Leslie’s relationship with MD was likewise complicated. Electronic devices know that she’s nervous around them. “They react like a horse does around a tenderfoot,” she told me. “They misbehave.” For instance, she’d been typing a perfectly polite e-mail to a coworker when, in the middle of the message, MD somehow tossed in fucked. Leslie marveled at the Droid and needed it to stay in touch with the office, but she was frustrated when we entered gaps in Verizon’s coverage, of which there were more than the company claims. “We’re like idol worshippers with technology we don’t understand,” she said. “Punch this button because it worked last time. Like the ancients who sang up the sun because if they didn’t, it wouldn’t rise.” Often, I’d see her holding one of her gizmos up to the sky at odd angles, as if offering a sacrifice. It didn’t look too weird if the object was the phone or the little 4G device to connect to the Internet, but she made a peculiar sight when she walked around with the laptop hoisted over her head. As for me, I was delighted by those endlessly spinning “beachballs of death” or the message “No service.”
There was service on the road to Tuscaloosa. Instantly, MD told us that the headquarters for Relief Work Volunteers was in the McAbee Center. Leslie phoned. Yes, volunteers were still needed. We were to show up at nine the next morning to register.
U.S. 82, a federal highway that had the charm of a county road, carried us through peach orchards and small towns and long stretches of pine and sweet gum into the fringes of Tuscaloosa.
We saw very little damage at first—a few boarded-up windows, a roof or two missing shingles—and then the destruction looked postapocalyptic. An entire shopping mall and a nearby residential neighborhood had been pulverized. All that remained of two houses were the foundation slabs, swept as clean as if newly laid; the tornado had sucked the plumbing out of the concrete. Severed tree trunks, branches amputated by chain-saw winds; the steel stanchions of a huge highway sign bent like straws; and everywhere, backhoes and bulldozers pushing rubble into mounds twenty feet high. Berms of dirt, brick, and concrete surrounded the lake Messildine had mentioned, and I pictured that Georgia woman at the bottom, trapped in her Cherokee. The twister had destroyed seven thousand homes and businesses and killed forty-three people. It was an EF4 in the weather bureau’s parlance, the second most powerful category, internal winds of two hundred miles an hour, roaring and thundering, a furious choir singing its own “Dies Irae.”
We found a functioning campground some twenty miles west of the city, in Lake Lurleen State Park, named for Lurleen Wallace, who married George and succeeded him as Alabama’s governor. The next morning, on the way to the McAbee Center, we passed more evidence of the tornado’s capricious rage: a sofa and TV set lay atop a pile of bricks and concrete blocks, the TV’s screen without a crack in it; an American flag clung to its downed pole; one house stood almost intact; its neighbor had only one fractured wall standing, on which someone had painted “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
“Turn left on Fifteenth Street,” MD commanded, and with annoying precision she guided us right to the volunteer center, a gym on the grounds of a Veterans Administration hospital. We signed in, were issued name tags, work gloves, and safety glasses, and received our assignment: the Phister Warehouse, across town.
Before leaving, we wandered over to two large, acetate-covered wall maps of the United States, on which volunteers had written their initials in their home states. Those in the South were so covered that there was no space left. We added LW and PC to the dozen or so entries in Connecticut. A relief coordinator, John Lambert, told me that fourteen thousand people had flocked to Tuscaloosa from every state in the union except Alaska. Some had come from abroad—from the United Kingdom, Germany and Switzerland, Jamaica. Lambert, a recent graduate of the University of Alabama, struggled to express his feelings.
“It is awesome … people wanting to come and help and saying, ‘This is my neighbor, I want to reach out to them, I want to assist them.’ It’s kinda cool to see people from, like, Ohio coming down and saying, ‘We’ve heard about this and we want to help y’all.’”
Dean Cannon’s idea that what bonds Americans to their country is our form of government, combined with our shared history and culture, rings true; but evidence of something more fundamental was right in front of us, on the maps: a spirit of generosity arising from a recognition that we are not islands unto ourselves but parts of a greater whole. That spirit had compelled thousands of men and women to travel long distances to a place many had never seen and come to aid fellow citizens they’d never met. They’d disrupted their own lives to clear rubble, load trucks, deliver food and medicine, and comfort the afflicted.
At the Phister Warehouse, in a drab industrial district, I backed Fred into the shadiest spot I could find, under a mimosa whose pink flowers threw off an amazing scent. Leslie dropped the truck’s tailgate, clipped Sage’s and Sky’s leashes to anchor points, and filled their water bowls to overflowing. The temperature had hit triple digits.
Fred shared the parking lot with a couple of rental trucks and several vans belonging to church groups.
The warehouse must have covered an acre. Boxes of supplies, number-coded to indicate clothes, towels, food, soap, shampoo, bottled water, and so on, were stacked on pallets or in bins from one end to the other. Supervising the volunteers were half a dozen women wearing yellow T-shirts from Seventh-Day Adventist Disaster Relief. We reported to the lady-in-charge, who assigned us to Mary Rose.
We were to fill an order for the New Light Baptist Church in the town of Eutah, Mary Rose told us in a soft voice. A huge order for just about everything imaginable—Eutah had been devastated. She glanced at the clipboard in her hand. “It’s so big, it’s ridiculous,” she said. “All right, first thing for you is to find four big pallets and bring ’em right here.”
Mary Rose, who was about fifty, had doused herself in cologne. In a few minutes, after dragging two pallets down an aisle to the appointed place, I found out why. The warehouse, despite the whirring of giant exhaust fans, steamed like a greenhouse in Bangkok. I was dripping. We started with canned goods, which I was stacking neatly in a cardboard box until Mary Rose instructed me to not be so fussy.
“Just dump ’em in, baby,” she said.
“Does the order ask for beans?” Leslie asked, holding two.
“Oh, just give ’em everything,” Mary Rose answered. “And some tuna, and some peas, just throw ’em all in the box, yeah.”
“We’re going to give them a massive case of indigestion,” Leslie muttered, and tossed in an ample supply of Imodium.
From foodstuffs, we moved on to toothpaste, toothbrushes, towels and washcloths, plastic tableware, paper plates, napkins, flashlights, batteries, with Mary Rose reading off the items on the order form.
After a lunch of chicken and dumplings, gratis from a local chain, she led us through the rest of her checklist.
“A generator!” she whooped. “The minister’s got the nerve to ask for a generator? And look at this. TVs and a computer! What does he think we are?”
She handed us signs that read HOLD FOR NEW LIGHT B.C. and told us to tape them to the pallets we’d loaded. Then she walked off, maybe to look for a generator or computer. Nearby, a few high school kids and a couple of women were sorting clothes, and that’s when I observed something I should have noticed earlier: all the volunteers were white, all the supervisors were black. This in Tuscaloosa, where on a sizzling June day in 1963, defying a federal court order to integrate state schools, Governor Wallace stood on the steps of Foster Auditorium at the University of Alabama to bar two black students from enrolling. The same George Wallace who’d vowed in his inauguration speech, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!” Forty-seven years, eleven months, and twenty days later, I was watching blacks and whites working side by side, and what was more astonishing, whites taking orders from blacks. It would have made a fine photo to post in the Tin Top Café.
The next day
, it was 102 degrees, and the forecast promised three more scorchers. My aid-worker zeal beginning to wilt, I was pleased to hear from Mary Rose that most orders had been stacked and shipped.
“I’m trying to find something useful for you to do,” she said as we traipsed after her down a corridor between bins of stuff. “But it looks like we’ve come to the end of the rope.”
We ended up sorting clothes with a crowd of teenagers from various church youth groups—Methodists, Baptists, an Episcopalian or two, some in T-shirts bearing biblical quotations. Leslie asked one volunteer if nonchurch organizations like the Red Cross were involved. “Yes,” he said, “everyone is here.” But the religious current was stronger, for we were in the buckle of the Bible Belt. Southern religion is often the pulpit-thumping kind that favors judgment over mercy. I grew up with the Roman Catholic version but, it seemed to me, the relief effort was what Christianity should be all about. It was a time for mercy; for those who sought judgment, the tornadoes had rendered enough to last a long time.
We worked for an hour or so—men’s shirts in this bin, children’s shoes in that—and when it was all done, we hung around and tried to look busy. As always, that proved harder than work, so we chatted with a co-volunteer, a middle-aged woman named Carol. Like the Meyerses back in the Keys, she reminded us that we weren’t quite as adventurous as we’d thought. Thirteen years ago, with her mother and her ten-year-old daughter, she’d driven from Tuscaloosa to the Arctic Circle and back, camping out in a tent every night but three for sixty-one days.
Mary Rose dismissed us, thanked us for our services, and we left, Leslie feeling that we hadn’t done enough. I, on the other hand, felt virtuous and in need of a bath.
Lake Lurleen supplied it. We jumped in with Sage and Sky, only to find it nearly as hot as the air, more like a Jacuzzi absent the soothing jets.
That evening, I was grilling chicken breasts when Leslie, her face ashen, returned from a walk with Sage.
“Phil, she’s peeing blood.”
As if on command, Sage squatted, leaving drops of alarming red in the grass. She whined, twitched, and looked at us, with what I took to be a plea in her dark eyes. The dread that Sage might die on the trip had lurked in the back of my mind ever since leaving Connecticut.
We lifted her into the truck and drove through the darkening woods to the main highway, where we picked up a cell phone signal (for once, I was happy), called a local clinic, and then our friend Brad. Brad’s a doctor for humans, but he’s raised and trained many dogs, and knows more about them than most veterinarians. “Probably a UTI,” he opined (medical jargon for urinary tract infection). “They’ll give her…” He rattled off various “omycins” and warned us to avoid one omycin because “the vets love to give it, and it costs way too much.”
The clinic was in a nondescript strip mall. Though never a candidate for a doggy Mensa society—whatever genius she had she showed in the field—Sage recognized a veterinarian’s office when she smelled one. Knowing she was to be poked and prodded, she resisted when the vet, a large young woman with a raspy voice, led her to an examining room.
“It’s okay, girl,” I said, ruffling her ears.
We waited, anxiously, for twenty minutes or so, until the vet emerged with Sage, confirmed a UTI, and prescribed an omycin. We didn’t care if it was the one Brad had advised us to avoid, and we paid the bill—$277—without a flinch.
We returned to carbonized chicken breasts on our little hibachi. In the morning, the puddle Sage left under an oak tree was pinkish, but she seemed to be on the mend. A brassy sun bobbed over the trees, forecasting another blazing day. We ate cold cereal, then sweated through the hitch-up drill. Leslie’s iPod was playing “Sweet Home Alabama” as we pulled out, headed for Tupelo and the Natchez Trace.
11.
As we drove the road through Veterans Park in Tupelo, a band played “Stars and Stripes Forever” in my head. American flags picketed both sides almost all the way down to a placid lake dotted with Canada geese, mallards, and pintails. The flags might have been left over from Memorial Day and continued to flutter for the town’s next big event: the eleventh annual Elvis Festival.
Leslie had talked me into visiting Elvis Presley’s birthplace. Here was another of our differences. I am severely allergic to visiting iconic places where people gather in droves; Leslie’s always up to try them. Years ago, she’d had to force me to go to the Grand Canyon. A tourist trap, I’d thought, determined to be unimpressed. She still likes to quote my reaction when I saw it: “Hoooollly shit!”
The basilica of Elvis worship is Graceland, in Memphis; the east side Tupelo neighborhood is the manger, dedicated to the first thirteen years of his life. It consists of his boyhood home, a clapboard shotgun house smaller than some of the travel trailers we’d seen on the road; the white frame Baptist church where he sang in the choir; a modern museum-cum-gift shop filled with memorabilia and kitsch; a fountain called the “Fountain of Life,” inscribed with his dates of birth and death; a life-size bronze statue of thirteen-year-old Elvis in country-boy overalls, carrying an acoustic guitar; and all of this on fifteen manicured acres of a Tupelo city park bought with the proceeds from an Elvis homecoming concert in 1957.
Mississippi, touting its contributions to American music, has established a Blues Trail, a Gospel Trail, an R & B Trail, and a Country Music Trail. I learned from Dick Guyton, executive director of the Tupelo museum, that Elvis is the only entertainer with markers on all four.
“He took the black music, the gospel music, the rockabilly music, the rhythm and blues music and put ’em all together to make the Elvis sound,” Guyton said.
Our first crossover star. Guyton’s theory is that Elvis’s church experiences, oddly enough, inspired his semiobscene stage style, those signature bumps and grinds. “The preacher in the church he attended as a little boy—that preacher played the guitar, he moved around on the platform, he made some moves, too, and Elvis picked that up from the preacher, thinking that if the preacher did it, it was okay.”
Guyton, an affable man of seventy-two, is a Tupelo native who had seen Elvis in person in 1956 and 1957, when the King played concerts in his hometown.
I didn’t dare confess to Guyton that I was never a fan of Elvis’s music or his movies. That doesn’t mean I think he lacked talent, even a genius of sorts. He reached the Mount Everest of fame for a reason; many stars today, however, are famous for being famous.
His legend has taken vicariousness to a whole new level, creating an entire subculture of Elvis impersonators who compete annually in Memphis for the title of Ultimate Elvis. (Incidentally, the current term is tribute artist, which I guess sounds tonier than impersonator.)
Tupelo’s Elvis Festival is to this contest what a wild-card playoff is to the Super Bowl.
“We’ve got thirty-five guys performing this weekend for the opportunity to go to Memphis in August,” Guyton told me. “Some of ’em are really good, some are questionable. But in the last four years, we’ve had two guys from the Tupelo competition win the Ultimate Elvis.”
And the Ultimate isn’t ultimate. There is an Elvis Extravaganza contest, an Images of the King contest, and, grandest of all, the Elvis Tribute Artist World Cup finals. All of which made me wonder: Why no Ultimate Sinatra? No Images of Lennon contest?
Guyton showed me a festival program with photos and biographical sketches of the tribute artists spread over three pages. There were fat Elvises, thin Elvises, and is-that-supposed-to-be Elvis? Elvises. Each, Guyton said, would be judged on the skill of his counterfeiting.
After fingering some Elvis dishtowels, Leslie paid her own tribute by buying a coffee mug. It pictured the King, in a blue turtleneck, hands clasped behind his head.
“It’s not skinny Elvis,” she said, studying his image. “It’s not fat Elvis. It’s androgynous Elvis. That pompadour is incredible! I look forward to my morning coffee.”
12.
We picked up the Natchez Trace Parkway north of Tupel
o. Two asphalt lanes, smooth as tabletops, the shoulders speckled with wildflowers, unreeled through ancient woods broken here and there by farm fields where young corn sprouted in black soil. Tall pine, oak, and gum trees splintered the late afternoon sunlight, creating a hypnotic play of light and shadow. Many highways offer more spectacular views, but the Natchez Trace is the most enchanting road in America. It begins in Natchez, Mississippi, and ends in Nashville, Tennessee, and in all those 444 miles there are no cities, power lines, billboards, motels, big-box stores, or fast-food joints—and there’s only one gas station. The absence of commercial enterprises is no happy accident; the highway, built in the late thirties on the remnants of a pioneer route, is administered by the National Park Service. It’s a kind of elongated national park that carries motorized traffic.
And there wasn’t much of that. On the Connecticut Turnpike, we could see ten times more cars and trucks in a one-second glance than we saw in an hour on the Trace. It bore us out of Mississippi, nipped off a corner of Alabama, crossed the Tennessee River, and entered the state of Tennessee, spooling past beds of bloodroot and clover bordering deep green forests. Cruising around the bends in a countryside spared from ruin, I thought, This is what an American road should be—harmonious with the landscape.
We left it, reluctantly, a little distance beyond Meriwether Lewis’s gravesite and found a charming mom-and-pop campground and adjoining roadhouse in a grassy spot on Swan Creek called Fall Hollow. Bill Roper, a big, bearded guy who looked like Ernest Hemingway playing Santa Claus, ran the place with his wife, Kathy. He came outside, brimming with an open-hearted, open-handed manner, and said, “You can camp here under one condition: give me a tour of that bee-yew-tee-ful ole Airstream.” This was one of many compliments bestowed on Ethel, and I worried that she was becoming vain.
The Longest Road Page 7