beloved Appalachian Mountains just an hour’s drive away and the beach five hours to the east. I gave it all up to cross the Mason Dixon line and enroll in school in Pittsburgh, a place known for cold winters, smoky steel mills and a pretty sorry baseball team. By the time I’d arrived, Roberto Clemente was long been dead and Willie Stargel had retired. As I left the South with everything packed in a car including a bottle of decent Scotch (given to me by coworkers who said I’d need it to keep warm), I promised everyone I’d send my new address and phone number when I got settled. I’d only been in the Steel City for a few days when I came across a “historical” post card of the city. The photograph, taken on a midmorning in April 1911, looks toward "The Point.” At that time, The Point was a rail yard and the air so smoky that you could only make out the shapes of buildings. This was at the period of history that executives would take an extra shirt to work with them and change at lunch, their first shirt being dirty from the air. The photo looked so dirty, an image a lot of my friends had of Pittsburgh, so I brought a stack of the cards to send out to friends and family. On the back I wrote a simple note, “Having a great time, wish you here,” and added my address and phone number.

Thursday is Inappropriate Card Day—a holiday thought up by Diesel over at “Mattress Police. I want to get in on this holiday while the gettin's good and before Hallmark ruins another holiday in their attempt to commericalize every single day of the year. But there's a problem. On Thursday, I’ll be flying south to Cancun (and then riding through the jungles for a few hours in the back of a van). Before I go, I'm gonna clean out my card drawer in my desk (old dated Christmas Cards, Hanukkah cards, birthday cards, get out of jail free cards, whatever I can find). As I travel and listen to Pink Floyd on my iPod, I'll address them and maybe even write notes in them. There are a few folks who need to receive a such a card. And because I won't mail the cards till I get back in the states, these cards will arrive long after ICD, just like my Christmas Cards (which generally arrive at their destination sometime between New Years Day and the Fourth of July).

Surprise someone and send out your own inappropriate card! This is a great opportunity to clean out desk drawers and recycle. Didn't Obama say something this evening about going green? And just imagine the look on the face of one opening your card and thinking “WTF” (can someone explain to me why folks always seem to think of the World Tennis Federation on such occasions?).

China Road: A Book Review

I haven’t been into writing much lately. Instead, this weekend, I did things like make a big pot of split pea soup and sat by the fire reading as the snow reappeared (but since we lost most of our snow, there isn't enough to ski).
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Rob Grifford, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Blackstone Audio, 2007 release), 10 hours and 37 minutes.

What a better way to end a chapter in your life than to hitchhike across country. Rob Gifford time in China, as a reporter for NPR, is coming to an end. After packing up his family and sending them back to their home in Great Britain, he sets out to cross China on Route 312, the “Mother Road.” His journey leads him from Shanghai and the highly industrial east, through the Gobi Desert and various ethnic regions and on the Kazakhstan. Traveling with a backpack (and a copy of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath), he utilizes all forms of transportation—hired cars, buses, and trucks—to make the trek. As he travels, Gifford draws upon his understanding of the complexity of this vast country, providing the reader lessons in history, religion, language and economics. He continually comes back to the question of what China’s future holds. Acknowledging the positive changes since the death of Mao, he sees great possibilities as well as dangers in China’s future.

Gifford often travels off the beaten path. He visits farmers who’d sold blood for plasma and are now infected with AIDS. On the road in a bus, he talks with a physician and nurses about China’s one child policy and the horror stories of forced late-term abortions including the rumors of children who survive the abortion procedure being drown. In one town, he meets two men who are dressed in ties (a novelty on the desert frontier) and discovers they’re distributors for the Chinese branch of Amway. Astonished, he attends their evening meeting where they tout their luck at selling mouthwash to a nation of garlic eaters. They also proudly proclaim that all the Chinese Amway products are all made in China. One Sunday, he spots a church and decides to visit. The congregation’s pastor doesn’t show up and they convince Gifford to speak. Later, in the Gobi, Gifford spends the night in the dunes, sleeping on a mat and watching the colors of the day fade and the beauty of a desert night and the next day’s sunrise.

My favorite part of Gifford’s tale is the time he spent in the ethnic regions of China. Although the vast majority of the country’s population is Chinese, they mostly live in the eastern portion of the country. As one travels further west, in the less populated areas, the people are not ethnically Chinese. He discusses how modern China, like the dynasties of the past, has tried to woo the ethnic areas. Ethnic Chinese who tour and vacation in these areas see stereotypical views of colorful dressed natives serving exotic foods and performing traditional dances. Gifford find that they’re always dancing interesting, reminding him of Native American tourists’ villages in America.

Gifford explains both sides of China’s vast empire. Certainly China herself doesn’t see it as an empire, but many of the ethnic people do. China tells their nation’s history in order to reflect the party’s stance that the ethnic areas have belonged to China for 1000s of years even though that’s not accurate. His exploration of the ethnic areas provides him an opportunity to discuss the Chinese language. To those of us in the West, the language seems complex, but isn’t really, especially once one gains a basic understanding (there are 200 radicals that make up the characters that one must learn). He notes that in the past, those who lived west of the Great Wall (in the ethnic areas) were labeled with the same Chinese character for a dog. But in the 16th Century, after the Chinese reoccupied these territories the last time, they changed the character in an attempt to relate better to the people there. Gifford also notes that although the Chinese expanded west, that they their haven’t become a conquering power elsewhere and in the 15th Century, the emperor had what was probably the greatest fleet at the time burned, for he wasn’t planning on being a naval power. Unfortunately, for China, the next challenge came from the sea as the Western world made their way to the region.

Gifford interest in China came from reading the stories of missionaries to the nation. He first visited the nation as a student and has come to love the people and the complexity of the country. But he can’t help but wonder if China isn’t condemned to repeat itself. Chinese history is filled with examples of the people revolting and those who obtained power eventually becoming corrupt while ignoring the needs of the populace, which sets the seeds for another revolt. In many ways, the Communist Party (which today has little to do with Marxist economics) is just the latest in a long string of corrupt national leaders.

I listened to the audio version of this book.

Trains, hiking and memories...

You may remember that back at the end of the year I spent some time in the Georgia Mountains, staying at a lodge at the approach trail to Springer Mountain and the Appalachian Trail. I mentioned in my post that it’d been a while since I’d been in that country—this is my story of heading there the first time, in the summer of 1985. The photo to the left was taken in front of the falls in late December. The second photo was taken from a ride somewhere in the Georgia or Southern North Carolina Mountains, back in '85. This story really is more about my first adult train trip in the US. Since taking the train to the trail in '85, I've covered over 21,000 miles of Amtrak track (and much of that track I've covered many times). I've written about this two week hike twice before. One blog was about a man we named "Cornbread." The second blog was about another interesting character we came across while hiking this section of trail. In the second story, I changed the names.


I wait, my backpack resting against my thigh, and look up the tracks for the lights of Southern Crescent. The night air is heavy, warm and moist. It’s 1:30 AM and the train is 30 minutes late and I tell my friend that she can go home if she wants. But she, like many of the others who have brought friends and family to the tracks, waits. We make small talk. Finally, a light is seen in the distance, growing brighter. The locomotives blow by, as if the train is going to pass us by, then the metal wheels squeal and the train comes to a stop. An attendant steps off, sits out a stool and those of us waiting make a line and begin to climb aboard. I give Paula a quick hug and thank her again for the ride, shoulder my back and board. A minute later, the whistle blows, the attendant picks up the stool and boards the train as the cars jerk and continue their southbound run through the night. Next stop, Spartanburg, but I’ll be asleep by then.

I stow my pack overhead and take a seat next to a man who’s already fast asleep. A few minutes later the conductor comes by and collects the $30 for my ticket. I lean back my seat and close my eyes, attempting to sleep to the swaying of the car and the clicking of the wheels. Although tired, I'm also excited. I haven’t been on a train in the United States since I was a kindergartener and my class rode the Seaboard Coastline from Southern Pines to Vass. Or was it Cameron? Tonight, I’ll ride a couple hundred miles through the Piedmont, from Gastonia to just north of Atlanta. I watch as we race through small towns, the lights of the crossbars and the stoplights blinking on deserted main streets. Finally, I finally fall asleep. A few minutes later I wake up shivering. The AC is running full blast and the car is cold. I grab my sleeping bag from my pack, unzip it and wrap it around me for warmth and fall back asleep. A couple hours later, the attendant shakes me, informing me that my stop is in just a few minutes. The guy next to me is awake and he asks if the lounge car is serving coffee yet. Not until 6 AM, he’s told. I stuff my sleeping bag into its bag and secure it back to my pack, and then sit back down to wait.



I chat a bit with the guy beside me. He boarded the train in New York and is going home to Mississippi. He's curious as to what I’m doing on the train with a backpack. I tell him that I’ll be meeting friends in Gainesville and we’re heading up into the mountains to the beginning of the Appalachian Trail. I learn that he’d grown up in the South, but like many African-Americans of his age, he had to leave if he wanted decent work. I don’t tell him, but as he’s telling his story, I’m reminded of photograph a friend had taken in the mid-60s. Phil was working for the Charlotte Observer at the time and caught on film the faces of three black boys looking out of the window of a northbound train. He titled the work, “Chicken Bone Special,” a nickname the Southern Crescent earn as hardworking families from the Deep South, with little money in their pockets, would head north for work with a basket of fried chicken to tide them over.

The sky is pink when I step off the train at Gainesville. A sense of loneliness and abandonment washes over me as I walk across the platform as the train pulls away, resuming its journey toward Atlanta, then Birmingham, Tuscaloosa, Hattiesburg and on to New Orleans. I can tell right away that this isn’t the best part of town. The rails run between industrial buildings, many abandoned, with their dark windows reflecting the morning light. Those who got off the train with me are all met by friends and family. Soon, I’m the only one left. A cab driver asks if I want a ride, but I tell him that I'd be meeting friends later in the morning, but ask if he knows where I can get some breakfast. He points to a diner down the street and I head that way. Going in, I’m aware of the stares, as drop my pack on one side of a booth and sit in the other a big breakfast: poached eggs, corn beef hash, toast and plenty of hot coffee. As I eat, I pull out A Breakfast of Champions, by Kurt Vonnegut and begin to read. I stay, long after finishing my breakfast, drinking coffee and reading. It’ll be noon before Reuben and his brother are to arrive and pick me up at the train station. I have plenty of time to kill.

I sit in the diner for a good 90 minutes, waiting for the sun to get up into the sky, before heading out to see the town. I walk around and find a park where I place my pack against a tree, using it as a backrest, and sit, continuing to read. Later, as the stores begin to open, I spend time looking at antiques. It’s a safe hobby as I’m surely not going to buy any to add to my pack. I head down to the train station an hour early, thinking I can find a bench there to sit and read, but am surprised to get there about the same time as Reuben and company. He’d hired the janitor at his law office to drive them in his wife’s station wagon. I dump my pack in the back of the wagon and crawl in the backseat. We make a short stop for burgers, and then drive toward Amicalola Falls. The Appalachian Trail begins at the top of Springer Mountain, but it requires a hike to get to Springer. We skip the falls, as we take a Forest Service road that takes us within a couple miles of the Springer. We unload and say goodbye to our chauffeur, shoulder our packs and hike off into the woods, not stopping till we get to the bronze plaque bolted on rock, identifying the summit. We stop long enough to take a few photos, and then head down the trail, following the white blazes toward Maine.

Reuben and I are out for two weeks, and won’t stop till we reach Fontana Dam at the beginning of the Smoky Mountains. Bill, his brother, will hike with us the first week, getting off the trail just south of the North Carolina border, where his wife will pick him up.

The woods of my childhood: a rambling memory (or, why I love winter)

This memory of childhood answers the question that many have for me, “Why do you like winter?” It’s true, I do love winter, and look forward to getting more snow this afternoon. That said, should I admit that I’ll be heading to Central America in two weeks?
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I was blessed to be raised where there was plenty of elbow room. When I was nine, we moved back to North Carolina, outside of Wilmington. It was 1966 and the urban sprawl that has ruined the South and much of the rest of the country hadn’t yet reared its ugly head. I suppose we were the first wave of that sprawl. We were in a new subdivision, but the development hadn’t really taken off. In all, there might have been 15 houses in the whole area. The downside was that there were no friends that lived close-by. But that was counter-acted by the vast woods that stood behind our home. It was years after I’d left home before roads dissected those woods and houses replaced the forts and hideouts my brother and I built.

The woods were divided into two types of habitat. The high ground was sandy soil and quite open, with longleaf pines and wiregrass and an occasional scrub oak. Traveling through this area was rather easy as there was not much undergrowth and there were old two-track trails running through the woods we could follow when we wanted to make good time. Separating the woods were the low, swampy areas. Elevation was rather relative and one wouldn’t need the full length of a yardstick to measure the difference between the high and low ground. A large swamp separated, maybe a hundred yards behind our house, separated the woods and to get further back into them, one had to walk around it. Later, my brother and I, along with friends, would cut a path through the swamps that we could use during dry spells, but that would be a few years off.

My first memory of exploring the great woods was in the first fall we lived there. I expect it was December, just after my baby brother was born, and I was out in the woods with my dad and my mother’s father. My grandfather only got to visit us once after we got to Wilmington. He was impressed with our house, telling us the second bathroom was for a maid. Although our house was nothing grand, it must have seemed that way to him. I later learned that he didn’t have indoor plumbing until my mother was in high school and dating my father. My father, who worked after school with his dad in the plumbing and heating business, installed the bathroom in my mother’s home. That afternoon, our house got stuffy with everyone gathering around the newborn and we menfolk took a walk in the great woods. Out there, along a two track road that ran behind the great swamp, while smoking a Camel, Granddaddy told us about deer hunting in this area during the war. There were no longer deer in this part of the county, but it was nice to know that the woods in which I explored had also been explored by my granddad, twenty-some years earlier when he’d left the farm and moved his family to Wilmington to work in the shipyards. It was early that first January we were in Wilmington, just a month after the birth of my baby brother and a week before my tenth birthday, my granddaddy died.

At first, we were not allowed to go back behind the great swamp without by ourselves, but this gave us plenty of area to roam. But we could only roam in the woods when the temperature was below 60 degrees. Our mamma lived in fear of snakes. She hated the slithery reptiles. Mom wasn’t the type of woman to hate and was quick to get on us if we spoke about hating anything, especially someone else. The exception to this rule was snakes and she would have loved for us to have shared her hate for the slithery creatures, but that wasn’t in the cards. Mamma’s fear of snakes caused her to set the 60 degree threshold, a temperature when snakes, which are cold-blooded and have no means of keeping their body core warm, hibernate. Those slithery beasts drew out a primordial fear out of my mom. It was as if she took the Biblical curse personally. She insisted the men in her life, her husband and later her sons, stomp on the heads of serpents before they had a chance to strike at her heel. As far as I know, she never personally harmed a snake, except for one, but that’s another story. It wasn’t the woman’s job to do in snakes, that’s what men and garden hoes were for. It says so in the Good Book: the woman’s male offspring will strike the head of the serpent. (Genesis 3:14-15). Somewhere along the way, as scribes wrote and rewrote scripture, one of them left out the part about the hoe, the preferred implement for striking a snake’s head.

The woods were prime habitat for snakes. The sandy high ground, under the longleaf pines and wire grass, were ideal for the Eastern Diamondbacks and Pigmy Rattlers along with Copperheads. In the years I lived there, I never saw a diamondback, but pigmy rattlers and copperheads were frequently seen in our yard. Once, when using clippers along the edge of the house (this was before weedwackers were ubiquitous), I clipped into a 10 inch pigmy rattler. The snake was caught in the jaws of the clippers and I held it up in fascination as it withered around, its fangs exposed and striking at the metal clippers. Luckily, my hands were out of the reach of the pissed-off serpent. The watery bays of the woods were the perfect habitat for the dread Cottonmouth or water moccasins, an ugly and mean snake that stinks (they actually do give off a foul scent when threatened). These snakes were frequently seen in the drainage ditch at the back of my parent’s property, their location often pointed out to us with Sheba, an English setter that my dad had gotten as a bird dog.

Sheba was gun-shy and never flushed out a covey of quail, but she could distinguish between a poisonous and non-poisonous snake. For some reason, she only bothered the Cottonmouths, cornering the snake and keeping it a bay while dancing around it and barking until my dad came out and took care of it. Once, a snake bit Sheba in the nose and her snout swelled up at least twice his normal size. The vet drained the snout and gave her an antivenin and, in a few days, the dog was back flushing out snakes.

With so many slithery reptiles living behind our house, and my mom’s rule about temperature, my brother and I lived for winter, when we could explore the great woods. Wearing rubber boots, we’d walk around the shallow oval lake, dotted with Spanish moss draped cypress, which stood to one end of the great swamp. Later, I’d learn these were geologically known as a Carolina Bay, but as a boy it was just a swamp. When it dried up, you could walk out on the spongy peat moss. Even when the bay was filled will water, there was no place deeper than a foot or so, which meant Mom didn’t have to worry too much about us drowning. Occasionally, when the temperature dropped below freezing at night and you were out in the early morning, a thin sheet of ice would surround the edge. Wearing our rubber boots, we’d step on the ice and watch and listen as it cracked and splintered under our weight.

One winter, we saw in Boy’s Life an article on making an ice rescue tool, a pick of sorts that you have on you in case you broke through and fell into the water and needed a way to get out. The pick was made of a large nail secured in a piece of wood, with another piece of wood serving as a sheaf. The idea was that if you fell through the ice, you could pull out the pick and drive it in the ice and pull yourself to safety. Of course, we never had ice that thick nor did we have water so deep that we couldn’t walk out of (and it never got cold enough for the salt water in the Sound to freeze), but we made them anyway, just in case another ice age descended. Besides, they were easy to make and we could use them to fight off snakes and wild animals and, more likely, older boys. I don’t know what happened to our ice rescue picks, but having lived for years in country where it’s feasible that one might actually employ such a tool, I’ve yet to feel the need to make another.

As we got older, the Bays had less and less water in them as a series of drainage ditches had slowly been lowering the water table. I was in college before the first road was build through the great woods and it was after I’d left North Carolina that the woods behind my parents house had complete succumbed to development. I’ll never forget the feeling the first time I was home visiting and look out into the backyard and noticed that the woods were gone and another row of houses stood behind my parents. The giant woods had been consumed by the great the Southeastern Sprawl.