Like a pair of
vampire bats, the boys blink and cower under the covers, hiding as we open the
curtains, revealing a glorious rain-washed morning. “Remarkably accurate
description,” admits Barkley.
I plan to look at
the map and weather on the Nook this morning, but Keith hid it somewhere. He departs, venturing downstairs for
breakfast, informing me that I’m not permitted internet access until I dress
and brush my teeth.
Obediently, I
stand to put on my clothes but keep failing as I fall back into the chair
before I can pull up my pants. Keith returns, sated by hotel food-like
substances. He instructs me to use my PT
arm extension exercises to stand upright. This involves pushing my top body
upward following my arms, the momentum carrying me up to stand. Complying, I look somewhat like a deranged
dolphin trying to escape from Sea World.
Keith begins demonstrating his idea of the correct PT form. He resembles a demented Japanese person repeatedly
bowing, ever lower each time.
At long last, dressed
and my teeth sparkly clean, the Nook returns.
I check the weather, map and email.
All in order!
Early morning
drama overcome, we actually leave the hotel by 8:45AM. Barkley and Bloodroot plan
to visit a Coca-Cola Museum that opens at 9AM in Vicksburg. On the brief ride downtown, they excitedly
discuss the museum’s potential contents. The museum looks pretty sucky to the
parental units so we opt out.
Pearl takes us
downtown, patiently circling until we find appropriate parking. Barkley and Bloodroot hop out of Pearl’s
doors, barely saying goodbye, determined to be the first people in the
Biedenharn Museum when the doors open at 9AM.
The museum, whose doors open a
good bit past 9AM, disappoints the boys.
“Sadly,” opines Barkley with a sigh, “we just walked through a couple of
rooms filled with old racist advertising.”
In the 1890s, a
druggist named Biedenharn began bottling Coca-Cola syrup with soda water to
take out to the surrounding countryside, starting the proud tradition of
independent Coca-Cola bottlers. Bloodroot & Barkley rate the 1920s Coke
models’ butts. Having avoided the museum, I can’t intelligently explain who won
the competition. The advertising portrays blacks as puffy-cheeked red-faced
happy darkies, per Barkley “probably drawn by 17th-century people
with gonorrhea who’d never seen a black person.” Huh? This
is Mississippi, a place where skin color comes in a rainbow assortment.
Leaving the happy
darkies behind, the boys wander next door to a used bookstore, finding it much
more to their liking. Stereotypical
nerds, they buy numerous books, grateful that we brought a car. Fortunately, they surmise, an airplane remains
far beyond our collective means. From
the bookstore owners, they learn that the Mississippi Delta for millennia has
been very, very poor. The owners report, “We’d sadly watch Teach for America
New Yorkers arrive in the Delta.
Altruistically intent upon teaching America’s poor, the volunteers would
look about and just go home, completely overwhelmed by the magnitude of the
sprawling misery they saw.”
Bear and I have
our own adventure while the boys meander through theirs. We explore downtown Vicksburg, walking
downhill, scarily downhill, eternally downhill to the river. All Bear has to do
is let go of the chair and down to the river I would fly, smashing into the
murals lining the river’s edge. Having a
good bit of life insurance, I’m worth far more dead than alive. Good thing he
loves me!
Vicksburg, a cute
little Southern town, commissioned wonderful murals at the river’s edge illustrating
life in Mississippi. Forming a wall in front of the river, the murals depict cotton
crops, schools, blues players, the river and floods. Lines mark the water’s height during the
great flood of 1927, when the Mississippi rose 6’2” above her bed. The river may periodically flood, but fortune
placed the battlefield nearby, allowing Vicksburg to turn the tourist trade.
We walk back up
hill to greet the ever patient Pearl, settling in with her to await the boys’ return. Parked on a steep hill, Bear has curbed
Pearl’s front wheels (turning the wheels and backing them into the curb,
stopping any downward slide before it starts), as we learned to do so long ago
in Akron and Pittsburgh. Chafing, Pearl complains,
“I’m quite capable of remaining on this hill.
I’m not a Model-T Ford, for goodness’ sakes. You guys are forever overreacting.”
Scanning our
future plans, I note that Bloodroot has us visiting the Chennault Museum in
Monroe, Louisiana, tomorrow, Sunday, when it’s closed. (Does Bloodroot do this
because he loves me and wants to spare me yet another military museum?) A quick conference ensues when the boys return. Acknowledging temporal reality, we decide to
drive to Monroe today to visit the Chennault Museum and tour Poverty Point
(today’s original plan) tomorrow.
Off we go to
Monroe, Louisiana. Scanning the route
for a picnic table, we hope to have lunch before sightseeing in museum #2, cleverly
avoiding grumpiness and meltdowns. But
to no avail: we see nary a picnic spot during
the hour’s drive from Vicksburg to Monroe.
Reaching Monroe,
we exit I-20 downtown near the “Civic Center.”
Pearl cruises a few blocks into the city. The bookstore folks were right about the
desolation—Monroe is the saddest ghetto I’ve ever seen, and I’m from Cleveland.
Tijuana’s bustling humanity suddenly looks prosperous. I suggest stopping at the hospital, an
edifice housing the last functioning sector of the American economy and perhaps
people who won’t rob us. “We could ask
the valet for directions,” I offer brightly. My fellow animals ignore me.
The hospital holds
Monroe’s only sign of life. The unremitting bleakness of the metropolis’ former
downtown stretches for miles. I wonder, has a neutron bomb exploded here,
eliminating all life but leaving the buildings?
After fifteen minutes of driving about, we pull into an open gas station
that has no outside windows, the only operating business we’ve encountered. The
Pakistani/Indian worker standing at the register behind steel bars and the only
sheet of glass in the building (bulletproof) has no idea of the museum’s
location. Nor does he have a working bathroom. Nor ice. Loud rap music erupts
from cars. No one speaks to us, our skin being the wrong color. One elderly
gentleman crosses the color line and gives us very confused directions of where
he believes the museum might/could be.
We leave the gas
station for more futile cruising, eventually parking at the central police
station. The boys exit Pearl near a sign stating “subject to strict
surveillance.” No one answers the door.
Have even the police have left town, abandoning their station?
The urban blight
amazes me. Is this what our country has
become as the factories fled? No work, no jobs, no stores, completely
segregated and with the poor solidly black.
Post-Reaganomics Cleveland sported large swaths of wretchedness yet
still maintained downtown office and shopping areas.
Leaving the empty
police station, we follow signs to several downtown museums, all closed on a
Saturday! We pass the large green metal
tents I’d spotted from the freeway.
Perhaps an urban revival attempt at a flea market? No one in sight. I’m reminded of a post-apocalyptic movie
where the survivors peep out, look about, then scurry back into hiding.
Determined to
exhaust all possibilities, Bear continues traveling about in circles. Disgustedly,
Pearl notes, “There’s where we exited the freeway, AGAIN.” “Ask the hospital valet,” I repeat, a bit
more heatedly, this time. “What? Why?” I
receive the growly response vented by a very frustrated Bear. “OK, OK.” We approach
the valet who gives us the correct directions out to the suburbs and the
museum.
Backtracking on
I-20, we exit by a suburban mall this time.
Still seeking ice and a restroom, we drive into a different gas station,
this one solidly white. The station has two handicap ramps. While no rap music assaults us, an ice
machine blocks the east ramp. As Pearl
pulls over to the west ramp, a redneck in a huge smelly white truck drives
around us, cutting us off to park and monopolizing the three handicap spaces, completely
blocking the west ramp. Keith’s jaw flaps, left completely speechless by the
incredible rudeness. Pearl eggs Keith on, “Let’s ram him, Bear!” Keith’s foot
shifts to the gas pedal. Fortunately,
just in the nick of time, Bloodroot and Barkley hop out of Pearl to intervene,
kindly asking the young man to move his truck, appealing to his sense of
politeness. He does, after apologizing
to us. Sven and I gratefully visit the
bathroom while Keith buys ice. The boys
buy some gas-station garbage food.
Whew! What an
adventure! Back on the road, following
the valet’s directions through the ritzy suburbs, we at long last pull into the
Chennault Aviation and Military Museum parking lot. They have a picnic table! We are saved, cannibalism
avoided, although we may not be speaking to each other for a while. Out comes the cooler and stove. Bear brushes aside all offers of assistance,
creating a simple meal of sausage, peppers, onions and pasta. He worries, “We’re nearly out of good
food. We’ll have to find a grocery store
soon.” Point noted. Monroe easily qualifies as a food desert, but
we’ll be in Dallas soon enough.
Sated, we enter
the museum. Fortune smiles upon us,
after having abandoned us for most of the day.
We meet yet another completely obsessed museum guide who teaches us
lots:
Claire Chennault,
a boisterous, forceful Louisiana boy, joined the military in the 1910s. Learning to fly, he progressed up the
military ranks, but constantly told his superiors what to do—not a good move. (Chennault
supported pursuit flying while the Army invested in high altitude
bombardment.) By 1937, Chennault, deaf
and tired of fighting with his superiors, resigned his commission in the U.S.
Army Air Corps.
Around this time,
Japan invaded China, easily defeating the Chinese military, and began genocide
in Nanking. Chiang and Mme. Chiang
Kai-shek hired Chennault to develop the Chinese Air Force. Initially planning a three-month stint in
China, Channault remained there nine years, through the end of World War II.
Chennault created the
Flying Tigers, an American volunteer group who fought the Japanese in China
with covert US support. Faced with the
Japanese Air Force’s numerical superiority and greater maneuverability, he
trained his pilots to attack the Japanese bombers from above in groups. In
various sorties his Tigers graphically demonstrated that a fighter could take
out a bomber, conclusively proving his point in the old argument with his Army
superiors.
Many of the Tigers
aided Chinese troops through an absurdly dangerous airlift, carrying food and
supplies from Burma to China over a mountains range they called “the Hump.”
Shifting weather and high winds over this offshoot of the Himalayas claimed
many American lives. (Building runways by hand, while almost starving, claimed
many Chinese lives.)
Roosevelt loved Chennault,
making him a general. McArthur hated him, retiring him again as soon as
Roosevelt died.
Even today, the
Chinese revere Chennault, nationalists and mainlanders alike, despite his air
force accompanying Chiang Kai-shek to exile in Taiwan.
The museum itself
honors people from all parts of Louisiana who fought in wars from WWI to Iraq,
complete with uniforms and transcribed tales of close calls and narrow escapes.
The boys are in heaven reading personal war stories from around the world; I’m
terminally bored. How long can you stare at a bunch of uniforms? It’s mostly dead white men, but I am happy to
see one Tuskegee airman and a smattering of women.
We leave as the museum
closes, returning to Vicksburg, eating nuts and cheese along the way. We learn
that the state of Louisiana, pleading poverty, eliminated all roadside rest
stops. What? Eating at YuckDonald’s is
good for the American economy, you know!
Is there ever a thought regarding the social and economic costs of bad
food? That we all pay for the resultant
diabetes, obesity and heart disease?
Apparently not in Louisiana.
Barkley
investigates poverty statistics for Monroe on the Internet. He finds it to be
the same as Detroit, around one third living in poverty, unless you’re under
eighteen, in which case poverty claims half the population. The city of Monroe
is entirely black and the suburbs resolutely white. What an American city this
is! Raised up from obscurity through one man’s innovation in military aircraft;
brought down and destroyed by racism and white flight.
We return to our
Vicksburg hotel. Back in our room, we
make salads for dinner. The boys eat leftovers. Fate teases us with the penultimate
irony—our open hotel window overlooks the Wendy’s drive-through. People yak, pull through, and order gross
food. When I think of fast food, I think
of Soylent Green (Soylent Green, a
1973 dystopian science fiction movie, depicts the grossly overpopulated human
race subsisting on one food substance, Soylent Green. In the film’s denouement, Soylent Green turns
out to be made from corpses.) Looking
down at Wendy’s I wonder, “Are they ordering Soylent Red, Green or Yellow?”
Ah well, enough navel
gazing. After 9PM, Wendy’s drive-through
blessedly falls silent. We cut the
lights and turn in for the night.
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