Blue Highways: Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

Unfolding the Map

William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) is making his way through southern New Jersey, and finding a little bit of the South there.  I use the opportunity to reflect on what makes the South, the South.  To see where Millville and Bridgeton sit as we begin our trip westward and back to the beginning, go to the map.  The illustration at right is by Bob Hines, hosted at Wikimedia Commons, and is of the New Jersey state bird, the American goldfinch.

Book Quote

"As the pine belt disappeared, the state took on a Southern cast below Millville, an old glass-making town on the Maurice River flowing through the exposed silica deposits of lower Jersey.  Near here, the first Mason jar was made.  Outside of Bridgeton, the Southern aspect showed plain: big fields of soybeans, corn, cabbage, strawberries, and fallow fields of dusty brown, and slopes of peach and apple orchards.  Black men worked patch farms, and with cane poles they fished muddy creeks of the lowlands where egrets stepped meticulously through the tidal marsh."

Blue Highways: Part 9, Chapter 9

Downtown Millville, New Jersey. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host page.

Millville and Bridgeton, New Jersey

There is a difference in the South.

I'm not sure exactly what that difference is.  Maybe it's the light.  In the North, the light seems either really really hot and intense, at least in the summer months, or cold and harsh in the winter.  That is, if you see the light at all in the winter - when I lived in Milwaukee we would often go a month or two with gray, overcast skies.  In the South, especially as you get closer to the Gulf Coast, the light takes on a muted aspect, and it seems like the colors, especially toward sunset, become pastels.

Maybe it's the land, which takes on a rural aspect.  Certainly there are large cities in the North, but the South has been and will be known primarily for its agriculture.  I think that perhaps an offshoot of this idea is also based on ethnicity.  When I lived in the North, the African-American population was mostly found in the cities.  Once you drove into the country in the Midwest or Northeast, the farmers were mostly white or the farms were large cooperatives or corporately owned.  But in the South, African-Americans are much more represented in the rural populations, and as owners and workers of farms.  Perhaps this has to do with migration - in escaping slavery, and later the hardships of sharecropping as well as looking for well-paying jobs, many African-Americans moved north to the factory jobs in the cities.  This created a population that moved into cities and stayed and that only reconnects with its farming roots perhaps when some people from the North come back to visit their extended Southern families, many of whom have roots and branches that still farm as a way of life.

Maybe the change is in the stereotypes that we have of the South.  Who hasn't heard a version of the "sleepy South?"  Who doesn't take note of the different accents one finds there.  Who doesn't note the change to primarily country music and Christian stations on the radio when one crosses the imaginary line (the Mason-Dixon line if you will) that demarcates the South from the other parts of the nation?

Perhaps it is the food?  The slow-cooked comfort food, with those qualities that we consider Southern.  Barbecued, fried, often with vegetables, like okra, that those of us in the North have never tried.  Grits, biscuits and gravy for breakfast, Collard greens and fried chicken steak for dinner.  Good, wholesome and often artery-clogging food.

It might be that the change is also in pace.  To me, the North seems busy.  People constantly moving, meeting, getting places.  They bark orders and arrange things on their various communication devices...smart phones, IPads and other tablets.  In the Northern cities, people put on headphones and crowd the rest of the world out with music from their IPods and MP3 devices.  In the downtowns of places like Chicago and New York, the clattering of the subways and elevated trains create, at least for me, moments of loud distractions as they rumble overhead and underneath, squealing to a stop with the scratchy announcement of loudspeakers, and then rumble off again, sparking away into the distance of tunnel or track.  But in the South, the days seem to go longer, especially in the summer.  My one experience of living in the South, in New Orleans (which admittedly is Southern and yet not Southern but in this experience I think it is very Southern), the night brought more quiet.  I could hear the insects even as I sat on a porch outside my home.  In fact, where did I ever sit on a porch in the evening regularly other than in the South?  The smells of night-blooming jasmine filled the air.  Music, actually played and not filtered through cords and earpieces but actually transmitted straight to the ear, seemingly such an important part of the Southern soul, filtered out of houses where someone practiced, or out of clubs where bands entertained.  The days were often hot and lazy, leading to a sort of lethargy of body and reflection of mind.

I don't really want to paint the South in one broad brush, just as one can't paint the North accurately in similar strokes.  The differences abound from Georgia to Louisiana, from Florida to Tennessee.  A people and place cannot be captured in a few words as there are complexities and regionalities and all of those things that make us all individuals, each deserving of notice individually in our own right.

Yet it is our tendency as humans to avoid the complexities and generalize.  We want to make things simpler in order to grasp only the essences of what we need to know.  And for that reason, we can point to the pace, and the food, and the rural, and other aspects of the South that jump out at us, or are reinforced in other ways, so that minds so capable of grasping the most complex ideas don't have to work as hard.  This is a danger, as if we oversimplify, we run the risk of dismissing a whole region based on isolated facts, or making too much of cosmetic differences instead of celebrating our whole country.  As we know tragically from history, over and over again, generalization can lead to some very bad consequences.

Yes, there is a difference in the South.  And I like a whole lot in that difference.

Musical Interlude

I first heard R.L Burnside in New Orleans, on a CD that had a re-mixed version of his song Miss Maybelle.  I really liked it.  We think of the South as a bastion of country music, but the south is also the birthplace of jazz and the blues.  R.L. Burnside was one of the the last of the old-time blues players who took the Delta blues and made them even more raw by electrifying them.  I wish I had seen him live in New Orleans before he died in 2005.

If you want to know more about Millville and Bridgeton

Bridgeton Area Chamber of Commerce
City of Bridgeton
Glasstown (Millville) Arts District
Millville Chamber of Commerce
The News of Cumberland County (newspaper)
Wheaton Arts and Cultural Center of Millville
Wikipedia: Bridgeton
Wikipedia: Millville

Next up: Othello, New Jersey

Blue Highways: Somewhere on the Hudson River, New York

Unfolding the Map

We have reached what, until the colonists and settlers pushed farther inland, would have been to them the mightiest river of America.  Where William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) joins it, you can throw a rock across the Hudson but, eventually it becomes the large expanse of water that traverses the Hudson River Valley and flows past New York City as it mingles with the sea.  In this post, I'll look at the Hudson through song, literature and art.  To find out where we touch the fledgling Hudson, see the map.

Book Quote

"Our beginnings do not foreshadow our ends if one judges by the Hudson River.  A few miles east of the Bad Luck Ponds, the Hudson came down between the ridges to race alongside route 28; it was a mountain stream: clear, cold, shallow, noisy.  A few miles from its source in Lake Tear-in-the-Clouds a mile up on Mount Marcy (the Indian name for the mountain is better: Tahawus, 'Cloud-splitter') and three hundred river miles from the thousand oily piers of Hoboken, Weehawken, and Manhattan, here it was a canoer's watercourse.  Above the little Hudson, spumes of mist rose from the mountains like campfire smoke."

Blue Highways: Part 8, Chapter 7

The Hudson River right where it joins route 28 in New York. Photo by "swisstek" and hosted at Panoramio. Click on photo to go to host page.

Somewhere on the Hudson River, New York

I remember the first time I saw the Hudson River.  By seeing the Hudson River, I mean really seeing the river, not the part that flows past the "thousand oily piers" between Manhattan and New Jersey.  I was in my late 20s, I think I would hazard, and had driven out to Yonkers, New York from Milwaukee on a work-related trip.  I had a couple of people with me, and I had worked out with them, on our trip back, to stop in Cooperstown, New York to visit the Baseball Hall of Fame, then stop at one of my companion's home in Geneva, New York in the Finger Lakes area, and then cross at Niagara Falls, head across Canada (basically LHM's route in reverse) to Detroit where we would stay at the home of my second companion before heading back to Milwaukee.

Our initial drive out of Yonkers was as you'd expect from the New York City region - a lot of interstates.  We planned to take the interstate straight north up the Hudson and then connect with another freeway going west toward Cooperstown.  It was morning, and the sun gave that soft light that only the sun can give when it is a couple of hours old.  I remember both of my companions being a little sleepy.  I believe there was a moment - I can picture it in my mind though I've probably put a few images together into one idyllic one, where we crested some stretch of interstate and there lay the Hudson, expansive, placid and the water a mix of blue and green.  I picture wooded hillsides sloping down to the water.  There wasn't much beach, as I remember.  In fact, if I wasn't aware that I was driving along the Hudson River, I could have easily mistaken the river for a long, narrow lake - that's how calm the waters seemed to be.

I think that the Hudson is probably one of our great rivers, because it was probably one of the first big rivers that settlers knew when America wasn't even yet a dream in the mind of the colonists.  Yet I was surprised.  Other rivers are celebrated in well-known songs.  The Mississippi has had untold numbers of notes and lyrics written about its entire length, about certain portions of it, about its moods and floods.  Literature has been written where the Mississippi is a central character - I'm thinking particularly of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Roger Miller, Johnny Cash, Sam Cooke, Paul Robeson and the Doobie Brothers, among others, have sang about the Mississippi.  Other rivers have also taken their central place in art, music and literature.  The Missouri River, made famous by Lewis and Clark's journey, for example, has had its moments of celebration.  Oh Shenandoah, for instance, was a song that I learned in grade school that has "across the wide Missouri" as part of its refrain.  The river has also been celebrated by such musicians as Bruce Springsteen, Carly Simon and Van Morrison.  Even lesser known rivers such as the Columbia River, the Kern River, the Red River, the Green River, and the Tennessee River get their due in song.

I tried to find songs that celebrate the Hudson River, but mostly came up empty.  I know that there must be some out there, but I couldn't find many that I could use for the musical interlude, though I was happy to see that there was a decent one.  However, for one of the United States' great rivers, there seems to be a dearth of songs about it.

Where the Hudson river really shines is in the visual arts, especially paintings.  It gives its name to a genre of paintings by artists grouped in what is called the Hudson River School.  The paintings of these artists are steeped in the Romantic tradition, in which the Hudson is shown in an idealized fashion as a true wilderness to demonstrate its savage nobility and pristine nature.  In the paintings, the majesty of nature is often at odds with humans and their drive to toward resource development, such as this 1866 painting by Samuel Colman called Storm King on the Hudson demonstrates:

Samuel Colman, Hudson River School. Storm King on the Hudson, 1866. Obtained from Wikimedia Commons.

In addition, the Hudson River also shines in literature.  Some of the earliest American literature, such as the stories of Washington Irving and the Romantic novels of James Fenimore Cooper take place within the environs of the river, and many authors over American history have written about the Hudson and the places it passes.

The Hudson River is also environmentally sensitive.  For a few years I worked with religious organizations on shareholder actions around environmental and social concerns.  A number of religious groups had filed shareholder resolutions in the past against General Electric, who dumped PCBs into the Hudson River from two of their plants.  The river also has concentrations of DDT.  The GE plants have since been declared Superfund sites and cleanup continues.  In terms of total pollution the Mississippi River dwarfs every other river in the United States in the amount of contaminants in its water, but the Hudson is still rated the 33rd most polluted river in the country.  What probably makes it even more polluted is that the Hudson is an estuarial river, in which tidal action from the ocean causes the salt and fresh water to mix, and also causes the river from its mouth to Troy, New York (over 150 miles upriver) to run backwards, and rise and fall when the tide is coming in or going out.  Estuaries are very environmentally sensitive, and in the past pollutants, such as raw sewage, from New York City and cities on the New Jersey side of the river polluted that whole, though there have been many efforts from those places to clean up the Hudson River estuary.

The Hudson is one of America's great rivers, and is beautiful to see.  While I am surprised that it isn't celebrated more in song, I am not surprised that it holds a magic place in the hearts of those who live and work around and near it.  It certainly had a great effect on our art and literature, and to link it to a past post, it was the first part of the inland transportation route completed with the monumental Erie Canal.  It deserves its accolades, and our protection.

Musical Interlude

As I mentioned above, I had trouble finding a song for the musical interlude about the Hudson River.  Paintings, no problem.  Literature, no problem.  For some reason, the Hudson doesn't inspire song the way the Mississippi or other rivers do.  However, Dar Williams came through with a song about the Hudson, inspired by her residence near it.

Addendum:  As I was searching for more information on Dar Williams, I discovered that she has a new song, just released, called Storm King, which is beautiful!  This is the mountain in the painting by Samuel Colman that I include above, and she evidently lives near it.  Enjoy this serendipitous moment of discovery!

If you want to know more about the Hudson River

Historic Hudson River Towns
Hudson River Foundation
Hudson River Heritage
Hudson River Valley Institute
Hudson River Valley National Heritage Area
Hudson River Watertrail Association
Wikipedia: Hudson River

Next up:  Hague and Ticonderoga, New York

Blue Highways: Backoo, North Dakota

Unfolding the Map

One thing I like about Blue Highways is William Least Heat-Moon's (LHM) willingness to go off his beaten path and explore.  Backoo was not on his route but he went there anyway.  He didn't find much, but it's the exploration that's the reward - and who knows, he just might have missed something had he not gone.  Go north to Backoo and locate it on the map!

Book Quote

"A sign pointed north to Backoo.  Backoo, North Dakota, may not be the only town in America named after an Australian river (the Barcoo), but then again, maybe it is.  I went to see it, or, as it turned out, to see what was left, which was:  the Burlington Northern tracks, a grain elevator, grocery, boarded-up school, church, and a thimble of a post office."

Blue Highways: Part 7, Chapter 9

The abandoned Backoo school house that LHM mentions in Blue Highways. Photo at the Ghosts of North Dakota website. Click on photo to go to host page.

Backoo, North Dakota

There doesn't seem to be much to write about in terms of Backoo, because I couldn't really find a lot of information on the town.  But I think it is interesting that someone may have named the town after the Barcoo River in Australia.  There is another possible story about the name that the Wikipedia entry below cites: that Backoo was named after the Azerbaijani city of Baku.  However, there is no supporting information that I can see.  And with an Australian accent, it is very easy to see how Barcoo could become Backoo.

In the 1980s, Australia seemed to become the favorite country of the U.S. public.  Part of Australia's popularity was due to Paul Hogan, the Australian actor and comedian who portrayed Crocodile Dundee in three movies.  Depending on how old you are, you may remember the "That's not a knife..." scene.  Or perhaps this 80s Australian tourism commercial aired in the U.S starring Hogan.

Part of the appeal also was due to popular music coming out of the land down under into the United States.  The Bee Gees, though they moved from Australia to the United Kingdom in the late 60s, had huge hits with their songs for Saturday Night Fever.  AC/DC was a 1970s rock phenomenon and the Little River Band had a string of hits that I particularly liked in the late 70s.  During this time, the U.S. also enjoyed hits by Helen Reddy and Olivia Newton-John (who also starred in some hit movies).  In the 80s and 90s, Australian music seemed to explode.  Men at Work had a huge hit celebrating Australia in Down Under.  Midnight Oil became a favorite group of mine because of their hard driving punk tinged rock with a social justice message.  Around the early 90s Kylie Minogue, a former soap star, began burning up the pop charts.

I was always captivated by the idea of Australia.  Of course, we all learned the story of how Australia was founded as a penal colony for Great Britain, which when I was young had me envisioning a country full of dangerous criminals.  What they didn't tell us then was that most of the people sent to Australia either committed petty crimes, were in debt or were turned in by those who wished them ill.  They also didn't tell us that many more people immigrated by choice to Australia than were sent.  I also enjoyed the wild history stories of Australia that in many ways reminded me of the American West.  I thrilled over the original "Iron Man" story of Ned Kelly, the Australian bushranger and outlaw who fashioned a homemade suit of plate armor and shot it out with police.

When ESPN first became a sports network, it didn't have any official contracts with any major American sports leagues.  Instead, it ran different sports from around the world and provided me with my first look at Australian Rules Football.  "Footy," as it's known in its home country, was the strangest thing I think I ever saw.  It seemed to be a combination of soccer, rugby, American football, and even basketball because the person with the ball had to bounce it every three steps.  I watched every broadcast I could of this new game for about a month until something else, probably a girl, caught my teenage mind.

I couldn't put down Bill Bryson's account of Australia titled In a Sunburned Country (a book I'm considering for a future Littourati subject).  His accounts of some of the wonders and the quirkiness of Australia has made me want to go there even more.  He had a wonderful description of driving from Perth and listening to cricket games on the radio - he printed his version of the announcers calling the cricket play-by-play that cracked me up but also reminded me of nights driving and listening to baseball games.  I would think that a foreigner traveling through the U.S. and hearing baseball on the radio would think it the same type of gibberish that Bryson describes on hearing radio cricket.

Bryson's hilarious accounts of the all the poisonous things that live in Australia (which by far has the most concentration of deadly poisonous creatures on Earth) still hasn't deterred me from wanting to visit and explore the country.  Even a Crocodile Hunter episode (yes, he was from Australia also) about the 10 most dangerous snakes in the world (I think they all live in Australia) hasn't cooled my desire.  As I tell my wife, millions of Australians exist alongside funnel web spiders, box jellyfish, taipans, red-backed spiders, brown snakes and other dangerous things and the vast majority of them don't die.

Of course, the Australians themselves make me want to come to Australia.  I haven't known many, but those I've known are extremely nice and have always encouraged me to visit their country.  They are also very adventurous people, and the Australians I know always seem to be doing interesting things and traveling a lot, even to the most remote locations in the world, just to see what's there.  I think Australia is remote, but if you live there, then every other place on the planet must seem like it's extremely far away.

I have a goal to visit Australia and perhaps if I do, I will see where the Barcoo River is located.  I will eagerly explore its cities, like Melbourne and Sydney.  I would love to go to the other end to Perth, which I hear is a wonderful place.  Of course, one must visit the interior, the Outback.  I would like to hike and explore and hopefully not get killed by something poisonous.  And I think I'd have the time of my life.  I think that there are probably a lot of similarities between Australia and the United States, given their shared history as British colonies with indigenous populations (and the bad history with those indigenous) and with a lot of space to roam in.  But I think that it would be so different and beyond my current knowledge that it would be just an amazing experience.  I can't wait until I get the chance to see it.

Musical Interlude

In the late 70s, when I was fourteen, I was filled with hormones and desperately infatuated with a new girl who came to our school named Laura Johnson.  I thought that she was the most beautiful creature I had ever laid eyes on up to that point, and I ached for her.  Unfortunately, I was ungainly and awkward, shy, didn't think much of myself and was not very suave or debonair around girls.  And I was not one of her crowd.  The popular guys and jocks went out with her and all I could do was watch her and yearn for her from afar.  But this song, by the Little River Band from Australia, was a big hit at that time and it was to this song, Lady, that I imagined myself slow dancing close to her.  I don't know what happened to her or where she is now, but I can feel the faint echoes of the ache in my heart whenever I saw her that year.

If you want to know more about Backoo

Wikipedia: Backoo

Next up:  Cavalier, North Dakota

Blue Highways: Sand Mountain, Nevada

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapThe cosmic symphony comes alive in today's post, as William Least Heast-Moon passes by Sand Mountain, an enormous dune in the alkali flat desert of Nevada off Highway 50.  Did you know a sand mountain can sing?  Read on, and read about other types of sounds in our natural environment.  To see where Sand Mountain is located, click on the map thumbnail, to your right, while you groove to the sounds of Earth, Wind and Fire (below).

Book Quote

"The argument whether or not Sand Mountain had crossed the highway made more sense when I saw the thing - a single massive mound of tawny sand, a wavy hump between two larger ridges of sage and rock.  It was of such size that, while it wasn't perhaps big enough to be a mountain by everybody's definition, it was surely more than a dune.  Nevadans once called it "Singing Sand Mountain" because of the pleasant hum in the blowing sands, but no one has heard the mountain since off-road vehicles from California took it over."

Blue Highways: Part 5, Chapter 10

Sand Mountain, Nevada. Photo by basis104 on Panoramio. Click on photo to go to site.

Sand Mountain, Nevada

The existence of a "singing sand mountain" makes me feel strangely happy.  I couldn't really put my finger on it at first, but I think I understand why.  The sense that the earth "sings" is comforting for a number of reasons.

I have not stepped foot on Sand Mountain.  Like LHM, I passed by it on Highway 50 at a distance.  My wife and I noted that it was there, and I think that she read while we zipped by that it was a singing sand mountain.  As a sand dune, it is subject to the elements and therefore, not only does it sing, it has probably moved to various places during its existence.  This is alluded to when LHM stops in Frenchman and a person sitting near him at the counter mentions that Sand Mountain has moved across the highway.  Knowing these facts about a natural feature almost begs us to give it some kind of anthropomorphic attributes.  For a moment, I can get in touch with those primordial feelings that made our human ancestors worship geographical phenomena, like mountains and rivers, as actual gods, or manifestations of divinity on earth.

But there is more to it than that.  I buy into the fact that humans affect the planet with our activities.  I have no problem that we contribute to climate change through our release of chemical compounds into the atmosphere.  I know that we affect the environment.  Our endeavors have leveled mountains, and have created lakes where there once were rivers.  The Three Gorges Dam in China, for example, concentrated so much water in one place that it had perceptible effects on the very rotation of the earth.  We have remade landscapes to suit us.  We have and continue to mow down forests.  We create giant landfills to store our discarded items that will take thousands of years to decompose.  Even now, pools of melted radioactive materials are sitting at the bottom of reactors in Japan after a tsunami hit them, and who knows how long it will be before humans can safely inhabit those areas again.  We have left our calling cards in the world's highest and lowest places, and even on the moon.

And yet, a sand dune sings!

We know that people sing, and we hear songlike attributes in many animals.  My dog sometimes trills in her excitment, and my other dog, gone now for about five years or so, used to howl when we hit notes, with our voices or with instruments, that resonated with him.  Much has been made of the communicative songs of whales and other mammals in the ocean depths.  Birds sing in communication, and insects use their legs and other parts of their bodies to create marvelous little rhythmic tunes.  Once a seal, watching me curiously from the water with only it's head exposed, seemed to sing a little short tune at me before diving into the waves.

When I was much younger, I used to have an album by Stewart Copeland called The Rhythmatist, which was the music from his documentary of the same name.  He had traveled through Africa, and was introduced to rocks called rock gongs.  When struck, these rocks make sounds, some audible, others so low on the frequency scale that they can not be heard by human ears.  One can always hit or strike things in nature to make a sound.  A band from the Basque Country in Spain, Oreka Tx, has a documentary called Nömadak Tx that chronicles their music making adventures with other cultures around the world.  In one part they make their native instrument, txalaparta, out of stone, in another part they makeone out of ice.  As beautiful as the sounds of these instruments are, they need human help to make the sound.  Natural sounds, made by nature through nature, are different.

Inanimate objects we don't often associate with singing, yet well placed crevices or cracks and a rush of wind or water can cause natural sounds that change with the rhythm of air or waves.  As I grew up on the Northern California coast, I knew a number of spots where seawater, rushing into cracks along the rocky coastline, either pushed water or air through holes and created moaning or whistling sounds.  These sounds were often crashing and mournful, as if some being had been locked up in the tides and was mourning the loss of her freedom.

Apparently atoms can make sounds.  A couple of articles I found seems to indicate that atoms moving make a simple click sound as they move.  Scientists observing atoms, if they do certain procedures, can create a sound which seems "heartbreaking."

In fact the entire earth, according to scientists, actually emits notes and tunes of power and complexity.  the scientists don't know what causes these tunes, which are imperceptible to the human ear but which I have to believe have some impact upon us on a subconscious level.  What might the earth be singing about?  Is it singing in eternal joy?  Is it communicating with its brothers and sisters in the solar system?  Is it singing its loneliness in the cosmos?

But why stop there?  Radio telescopes pick up the sounds of stars being born, stars dying, distant objects moving toward or away from us, and even sounds from the instant after the Big Bang.  We are surrounded by the singing of the universe around us.  Every moment, every happening, is accompanied by a movement of energy that can be converted into a sound if we choose to do so.

Is this the physical manifestion of what Dante called "the sweet symphony of Paradise?"  Is this the seven perfect tones that Cicero believed held the universe together?  These questions are beyond my ability to understand.  I've always been drawn to music, and regardless of whether that music comes from the intellect of human musical genius, an animal communicating something to another, an earthly non-human source, or the cosmos, I am glad that a universal song is constantly playing.  When I sing or make a note on an instrument, I too join that cosmic symphony and am connected with the universe.

And I'm comforted to know that after I am long gone, after humans have played out their journey in this universe, most likely somewhere, sand dunes will still be singing.

Musical Interlude

This song seems very appropriate for the musical interlude, given that it's a joyful song, advocates singing as healing, and was conceived by a band that takes its name from the elements.  I must say that I really love Earth, Wind and Fire.  Enjoy Sing a Song.

If you want to know more about Sand Mountain

Nevada Destination Guide: Sand Mountain
Roadside America: Sand Mountain
Wikipedia: Sand Mountain

Next up:  Salt Wells, Nevada

Blue Highways: Athens, Georgia

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWilliam Least Heat-Moon (LHM) pulls into Athens, Georgia to simply walk off his Swamp Guinea meal and sparks my reminiscences on my youthful music tastes, as well as an aside about moonflowers and romance.  To place it all in geographical context, click on the map thumbnail at right.  Leave a comment if you'd like to suggest music that I might want to hear.  As I say below, I'm open to anything.

Book Quote

"The frogs, high and low, shrilled and bellowed from the trees and ponds.  It was cool going into Athens, a city suffering from a nasty case of the sprawls.  On the University of Georgia campus, I tried to walk down Swamp Guinea's supper.  Everywhere, couples entwined like moonflower vines, each waiting for the blossom that opens only twice."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 16

An Athens, Georgia street scene

Athens, Georgia

If you ask me what I know about Athens, Georgia, I'd tell you the bands REM and the B-52s.  Really.  I didn't even know that the University of Georgia was located there.  So it's my turn to learn more about Athens.

Of course, the B-52s and REM aren't just any bands, and Athens evidently is known as "The Liverpool of the South."  But back in the early 80s, I watched an episode of Saturday Night Live and tried to make sense of what I was seeing on the television screen.  There was a band, with two women with huge hairdos making ululating sounds, and a guy yelling something about a lobster.  I thought they were the strangest thing I had ever seen, and frankly, I didn't like them.  It took me years to develop an ear for them - I saw them in concert in the early 90s and again a couple of years ago and I really enjoyed them both times. 

I felt the same way about Athens' other major contribution to music, REM.  I liked the fast tempo and catchy lyrics of It's the End of the World as We Know It, but I wasn't taken by much of the rest of their music.  Even today, I like some things by REM but am not convinced of their overall greatness.  So, by extension, it's taken me a while to appreciate Athens as remotely contributing something to my life.

My sister credits me with influencing her music tastes when she appropriated my record collection when I went to college, but I was never really sophisticated in music.  While punk bands and new wave were beginning in the late 70s and early 80s, the radio station in my little Northern California town was firmly locked in the early 70s when it played music for "the kids", and the "newer" stuff that my peers listened to was definitely of the heavy metal variety.  The most daring music played on the radio or listened to by my peers was probably Frank Zappa.  I didn't get introduced to some of the newer music coming out until I went to college and started listening to Bay Area radio stations.  My approach to music has always been like my approach to wine - I know what I like regardless of whether it is considered a desired vintage or cheap.  This has stood me in good stead, and has led me to lots of great music and an openness to pretty much everything.  When I lived in Texas, this openness led me to a lot of great singer-songwriters and when I lived in New Orleans, the whole New Orleans jazz and brass band scene.  I tend to eschew most modern pop, and look for music that is interesting and not cookie-cutter.

In the end, I came back to the B-52s, even though they eventually became pop.  My wife had a couple of their early albums, and I began to appreciate just how radical they were back in the day when I was initially dismissing them as weird.  Here are the B-52s on Saturday Night Live in 1980 - the first time I ever learned of them.  They were just becoming a national act right about the time that LHM stops in Athens.  Could it be that he might have caught some of their music, drifting with a breeze as he walked at the University of Georgia?

Switching gears a second, LHM gets a little romantic and throws a little sexual imagery in the passage above, where he equates the couples on the grass at the University of Georgia with moonflowers.  The moonflower, like it's name implies, only opens in the evening.  I remember moonflowers from when I lived in New Orleans, and they easily can be equated with romance.  When they bloom at night, they are very fragrant and along with the scent of night-blooming jasmine, they scented the air in the New Orleans neighborhood where I lived with sweetness.  It was easy, on a warm spring or hot summer night to let one's fancy run wild with imagination with those scents swirling around.

Moonflowers also figure in some voodoo that is related to romance, which again reminds me of New Orleans.  John the Conqueroo root, used in some voodoo spells and potions to aid in gambling and flirting, comes from a plant related to the moonflower.

I hope, for the sake of those sprawling couples at the University of Georgia, that blossoms opened more than twice.  But I'm sure that at a university as big as Georgia in the early 80s there were plenty of blossoms to be plucked in the moonlight.  As the B-52s sang in their Song for a Future Generation: "Let's meet, and have a baby now!"

If you want to know more about Athens

Athens Banner-Herald's Online Athens (newspaper)
Athens-Clarke County Guide
Athens World (blog)
Blogs at Online Athens
Downtown Athens
Flagpole (alternative newspaper/magazine)
The Red and Black (independent student newspaper)
University of Georgia
Visit Athens, Georgia
Wikipedia: Athens

Next up: Conyers, Georgia