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| beautiful weather in south-central Georgia |
Friday 26 October – These Days
and Rodeway Inns are not as generic as they might be. The one in Adel, for instance, has something
of a migrant-farm-worker vibe, with a small charcoal grill sitting outside one
room, and a whole lot of laundry happening somewhere. The maids are black, with southern accents –
in California they’re brown and speak Spanish; in the west they’re white and
sound like me; in Alaska – I never saw a maid in Alaska. Seriously, three nights in that hot springs
resort and I never saw a maid. Hmmm.
Anyway, generic or not entirely, the Days Inn did not seem a big enough
slice of Adel that I could just hit the interstate and claim I’d been in
Georgia. So I drove down the secondary
road, which quickly turned into something more like a side street. It showed me a cotton field, some trailer
parks, tall pines and red dirt roads spidering away from the paved street. I tried a dirt road, and found squash fields,
maybe some beans, and what I’m guessing were South or Central Americans sitting
by the at the edge of the cultivated area.
I took a few photographs, thinking about the stillness and deep quiet of
the scene, and the century or so that there’ve been fields and migrants to work
them in this part of the world. And then
Mr. John arrived, to toss a few handfuls of pebbles into all that quiet.
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| This picture I think barely worth a business card from Eduardo's |
He arrived in a white pick-up truck, wearing a heavy white beard,
almost Santa-style, and a University of Georgia ball cap with an eight-dollar
price sticker on the brim. He had
somewhat fewer teeth than is standard amongst my acquaintance, and he demanded a
photography fee. At first I wondered if
I had, perhaps, violated local rules by taking pictures of workers – you know –
but I figured I could take him if I had to.
So I fished around in my pocket and came up with some receipts and other
detritus. I offered him a business card
for Eduardo’s in San Rafael, California, assuring him they offer a great
breakfast. Ice broken, off we go.
He mocked my origins, drawling, “Baaaw-ston Massa-two-shits,” after
he’d asked where I’m from. Apparently
equating New Jersey with New England, he told me he’d lived there in the very
early sixties, with two women who worked in health care. When the three of them finished their
physical therapy in the morning, one would roll over and say, “Taaalk to me.” “She loved my accent, you see.”
I asked how he’d gotten to New Jersey, but first he wanted to know how
I’d gotten to Georgia, so I told him a few of the places I’d stopped on this
trip. He asked whether there was any
particular reason or rhyme to my itinerary.
“I’m going places where I know someone who’ll put me up for a night,” I
answered, and he told me he’d offer a place but he had to head home to shave
and bathe and then drive up to north Georgia for an annual reunion with fifty
or sixty of his family members. So I
mentioned I was heading south anyway, but how had he gotten to New Jersey?
He attended U. Georgia and majored in agricultural science. When he was headed home to farm, out of
nowhere he got a job offer from Seacrest, a frozen vegetable company in
Macon. He declined, enthusiastic in his
belief that vegetables would grow well in south Georgia, where until the mid-20th
century farmers had focused on what Mr. John called, “melons, black-eyed peas
and other staples.” Then he went off on
a tangent, and how he wound up in New Jersey working for Birdseye I cannot tell
you.
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| Cucumber fields, without the workers |
Nor how he got back to Georgia, but I do know that as of fall 2013,
south Georgia farmers are growing all kinds of vegetables, including pickle
cucumbers. Mr. John now works for
Klausen, overseeing fields of cucumbers.
The ones in the fields around us, grown for pickling, are what he
considers “sweet, but not as sexy” as salad cucumbers. He waited a long time to make sure I got it, and then, just in case, said,
“they’re small and ugly – not sexy.” I
am not the kind of person who usually finds heavy-handed and obvious double
entendres amusing, unless glossed over very lightly, but I was in a mood to be
seduced a bit, I guess. All that pop
country music...
He then pounded the joke firmly into the ground by asking whether I
knew what the original one-size-fits-all was.
I took a step away from his truck, made what I hope was a
dubious-looking face, and queried the entire concept of southern charm. He made it up to me by inviting me to pick
myself some cucumbers from the fields, so I looked dubious again and asked
whether he had the authority to make that offer. He suggested that I go ahead and try, and
“when they’re getting ready to arrest you, you say Mr. John the Pickle Man said
it was okay.” He waved and drove away,
and I checked with a guy in the field before picking a couple of cukes.
As I headed back to my car with my small gleaning, a few puffs of red
dust announced Mr. John’s return. He
wanted to assure me, having noticed my ‘crack’ about southern charm, that he
has it in plenty. I agreed, sincerely,
but he plowed right through my interruption.
The thing is, he explained, when he hears someone say she’s staying
wherever someone offers her a place to sleep, he likes to explore the
possibilities.
We parted with grins on both sides, and I turned south. The freeway entrance was half-blocked by six
police cars, including a canine unit, surrounding a sedan with its trunk open.
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| This much Spanish moss seems, to my northern eyes, more a caricature than an actual characteristic of the South. |
There were cotton balls blowing across the freeway, which suggests that
the crops where farther along than they were in Lubbock. And there are offers of pecan roll, with free
samples. What is a pecan roll, and why would
I want a free sample? When I crossed
into Florida, the signs started offering free orange juice. I don’t particularly care for orange juice,
but when your host state offers it free, is it churlish to refuse? On grounds that it’s more churlish to cause a
massive pile-up by swerving into the welcome center at something past the last
second, I declined the juice. But I
gloried in the swirling cotton balls to make up for it.
The Florida I’ve met before is convention-center territory, and the
keys. This was northern Florida, rural
and not very touristy. (I don’t hear
banjos.) It’s got fields of cotton,
something bright spring green and just sprouting, pines and the big old trees –
oaks, probably – that host the Spanish moss.
There were black cows, red cows, vari-colored horses. More Spanish moss, the Museum of Drag Racing
and more, more, more Spanish moss. And
A.K. and J. have a dinner date, so I need to keep moving, but here’s another
bit of the world I’d like to explore more, and probably never will.
There are sand cranes in A.K.’s driveway and a small swimming pool more
or less in her living room. She is an
old boss of mine, and one of my favorite people, and I am so glad I headed
south instead of east from St. Louis.
She offered me a salad and I offered her cucumbers, and the story that
went with them. They were indeed sweet,
and I suppose small, but I don’t get the ugly part.
This is how I met A.K., sometime in the late nineties: I was working at a conservative,
centuries-old, Fortune 500 financial services firm headquartered in
Boston. My boss was a wonderful woman
who’d been there almost forty years, probably wearing gray flannel suits the
entire time, and one of the first computer specialists in the
organization. When my mother died, she
hugged me and drove me to my parents’ home 30 miles from the office, but in
everyday circumstances her reserve was considerable. She was retiring, and her replacement would
be one of the leading lights of our professional association – A.K., whom I
hadn’t met. I headed out one evening to
an association meeting, knowing my future boss would be there, and stood at the
edge of the social hour scanning the participants. From the dead center of the party, a tiny
dervish came whirling out, clutched my arm, stood way too close, looked up at me and said, “You’re Elizabeth! I’m A.K., and I’m a relationship person!” I
practically had a panic attack as all my brain gears shifted up, down and
around five or six notches. Eventually she taught me to network, and now I hang
out in her mini-pool, eating her favorite salad (with extra cucumber) from her
favorite restaurant, and I could not be more content.
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| A.K., thanks in part to my invaluable support for two years of her career, has done okay for herself. The guest room in which I stayed opens on to this handsome pool/porch/sunroom. |
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