| TRAVELOGUE, PT.1: FRIDAY (Natchez Trace, Clinton to the North End of the Ross Barnett Reservoir): I flew into Jackson, Mississippi on Thursday night, with a goal of cycling from Natchez to Nashville along the venerable old animal trail known as the Natchez Trace. This was the first leg of a road trip to be spent cycling, driving and researching what is known variously as the War Between the States, The American Civil War, the War of Northern Aggression, or my favorite moniker, "The Recent Unpleasantness." Friday morning I put the bike back together in my mom's garage and cycled from Clinton to Ridgeland along the Trace, where I met up with members of the Jackson Metro Cycling Club. The ride from Clinton was as harrowing as it gets. Despite the fact that the Trace is a two lane highway/National Park with a 50 mph speed limit, this particular stretch is used by Jackson commuters as an alternative to the interstate -- and they drive it here like the interstate is the alternative. I had a tense moment when one aggressive dumbshit in a black late-model Dodge Ram pick'em up truck jumped into my lane and attempted to pass two cars while blasting right past me. Looking him in the eye as he barreled towards me in MY lane, I gave him the Dennis Hopper-Easy Rider salute while mulling over diving over the handlebars, but knowing that my cleats were clipped into the pedals which meant that any attempt at escape would've been futile... Once I met up with Jackson Metro Cyclists, things mellowed out considerably -- perhaps because we were north of the city limits, or maybe because I now had the Law of Strength in Numbers on my side or just because the entire peloton exuded, exercised and personified Southern Hospitality and its incipient civility. It was a bitchin' ride, heading north by northeast, along the Ross Barnett Reservoir to the southeast, and the wilderness to the northwest, and I vacillated between the front of the pack and the back of the pack, chatting up a heart surgeon, a nurse, and low-buck bohemian in baggy shorts, punk rock t-shirt and a vintage, steel-framed steed. SATURDAY (Jackson, MS): My goal was to cycle south to Natchez via Port Gibson. After poking around Port Gibson, my mom would meet me in Natchez and we'd have gumbo and maybe a mint julep or two along the banks of the Mississippi River and she could cart my bike and me back to Jackson... (Port Gibson -- or more specifically Bruinsburg -- is where Ulysses S. Grant had to cross the Mississippi River before he began his siege on Vicksburg in 1863. Grant knew that control of the Mississippi River was key to crippling the Confederacy, as this would segregate the western part of the Trans-Mississippi Army from its supply line.) It rained that day, however. Torrential thunderstorms and malevolent strikes of lightning precluded puttin' in any miles -- I'm okay with cycling in the wet, but I draw the line at transforming an aluminum bicycle into serving as an improvised lightning rod. So with a bike ride rained out, my mom and I hit the Eudora Welty Open House in downtown Jackson and listened to tales of her incinerating the only copy of her Petrified Man after it was rejected by Robert Penn Warren who subsequently changed his mind and then Ms. Welty had to re-write the whole piece from memory and Penn Warren was none-the-wiser... We got to visit the bedroom-slash-office where Welty wrote The Optimist's Daughter and there were books through the entire house. What caught my eye was a coffee table that casually had a collection of works by HL Mencken lying next to another by Robert Penn Warren. Warren considered Mencken a pompous asshole after Mencken dismissed the entire citizenry of the South as buffoons, dolts and simpletons. Warren and some of his fellow scriveners at Vanderbilt used Mencken's dismissive attitude as motivation to elevate the folklore of the South, which Warren did in such works as "All The King's Men" (a veiled account of Huey P. Long's political career), as well as general venerations of the military genius of Nathan Bedford Forrest... Anyway, the Mencken-Warren pairing was a cheeky juxtaposition of Ms. Welty's doing... and one of whose resonance I am sure she was well aware of... "AND THE WINDS BEGAN TO HOWL..." The rains hit Jackson that afternoon and by the nightfall, the whole town was in the midst of the mother of all hailstorms and a tempestuous deluge or rain. Despite the ferocity of the weather, my sister Stephanie, my brother Bradley and I caught Merle Haggard and Bob Dylan at the Mississippi Coliseum in Jackson. Dylan was in town because of his proximity to a concert date the day before at the New Orleans' Heritage Jazz Festival. Concurrently, his old bud the Hag was performing in Monroe, Louisiana, a quick hit from Jackson, so it made logistical and conceptual sense for the two of them to get together... The Hag was in rare form. He introduced "Mama Cried," as "a song I wrote for my mother. I'm gonna play a song I wrote for the rest of you mothers a little later." Other yucks included his dedicating some jailhouse dittie to "all the ex-cons here tonight. You've have already done your time -- the rest of you still got yours to do." Then he dedicated "Fighting Side of Me" to the American troops abroad, which drew a predictable if not sincere chorus of approving whoops and whistles. The band kicked into Hag's pro-Vietnam anthem, and in a moment worthy of St. Vitus, the assembled broke into spontaneous square-dancing and boot-scooting... what wasn't predictable, however, was Haggard blowing through the first verse then stopping the song before the chorus hit... the dancers were dumbfounded and confused, but my guess is that the more observant Haggard hounds know that the man is vociferously against the war in Iraq.... the old boy was making a political statement by silencing his oft-quoted refrain of "When you're running down our country, hoss/You're running on the Fighting Side of Me..." When the music stopped, the hush was deafening and the band slid into a ballad that I didn't recognize, before Merle took a bow, walked up to the mic and exulted "Happy New Year" to the baffled audience, and then walked offstage... Dylan was next and commences his set with a trio of unrecognizable dirges that sent a healthy portion of Haggard fans in search of the nearest honky tonk... During a moment of dead air one yahoo yelled out, "BOB DYLAN IN MISSISSIPPI!" which was greeted by an awkward, pregnant silence, which the same old boy broke by caterwauling, "THAT'S ALL I GOTTA SAY..." That coda spoke to the assembled, many of whom answered in kind with a chorus of guffaws, "hell yeahs," and rebel yells... When Dylan sang, "And the winds began to howl," he wasn't kidding, and his band's gale force seemed to match the intensity of the storm pelting the tin roof of the auditorium... |