Blues, haints and bayous: snippets from the Deep South: Oddities and curiosities

We are not quite in the Appalachians, more like the foothills. But, the further north we go the cooler it gets, so, we are heading south soon. Though it is not too cold. I would call it one jacket only weather. And nothing when in the car.

We skipped up to Chattanooga in Tennessee, because it was close, and we love the song, Chattanooga Choo Choo. The song, though, was written about a train ride that the songwriters took from New York to Chattanooga, and has very little to do with Chattanooga. It has more to do with the rhythm of the train wheels riding on the rails, I think. But we still found something unique in the city to visit and that was a lovely historic Carousel situated in Coolidge Park in the very heart of the city. We spent ages talking to the attendant and park rangers there, who seemed to have very little to do other than to talk to us, as it turned out. Great jobs they all had. Just monitoring that things worked. The Carousel, built in 1894, had fallen to bits over time but a local woodcarver and his mates set to work renovating and rebuilding it and that took four years. It now runs all year, but with very little wear and tear in the winter months. Bec was so charmed she wanted a ride.

From here we turned south into Alabama. Alabama is big ute country. Big F350s, rolling along, occupying the entire lane, wide-bottomed gals peddlin’ on gas. It is big land country, big house country, and big sky country. It is also big church country.

In Fort Payne alone, in just a tiny 8.8 mile radius, our Sat Nav listed 51 churches. How do they service so many? Most of them were of the Baptist persuasion with utes and SUVs parked outside a’plenty on this Sunday, heading south. Tho’ the young man who sold us SIMS in Atlanta informed us that religion was ‘not a big thing’ with his generation. He believed it was ‘mainly the oldies’ who still attended church in the south. We think, then, there must be quite a few ‘oldies’ in these parts, given all these churches.

A market in the quaint mountain village of Mentone pulled us to a halt. This little place is reminiscent of a more rustic log-cabin version of the town of Nimbin in New South Wales to us. We chatted with the shop owners displaying their wares in tiny log cabins on either side of a mountain road which would have been charming had the trees had leaves. They are bare still, sadly, with only a few green shoots, which seems to give everything a slightly seedier air than it will in the spring.

One lady from Argentina was weaving on triangular, square, and rectangular pin looms - delicate woven scarves, stoles and shrugs of elaborate textured wools and silks to sell in her store. A craft she had learned around the kitchen table from her mother and grandmother in Argentina, she said. Her partner recycled branches and logs and built furniture: beds, benches, tables and sometimes ballustrading for outdoor decks and patios. You name it, he could contract to make it, he said. Self-taught and self-supporting, the surrounding forest was his source of twigs and logs. His craft was his livelihood. We spent much of the remaining afternoon chatting around a rusted 44 gallon drum in the open market area filled with logs and seeping woodsmoke. The pine smoke tang took us back to Canada. We talked books and travel and retirement and politics with a group of market folk who seemed to retire up here from Birmingham. And found many who admitted to being thoroughly wooed by the charms of Donald Trump.

We drove into Birmingham, somewhat tentatively. Our memories of Birmingham stem from television images of civil rights clashes in the 60’s. Rabid dogs, rampant riots, police pressure-hosing race protestors, and the shadowy white clad figures of the Ku Klux Klan. Birmingham was the centre of hell in those days. Today, it seems more peaceful and, in parts, extraordinarily prosperous. Our big car seems to head off into these areas by preference. It took us up into a suburb in the hills called Mountain Brook. Built by a real estate developer with an eye to exclusivity here are massive churches, exclusive country clubs, secluded mansions, ancient grist mills converted to quaint private homes, private schools, and a very smart-set out today on the jogging and walking paths. Here, too, live many celebrities and movie stars, we soon discovered. In this isolated community high on winding hills elevated from the valley folk.

Many of the valley folk of Birmingham are still struggling we soon found. We drove into the heart of the city, parked, and were immediately accosted by a series of homeless panhandlers with a style of persistent begging just short of aggressive and intimidating. So, too, in parts of Atlanta. It is winter. They are cold. They need warmth and food and shelter and love. Is a dollar the answer, though? We never know. We are inclined to offer them a meal, but it is not food they want. It is money. And we won’t support drug and booze addictions, so we often have to pass.

Just to the right of the fountain at Five Points where an unusual Ram-Man reads a tale to a group of animal listeners stands a statue of Birmingham’s Brother Bryan. James Bryan, a minister in the same era as Martin Luther King, similarly supported civil rights and integration in the south. Like King, he conducted large prayer gatherings around the city, and, like King, he worked tirelessly for the cause, calling his charges ‘Brother’ and ‘Sister’, and earning the name, 'Brother Bryan', in the doing. He is remembered for frequently arriving home on the coldest nights without his coat, because he regularly gave the clothes off his back to the poor and homeless. Amazingly selfless. The very real social problems have still to be solved, though.

We pass the home where Helen Keller grew up blind and deaf after a childhood illness yet learned to communicate with the help of her amazing teacher, Anne Sullivan. Excellent facilities for the blind and deaf were built in the same community, so the good work goes on.

We drive through many small towns where the public buildings are so huge they would shine in any major city back home. We are in awe of the money spent on such massive town halls, court houses, and public spaces in these small and medium-sized towns. Why do they need to be so huge? Or is building so cheap in the States, compared to Australia, that these expenditures can so easily be legitimated.

We are really appreciating the distinctive informative signs that offer detail on many of the historical sights we are passing. Our car bucks to a stop when we see one. One old pioneer 'stand' sits in downtown Tuscumbia, and tells us that around 1815 this small wooden building was a stagecoach stop along a route that Andrew Jackson had built, called the Military Road, between Nashville and New Orleans. Stagecoaches bought the mail along this route. One trip took 17 days. These stand were built at convenient halting points, and acted a little like inns, to accommodate passengers who travelled with the mail.

Then, as now, there would have been places to eat near the ‘stands’ for the travellers. Modern-day America has resorted, though, to a very generic servicing of travellers in the main, which is efficient, we assume. Typically, these are now found out of town, along the intersections of the routes where travellers tend to stop. Here, too, are the modern day hotels and inns. Along with McDonalds and Jack’s burgers and the like, are chains of steak, seafood, pasta and pizza places. After just a few days of travelling this fare near the inns is wearing a little thin with us, as the same menu appears in the same chain at each different stop. I wonder if it was the same back then? A little individuality would not go astray, m’thinks, but we are hard pressed to find it as yet.