03-07-11 One step forward and two steps back

03-07-11
“One step forward and two steps back
Nobody get’s too far like that”
160 miles
Thank goodness for the camp hosts space heater!
I pack up the tent site and haul everything to the car in several loads. Mischa is barking more than usual - both at the tent area and in the car. I’m out of here line of sight for a few minutes at each trek between car and tent. Usually she is patient and behaved but she is barking more than usual today. And that is uncustomary. Part of it is explained by the presence of people and other dogs when she is in the car alone - but when she was at the tent? And when I leave here to take a shower she barked incessantly.
Annoying, embarrassing and unusual for her.
Had she been too long off the road and forgotten her road manners?
On petting her and trying to soother he I noticed two lumps on the left side of her neck. One is rather large visablyand teardrop shaped. It had not been there just a few days before. Perhaps a bite? A puss bag or a cist? I don’t have a vet to take her to and if I’d noticed it back when Cindy too Scooter to the vet for his leg bite, perhaps I could have had her vet examine it. Maybe I’ll see if my friends in Atlanta have a vet they can refer. I’ll be sure to mention this over the next few days. Perhaps her behavior is related to this mass?
I take another picture of the lake an d camping area. It was a grey morning similar to when I arrived last night, but the sun is trying to come out at 9am and I get a few shots in sunlight before leaving.
Driving out of the town towards Opp I start to notice a smell like electrical fire. I pull over and the smell continues to persist and it comes into the cab. I open the hood. Can’t notice anything. Check the trunk - back to the cab. Strong! For some reason I check the oil level. Nothing. Dry as a bone. I put in the only oil I have left in the car. My last mechanic told me Saturn’s especially the SC coupes’ burn oil. “Check after any long trip” Nearly any day is a long trip.
I’d forgotten to check after getting to Cindy’s Not since Amarillo! Idiot!
I had only about 4/5 of a bottle of oil and that didn’t show up on the dipstick at all!
I drive up the road hoping for a gas station soon.
There is a rest stop a mile ahead. I pull in, ask the attendant “which way is the closest gas station?”
“Opp is 14 miles ahead”
“It’s only 7 miles back to Florala” I return.
“By the time you get back to Florala and come back here you’d have driven 14 miles, Right? He questioned.
“But I’d hate to blow my engine by not driving back the 7 miles for oil instead of going 14 miles ahead just to not backtrack” was my rejoinder.
I drive back to Florala and get 4 quarts at the local auto parts store. I take two quarts to bring the dipstick to full. I have two more for the road. I return on my path up to Opp. I’m looking forward to getting there and I’m starting to get hungry.
I never get there.
The highway I need to follow to get to Dothan goes right just before I could enter Opp. On I go, hoping for fast food along the highway.
As I continue along I pass a big intersection. The road narrows , I cross a bridge and a car is on my tail (I’m doing the limit) and My Highway marker is no longer showing on the sign posts. “Brantley” is not a destination I’m supposed to be heading to - so - to loose the tail-gater and to confirm my suspicion about my direction, I pull off to this gas station/convenience store on the left.
I pull in - look at the map - look at the sign in the window that promotes “Full Belly Pizza”. Just then this car speeds into the gas pump side sliding to a halt and this woman jumps out with her cell phone to her ear and runs into the service station side of the building. I got out a few seconds later an saunter inside thinking . The two men are dragging hee
But when I walk in the woman is going crazy. Two men are trying to hold her up. She is flailing around hysterically like a person going through rapture at a revival meeting. The two men are dressed in a sort of camouflage uniform, one has an orange vest on. The man in the vest tries to help her up and tries to guide her to a seat.
I ask “what’s gong on” and the man in the vest points behind me and says “She’ll be with you in a minute”. I look behind me and another woman is walking up calmly with a cell phone to her ear saying “a guy on parole shot his wife and as seen at the school. The school’s on lock down. Police are there. No shooting at the school.”
The calm woman goes behind the counter. I order a slice of heat lamped pizza, grab a pepsi amd a snickers. Having just heard the situation, I’m taken by the contrast between the woman ringing up my order who gives me a look like “Can you believe this woman”? And the other near catatonic woman who is now standing, cell glued to here ear saying “No! There were shots at the elementary school!”
I didn’t know who had the more informed story, but it seemed like the woman behind the counter was in a better state of mind to deal with any inevitability.
I took my purchase out to the car after clarifying my suspicion about overshooting my turnoff (would not be the last time today to do that).
I ate the pizza in the car sharing the sausage with Mischa. Turned out it was a breakfast Pizza!
Sausage- bacon - egg - cheese! Brilliant!
I back tracked, found my turn off and continued to Elba (able was I ere I saw elba); Enterprise (site of my next failure to recognize my path had changed direction without me) and on to Dothan.
As I approached Dothan, I heard on a NPR station out of Georgia that today was the 50th Anniversary of the march from Selma to Montgomery. “Bloody Sunday”, as it never got more than a few miles before having attack dogs unleashed on them.
Fifty years, and I wish that kind of unchristian, inhumanity had passed us by. But I remember my sister Cindy talking a few days earlier about a friend of hers who was talking about a mutual friend in Alabama. “Oh, he’s dead. They put a rope around his neck and dragged him behind a truck.” And that was last year. I looked on the internet to see if I could find the report and was saddened to read that last year a man in South Carolina; A man and a woman in Texas shared the same fate.
LAST YEAR.
By “men” who mix being “White, Male, Christian, Conservative, American and Southern into the worst example of form of existence called “Human”. They disgraced each of the aforementioned catagories with their very existence. And yet they exist, thrive and continue to find fellowship.
I felt a great sinking feeling.
And I think of Tim McVey.
And the ongoing war on “terrorism” that is being allegedly waged in Afghanistan and (Illegally) in Pakistan when we do nothing about the “Tim McVey’s” in our own country. The type that feed on right wing talk radio and the hate spewing from Fox News daily.
It reminds me of Dickens warning from the Ghost of Christmas Present of the two creatures beneath his robe: “Ignorance and Want”
As the right constantly complains about “Elites” and teachers and public education. They want home schooling and “creationism” and “Voucher System Schools”
They want “Ignorance” for the masses , not for their children - they want Them to be elite.
I got to Dothan Walmart (south of town). I look for 3 things - Camping equipment - (Tent Heater and a ground mat); Cell Phones (My own is having problems charging and I’m sick of AT&T); and Shoes.
I end up buying a $12 pari of tennis shoes.
I had been hoping to meet Bill Perkins in Dothan. We’d been Facebook friends for a few years due to his great article about Facebook Friendships featuring our Mutual friend, musician Elliot Randall (know for the signature guitar solo on Steely Dan’s “Reeling in the Years”. I had questions I wanted to ask him about the economy in Dothan over the last years; his take on the 50th anniversary march on Selma and talk about music with him. It was not to be..
Off to other places - Blue Springs State Park.
I arrived just about 4pm. No one inside the Kiosk. A “Huey” starts to bear down on me as I enter the park. It flys by, the first of many thorough the night.
I find a primitive spot to camp at - wifi not to be found except near the ranger station and kiosk (though they advertise proudly “Free Wifi”
A sad looking man walked over with his laptop in tow to sit in the cold at a bench near the Ranger’s House just to get reception.
After finding a tentative tent site I drive out to find a dtore to buy food/charcoal/ice for the night.
Nothing.
4:30 and the gates close at 5pm. Even the local restaurant closed at 2pm! (Mondays and Tuesdays)
Fuckit! One night - I’ll eat raisins and go to sleep. I head to Tuskegee tomorrow!
[Addendum] I re-read Steinbecks next to last chapter in “Travels” dealing with the Louisiana “Cheerleaders” and the man he gave a partial ride towards Montgomery. It seems not much has changed besides freeway routes since his time. (going from New Orleans through Jackson, Ms would now be on course to go through Birmingham, Al rather than Montgomery, Al.)
But sadly along many of the bleak two lane blacktops like the one that lead me to Blue Springs, there are many dark souls hiding many ugly secrets. Or maybe not so secret. As one of the people working at the Blue Springs Park told me when I talked to him about hearing a lot of small arms firing the night before.
“Oh, that’s one of our crazy neighbors. He likes shooting his guns a lot. He’s practicing to overthrow the government”!
He said it with a chuckle and a wink.
I’m not sure what disturbed me the most, his nonchalant attitude or the chuckle at his little joke.