Stop One…Milledgeville (Dragon #1: History)
My intention was to go to the Flannery O’Connor Museum, but I heard there was a haunted / abandoned insane asylum in Milledgville, so…. I went there instead. I broke in the basement and used the camera flash to navigate the lightless halls / find stairs, which were lined with sea-foam-green chain-link fence. My heart was fluttering pretty hard…no better word than haunted.
Stop Two: Albany (Dragon #2, The Journey–or is it Self??)
I’m working on writing up the story of this trip. Mostly I’ve just got a lot of descriptive scraps about breathing deep and acquainting myself with the fear-impulse to hesitate or leap back. It was a last- minute, three-day trip in a fishing-boat with Uncle Vic down the flint river, complete with 44’s, scuba diving, storm boating, trailer backing, and alligator wrestling. It was a short time to get acquainted with so many dragons, but there was a lot of breathing and talk about life, and they were all kind to me.
A kid (that Uncle Vic took under his wing) took this picture of a scuba diving lesson in a spring on the quail plantation the day before we left. The sky from underwater looks purple, and its the most frightening and peaceful thing.
On the first night, Uncle Vic showed me how to shine gators with a flash light to make their eyes glow back red like tail lights. He took this next picture while he was doubled over laughing and cursing because he’d thought I was just out scouting an island for camping and I came back with a gator. I’d been all talk about learning to catch them, and earlier in the night he’d had to wrestle one that I’d tried to get but had hesitated and jumped back when it thrashed.
He later told Sister that he’d only seen one grown man catch a gator in his whole 70 years of life, and the he just couldn’t believe I’d just gone and got one…he said, “She must’ve picked him outa the river like a God-damn lilly.”
Here’s Uncle Vic.
Stop Three: Mcdonough (Dragon #3, Art / Makin Somethin of It)
I stopped here to see my friend Kyle for Norm and Norma practice (the second one ever). A facing of demons in itself…not quite the same gothic, dark, literary type–more the middle-America Dinette City type. We threw rocks on the RR tracks at night and they sparked. And this adventure, like the trip down the river, also included turkey callers: Micky’s Jam ….That one’s actually a clip from jam session #1 last month…but we’re trying to polish a couple tunes (like “Get Normal,” which is all about setting each other’s demons free with Sun Tornadoes and Jared Letto). Huzah!
As it turns out, I had airline miles saved up and was able to get a free flight to Seattle and another out of LA. So I’m gunna keep my west coast shows and I’m leaving the gps lady (plus phone, computer– everything else that has a chord attached to it–) behind. Just after deciding this I cleaned out the van and found my shoe, smashed like a frog beneath the suitcase.
photo by meredith heil.
The acute pang of what could easily be interpreted as failure is by far more triumphant (in fodder if nothing else) than the grinding sisyphean task of managing a scared pit bull at rest stop, after strip mall, after florescent-gas-station-over-hang….and so-on across a gauntly jaundiced and unyielding USA. That is to say that, after Harvey-Sue lashed out at lovely boy in Asheville and again at a lovely girl in Nasheville; after he crouched to the ground and refused to pass by a cleaning cart outside of a hotel in Cadiz KY; after I’d taken him to a vet behind the Cracker Barrel and got him some sedatives (which did nothing but make his nervous pacing from front seat to back impossibly titubent so that he catapulted the water bowl into my lap more than once); after he peed into my messenger bag and would only look at me pleadingly and afraid; and finally, after I realized I’d dropped my new green Converse out of the van back in TN, and now had but one shoe…..I decided to stop in Pedukah, KY amidst silent soy bean fields to make a decision.
I sat at a picnic table, and as I racked my surroundings for some sign of what to do, I was joined by a Pedukian named Michael who started smoking cigarette butts off the ground. I thought he would surely hold the answer, but he hardly said anything. To the final question, “So should I keep going or go home?” he just let a half chuckle and squinted towards the road. The only thing he asked me was if I needed money and I said no, (but not “thank you” because I didn’t want to assume he was offering). There was a buzzard circling over our heads and Mike said, “so, guitar?” and I said “Sometimes.” and then, “I think I better go home.”
The rest was easy. There is a great sweeping relief in surrender when such efforts have been put forth to fight the defeat. So in giving in, Harvey and I made peace and he slept, and the sunset was stark and I drove fast. When I crossed over Nasheville I decided to look for the field where we had stopped the day before, marked with another old race track, so that I might find my new green shoe. I doubled around and exited off the freeway. I pulled over and untangled myself from chords and gps lady (“rerouting. rerouting. rerouting. make u-turn. rerouting. you’re going the wrong fucking way. rerouting. u-turn.”) I got out, …..and lo and behold, in the nearly dusk, I saw….no shoe. I glimpsed around on the fences, like maybe someone would have perched it atop a post like they might a little deer skull. Nothing was there….. and we were on the perfect path.
Photos By Meredith Heil.
Ok so I can do many things and it would bring me great self validation to list them here. But instead I’ll list the thing that I’ve most recently determined I can’t do, which is control my temper when Harvey-Sue pushes my buttons. We may have possibly gotten in a wrestling fight behind the BP in some small town Indiana. So, if anyone has any advise on nurturing dogs who suddenly start rebelling against your leadership (he’s going nuts–acts like he’s on LSD; he’s quick to startle, has taken to barking and growling at people who approach the van, won’t listen to me a bit) it would be appreciated. Even better would be advise for me about dog-dealing temper control. I’ve got more to learn than he does, I know.
