Kudzu and Hydroplanes

Kudzu and Hydroplanes

by

Steve Ketzer, Jr.

(2016)

            In northern Florida and southern Georgia, Spanish moss gave way to kudzu that, having covered and killed the natural understory, was climbing up the pines to steal their light.  Kudzu, a gift from Japan, was introduced in parts of the South as pleasing, quick growing ground cover and a remedy for soil erosion.  It took to the land like a new religion, unstoppable. The poor redbud and dogwood had no chance—someone is always trying to change nature, especially the South's, sending in armies of kudzu creepers.

            At Thomasville, Georgia, I got on 84W that would take me through southern Alabama and Mississippi before crossing over that greatest of American rivers at Natchez into Louisiana, my destination being Alexandria and the boat races at Lake Kincaid.  The highway would go through Bainbridge, Dothan, Andalusia, Monroeville, Laurel and Bude.  Pinky rode shotgun, and for canine comfort and pleasure, her bed was beside me where once the Echo’s passenger seat was bolted.

            For the trip, I pulled from the Ls of my CD collection: Little Feet, The Little Willies, two of Leo Kottke, three of Sonny Landreth, four of Lyle Lovett, passed on my wife’s K.D. Lang, but did take her Lilith Fair. I also had on board spoken word that I hadn't heard in twenty years, a four CD set: “In their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry,” which ran the gamut from Walt Whitman, originally recorded on a wax cylinder by Thomas Edison in 1890, to poets of my generation, including Jimmy Santiago Baca, Rita Dove, Luci Tapahonso, Luis Rodriguez, and Li-Young Lee: 79 poets, 122 poems.  If that didn’t do it, I had country music on FM, or the ping and pong of NPR and Right Wing Radio, whichever came in clearest. The latter two, as hard as they might try, could not compete with the pretention, pomposity and maudlin melodrama of the poets, their serious self-importance.  Oh, some were cute if coy, some funny, as with Nash, or just plain goofy, as with Ginsberg, but overall, they had the voice of all-knowing Gods.  As the decades of poetry rolled into the 60s and through the 70s, the voices turned to angst, anger, and hatred, Whitman’s poets to come, I suppose, turning the world upside-down, splashing buckets of red paint down the face of Mount Rushmore while screaming "mene mene tekel upharsin" at the long ago dead, as if the poets and their like, even with two hundred years of hindsight, could have done better.  As Ken Kesey said to the horde of anti-war demonstrators looking up to him for wisdom and guidance, “Fuck it.”

            I drove in a hail of bark behind logging trucks while Pinky slept beside me on a pink, princess baby blanket.  With her window rolled down and passing through small towns, she sat up and held her hound/shepherd snout out and snuffed the air, no doubt making notes as to how to get back home.  Circumnavigating Dothan’s traffic—although a nice town, resplendent with Biblical context, let us not go to Dothan—we pressed on and stopped in Monroeville to overnight, pay homage to Truman Capote and Harper Lee, walk around the Atticus Finch court house, and eat fried chicken from Mel’s Dairy Dream, a shack adjacent to a low stone foundation where a home once stood.  The stone foundation reminded me of an archeological dig, a civilization long gone, the site where Capote once lived with his cousins.  But the trees still stood, no doubt the same trees Truman and Harper hid and giggled behind.  It was a nice little town with friendly people, black and white, and not one of them appeared to be in a hurry, but moved at the pace of their language, as did the light traffic on 84, no one back there on your ass all pissed off and antsy to pass.  I shared chicken livers with Pinky, and her eyes spoke of heaven.  It was good chicken.

            Getting an early start, and doing no more than sixty, we crossed Alabama and Mississippi to arrive at Natchez.  Natchez, with its twin bridges spanning the Mississippi, was green; if it wasn’t a structure or pavement, it was green, not the soft and somewhat fragile kind of Ireland that clings to rock, but engulfing, with lawns, shrubs, magnolias, and oaks, the land and sky full of it, as if the river rose and receded leaving everything green. I forgot to look for kudzu along the way, but would have noticed had that ugliness gained control.  With all that verdure, and knowing its history, why would anyone invite kudzu to take root in Mississippi?  Why tell a Cajun from Lafayette how to fix catfish, shrimp, oysters, gumbo, boudin, or crawfish etouffee?  A road sign announced access to the Natchez Trace, and as inviting as it sounded, we moved on, up and over the bridge.

            Crossing into Louisiana, the land flattened into fields of cotton, soybean, sugar cane, and rice, with an occasional crop duster performing aerobatics in the sky, or piece of farm equipment, like a grotesque, alien invader, crawling down the highway as Sonny Landreth played and sang about the land and people, his land and people, bottleneck in zydeco, South of I-10, Grant Street Dancehall; “Sometimes, darlin’, everything ain’t all about you.”

            I hadn’t been to Alexandria since 1978, when, while driving a bit too aggressively in the world championships on Lake Buhlow, I flipped my hydro “Styx Tryx” in the first turn with ten boats in a hurricane of rooster tails bearing down on me: Holy shit!  With massive growth, freeways and overpasses, I didn’t recognize Alexandria and was lost for an hour before locating the hotel (no GPS).  Commenting as much to a bartender at the Cajun Landing, he shrugged that he wouldn’t know what Alexandria was like back then, as he was “only” born in 1998 (1998!), but did offer that much of the growth was the result of Katrina, not from rebuilding after the hurricane, but due to hordes of people from New Orleans who took refuge there, and then stayed. The boats, although newly sleek to the point of stealth, and engines, sounds and smells, were most familiar, and many of the boats along the bank had the letter L before their number, L being indicative of the district composed of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, the district I raced out of decades ago.

     

            Not being satisfied to watch, and with Pinky at the Best Western, comfortable and happy on her queen bed, as the scream of outboard engines running straight pipes frightened her,  I volunteered in the pits.  I still knew what to do and could do what I once did, but not without serious payback.  On Saturday, I tweaked my lower back while helping swap out engines.  Not yet satisfied, I twisted and sprained my upper back on Sunday while helping lift a boat--to start an engine, the aft section of the boat is lifted until the propeller is out of the water, and held there until the engine clears out.  When it’s screaming bloody murder and the driver gives a nod, you let it go…and you let go.  I held on a split second too long.  While my feet were solidly planted in the Louisiana muck, my back snapped ninety degrees, and I thought, “Aw, man, that’s gonna hurt later.”  And it did, but not at that point, where I stood and watched the races, and, having experienced it, felt the jolts and battering in the turns, rooster tails hitting your face shield like a firehose, the digging of the right hand sponson, the surprise of the flip, and shock of going momentarily airborne.  What fun!

            The drive home was painful and long being interrupted by the many stops necessary to get out and stretch the back.  We again overnighted in Monroeville, but did no touring.  Instead, I ordered in pizza—Pinky likes the crust—soaked in a hot bath, thought about the drive ahead, Harper Lee, and wondered what could be done about the scourge of kudzu.