Though it was now pouring rain, we were making good time. In the first hour, no more than a dozen oncoming cars passed us on the parkway. The terrain had gradually changed from modest rolling hills to flat.
Then, about forty miles north of Jackson, we came to a screeching halt. A huge tree lay across the parkway. It was probably sixty feet tall (or long now), with a trunk many feet in diameter. The ground was so sodden, the tree had simply lost its footing and crashed down across the roadway. And it had fallen recently because there wasn’t a single car around and no emergency crews were on the scene. Who knows? Had we left Tupelo a minute earlier we might have been underneath that tree instead of looking at it.
The roadway was completely blocked and there was no way around. Exits and entrances to the parkway are few and far between, but fortunately there was an exit a half mile behind us, so we turned around and found our way back onto the Trace a couple of miles farther south.
Trees were down everywhere alongside the roadway, enormous trees no longer able to maintain their grip in the wet earth. It made for nerve-wracking driving. As we drove through densely forested areas where large trees loomed above the roadway, I found myself looking up as much as ahead, preparing to dodge the next one to come crashing down. The day before had been a carefree, top-down drive. Today the weather had turned the Trace into a nightmare. Maybe it was time to accept Christ as my savior.
We were smack-dab in the middle of Mississippi and I started to wonder what I might be missing by staying on the parkway, aside from falling trees. After all, it didn’t pass through any downtowns; it was a scenic drive through the countryside. So, we pulled off to see the tiny town of Ethel, population five hundred. The streets were deserted on this Sunday morning, but within a couple of minutes I’d seen enough Confederate flags on garages and trucks and cars to make me feel it would be safer for this liberal in his little BMW convertible with Massachusetts tags to be back on the parkway, even if trees were toppling over with unnerving frequency.
For more than three hundred miles the Trace had been our friend, but now it was tormenting me. The rains were torrential, the visibility poor. Every tree was a threat. I searched in vain for a safe place to pull over (it was also time to let Albie do his business) but found none. Albie, oblivious to the danger all around us, slept peacefully in the back seat. Sometimes it would be nice to be a dog. I was glad I’d affixed my emergency contact information to my driver’s license. It seemed a little neurotic at the time, but now it seemed downright sensible. How will the Mississippi State police tell Judy we died? That we hydroplaned and careered off the road? Or that a tree had flattened the convertible top and us with it? That an oncoming vehicle struck us head-on trying to avoid a falling a tree?
As we passed the enormous Ross Barnett Reservoir the rain let up a little and there were a few spots where the trees no longer hugged the roadway, so I was able to take a breath. Alas, we were not yet out of the woods, literally or figuratively. About sixty miles north of Natchez a group of cyclists was stopped by another huge tree that had fallen across the parkway. My heart jumped. I feared one or more of them had been caught as the tree fell. The rain had stopped, and I rolled my window down. The cyclists, one of them told us, had just come upon the scene; no one was hurt. Through the foliage I could see that an emergency crew had approached from the south. Another of the cyclists said they’d been told it would take at least an hour to clear the tree and open the roadway.
I couldn’t recall, probably because the rain was so heavy and I couldn’t see, where the last exit off the parkway was. The map on my phone was no help. We turned around and headed back north to look for a way off. Ten miles back up the road and we still hadn’t reached an exit, so we turned around yet again and drove back to the fallen tree to wait for the parkway to reopen. By the time we got there, a line of about twenty southbound cars had formed. As we waited, a National Park ranger police car pulled up and a man got out. (The Natchez Trace Parkway is part of the National Park System.) I stepped out of the car to talk to the ranger. This was the fourth tree to topple across the parkway that morning that he was aware of, he told me. The combination of the water-saturated ground and the weight of all the rain in the tree canopies, which were fully leafed-out, was too much.
“If you want to get to Natchez anytime soon,” he said, “I’d get off at the next exit, head north to Vicksburg on 27 and then down to Natchez on Route 61.”
One tree down is a warning. Two are a sign. As much as I wanted to lay claim to having driven the entire Natchez Trace Parkway, once the road reopened a few minutes later we took his advice and exited the parkway and headed northwest on Highway 27 about twenty miles to Vicksburg.
Approaching Vicksburg, we had our first glimpse of the mighty Mississippi River. More than 2,300 miles long, it has profoundly impacted the history of the nation and delineates east from west.# Reaching the Mississippi felt like a milestone of sorts. We were on the edge of the rest of the continent, looking out at the main artery of one of the greatest natural transportation systems anywhere in the world. Some five hundred million tons of goods pass through the Port of South Louisiana at the river’s southern terminus every year and the Mississippi River Basin, which stretches from Montana to western Pennsylvania and New Mexico to North Carolina, produces more than ninety percent of the nation’s agricultural exports. Without the Mississippi, the United States would be a very different country.
The rain had stopped but the sky was still leaden and the air damp as we walked around a nearly deserted downtown Vicksburg. Perhaps it was because I was tired from the stress of the morning’s drive, or maybe because it was a Sunday and the weather gloomy, but the town, even with its rich Civil War history, seemed forlorn. With all the delays caused by the heavy rain and the felled trees it was already late in the afternoon and we still had a ninety-minute drive down Highway 61 to get to Natchez where we were spending the night. We didn’t linger long in Vicksburg.
Natchez was prettier and seemed more prosperous than Vicksburg, and there were beautiful views of the river from a park across from our hotel. After we’d had a walk, we drove down to a landing along the river where a cluster of restaurants and bars hugged the river bank. It had turned into a clear, sun-drenched evening. Albie and I enjoyed a takeout salad from one of the restaurants (I shared the chicken strips in the salad with him; he’s not a big fan of lettuce) and watched the barges making their way along the river. In the background was a bridge connecting Natchez to Vidalia, Louisiana, and as the sun dipped farther toward the horizon the whole scene was infused with a rich, golden light. At river level you can use your imagination and take the river south to New Orleans, where we were headed, or north up past Memphis, St. Louis, and Minneapolis, or board a raft with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.
My mind was on New Orleans. We were north, but about seventy miles west, of the city. In the morning we’d get back on Highway 61 and travel southeast to the Big Easy, a city I first visited when my older son, Dan, went off to college at Tulane in 2009 and where he lives today. We’d been driving every day now for more than a week. In New Orleans we’d slow it down, stay for three nights, and breathe the jasmine-scented air.
* A must-read for every American who wants to understand the history of this country is Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose (Simon & Schuster, 1997).
† The WCTU was founded in 1874 to protest against the consumption of alcohol, but it evolved into an advocacy organization on behalf of labor laws, prison reform, and women’s suffrage. The monument in Tupelo commemorates statewide prohibition which went into effect on January 1, 1908.
‡ The vast majority of Southern monuments to the Confederacy were erected decades after the Civil War, during the Jim Crow segregation era of the 1890s to the 1950s, as a symbolic protest of the supremacy of the federal government in matters of civil rights. Many have argued they were intended, among other things, to intimidate local b
lack populations.
§ Tummler is a word of Yiddish origin that means “to stir,” but it is the term used to refer to an employee, usually male, of a Borscht Belt resort (the resorts in New York’s Catskill Mountains that are generally patronized by Jews) charged with the duty of entertaining guests throughout the day by providing any number of services from comedian to master of ceremonies.
¶ Voz and I have stayed in touch. A couple of weeks after we returned home, he e-mailed me a play he had written. He’s a man of many talents.
# The great arch on the riverfront in St. Louis is called the Gateway Arch because it is the gateway to the West.
PART TWO
To There . . .
SEVEN
Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans?
I first fell in love with New Orleans while walking along the waterfront in Portland, Maine, during the summer of 2005. From somewhere in the distance, the strains of live music floated on the breeze and I followed my ears until I rounded the corner of a cobblestone street. There, a large crowd was listening to three black musicians, a solid woman on clarinet and vocals and two men, one on tuba and one playing rhythm guitar. The woman’s voice rivaled that of great jazz singers, such as Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughn. And the sound she coaxed out of her clarinet was ethereal, like nothing I’d ever heard before.
When they took a break I approached the woman, clearly the star of the show, and bought one of the CDs she had for sale. She told me she was from New Orleans and was spending part of the summer busking in small New England cities from Burlington, Vermont, to Portland and would soon be heading home. Her name was Doreen Ketchens, and the tuba player was her husband, Lawrence.
A few weeks later Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. I’d never set foot in the city. As desperate, heartbreaking scenes unfolded on TV, I thought of Doreen and Lawrence and wondered how they had fared in the storm. When disasters like this happen, I try and help in my own modest way locally rather than giving to a large relief organization with high overhead. Doreen was the only person I knew (and barely at that) who lived in New Orleans. The small print on the CD I’d purchased from her a few weeks before had an e-mail address, so I wrote her, reminded her that we’d met in Portland a few weeks before, and asked if she was OK. To my surprise and relief, a reply came a few days later. Their house was damaged, Doreen wrote, but they were OK. I asked for her mailing address and sent a small check to help with the repairs.
Four years passed. In 2009, our son Dan was accepted at Tulane University and Judy and I were planning to take him down for an admitted students’ day. I thought of Doreen and e-mailed her again, reminded her that we’d met in Portland a few years before, and told her we’d be visiting New Orleans.
“We play regularly at the corner of St. Peter and Royal Streets in the French Quarter,” she wrote me. So, on my first-ever trip to New Orleans we found Doreen and Lawrence and became reacquainted. Dan attended Tulane, and for the next four years, whenever we visited, which was often, we made a point of finding Doreen at the corner of St. Peter and Royal.
Dan graduated, moved back to Boston for four years, and earned his MBA at Boston College. In 2017, he returned to live in the city that he, and we, had come to love during his college years. When we made our first visit after his return, during Christmas week of 2017, we again beat a path to the corner of St. Peter and Royal and there was Doreen, bundled up on a cold day, belting out songs and drawing a big, appreciative crowd. Some things never change.
As always, I reintroduced myself as “Peter from Boston,” to help her remember because she meets a lot of people. When I dropped a twenty-dollar bill in her white plastic bucket, she insisted on giving me a copy of her new CD. She adamantly refused more money. “You have to learn how to receive,” she said, scolding me gently.
Doreen’s love of music is rooted in her Tremé childhood. The Tremé, as it’s called—always the Tremé—is the cultural heart of New Orleans’s black community. Jazz, the blues, gospel, soul, rock and roll, and even rap all have their own roots in this neighborhood just north of the French Quarter.
Enslaved people in New Orleans enjoyed an unusual “luxury”: Sundays off to attend church. After church they gathered in Congo Square in the Tremé where they danced, sang, and played music. The enslaved themselves hailed from many different places throughout Africa and the Caribbean. In Congo Square they swapped, shared, and blended their musical traditions with Creoles and free people of color, and new musical forms were born.
So many musical greats have come out of New Orleans it’s hard to keep track: Louis Armstrong, Wynton Marsalis, Mahalia Jackson, Fats Domino, Dr. John (Malcolm Rebennack), and the Neville Brothers, just to name just a few. Though little-known outside New Orleans, Doreen, also known as Lady Louis (for a style that reflects Armstrong’s) and Queen Clarinet of the Crescent City,* is well-known within it. She belongs in that remarkable pantheon of New Orleans’s musical greats, and she is one of the many unique characters that make New Orleans such an effervescent joy.
A few years back, Doreen told me there were three funeral homes on the street where she grew up and since traditional New Orleans “jazz” funerals feature so-called “second lines,” lively musical parades that follow the funeral procession, second line music became part of the soundtrack of her early years. Her parents owned a sweet shop with a jukebox and she frequently sang along. She discovered the clarinet in fifth grade when she impulsively joined the school band to escape a pop quiz in history class. By the time she got to select an instrument all the flutes she admired were taken, so she settled for the clarinet and discovered she had a natural talent for it. “It’s by the grace of God that I stumbled on the clarinet,” she once wrote me.
Living in a home that was slowly rebuilt after Hurricane Katrina, Doreen is emblematic of the grit and determination of the New Orleanians who refused to let the music, and the city, die.
So, over the years I came to love New Orleans—the spirit, the people, the food, the music, the architecture, the gardens, and the charming, boisterous disorderliness of it all. It isn’t just a city I look forward to revisiting, it’s a city I yearn to return to over and over and over again. I do know what it means, as the song goes, to miss New Orleans.
Since Dan was now making his life there, I was excited the morning Albie and I woke up in Natchez because later that day we would arrive in the Big Easy, take a three-night break from the road, and wander the streets of the city our family had come to love. Though we’d only been on the road a week, I was also looking forward to being in what had become, over the years, familiar territory, a bit of home away from home. I knew where to get my coffee (French Truck on Dryades or Rue de la Course on Carrollton), who had the best almond croissant (La Boulangerie on Magazine), and where to take a beautiful walk (the quiet streets of the Garden District or the loop path in Audubon Park).
It was a picture-perfect day in the southland as we rejoined Highway 61 in Natchez, the road we’d taken from Vicksburg and would follow all the way into New Orleans.† The New Orleans playlist on the car stereo was getting me in the mood.
As we drove from Mississippi into Louisiana, it occurred to me that other than barking at a Golden Retriever puppy we’d passed on a walking path in Maryville, Tennessee, Albie hadn’t barked at all since we’d left home. He didn’t bark when a loud group of partiers gathered in the hallway outside our hotel room in Tupelo at 2:00 A.M., and he hadn’t barked at any of the other dogs we’d passed on our many walks. At home he barks at everyone who approaches the house and, to my chagrin, at many dogs we pass while walking. He barks at Salina in the morning when it’s time for breakfast, or when he feels she’s getting too much attention at his expense. But he’d been uncharacteristically quiet all week. Was it because he no longer had territory to defend? No one to compete with for my attention and affection? There was no way to know but I appreciated the quiet and the more mellow demeanor he had brought with him on the road. I hoped it woul
d last.
Maybe it’s because he was our first dog, or because there’s something especially soulful and vulnerable about him, or because he had the hardest life of our three rescues before finding a home with us, but I have a little something extra in my tank for Albie. Don’t get me wrong; I love them all dearly, but Albie pushes my buttons, all the good ones, every time. I never imagined taking this trip with either of the other two. It was always going to be Albie and me.
A few years ago, while in Louisiana working on my book Rescue Road, I had a free weekend and drove from Alexandria to St. Francisville, a small town in the heart of Audubon country I’d read about in the travel section of the New York Times. John James Audubon, the great naturalist and painter who created the legendary and lavishly illustrated book The Birds of America in the early 1800s, did most of his work and extraordinary painting while living in this part of Louisiana, south of the Mississippi border and about twenty-five miles north of Baton Rouge.
St. Francisville is a small Mississippi River town of well-tended houses and gardens, and many galleries and boutiques. It’s a lovely place to take a stroll—some say it’s the state’s most beautiful town—so about an hour after leaving Natchez we stopped there.
There are parts of Louisiana, St. Francisville being one of them, that drip with Old World atmosphere. Even the street names are evocative. We parked at the corner of Royal and Prosperity Streets and wandered into the large burial ground surrounding the Grace Episcopal Church.‡ Spanish moss hung from the massive live oaks and a black man in green work clothes and a hat draped with mosquito netting, the caretaker I presumed, poked gently at the ground with a rake. He saw us but did not acknowledge us. Elaborate wrought iron fencing enclosed the cemetery, and the sound of a thousand crickets filled the languid, humid air. And the smell: moist, fecund, and fragrant. Many of the lichen-tinged headstones dated to the early 1800s. The scene before us was both mysterious and inviting, and unmistakably Louisiana.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 9