Walking back home. Part 3

Nothing lasts forever...


Not even this walk.


I end my ruminations at Snowdown Methodist Church. I walk around back to where both of my Grandfathers,George and Carl; my Great Grandmother,Carrie; and more family and friends than I care to mention are buried. My mother and I both have a plot there. I am supposed to be buried right next to George although I have no intentions on a dirt burial. I will either crawl off into the mountains to die, renewing my covenant with the Earth and returning to my rightful place on the food chain; or I will have a flaming burial at sea. A good old Viking funeral and debauched party with friends to send my mortal remains to Davy Jones and my spirit free to go wherever spirits go when they are no longer inhibited by the desperation of flesh.


I view most of our death rituals as primitive at best. Morbid at their worst. The viewing of the body at the funeral home is a horrible ordeal involving the most sickening of floral stenches, dressing up in uncomfortable clothes, and commiserating with people you haven't seen in 20 years, for reasons you can't remember. I swear before all that is Holy and Bacon-flavored, if any of you subject my cast-off meatbag to any such indignity, I will come back from the Great Purple Wherever and plug up your toilets with feminine hygiene products and peanut butter.


Dirt burial is another such example. What a waste of quality real estate are cemetaries. Just think of all the land we could spread out on were we to just use the dead as fertilizer. Run them through a log chipper! Feed the fish! Replentish the oceans! Have greener grass! The meat is not the man, I always say. Put up a website with tombstones and dedication pages where people can go grieve for loved ones, play their favorite music, watch home movies, and even leave virtual flowers on the virtual grave. Stop using up good dirt for the dead. Let the living enjoy it! But then again, I feel the exact same way about golf courses and their patrons...including the log chipper part.

My Grandfather gave all this land to the church back in the way back and that field on the other side of this fence was where I shot my first quail. And kissed my first girl, somewhere other than the lips. I drove a car through this field one night, high on something illicit and probably not very good for me, doing doughnuts in the sagegrass and listening to AC/DC "Back in Black" cranked up to an earth-shattering 11.
I used to lie on my back and listen to God speak to me in pine needle whispers. I dug for treasure here and vented my teenaged angst throwing rocks at the moon.

A cursory glance at the old home place tells me that my walk here is over. There is nothing left to see. The property has long ago been sold to strangers and the untamed wilderness, streams, and adventure of my youth is gone. Houses dot the red clay earth where I played with cars and army men built forts and bridges to enemy territories. Muscadines vines and my Grandpa's barn have lost the battle with Roundup herbacide and neatly trimmed lawns covered in children's toys and other people's cars.

That window over there is the Sunday school classroom where I always had more questions than answers.I would sometimes just stare out the window while the well meaning teacher would drone on about Samson and the Three Wise Men bieng firemen and watch the ladies, those who could cook AND those who could not, setting up the "Dinner on the Ground". It was never actually on the ground though. It was always up on long concrete tables, which still stand today. Many a banana pudding were sacrificed to the Lord right on that concrete slab.

I call for a ride and head back to Mom's where I watch a little of her favorite Tv shows, eat what passes for Key lime pie in this part of the world and play with her ugly-as-sin chihuahua. I think about old lovers, my walk, and the Most Important Thing.

The rest of my vacation was spent in a whirlwind of early morning Tennessee River boat rides, BBQ, my kids, Jessi and Jonathan and Grandbaby, Bailey. I also played catch-up with old friends, watched soap operas, smoked "recently" illegal substances(more on that later), and ate more pie. It was a very nice trip home. One of the first in years when everyone I saw was happy to see me and I was happy to see them.

By the time I loaded my trusty backpack onto the Greyhound, smoked my last cigarette for a few hundred miles, and found a seat that did NOT smell like pee, I was ready to go HOME. When the bus pulled away from Tupelo, I found my heart beating faster. I am always happiest when moving forward.

Key West is home now. But that is not the Most Important Thing. I contemplate this all the way back to the islands. What is the Most Important Thing missing from my life? I have a wonderful life. My best friend is my wife, no major drama at hand, the kids are doing fine, even the dog is healthy, if ugly as ever. I contemplate innocence and roots and family and every other thing that could possibly be wrong with a man's life and cannot come up with a damned thing missing from my existence here. Everything is good.

So why this feeling that something is still out there, something familiar, something unknown, something new, something ancient? Something that I am running toward as well as away from? A Most Important Thing, I am sure, but can't quite lay my hands upon. Are we destined to always search for the next brightening horizon, the next lonely highway, the next stretch of blue ocean? I think we are. Only some of us are more attuned to the call than others. It is as much a curse as it is a blessing.

The bus lets me out at the airport and I inhale Key West in all it's glory. The fetid mangrove and salt smell is intoxicating after the foul stench of The Great Unwashed passing themselves off as fellow travellers on the bus. Diseased plebians, the whole coughing, crying, farting, snoring lot of them. I light my first cigarette in a few hundred miles, throw my backpack where it belongs and start walking back home...

Walking back home. Part 2

I walk all over Key West.

There is something magical about walking the streets in Old Town early in the morning, just as the sky is breaking open with the first rays of day. After the last bar closes, during the Morning Glories, and before the scooters. Every flower blossom worth a damn is wide awake and everyone else is asleep. Everyone but Sandy's on White. My feet find themselves wandering toward a cafe con leche and toasted, buttered Cuban bread.

It offers the senses a dance in which one must participate.

The waterfront at midnight. The pirate sway of drunkeness as I try to navigate the boardwalk after several whiskey(American spelling) and cokes. The inevitable walk back from Stock Island from either the hospital or the jail. I used to walk all the way from the dinghy dock to the laundromat, Sam and Moon as well, with my laundry bag on top of my head like some sort of sweating, swearing, olive-drab hat the size of a manatee. Sometimes I just walk out to White Street Pier and stare at the water and the people and their dogs and their kids and I think about things better left unthunk. Old regrets and moments when you wish you had been a better person, a better friend, a better father, a better...anything. That kind of walk is required penance periodically as long as you can remember, as in all of life, to not take yourself too seriously. Guilt is mankind's most useless emotion. It changes nothing.


This walk was different. This was home, for home's sake. I just wanted to feel it under my feet, to let the musk of cedar and magnolia and BJ's BBQ permeate my skin, to recall something lost, a Most Important Thing, and hold it. To hear Grampa Daniel's voice once again, telling me that I could always come home when all I wanted to do was leave. I still crave fresh homegrown tomatoes and will bite into them like an apple because that is the way Grampa taught me to do it when I was 8 years old. I wanted to drink from the spring behind the thicket with the mason jar hanging from a stick. But I have that. Or have had. I can hold that in my Inner. What I came here for has been missing for as long as I could remember but at the time I really couldn't have told you what it was.

I wanted to flake away the bark of a pine tree until my hands were sticky with resin. I wanted to get red clay on my best shirt. I wanted to hunt for arrowheads in Altha Wingo's woods across the the road because for some reason I never could find any on my side. I wanted to go fishing with Trip, a plastic bucket of nervous minnows and a cane pole. I wanted to sleep in the barn. I wanted to go to Snowdown Church and try to sing bass during "Standing on the Promises" like I did when I was a kid and sat on the back row. My Grampa sat on the front row and cried everytime we sang "How Great Thou Art". The difference 30 years can make.

I have hitchhiked across this beautiful and savage country several times. I have been told that I have a bit of a rogue-ish look about me so when I hitchhiked in the late Eighties, I got to walk a lot. I walked out into the Mojave for a week once. I lumbered into the Tetons several times. I have stood on a corner in Windslow, AZ. The Lovely Sam and I walked to Billy the Kid's gravesite. He really is buried with Charlie Bowdre. It really does say "Pals" on the headstone. We have also walked to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, to the top of Bell Rock in Sedona, the giant redwood forest of northern California, and the streets of San Francisco. We have walked hundreds of miles in North Carolina together and slept under the stars for so many nights in a row that a Wal-Mart became an alien concept. I walked down Hollywood Boulevard and stood next to the casting of John Waynes boots. Marilyn Monroe has bigger hands than his feet. Or maybe I am getting Norma Jean's cement prints confused with a drag queen in Nashville who sings "Happy Birthday, Mr. President" in perfect breathless fashion?

What happened here? Where did the dirt roads go? Where went hunting snakes and curing the hides on the clothesline with Mom's salt? Where is Claude Curtis' burger joint? How come no one "liberates" the special mushrooms from The Field anymore? What happened to the damned water in Mineral Springs Park? What happened to Rhonda's pool and Eastside Superette? Who filled in the chalk mines? And for Dungeons and Dragon's sake, will someone please tell me what happened to good old boy sheriffs like Amos Bates? I understand you guys don't even see yours much. Sometime after 8 years old and sometime before I decided to blow my life up the last time, I was happy here. When did it again become somewhere else to walk away from?

I keep on walking hoping some semblance of truth comes from this trip. I feel as if something has been unresolved and unravelled for a long time now. Something to do with this place and why I chose the End of the Road for a home this last several years. I need to hold it in my hand. That Most Important Thing. Hold it and treasure it this time.

Nothing lasts forever...

To be continued.

Walking back home. Part 1

I am never quite prepared for the shock of leaving our self contained universe here in the Keys.

The outside world, on the way down, fades into the rearview and seemingly ceases to be. At times the transition is so profound that it feels as if there should be some sort of ceremony involved. It is not like arriving anywhere else in the world. It's not like riding the Greyhound toward somewhere like Flagstaff. Sure, you are going somewhere but driving down US 1 South, out of Miami and toward Havana, you have the distinct feeling that you are going somewhere IMPORTANT.

On the way up, however, the city of Miami looms ominiously and beyond her neon indifference, the rest of the world. There should be a shrine in Key Largo for travellers forced to return to the mainland. They could pull over and ask the gods to protect them against the Evil Forces of Reality and 9 to 5, to keep a little coconut in our soul and some jerk spice close to the stove.

I had been promising my mother that I would return to my Mississippi home town for a visit for some extended time. It worked out to where my chronically unfortunate pockets happened to be flush near my Mom's birthday,the birth of my beautiful grandchild, Bailey, and the afterglow of finally paying off the Rusted Root. I decided to make the Mississippi Pilgrimage.

The Lovely Sam dropped me off at the airport bus station and sped away, spraying gravel and squealing tires, yelling something that sounded like "FINALLY!" I think she meant that she could finally cry her lonely cries for her absent love. Poor girl, what would she do without me for 2 weeks? I am her reason for living, after all...

I was raped for a ticket aboard the USS WHYDIDNTIFLY, a stately aluminum tube chock full of Swine Flu goodness, owned and operated by the New World Order Prison System. One driver was so militant and overbearing, especially about the behavioural speeches he would give at every stop, he made me want to break my nearly 60 day streak of sobriety just to break his rule about not drinking on the bus.

There are many signs, if a person is observant, of the inevitable decay of Western Civilization. None are more frightening as the Atlanta Greyhound terminal. There are so many crack dealers, crackheads, crackwhores, hustlers, pimps, and my favorites, smelly bums, that you can't move inside the terminal itself. And those are just the passengers! I was offered oxycontins 3 times by fellow passengers on just one 400 mile stretch of road! I won't say whether I bought any of them but I will say that if I did, it was strictly in the name of investigative journalism.

Less than 24 hours into this thing and I already miss the Root and conch ceviche. But wait, here comes Muscle Shoals, Alabama and I know I am close to home. A few more hills and I am in Tupelo, Mississippi, birthplace of The Big E. Elvis. Thank you, thank you very much...also superb hickory smoke pit BBQ and

My mother and my children live about 50 miles outside of Tupelo and by the time I arrived, I was starving! I spent the next 2 days raiding the refrigerator and playing catch up with Mom. And then I went for a walk.

The first person I ran into was an old flame of mine. Back in high school, I was a fool for this girl but she was always too good for me and I was a little too wild for her. She was the girl you wish you had lost your virginity to, instead of the girl at Pickwick with the mustache and the huge areolas. After all these years she is still just as beautiful as she always was. She comments on my walking and the fact that I always did when I was younger and we laugh about old things that no one remembers but us.

I still love to walk. There is something about the connection of my feet against the earth that seals the covenant between Myself and the Other. I walk everywhere. I don't care much for the word "hike", though. I'm all for hiking as an activity just don't care for the word "hiking" It sounds too butch, too strenuous. I am a Walker and an Explorer Afoot. A Meanderer, a Stroller even. What I do, what I have always done, is more of a leisurely larrumphing about, Baloo-style, exascerbated by my tendency to go barefoot or if I have to wear shoes at all, flipflops. I love the feel of Mother Earth beneath the soles of my feet. My spirit clambors for dewy grass and black tilled dirt, a salty beach, a canyon floor, or a long deserted stretch of highway. I walked completely across the fine and beautiful (psychotically hot and invasively dusty) New Mexico just to prove to myself that I could and that it would be worth it. I could and it was.

I have done my fair share of the Appalachian Trail, the Oregon Trail, the old Natchez Trace and most of Route 66 all the way to Flagstaff. I almost froze to death on the top of a mountain in Alamagordo once, whacked out of my skull on a handful of peyote and a case of japanese beer, until I was rescued by a beautiful mute Native girl in a white Caddy, who took pity on the lost and hopelessly demented.

I used to walk this town. I knew every trail and shortcut, every possible route to get anywhere. I would walk to school. I walked the woods. I would beat down my own paths through untamed brush and when I couldn't, learned to be flexible enough to accept the fact that you sometimes have to go back a little in order to go farther forward. I walked with my Grandpa Daniel through town where he would show me off to all his friends down at Jaybird Park where all the farmers smoked Swisher Sweets and told the same old lies to the same old men trying not too hard to sell vegetables.

I would walk past the antebellum mansion on Eastport St. and wonder about the rumors of the tunnel that alledgedly ran from the old Brinkley place to somewhere underneath the high school. Sometimes I would walk out to Leadbetter's Fish Market and stare at them cutting and filetting catfish. I once saw a river cat that laid across two large washtubs full of ice with plenty of fish to hang over each end. Not everyone can say that.

I even used to walk at night. Snowdown Cemetery and the woods behind our house were my favorite haunts. The etherealness of full moon through forest. Cicadas and tiny green tree frogs pulsating along red clay memories. I walked all the way to the Margerum Ghost Town once and arrived well after dark. I spent the night there and walked back the next day.

I walk all over Key West...



To be continued...