Mealtime with William Least Heat Moon, Vol 2: Swamp Guinea's

"The road through the orange earth of north Georgia passed an old, three-story house with a thin black child hanging out of every window like an illustration for “The Old Woman Who Lived in a Shoe”; on into the hills and finally to Swamp Guinea’s, a conglomerate of plywood and two-by-fours laid over with the smell of damp pine woods.Inside, wherever an oddity of natural phenomenon could hang, one hung: stuffed rump of a deer, snowshoe, flintlock, hornet’s nest. The place looked as if a Boy Scout troop had decorated it. Thirty or so people, black and white, sat around tables almost foundering under piled platters of food. I took a seat by the reproduction of a seventeenth-century woodcut depicting some Rabelaisian banquet at the groaning board.

"The diners were mostly Oglethorpe County red-dirt farmers. In Georgia tones they talked about their husbandry in terms of rain and nitrogen and hope. An immense woman with a glossy picture of a hooked bass leaping the front of her shirt said, “I’m gonna be sick from how much I’ve ate.”

"...I was watching everyone else and didn't see the waitress standing quietly by.  Her voice was deep and soft like water moving in a cavern.  I ordered the $4.50 special.  In a few minutes she wheeled up a cart and began off-loading dinner: ham and eggs, fried catfish, fried perch fingerlings, fried shrimp, chunks of barbecued beef, fried chicken, French fries, hush puppies, a broad bowl of cole slaw, another of lemon, a quart of ice tea, a quart of ice, and an entire loaf of factory-wrapped white bread.  The table was covered."

-from Blue Highways , by William Least Heat Moon

Mealtime with William Least Heat Moon, Vol 1: Brenda

"…and inside hung an insurance agency calendar and another for an auto parts store. Also on the walls were the Gettysburg Address, Declaration of Independence, Pledge of Allegiance, a picture of a winged Jesus ushering two kids who belonged in a Little Rascals film, and the obligatory waterfall lithograph. The clincher: small, white, hexagonal floor tiles. Two old men, carrying their arms folded behind, stopped to greet each other with a light, feminine touching of fingertips, a gesture showing the duration of their friendship. I went in happy.

"I expected a grandmother, wiping her hands on a gingham apron, to come from the kitchen. Instead I got Brenda. Young , sullen, pink uniform, bottlecaps for eyes, handling her pad the way a cop does his citation book. The menu said all breakfasts came with grits, toast, and preserves. I ordered a breakfast of two eggs over easy. “Is that all you want?”

“Doesn’t it come with grits and so forth?”

“Does if you ast fort.”

"I want the complete, whole thing. Top to bottom.”

"She snapped the pad closed. I waited. I read the rest of the menu, the Gettysburg Address, made a quick run over the Pledge of Allegiance, read about famous American women on four sugar packets, read a matchbox and the imprints on the flatware. I was counting grains of rice in the saltshaker (this was  the South), when Brenda pushed a breakfast at me, the check slick with margarine and propped between slices of toast. The food was good and the sense of the place fine, but Brenda was destined for an interstate run-em-thru. Early in life she had developed the ability to make a customer wish he’d thrown up on himself rather than disturb her."

-from Blue Highways , by William Least Heat Moon

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

The Travel Narrative

I mentioned the other day that I’m reading Blue Highways  by William Least Heat Moon, a book that was recommended to me 10 years ago in Cuszco, Peru and which has been nagging to be read on and off ever since. Next to it on my nightstand sits Into Thin Air   by Jon Krakauer, a first-hand account of the Everest disaster of 1996. Meanwhile, on my way to and from work I have been enthralled by Melville’s Moby Dick,  a book that nearly circumnavigates the globe before its finish. 

My favorite book so far this year might just well be Kerouac’s On the Road,  and my favorite author of all time, as any regular readers have probably deduced by now, is Ernest Hemingway- chronicler of European wars, African safaris and Cuban boatmen. If it wasn’t clear to me before, it’s becoming crystal clear now, that I am a hopeless sucker for the travel narrative:

“The travel narrative is the oldest in the world, the story the wanderer tells to the folk gathered around the fire after his or her return from a journey. “This is what I saw” — news from the wider world; the odd, the strange, the shocking, tales of beasts or of other people. “They’re just like us!” or “They’re not like us at all” The traveler’s tale is always in the nature of a report. And it is the origin of narrative fiction too, the traveler enlivening a dozing group with invented details, embroidering on experience.”

–Paul Theroux, The Tao of Travel.

Anyone else?

First Line Friday! William Least Heat Moon

Today’s first lines comes to you courtesy of my bedside table, where sits William Least Heat Moon’s Blue Highways  at the moment. Take a look:

“Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew, free of sense and restriction, deriving from the most remote of sources. Take the idea of February 17, a day of canceled expectations, the day I learned my job teaching English was finished because of declining enrollment at the college, the day I called my wife from whom I’d been separated for nine months to give her the news, the day she let slip about her “friend” Rick or Dick Chick. Something like that.”

The opening sentence, and the one that follows it, don’t so much launch into a story, as they simply share some words to the wise. And any time we recognize the voice of experience talking to us, we do a very human thing, we start calculating whether or not we should trust the source and heed the warning, or whether we should dismiss it out of hand. We become eager to hear the tale behind the advice. Curiosity overtakes us, and we read on.

Here’s a guy on the edge. His marriage is on the rocks, he’s anxious about his job, and then boom- things go from bad to worse. He gets canned, his wife has replaced him and he’s pushed right over the precipice. Now he’s susceptible to all sorts of crazy whims. And we want to know just how crazy it gets. All in all, I think it’s a great opening. Worked for me, anyway.