Bike Odyssey 2014 – Day 11 – Arkansas weather

The day began with a spectacular piece of serendipity: in Oxford I had been feeling coincidence near (and thinking at the same time that this was sheer moonshine) – perhaps an encounter with my former colleague Richard Gray, Faulkner specialist and Oxford Faulkner-conference regular? – instead it was somebody from the same era of my life, somebody I hadn’t seen since I last saw Richard, at Essex University in the UK, where we both taught; and the coincidence arrived inside Rowan Oak itself, of all places – Faulkner’s old home. Visiting at the very same hour were Patrick and Barbara Russell, from the UK. Patrick had been a student in the 20th Century Dramatic Literature class I taught at Essex U., 40 years ago; it was one of the first university classes I taught, and I was horribly anxious, and excited to find that the class took off. They contributed some wonderful insights into Chekhov, which I still pass on to my classes. It was a baptism, unforgettable. ‘This is what I came to university for,’ said one of the students – not, I think, Patrick, although he said he had often spoken of me to his wife. And it was he who recognized me in the lobby of Rowan Oak. What a glorious reunion!

And what a place for a reunion! The university has made the best job I’ve ever come across of maintaining a historic house and introducing it to the visitor through exquisitely staged rooms and exhibits both tactfully placed and comprehensive. That morning, before we went to Rowan Oak, I’d been thinking about Faulkner’s marriage to his much longed-for Estelle – how romantically it began, yet how the marriage fell short of its beginnings (something of this meditation may be what shows up in the tortured expression on my face, outside the house!).

We set out towards Little Rock, Arkansas, as usual on two-lane blacktops where possible; William Least Heat Moon’s book, Blue Highways, was an inspiration to me 30 years ago – today’s back roads are less heartily bizarre, more purely desolate. A few joys nonetheless: a collapsing one-room shack on a low loader, wonderfully odd; an entire field full of old rusty bathtubs; more cemeteries whose every grave sported Memorial Day flowers – clearly, after seeing hundreds of thousands of these bouquets, this is the work of the graveyard managements and not only of pious citizens; some notable roadkill – armadillo, raccoon. An ancient peeling sign declares, “Get ready! Jesus is coming” – the sign so decayed it could have been made in the 1st century, confirming what numerous Americans believe, that Jesus was an American. (How can they believe this? Simple – all great Christians are Americans, and history is bunk.) My favorite roadside church message so far: When You Break God’s Law, You Break God’s Heart. Now that we’re out of Alabama I can stop compulsively singing the chorus of Sweet Home Alabama (and pretending to myself that I don’t know the nauseating words of the verses), and return to shouting my standbys, Gimme a string bean / I’m a hungry man, and JJ Cale’s I’ll come back and haunt you as a / Nother man… When signs to Memphis began, I turned to Marc Cohn’s Touched down in the land of the Delta Blues / In the middle of the pouring rain. Immediately, it began to rain.

The best encounter of our journey yet, as Joe described it, occurred when I took a back road so obscure that it brought us to a different time, a hamlet (the word Faulkner uses) preserved exactly as they appear in Faulkner’s novels. We parked in the tiny forecourt of a long since abandoned structure, once a filling station (sometimes there are non-functioning pumps left, but here there were none). Now – we’re in the South, I said to Joe. At this, a man – Donal Burnett (Donal pronounced Dan-ell) – emerged from the hitherto empty-seeming structure and, as I was apologizing for ignorantly parking on his property, invited us in for coffee. Inside we met his wife Lavorn (I’m pledged to send them our photos, and I have, in Lavorn’s hand, the spelling of the family’s names) and we were greeted like space aliens, which we might as well have been. Daughter Melody was incited to shake hands with the man from Australia, and did so as if Joe was from Jupiter. The gas service is no more; the Burnetts survive selling cups of coffee, and candy, and presumably with the help of welfare. They were wonderful to visit with, as Americans say, and we’d have been happy to stay all day. The tiny, deserted road, a lane almost, that they live on carries the implausible title of Martin Luther King Jr. Highway; hard to tell if this choice of thoroughfare to honor MLK reveals defiant negligence or outright mockery.

Back on the road, we crossed the Mississippi, which was for me – and surely for anyone familiar with American history – a portal of dizzying power; I thought immediately of the miracle made possible when ‘The Wall’ fell: riding a bike under and through the Brandenburg Gate, in Berlin, once the heavily guarded borderline between East and West – unimaginable to simply cycle through it! – another experience that was like stepping through a door made of mercury. At once the thunderstorm that had been threatening all day (since ‘Walking in Memphis’) broke, in the micro-climate big rivers bring; thunder crashed around us like collapsing buildings; we quickly put on our raingear and that made the weather brighten. Only for a while, though. Locals call it Arkansas weather, and it soon included a brief taste of my second hailstorm while riding. Little Rock arrived in driving rain and traffic jams. The campsite we’d booked (or Kampsite as the KOA proclaim – someone never heard of the Nazi evil-eye of that ‘k’, as in Amerika) promised a drenching before we’d even got our tents up, at the startling price of $35 each. Motel 6 (50 years old and going strong) offered a shower, TV and big comfy bed for $39.99. Slam dunk.