Arkansas – Ken Rodgers

September 19, 2012September 19, 2012

I Did NOT Eat Lobster But I Did Eat Grits

But then I did eat lobster. Not one of those big sea-bottom bugs that cleans all the trash off the floor of the ocean. The bug-eyed wavy-feelered gout-creating sea-bottom bug. My lobster came disguised as chowder and seafood filling for a wrap. I finally gave in to the push push push to eat lobster bugs while we traveled in Nova Scotia. I mean, if you are there, you should give it a go, eh?

One of the many aims of our trip was to, while traveling, sample the local fare, especially grits. But as we motored east, the multiple southern US menus I perused and their descriptions of gree-its (as Betty says, in the South, grits is a two-syllable word) didn’t jangle my taste buds. But I ate a lot of other regional stuff.

In Brownwood, Texas, I had a lot of BBQ, Texas style, but the real Texas dining delight was a big platter of Sunday morning chili that lit my nostrils up and made my head sweat. Hot tortillas too, and hot coffee. Outside, it was bumping over one-hundred degrees. Hot.

In Mt. Pleasant, Texas, I ate the worst etouffe I’ve ever had. It wasn’t inedible, just the worst I’ve ever eaten. Etouffe is a crawfish and rice stew, so to speak, and usually is tongue-tingling spicy and delicately nuanced in its seafood and rice paddy flavors. But this etouffe was mindful of mud. Not for nothing do they call crawfish mudbugs.

I ate BBQ from Texas all the way east into Virginia, but the best was at the Blues City Cafe in Memphis, Tennessee. Right across the street sat BB King’s blues club and the sound of delta blues rattled off the old brick facades of the clubs and restaurants that line Beale Street. My BBQ was boisterous and sharp-flavored, redolent of hot things and the sweet melt of brown sugar.

In Bentonville, Arkansas, I took on southern fried chicken in a wanna-be swanky joint, but the spice on the chicken kept revisiting my palate all night long. In gustatory conflict I reckon, with the sweet waffles served as a side to that fried bird.

At Pittsburg Landing on the Tennessee River, just north of Shiloh’s Civil War battlefield and the legacy of that vicious and horrible fray, I dined on fried catfish so light I thought it was some exotic denizen from foreign seas instead of American freshwater bottom feeder.

In Virginia it was finally grits. In an Arlington diner I took on the grits and wasn’t moved either direction, for or against. In Williamsburg, I tried them again and this time they lived up to my expectations. Like fine polenta, (and why not, they are both a form of corn meal mush) the grits were golden and full of cheese and butter and lots of shrimp and red and green peppers. Very delicate and fine. Now I know why southern folk brag about their grits.

Also, while in Williamsburg, I sampled some colonial fare…bangers and mash. In my ken, this English dish has a sorry reputation and when I have eaten it in the past (bangers and mash are mashed potatoes and sausage), they’ve left me swearing I would never do that again. But at the old Williamsburg colonial tavern where the staff dressed in 18th Century garb, the meal was tasty and passed the real test…my bangers and mash didn’t revisit my gullet two or three hours later.

In Boston I ate something that I haven’t really had since we moved to Idaho, unless of course we are traveling. In between film screenings, tours of Boston’s red-bricked and cobblestone-streeted North End, not once, but twice, on successive nights, I dug into a monumental plate of manicotti…cheese and red meat sauce and delicate pasta. Ahh!

And then further north, to Nova Scotia, Cape Breton and seafood. Seafood pasta, chowder, haddock fish and chips, haddock fishcakes and chow chow, fish, fish, fish. I probably eat seafood four or five times a year, but I’ve been eating it every day, sometimes twice a day. Even lobster.

August 18, 2012

On Wood Storks, Murder and Idabel, Oklahoma

A couple of days ago Betty and I motored north out of east Texas up US Highway 259 into McCurtain County, Oklahoma, towards the small town of Idabel. I can recall my oldest living aunt, who would have been born around 1903, talking about that town when I was a kid. I have no recollection of what was specifically discussed, but I suspect the clan inhabited the place or adjacent diggings in the days before they had to flee the country for the searing climes of south-central Arizona.

The border between Texas and Oklahoma in that locale is the Red River. North of the river lies Red Slough, a marshy, tree-bedizened terrain pocked with ponds and sumps that before the Anglo settlers showed up and diked and drained would have been a tough place to farm and run cows.

As we drove north we spotted a large number of big white birds sitting on the other side of a long, narrow pond. Some of them looked like egrets, but others seemed larger and more…can I use this word to describe birds…authoritarian.
The day before, between Tyler and Mount Pleasant, Texas, we had seen what looked to us—or when we first saw them we didn’t know what they were because we’d never seen them—like wood storks. But the books say the storks live further south and blah blah with other stuff bird identification books say. But still, we thought we saw them. But we have thought we have seen rare birds before, only to find out they were something else, and the feeling of having made a rookie mistake forces us to hesitate anytime we think we have a rare bird identified.

220px-WoodStorkWhole[1] — Wood Stork, courtesy of Wikipedia

Wood storks are the only storks that breed in the US. They are big white birds with dark heads and big long bills. They stand forty or so inches tall and weight six to seven pounds. They like to hang around in ponds where the water is receding so that as the fish concentrate, the storks can wade in and use their big long dusky yellow bills to capture dinner.

South of Idabel I stopped in front of a rundown Oklahoma honky-tonk and turned around and parked in a spot by the side of the pond. A line of bushes partially obscured the birds in question. Across the road, old rusty rakes and swathers and tractors and trucks ganged up around a falling-down barn. We got out and took a good look at the birds. We had our Sibley bird book out and our binoculars that had fogged-up lenses because they were cold from the air conditioner and it was hot and humid outside. We rubbed the moisture from both the lenses and the eyepieces again and again and as we looked up, one of the suspect birds flew in low for a landing and the flight feathers were black, a distinguishing factor in wood stork identification. The big gang standing around in the water sported dark heads and big long dusky yellow beaks just like Sibley says they should if they are indeed wood storks.

Given our experiences mis-identifying avian critters, and given the experts saying that the birds hang out further south, I was hesitant to write this blog.

The Internet is a terrible thing sometimes, and sometimes it is wonderful. As I type this blog, the Internet is wonderful. This evening I found enough blog posts from local Oklahoma birders to believe that we really did see wood storks. Evidently, they tend to hang out around McCurtain County, Oklahoma.

In my memory, my paternal ancestors fled the Texas-Oklahoma-Arkansas region because of murder. Maybe there was a trial and the killer was acquitted, or maybe they hightailed it west with a name change providing just enough curtain to hide them from the law.

As I watched those wood storks near Idabel I had the feeling that I was observing something ancient and full of wisdom like judges, but not the local circuit court justices who would have judged my murderous grandfather or one of his killer brothers, but something more in the vein of half-human, half-avian beings that judge the dead as they enter the netherworld. Bird-like thinkers who own a roll call of every deed a man or woman ever did, bad or good, a ledger of sorts, toted up and spit out from the big dusky yellow bill as one passes his/her way into eternity.

Maybe Dante was thinking about something like these wonderful storks when he penned those words “Abandon all hope, you who enter here.” Of course the scientists will say they are just birds who cannot think or reason and as such they are incapable of making calculations of any kind. But I am a creative writer and a filmmaker and I say if I can conceive a notion, then I can believe in its possibility.

Back there in Idabel, Oklahoma, Betty asked me if I felt any ancestral tugs as we passed through the land where my father’s father, and his father, spent large chunks of their lives, and I told her, “No.”

But tonight, here in Memphis, Tennessee, I think maybe I did. Maybe I felt that tug that tethered them until they had to leave in the night and change their names from what…from Banta or something like that…to Rodgers. Part of that tug was the gut feeling with which those big judges with the long dusky yellow bills have netted me, or I have netted myself, or I am so enamored with those birds, and with the land, and its history, that I create my own realities. And of course, maybe I should be more tentative about all this speculation, like I often am when identifying rare birds.

August 17, 2012

On the Road–Capitol Reef to Bentonville

Complaints about my shortcomings make me cringe. As a blogger I live in fear of having my readers complain about my writing, the subject matter, the style, the focus I bring to the piece. I live in fear of hearing complaints that I write too many blog entries. But today’s flattering complaint arose because I haven’t written enough.

When we struck out for points east, I intended to write a blog every day or so. I held on to that promise for one entry and then found that each evening I was tired, hot, hungry, too overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape, the profundity of the moment, the miles, miles, miles we logged in our journey from Capitol Reef through Cortez, Amarillo, and on to Dallas and a screening of our documentary film, BRAVO! to the Vietnam Veterans of America. From Dallas down to Brownwood, Texas, and another screening of our film, then to Mt. Pleasant, Texas, and now to Bentonville, Arkansas, for an afternoon tour of Pea Ridge, as well as a morning viewing of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

So I have been truant, I suppose, and owe my regular readers an apology and a blog. So…here goes a whirlwind:

Colorado Country — Colorado River Country

We left the Capitol Reef country of south central Utah and motored east through ragged red canyons that zigged and zagged through juniper and piñon barrancas that drained down into the deep meanderings of the Colorado River. We went on to Ute country and Four Corners where I did pushups with one limb in each state. Then into Cortez, Colorado, where we managed a half day inspecting the Anasazi ruins at Mesa Verde.

We were joined by Germans and Italians and Australian bikers as we walked among the ruined walls tucked in beneath the russet overhangs of the mesa tops. Betty and I discussed the doorways, how the thresholds were so high off the floors and the lintels made so that passers-through would need to crouch to avoid banging their heads and we philosophized on that: small inhabitants, a way to keep the weather out. I thought maybe it had to do with war…I have a tendency to do that…and forcing one to ball up, knees to chest, might make it easier to conk an intruder on the head, or hack at his neck, or stab his gut with a spear.

From Cortez over to Amarillo and breakfast with fellow Khe Sanh veteran Mac McNeely and his wife Charlotte before heading for Dallas. Showing the film to the VVA’s leadership conference in Dallas, meeting some wonderful people, having dinner with Gregg and Ali Jones. Gregg is the author of Honor in the Dust, a riveting narrative of America’s involvement in the Philippines at the beginning of the last century. Dallas was hot and muggy and snarled with traffic.

From Dallas we went southwest to Brownwood, almost dead in the middle of Texas. Hilly and snagged with old mesquite, live oak and cottonwoods, the terrain looked thirsty, the bugs all whining in high-pitched voices, singing the song of drought. We screened the film again to an enthusiastic group of fifty at Howard Payne University, hosted by our friends Mary and Roger Engle. You can read more about our Texas screenings here. We met some interesting veterans in Brownwood, including a correspondent who shot photos and film footage during the siege.

From Brownwood we headed northeast, cut across the southeast corner of Oklahoma looking for my paternal roots. The country was wild with trees and creeks and winding highways. Clouds sulled on the horizon, begging for the chance to show us fiery skirts of lightning. And they did, sending blinding slashes and boisterous thunder that rattled the glass in the buildings.

Today at Bentonville, we visited Walmart’s Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and looked at Hopper and O’Keefe and Pollack and Homer, to name a few. We toured Pea Ridge, a battlefield from 1862 in the Civil War. Twenty-seven-thousand men fought in that battle, in wooded thickets, on craggy ridges, on broad fields, the largest battle west of the Mississippi River and one that crystallized the strategic and political positions for the balance of the war years.

Tomorrow we head to Memphis and Shiloh and another screening of BRAVO! before we journey on to Washington, DC.

I promise that Betty or I will blog on a more frequent basis as we motor into our futures. Well…maybe.