May 9
I’m taking a day off at the Tishomingo State Park in Mississippi. The ride from Fulton wasn’t long, but it was hilly, and My bike needs work on some of the easier gears.
It was a beautiful ride. It took me through some back roads, through neighborhoods with brick houses interspersed with farm and ranch land.
My right shoulder has been nagging at me for a few days. I’ve been trying to reduce the pressure on it. I removed the water bladder from my Hydro pack and strapped it to my front rack so I still have easy access to water, without the weight on my back.
I also took some time this morning to reconfigure my panniers, moving stuff from the front to the rear. That should ease the tension on my neck & shoulders.
Breakfast today was wonderful—three eggs with salt and paprika on a toasted tortilla, all cooked on my little alcohol stove. Usually there isn’t time for a hot breakfast.
The only problem is that alcohol burns dirty, painting my pots with black soot—and painting my hands as well—if I forget to put on the old, tattered biking gloves I keep with the food canister. Grime finds every groove of my hands and nails. So it’s important to have those gloves in plain sight, so I don’t forget to use them and carelessly pick up the dirty pan.
I spend a lot of time thinking about categories and how we go about ordering things and ideas in our lives. If I had a more taxonomical mind, I was would keep those gloves in a stuff sack with all my other gloves. Like with like. Things organized by what they are. But I’d be even less likely to go looking for them when I needed them. I tend to organize things according to what they do.
So, sometimes I get in trouble because I see fascism in the contorted mob of faces screaming at Ruby Bridges, or the same faces at 21st Century school board meetings screaming about so-called “critical race theory.” A more taxonomical mind would point out the subtle distinctions in political or economic platforms. Maybe we all lean one way or the other, towards what things or ideas do, or what they are.
Anyway. We all have inclinations. Few of us have wisdom. Wisdom seems to come in crowds.
I’ve been on nonprofit boards where some members were inclined toward grand, fearless gestures, and others were inclined toward slow, deliberated steps. You want those competing inclinations to balance each other out with creative tension. But sometimes it just devolves into personalities. “Of course he would say that.” And everyone defines everyone else accordingly to which team they seem to be on.
I met a man at a convenience store on a dusty corner of the town of Denis. When he found out I was from Alaska, he told me he served in the military there some years ago, where he trained for a covert op in Cambodia that took place just before it fell to the Khmer Rouge. He said a lot of innocent people died there. Then he said that people there don’t value life the way “we” do.
This was not a new idea to me. I had a college professor say the same thing about people in the Mideast. Now, I’ve read some poems from S.E. Asia. And I’ve read some Arab poems. Not many. Just enough to know that people grieve everywhere. And people grieve hard.
William Lloyd Garrison would have said something. I didn’t, for two reasons. I was afraid. Alone on a bicycle in the south in a time of extreme polarization, I felt considerably vulnerable.
But he might be vulnerable in other ways.
I don’t think he invented that line that Asians don’t value life. I think it was something people told each other, because they needed to distance themselves from the trauma. They needed to put all that horror in a particular stuff-sack of the mind. It’s not good enough to say something doesn’t belong in a particular stuff-sack you have to help them figure out where else to put it. My book learning, even the great poetry that taught me so much, is not enough to fill that role.
But Garrison in his grave is disgusted at my reticence. Henrietta Buckmaster’s lyrical book about the Underground Railroad (Let My People Go) explores Garrison’s spiritual vision. He was appalled when the abolition movement leaned into politics. There was no room for politics, no room for milquetoast civility, especially in a system that seemed to give all its advantages to the south. I wish I could have taken the book with me, but it was too heavy.
An hour or so before the town of Denis, I met a man fishing with his sons by a bridge on the Tenn-Tom waterway. This massive project was completed in the 1970s. According to the “trivia sheet” I picked up at the at the Whitten Campground, the project, which connects the Tennessee and Tombigee rivers, is actually identifiable from space. The only other human engineering project identifiable from space is the Great Wall of China.
Ok I’m
The man I met was displaced by the project. He pointed behind me at the big lake. “That was all forest when I grew up,” he told me. He pointed to where his home used to be. He said it was hard on his grandfather, losing that home.
His sons fish there almost every day, he said. He tries to get out every Sunday. They all still live nearby.
David: Great to hear this follow up. Hope you enjoyed and benefitted from (especially your shoulders) the day off at Tishomingo SP . We're curious whether you were tempted to continue on the Natchez Trace Parkway? We found its history of the native American experience with an expanding US, especially thru its "Trail of Tears" narrative, synergized with the story of slavery on the UGRR
Best wishes,
Dave Tempest
David, I appreciate reading your thoughts and I thank you for sharing this adventure with is ~Lee