1. AL's Broken Promise to Alice 2. What AL Told Alice When She Called From St. Louis in 1958. 3. What AL Was Thinking When He Hung Up Twenty Years Later.

1.

Dear, I'll take you dancing
in a club for madmen only.
I move like a falling star--hold tight!
We'll shoot above the dance floor
like swirling shafts of light,
but when we strike the earth, my love,
great heaven splits a seam,
and I'll hand out immortality
like rainbows on a stick,
and all our friends turn into gods
when they partake of it.

2.

The days are hammered in
like mending nails,
working on me, sugar,
like wind on sails,
and I never thought
it could feel so good,
shaking that Faustus hood.

3.

These ties,
enter the heart,
lace through the brain,
entangle the soul in a Gordian knot.
I never was the Alexander type;
I'm a sucker in slow motion.


(Clifton, University of Cincinnati, Summer 1988)

They Do Not Take Heads At Sea

Being raised by the Pacific,
having felt the sand like quicksilver
running beneath my feet in the fringe,
and having fled the breakers
instead of riding them out--
I would change.

Having seen the sailors
with their pandas in San Diego,
and having weighed their pay of dissolution
against this landbound existence
that seethes with desert sand and rain--
I would change.

Having talked with fishermen,
and having walked the hard bound boats
that creak and groan for deeper seas
while pelicans pout on the mast,
and having asked what their nets yield
on this side and that, learning
they do not know all the net yields--
I would change.

Being raised by the Pacific,
having searched for shells with my feet
until my back blistered in the sun,
conscious then and knowing now
that anything at all is one--
I would change, I would change.


(Poems by Poet's Roundtable of Arkansas, 1982)

Exercise in Subterfuge

Of more interest than, say,
time blowing out its stars
is the effect of loving you
in darkness,
talking ourselves to sleep
while the last to speak
hears the heaving cosmos
roll and sigh,
our hearts traversing time,
traversing time for we have loved
inside the silent chains,
eyes closing them away,
and we have loved,
and love remains.


(Arkansas Magazine, Arkansas Democrat, March 17, 1985)

The Mysterious Mr. Trump

Old and Ill-Advised Correspondence:
The Mysterious Mr. Trump

From the Undeleted Email Archive 

of

Ezra Arze, Jr.

Yeah, buddy, I agree with your take on Trump, and as I said before, the wife does, too.  If it comes down to a Hillary vs Trump election, we probably won’t get out and vote.  Well, the wife definitely won’t vote; she’s pissed at Trump because he’s wrecked such havoc within the Republican Party, at a time when we both believe the government has run amuck and needs to be reined in or American is going down the tubes. That means, of course, that we don’t think Hillary is any better than Trump. They are cut from the same cloth; they each are more concerned with their own personal wealth, power, influence and fame, than with the lives of average Americans. The only difference is how they got to where they’re at, and in that regard, I would say Trump has the edge.

Even though he’s a loud, know-it-all, pompous New Yorker, born with a golden spoon in his mouth, he has at least built something and put thousands of people to work; whereas, Hillary hasn't created anything, but has been a politician her entire adult life. That’s why she plays the game so much better than Trump, who doesn’t have a clue about politics, and blurts out whatever is on his mind; instead of, like Hillary, weighing every move against the polls, running it by a focus group, and practicing her nods and finger jabbing in front of a mirror before speaking. Everything she says and does is planned and choreographed. Take the last debate, for instance. The other two guys are on the stage, at their podium, the moderators are there, millions of people are tuned in, and everyone is waiting for…Hillary. And, at last, here comes the queen, takes her place, and with downcast eyes says softly, “Sorry.” I would guess that was planned. Why plan something like that?  Well, for one, it makes you the most important person; everyone is waiting for “you.” For two, it reminded everyone that she is a woman—everyone knows we must wait on women—and this one is, with any luck, the first  female President of the United States. For three, it showed how human she is. Oh, Hillary must have had to take a pee! We know how much trouble that is for women, especially an old woman, fighting that pantsuit and all. She’s just like us, just a regular person! Yeah, right. If she were just like us, she’d strap on another pair of Depends and waddle her ass out onto that stage, on time, like everyone else. Everything she has, has been given to her as a result of politics, whether salary, book deals, speaking engagements, cattle futures, Whitewater, renting out the Lincoln bedroom, donations to the vast Clinton Foundation (to keep control of their wealth and not pay taxes, the same taxes they want to wring out of the shrinking middle class), you name it—it came because of politics and political connections wanting favor.  She is a hopeless liar, deceiver, and scofflaw.  She likes to talk about what she’s done, and what she has “given” to the people. She has given nothing that she didn’t take from someone else, including you and me via taxes, but back to Trump vs Hillary.

When Hillary was running for the Senate in New York, and you said you were going to vote for her, of course, I was baffled: “How can you vote for that reverse carpet bagger from Arkansas, who has nothing on her record other than failures as First Lady here, and scandals as First Lady there, as the U.S. Senator from New York!”  I went through the litany of grievances I had about her since living in Arkansas when she was the First Lady, the lies and deception that followed. And you agreed. Yeah, she’s a money grubbing politician and a liar like all of them, but you were still going to vote for her, because, “you liked her politics.”  Well, hell, Vicki and I like Trump’s politics; he’s just parroting what the conservative base believes, but we’re not going to vote for him.  I agree with a lot of what Trump has been saying about political correctness, illegal immigration, trade, the Iran Nuclear Deal, shipping jobs overseas or to Mexico and Central America, getting taken to the cleaners by Mexico and China, theft of intellectual property, to mention a few.  How could I not?  He robbed those talking points from people like me. But when he talks about those things, it’s like listening to a buffoon. Trump doesn't explain policies, procedures or any other method to get those things done; he just plays the record again, over and over, parroting people’s anger and frustration.  Given who he is, I have no doubt he could build that “beautiful” wall and get it done in a hurry and under budget and could make better trade deals than the Obama Administration. On the warfighting end of foreign affairs, I think he’s clueless. When the primary comes to Florida, I’m voting for Rubio.  If Trump is the party’s choice, he’s going to have to show me a lot more between now and the election, including specific plans, and a whole lot more intelligence.

No, I don’t like the man, either; he comes off as an arrogant smart ass, and I don’t trust him. For all I know, the conspiracy theorists are correct: Trump is a shill for the Clintons. Bill and the Donald could have gotten together and planned this whole thing to take down the Republican Party, assure Hillary the presidency, and line up Trump with even more construction jobs and more wealth, as long as the Clintons are in on the take, they’ll do anything. Conspiracies aside, I’m sure the majority of people who support Trump in the polls are aware of his flaws, kind of like the Randy Newman song, “Last night I saw Lester Maddox on a TV show with some smart ass New York Jew, the Jew laughed at Lester Maddox, the audience laughed at Lester Maddox, too. Well, he may be a fool, but he’s our fool. If they think they’re better than him, they’re wrong.” 

His supporters are not all ignorant, toothless, rednecks from Buckville. Maybe Trump will do what he says, or maybe he’s playing them; either way, they don’t give a fuck. They are as disgusted with the Republican Party as they are with Obama.  They are not going to support the party’s current choice, i.e., Jeb Bush, and if the party goes down in flames, so be it. They’ve had it. They watched McCain and Romney get destroyed by the democrats because they wouldn’t eat Obama alive as they could and should have, and as they did their fellow republicans during the primaries. No, they had to be nice to Obama: he's so precious. And they were nice while Obama beat the shit out of them. In the second debate, after he’d whipped Obama in the first one, Romney was advised to back off,  you’re being too mean to Obama, Independents don’t like it, and then in the second debate, he let Obama (with Candy Crowley’s help) walk all over him. For instance, when Romney said the Navy was in decline and we needed more and more modern ships, Obama said something like, “Well, Governor, if you haven’t noticed, we have things called aircraft carriers now, ships where airplanes take off and land, and, and, the Army doesn’t have horses, either.”  Romney didn’t fire back, “Mr. President, can you tell me how many ships are in an aircraft carrier battle group, how many ships are at sea to support that group, and the age of those ships now in service?” No, he just stood there and took it, as if someone had advised him to pull the Ali rope-a-dope. Obama has never stopped campaigning, never stopped attacking, dividing and conquering, since his first inaugaration when he ridiculed the out-going administration as they sat in the audience, a time when America typically heals and comes together after an election.

Republican voters gave their party the House and the Senate, and all they got for their trouble was mocked (the Tea Party, Christian conservatives, and those of like mind) and stabbed in the back. It was bad enough that the democrats, Hollywood and the media constantly mocked them, but to have leaders of your own party do it, to brand you as racists, misogynists, homophobes, Nazis, etc., was too much. The vast majority of those republicans were merely constitutionalists, people who didn’t want to see the country turned into a welfare state, who wanted to bring spending under control and not have their grandchildren inherit all that debt.  They were good, hard working, middle-class Americans, many of them of the Greatest Generation, and many voted for Obama the first time around in hopes of at last putting race behind us.  That didn’t work out too well. After Sarah Palin went down in flames due to non-stop attacks by the media and Hollywood (SNL, especially, who treated Obama with kid gloves and never even bothered with Uncle Joe Biden), I told you Obama would win.  You said you weren’t too sure, because a lot of people wouldn’t vote for a black man. I said that it was just the opposite: people would vote for him “because” he was a black man. You agreed that that wasn’t right, either. Now, after seven years of the community organizer, race relations are as bad as they were forty years ago, and the areas having the worst problems, Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and to an extent, St. Louis and New York, have been controlled by Liberal Democrats for ages.

Obama and his far left agenda, created the Frankenstein known as Trump. As in physics, for every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Obama pulled the steel ball way, way back and let it go (fuck everyone who disagrees, I’m King), and it smacked the conservative ball way, way off center, but here it’s coming back, and that “Smack!” you hear is Donald Trump. Obama rammed too much down the throat of the American people that the majority didn’t want, but the republicans in D.C. wouldn’t fight. Those who did were mocked and ridiculed.  The republicans caved on every budget battle and debt increase while people like me who sent them to Washington screamed, “Shut the government down!  Keep it shut down until Obama at least compromises!” But, no, they couldn’t take being ridiculed by the left wing media and comedians, so they caved, every time, even though Obama’s refusal to compromise was half the problem. Saul Alinsky’s fifth rule is, “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” Buddy, it works on republicans, and Obama uses it constantly.  While it’s bad enough that he did it in the United States for the last seven years, being the non-stop campaigner and community organizer that he is, Obama will stand in foreign countries, ridicule republicans and “one” cable news channel, and blame them for all his failures.

  

Regarding gay marriage, almost everywhere it was put to a vote, the people didn’t want it, so the left ran it through the liberal circuit courts, and it squeaked through the Supreme Court 5/4.  Instead of being presidential and bringing the country together, oh, maybe by saying something like, “While this ruling is a great victory for a segment of society and their supporters, I understand that at least fifty percent of America disagrees. Even so, it is now the law of the land, and I would urge everyone to come together. Let us neither gloat, nor fret…blah, blah, blah,” Obama lights up the White House in rainbow colors as if all of American is dancing in the streets.  He knew they were not; he was rubbing their nose in it, which is the progressive M.O.   Ditto Don’t-Ask-Don’t-Tell, women in special ops, Obamacare, amnesty for illegals, securing the border, the Transpacific Trade deal, the Canadian pipeline, Iranian nuclear deal, letting Russia take Crimea without a fight, allowing ISIS to run amuck, et cetera, et cetera. Forget about conservatives, Obama went contrary to national polls on those things, and the republicans we sent to congress to fight just rolled over.  Now, he should be the lamest of lame ducks with only a year left, but he has a phone and a pen, and he’s going after GITMO, guns, and Cuba.  He sees himself stepping onto Cuban soil, as if it’s Nixon landing in China…and we defeated them! All we had to do was wait a few more years for the Castro brothers to pass, but, no, we must apologize, surrender, and hand them the victory.

Obama, with the aid of republicans, has decimated the constitution and turned the presidency toward a four to eight year kingship. Hillary Clinton will continue that process and get it completed. By the end of her eight years, the Supreme Court will be hopelessly far left, as will be the voting population due to public school indoctrination, amnesty of illegals, continuing illegal immigration because the border will not be secured, and legals of only a certain stripe allowed into the country.  After another four years of far left leadership, being a conservative in this country will be like living through “The Night of the Living Dead,”  the liberals being politically correct zombies. The same liberals who claim to be so kind, caring, compassionate, and giving, if only you will agree with them?  Yes, the very same. The left will have 100% of its progressive agenda accomplished, control of the vote, control of circuit and supreme courts, no legal and no 1^st Amendment opposition, and that will be it: done deal, game over. The left wins; democracy loses: nothing but blue birds and happiness. But, no, like in any other country where this has happened, the opposition doesn’t go away, it goes underground, and that’s when things get dangerous.  

     

So, your statement was that you couldn’t understand how such a vast majority of Americans could be snookerd by that asswipe Trump.  Well, man, that’s your answer. There is no mystery. They are no more snookered than the people licking Hillary’s rich, fat ass, or kissing Obama’s ring every time he lies, and he has lied many times, from Fast and Furious to Obamacare, and don’t forget the IRS scandal, when he said, “Not a smidgen of corruption.”  He said that while the IRS scandal was still being investigated, and after Lois Lerner had pled the 5^th the first time, around the same time all her and her staff’s emails mysteriously disappeared.  Not a smidgen of corruption?  Right on, brother! Obama took a page from the Clinton playbook: "You can’t prove corruption, because we have destroyed the proof; therefore, there is no corruption."  Some on the right like Trump’s politics, at least what he’s saying, standing up for them.  Maybe he’s a liar, too, maybe not.  If he throws them under the bus, well, so what?  Everybody throws them under the bus. By supporting Trump, they are merely saying, “Fuck it. Fuck these politicians, and fuck this government.” Others may be a bit more calculating, supposing no one can kill these monsters that arose during the Obama years: widespread terrorism, problems with Russia and China, Syria, Libya, Turkey, a growing racial divide, the failure of healthcare, a gutted military, and an anemic economy with an impossible national debt. We appear to be on the edge.  If a republican is elected, he will surely take the fall, along with all the blame. Why not let Hillary have it?  Let her take the fall.  No, the Clintons never take the fall. That history has yet to be written.  Cackling, wearing a pink pantsuit and dragging bags of money, she would ride off into the sunset.  Either way it goes, my friend, this does not bode well.    

Spean Bridge

Spean Bridge

by

Steve Ketzer, Jr.

(Having just returned from Ecuador—great country; great people—where we visited Quito, Cuenca, Loja, and Vilcabamba, here’s an article about Scotland. The story was published in the tourism section of Florida’s Citrus County Chronicle sometime in 2013.)

Following Bill Powell and Ron Hudnell’s lead, my wife Vicki and I went to Scotland last summer.  We went to take a break from the heat in Florida. Inverness wasn’t our goal while touring Scotland, but was not to be missed, as we were in the area, and now hail from Citrus Country in Florida, which holds the town of Inverness.  Also, the original Inverness in Scotland  is close to the “Scotch Highway”, i.e., a loop of highways were fine Scotch is distilled, including Glenfiddich and Glenlivet.  Consequently, we were certain Carl Lehmann would have approved the trip.  Granted a royal charter in the 12th Century, Inverness was officially established, but there is evidence it was a settlement since at least the 6^th Century, beginning with a people known as Picts. The current population is around 58,000.  Inverness itself is a picturesque city in the Northern Highlands on the banks of Moray Firth that gives way to the North Sea.  To the southwest of the city flows the River Ness, and some ten miles upriver, Loch Ness. Truthfully, though, we spent most of our time in Inverness trapped on the many traffic circles, some of which held two or maybe three lanes (who knows?), wheels within wheels spinning quickly; it was madness, as far as we were concerned.  Travelling by train, a much safer mode of transportation, we also spent time in Glasgow, Ayr and Edinburgh where we caught the last few days of  Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the world’s largest fringe festival (arts festival) and the first, having kicked off in 1947. But we spent the bulk of our time in the little town of Spean Bridge, ensconced beneath oak trees in a moss covered cabin on the banks of the River Spean.

For most Americans, Spean Bridge and its environs hold little significance, but for an elite group of our warriors, it’s a regular holy land. The village is located in the Western Highlands some sixty miles west of Inverness in the Great Glenn, and a short drive to Ft. William and the UK’s tallest mountain, Ben Nevis. The population of Spean Bridge, including the nearby hamlet of Achnacarry with its private castle, is around 1,500.  The area is thick with trees, small pastures divided by ancient stone fences, lakes (lochs), rivers and streams.  Spean Bridge although flush with history, is famous for two things:  Clan Cameron and Commandos.

Clan Cameron have their roots in the middle ages, but they’re probably best known for  supporting the Royalists and Prince Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie) who instigated the Jacobite uprising.  Their battle cry was, “Sons of hounds, come hither and get flesh!”  A reference to their propensity to feed the flesh of their enemy to the dogs.  Achnacarry and its private castle is the seat of Clan Cameron, and a brief walk away is the Clan Cameron museum, no larger than a cottage.  The Commando connection is a bit more recent.  During WWII, British Commandos took over Achnacarry and the area became their training ground.  Located on the fast flowing River Arkaig between Lochs Arkaig and Lochy, with forests, fields and Ben Nevis nearby for climbing, it was an excellent training venue for Commandos, Loch Lochy being used to practice opposed amphibious landings.  

Enter a select group of Americans.  In 1942, the 1^st Ranger Battalion, i.e., Darby’s Rangers, was activated in Carrickfergus, North Ireland.  The men volunteered from other American outfits, including the 1^st Armored and 34^th Infantry Divisions who had gathered around Belfast.  To steal a phrase, many were called, but few were chosen. The weeding out process was brutal.  Eventually 500 men were selected, a small battalion, and sent to Achnacarry to be either broken or turned into Commandos by their British cousins.  While some stateside G.I.s were being trained using imaginary weapons, the Commandos used live fire: bullets, grenades and explosives.  According to author and Ranger Historian, Robert Black, Bren gun fire came so close, it shattered wooden paddles in the hands of Rangers as they made amphibious landings from Loch Lochy.  Sometimes fire came too close, as when Ranger Donald Torbett failed to keep his tail down in the boat and got shot in the buttocks (his nickname thereafter was “Butt”).  In addition to amphibious landings, the training included climbing, rappelling, speed marching, hand-to-hand combat, night fighting, use of German weapons, toggle bridge and rope sliding across the River Arkaig, the latter exercise called, “The Death Slide”, and indeed one Ranger drowned in the attempt. The Rangers were housed in ten man tents, lived in the mud, dined on mutton and cold fish, and if they wanted a bath, they were invited to bathe in the icy river.  The American upstarts not only survived, they excelled, exceeded expectations, and were awarded the Commando “Green Beret” on graduation, which is where that history began.

During the course of the war, five other Ranger battalions were formed, and although not trained at Achnacarry, lessons learned there were applied.  The 1^st spearheaded the Allied invasion of North Africa at Algeria, and along with the 3^rd and 4^th Battalions, the invasions of  Sicily and Italy, while the 2^nd and 5^th landed at Normandy, the 2^nd being the famous “Boys of Point Du Hoc.”  The 6^th Rangers fought in the Philippines and are famous for liberating POWs during the Cabanatuan Raid: “The Great Raid.”  Merrill’s Marauders fought in Burma and are considered Rangers of the first regard. A provisional Ranger Battalion, the 29^th (called the 29^th because they were drawn from the 29^th Infantry Division), was formed in England and was the only battalion other than the 1^st to train at Achnacarry.  Members of the 29^th Rangers went on raids with British Commandos, but disbanded after 11 months and were sent back to their original units to teach other soldiers Ranger tactics.  From those original 500 men, the 1^st Rangers who trained at Achnacarry and the Spean Bridge area, grew the modern day Rangers, who continued to “Lead the Way” in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Grenada, Somalia, and have been fighting non-stop since 9/11. Headquartered at Ft. Benning, Georgia, the 75^th Ranger Regiment continues to produce the greatest warriors in the world.

 

Between Spean Bridge and Achnacarry, there is a monument dedicated to the Commandos who trained there, and to future Commandos who died in service to the crown.  The site is scattered with flowers and mementos left in remembrance of the fallen.  After visiting the monument, my wife and I did the five mile “Commando Trail” out of Achnacarry, a speed march used by Commandos and Rangers as a morning warm up. We did so good we decided to climb Ben Nevis, and while we summited in good time, especially for old folks, our legs gave out on the descent.  We thought we’d never get off that mountain; it took us three hours to go up, and six to get down.  Apparently, walking Rails-to-Trails in Florida wasn’t adequate preparation. But we did it, so as the Rangers would say, “Hooah!”

*Note: Steve Ketzer, Jr. is a USAF Vietnam Veteran who served at Phan Rang, Vietnam, 1970-71; his brother, Jerry, who served in Vietnam at the same time, was career Army and retired at the rank of Lt. Colonel; their father, who was wounded in Tunisia and, between escapes, spent over two years as a German POW, was one of Darby’s original 500 Rangers.

.   

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. 

          

Shelter in Place

Sitting in a canoe on Chilkoot Lake,

the water a mirror reflecting clouds

and mountains that rose from the lake’s bank,

I listened to the many snowmelt waterfalls

and reeled my lure slowly.

Not far away, a duck and her brood

paddled silently toward shore,

but of a sudden,

the duck quacked repeatedly

while flapping its wings and spinning

at which the ducklings did likewise,

splashing and spinning in all directions.

I then saw a shadow fall through sky,

an eagle, diving into that chaos.

It touched the water, and rose,

its talons empty.

The duck gathered its brood closely,

and they continued toward shore

as silently as before.

The eagle dove again, chaos ensued,

and again, the eagle failed.

On the third attempt,

the mighty eagle rose,

a duckling in its claw.

It flew to a tall stump and perched, ripped

into the duckling and watched.

Before the eagle could strike again,

the duck and her brood reached shore

and disappeared beneath the willows.   

(SKJ 06/2016)