Kathy Sue Loudermilk, I Love You: A good beer joint is hard to find and other facts of life

by Lewis Grizzard

  He begins precisely at sundown. He doesn’t hush until the dawn. I have nicknamed him “Hosea.”

  News from the outside world filters in slowly to a place like this. A big story here is that a cosmetic surgeon is moving to the island from Florida to take the wrinkles out for the summer parties at the Sea Pines Club.

  That announcement brought an interesting remark in a local paper from a man identified as an “island punster.”

  “Instead of having your face lifted,” he asked, “why not have your body lowered?”

  So the Reggie Eaves controversy rages on back in Atlanta, does it? Here, they are more concerned about the bleak outlook for shrimp. No white shrimp have been seen in coastal waters for five weeks. The cost of appetizers goes up and up.

  Coal strike? What coal strike? Bless my Lincoln Continental, the cost of a membership to the Sea Pines Club will go up from $3,000 to $5,000 come April 1.

  There has been some interest, however, in the story out of Arkansas where the preacher put his deceased eighty-year-old mother in a freezer locker and then tried to raise her from the dead. The older retirees here are keeping a close eye on his progress.

  I came here to cover the arrival of spring. It comes two weeks earlier to coastal paradise.

  I lived without any spring at all for a couple of years. There are only two seasons in Chicago. Winter and the Fourth of July. A year ago today, I was in snow navel-high to a tall Yankee.

  Missing springtime is like missing a woman. You never really noticed her and then she was gone, and all that she was returns and makes the separation even more painful.

  I think I read this somewhere. “Springtime is the land awakening. The March winds are the morning yawn.”

  People are already on bicycle jaunts around the island here. Sunbathers were on the beach at Turtle Cove over the weekend. Two couldn’t wait and hit the surf in mid-seventies temperatures.

  Squirrels cavort everywhere, I saw a bluebird and a starling. Four deer crossed a road in the Sea Pines Plantation and loped casually through front yards of island residents.

  Soon will come another sign of the season. I usually gauge the appearance of spring by the arrival south of the professional golf tournaments. Hilton Head’s annual Heritage Classic, a prelude to Augusta National’s Masters, is only a week away.

  “The boats are already coming in,” said a man in Harbor Town Tuesday. “The Heritage and spring brings them south.”

  Let it Be is docked from Ithaca. Taranak is here from Plymouth, Maine. Ravisscint came down from Wilmington, Delaware. I see them and think of the old line about nobody ever retiring north.

  The rain has stopped. There is a mist hanging over the marsh behind the Harbor Town Links’ sixteenth green. The wind has ceased, and the stillness that has followed offers an added comfort.

  Let them fight it out at City Hall, and where on earth is South Molucca, anyway? Spring is rushing in, and me and my duck wish you were here.

  NEW YORK SUBWAYS

  NEW YORK—I HAD planned to ride a lot of commuter trains around New York to practice for when Atlanta’s new rapid rail system opens. That will be just as soon as the excavation is completed and the city is put back together again.

  Presently, Atlanta looks like what Sherman would have left if he had been carrying bulldozers and jackhammers.

  Also, I figured the subway would be the best means of transportation around New York, following the big snowstorm last week. After the snow came warmer temperatures and rain. The snow melted and the streets flooded.

  The crud that normally just sits on the streets of New York started floating. Egg shells, potato peelings, and salami sandwich parts I stepped over on 52nd Street passed by me again as I tried to cross 63rd.

  I decided, however, to brave the flooded streets and to look for nonexistent empty taxicabs rather than attempt to take subway trains. That is because the snow and flooding were causing problems underneath New York, too.

  One train on its way to New Jersey quit running in what they call a PATH tube somewhere underneath the Hudson River, speaking of floating crud. The people inside the train were three hours getting out.

  “Everybody stayed calm,” said one of the passengers. “We sang songs to pass the time.”

  If I were on a stranded commuter train on the way to New Jersey in a tube somewhere underneath the Hudson River, I would not stay calm, nor would I sing songs. That is because I can’t panic and sing at the same time.

  I heard some other horror stories about subway trains from native New Yorkers who ride them all the time.

  “We were going along one morning,” a young woman told me, “and it became quite obvious the train was going faster than it should have been. Everybody got a little nervous.

  “Suddenly, the motorman walked out of his little compartment and threw up. He was drunk. At the next stop, they came and took him away.”

  Another commuter topped that.

  “You never know what you’ll see,” he said. “I was on my way to Queens. A guy and his wife or girlfriend got on the train having a big argument.

  “They argue for four or five stops. They get louder and louder. Finally, the guy takes all he can stand and starts choking the woman. He chokes her until she’s blue.

  “Another man nearby grabs him and pulls him away from the woman and belts him one to settle him down. Soon as that happens, the woman cranks up and bops the poor guy who saved her life on the head with her pocketbook. He’s out cold.

  “At the next stop, the couple gets off and walks away arm-in-arm.

  You simply have to know certain rules about riding commuter trains. Here are some I picked up in New York for Atlantans to remember in the future:

  - If somebody decides to choke his lover on a commuter train, don’t interfere unless you want your head bashed in.

  - No matter how crowded a car looks, it will always hold one more.

  - Let sleeping drunks lie. Unless one happens to be driving your train. In that case, launch an immediate search of the cars for a priest.

  - In case of an emergency, like having to walk out of a tunnel, avoid the third rail. Ignore this rule and that sizzling sound is you, Bacon Face.

  - Discourage pickpockets and thieves. Swallow your wallet before entering the train.

  - If several young men in black leather jackets appear and ask for your wallet, do not tell them you swallowed it. Notice the fellow passenger who did is now minus one wallet and bleeding to death.

  - Never shove a friend off a platform in front of a speeding commuter train as a practical joke. Unless he gave you a hot foot when you were packed in like sardines during rush hour the day before. Then it’s OK. You owe him one.

  - If you are now frightened about riding Atlanta’s new commuter trains after reading all of the above, don’t be. Remember none of that could ever happen in our city.

  SALTINES AND SOLZHENITSYN

  TELLICO PLAINS, TENN.—I had been days without newspaper, locked away in a careless world of mountains, rivers, dirt roads, and a supply of Vienna sausage and sardines and a gift for which we can never offer enough gratitude: the saltine cracker.

  God bless the saltine cracker, for it is constantly loyal in its service to enhance the flavor of even the barest edible. You could eat dirt with a packet of saltine crackers on the side.

  I can’t go many days without a newspaper because I can’t go many days without certain information necessary to my peace of mind.

  I need to make sure the world hasn’t been blown away, and I need to keep up with the Dodgers. In this rustic village, which is located at the foot of some mountains near the Tennessee-North Carolina border, I purchased a newspaper and found the world still in one piece, which is more than I could say for the Dodgers.

  Interest in the Dodgers is a carryover from my youth, but must a man have to explain every quirk of his character? The Dodgers, I read, have sunk to a lowly third. And the Giants, whom I hate, are still holding to first place. So help m
e Junior Gilliam, my favorite all-time Dodger, that can’t last.

  My companion and I needed a hot breakfast, if for no other reason than to take a brief leave from the joys of saltines. We walked into a place in Tellico Plains that was a combination beer joint and restaurant, mostly beer joint. The regulars were already at their stations. A card game of some variety was in progress, and an old man in a hat played the game with a boy-child on his knee.

  “You have grits?” I asked the lady.

  “Not grits,” she said. She was missing some teeth. “I could fix you potatoes.”

  Where does it say an angel must have teeth?

  Over eggs and country ham and fried potatoes—the kind that are round and thin—I read the rest of the newspaper. Carter this. Carter that. All hail Proposition 13. And a bearded man had made a speech in the Harvard Yard and had said some nasty things about our country. He made the speech in his native tongue, Russian.

  The man, who has never been to Tellico Plains, Tennessee, said we ought to eat dirt for awhile because we have become fat and too interested in material goods, like nice places to live and motorboats. He said we are suffering from a “moral poverty.”

  He said if he could change his country, which would put him in jail if he went back to it, he wouldn’t use our country as a model.

  I finished my breakfast and the newspaper, left a nice tip for the lady and walked out on the streets of Tellico Plains.

  It was a gorgeous late spring day. Just beyond the fruited plain that surrounds the village was a mountain majesty more green than purple, but stunning nevertheless.

  Passing by me were simple folk, dedicated to the day’s work and the simple pleasures. Most of them, I am sure, had never heard of the Harvard Yard, much less of the bearded, exiled Russian author who spoke there.

  A pickup truck passed through town, its rear bumper bearing a message I don’t entirely agree with, but one I needed at the moment. The Dodgers were going badly and what the Russian had said upset me.

  “America,” read the sticker, “love it or leave it.”

  But where would you go, Mr. Solzhenitsyn? Where would you go?

  8.

  RAILROAD BLUES

  One day there won’t be anymore trains to ride, and a part of me will die. The part that enjoys good conversation in the club car, morning coffee crossing the Potomac into Washington in the dining car, and little boys and old men who, as long as there are passenger trains, will stand beside the tracks and wave at them.

  SHE GOES BUMP IN THE NIGHT

  ABOARD THE FLORIDIAN—SHE used to have a more romantic name. She was The South Wind, and Johnny Cash mentioned her in a song: “She left me on The South Wind. . . .” When she was younger, she dazzled them with her speed and grace for over 2,000 miles of railed opulence.

  Now, she is a tattered, financial mess that is unloved and unwanted. By way of introduction she is Amtrak’s Chicago-to-Miami Floridian. She is old, she is slow, and she goes bump in the night.

  The Floridian, nine cars and a brightly painted engine with a red snubnose, left Miami just after dawn the morning before. The feminine personification is hardly applicable anymore. “It” passed through Fort Lauderdale and Orlando and rolled into Jacksonville nearly eight hours later.

  Then, there was a westward swing through the flatlands of south Georgia, through Waycross, Valdosta and Thomasville, before a turn north into Alabama and Dothan, Montgomery and Birmingham.

  The Floridian is notorious for running behind schedule. It is sup posed to make the 2,576-mile journey between Chicago and Miami in just over thirty-seven hours, two full days and one night.

  It is due in Birmingham’s old Louisville and Nashville railroad station—located in the middle of downtown—at 1:48 a.m. The rest of Birmingham sleeps unaware in a soft rain.

  A station agent, a baggage clerk and four passengers await the train on a platform outside the station. Precisely at its expected time of arrival, the Floridian’s headlight peers around a corner south of the station. “Train comin’,” says the station agent. Train comin’ right on time, for a change.

  I have made this trip before—Birmingham to Chicago, Chicago to Birmingham—aboard the Floridian. Nashville and Louisville are two of the stops in between. Rail travel remains a personal adventure, despite the hardships it often entails. Although Amtrak, the government-subsidized authority that runs most of the nation’s remaining passenger trains, has managed to upgrade some of its ser vice, much of it remains a frayed relic of the past. The Floridian falls into that category.

  This train is one of Amtrak’s biggest losers. This train, to borrow from songwriter Steve Goodman, “got them disappearin’ railroad blues.” This train is bound for a permanent siding if a providential solution isn’t found that would increase its ridership and cut down its annual losses. The yearly deficit runs into millions.

  One problem is its patronage is seasonal. “We are packed in the summer,” the dining car steward will tell me during the trip. “We’ll get two or three hundred people—most of them on vacation to Florida—every day. After school starts back, that changes.”

  When the Floridian arrives in Louisville the next day at noon, there will be twenty-one passengers on board.

  A route change was one of the possible solutions Amtrak was looking into before its management recommended complete scrap ping of the train. One proposal would have sent the Floridian south out of Nashville into Atlanta, then to Macon and Savannah—or to Macon, Albany, and Jacksonville. Public hearings were held in Atlanta and in cities on the Floridian’s route.

  If Amtrak’s board of directors goes along with management, Atlanta will remain the nation’s largest city not receiving Amtrak service. Southern Railway, which is not an Amtrak member, operates its own passenger train, the Southern Crescent, daily between Atlanta and Washington, D.C., and three times a week between Atlanta, Birmingham, and New Orleans.

  It is 713 rail miles between Birmingham and Chicago. Arrival in Chicago is scheduled at 9:02 p.m., nineteen hours after the Birmingham departure.

  I am asleep thirty minutes out of Birmingham, despite a ride reminiscent of the tilt-a-whirl from county fairs past. For $71.50, I have purchased a first-class, one-way ticket that entitles me to a roomette accommodation—a private room with a bed that folds out of the wall. There is also a tiny toilet, a tiny lavatory, and a tiny closet inside.

  A regular ticket—you sleep in a reclining seat in one of the day coaches—costs $35. Amtrak offers a number of special fares on the Floridian, including a Florida package that provides free use of a rental car for a week.

  I can sleep on a train. Most people can’t. I talked with a companion from the sleeper the next morning at breakfast.

  “Sleep well?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “There are only three ways to go to sleep on this train. Be dead tired, dead drunk, or just plain dead.”

  The equipment was old when Harry and Bess were in the White House. It is vintage thirties and forties. It includes a baggage car, one Pullman, four-day coaches, a diner, a rounded-end observation lounge car and a mail car tagging along at the end.

  One of the coaches has a domed top with huge windows for sightseeing. It is located behind the diner. The greasy smoke from the diner’s kitchen exhaust has opaqued the windows in the sight seeing dome car. The view from the back of the rounded-end observation lounge car is the front of the mail car. Nobody has ever accused Amtrak of planning ahead.

  Two middle-aged women boarded the train in Louisville. They will go to Chicago, spend the night, and board another train the following evening for California. They will arrive almost three days later.

  “The train is the only way to fly,” one tells me.

  “It’s the ONLY way I’ll fly,” laughs her companion.

  They are sitting in the lounge car, drinking beer. They have at least six beers each between Louisville and Chicago. When we reach Chicago, they are flying higher than anybody else on the train.

&
nbsp; Out of Birmingham, the Floridian crosses Sand Mountain. There are two tunnels. It gradually rolls down into the Tennessee Valley and into Decatur, Alabama, where it crosses huge Wheeler Lake, a TVA reservoir. Dawn catches up just outside Nashville.

  The terrain is hilly, the scenery is autumn-in-the-country. We are in Nashville’s crumbling Union Station at 7 a.m. We cross the Cumberland River and travel on into the Kentucky morning. There is a quick stop in Bowling Green and then another river, the Barren. A brochure describing the Floridian’s route says that near the Barren River is Lost River Cave, once the reputed hideout of the James Gang. The James Gang used to rob a lot of trains.

  Out of Louisville, we cross the Ohio River after a forty-five minute wait for our turn on the bridge. “This is what kills us,” says the dining car steward. “If it’s between a freight and us, we always have to wait for the freight to pass first.”

  Across the river is Indiana. Indiana, I notice, is mostly small towns, with miles of pig farms, cow farms and horse farms and acres of dying corn stalks in between.

  I also notice it is difficult for most people not to wave at a train when it passes by them. As long as there are passenger trains, there will be old men and little boys to wave at them.

  At Bedford, Indiana, we stop for the southbound Floridian to pass. It is nearly empty, too.

  My sleeping car porter is classic in the railroad sense. He is black, with a full crop of gray hair. He is smart in his black trousers and starched white frock. He is polite, patient and helpful. We talked about this train.

  “I told ’em they ought to put this train through Atlanta five years ago,” he says. “They ought to run it like the old Dixie Flyer that went to Atlanta and Albany and Jacksonville out of Chicago.

  “That was some kind of a train. It left Jacksonville at night and got to Atlanta the next morning. The businessmen used to ride it. A lot of people down there might ride it up to Atlanta now if Atlanta had any ball teams that were any good. But I don’t believe Atlanta will ever have any ball teams that are any good. Do you?”