Going South, Part III: I Wish I Was in New Orleans

 

Friday 24 June 2022, Birmingham to New Orleans

Like Montgomery, downtown Birmingham is marked by monuments, signposts, murals and sculptures commemorating the Civil Rights movement, but despite the influx of tourism that comes with these markers, the economic legacy of slavery and its engrained inequalities are still evident. Beautiful museums sit incongruously next to shuttered shops, derelict buildings, fast food joints and dysfunctional public services. There is perhaps a question to ask as to what role memorialising the civil rights movement has on poverty and racism in the USA today. More on this when we meet Mz Jackie of Memphis in a few days’ time. 

 

On the (correct) assumption that Amtrak would be late again (one hour), I decided I had time to try the local speciality: boiled peanuts in cajun spices (other flavours are available). My choice may also have been driven by sympathy for the people making a living standing over steaming industrial vats of boiling peanuts while the mid-day heat melted my rubber soled sandals and roasted a banana left in the car (which was still delicious).

At the station I join the queue on the platform and waited for the Crescent to arrive, chatting to Herbert next to me in line, an elderly gentleman who recalled joining Birmingham’s children’s marches in the 1960s. As the train pulled in a conductor called for groups to board first; Amtrak, in the 21st century, doesn’t have a seat reservation system so they have to shuffle people around manually. Herbert and his wife incorporate two young black women and me into their family so we could board together. The guard looked sceptical, as well she might, but lets us go ahead.

I bought a lot of work to do on the train journeys but it’s not getting done. There is a big window to look out of and an ever-changing landscape; I fear I might miss something if I look away. It’s the original FOMO. I know I sound old but people have lost the art of staring out of windows. We now look at screens or feel compelled to facetime someone rather than manage the discomfort of having to amuse ourselves with our thoughts. I catch a few podcasts, including The Grey Area's ‘The rise and fall of America’s monuments’ which seems a fitting programme to listen to while travelling through the South. Since the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2020, some 200 statues connected to the slave trade and the Southern Confederacy have been removed, with most just put in storage. There is uncertainty about what should stay and what should go, which effigies should be destroyed completely or just moved out of sight.

But the puzzlement in the presenter’s question of why people might object to the removal of statues of slavers and confederate soldiers (and the Bienville monument in NOLA, pictured, really shouldn't last much longer) fails to recognise the emotional responses that underpin change. There is power in the hands of architects and sculptors and dead Generals astride horses; there is power in feelings of shame and humiliation that we will do much to avoid; and there is fear of what power will be lost if things disappear. 

 

As a metaphor for the USA today and the debate surrounding its past, the Crescent moves at the speed of the 19th century through forests of thin trees, patches of swamp and rice paddies. We must bow down before the heat of the day in case the tracks have buckled. We must bow down before freight. 

 

 

Pulling into a siding to wait, I lose track of time: no-one knows how far away the freight is or how long we will be here. No radios or mobiles or timetables can apparently help. One carriage is freezing, another is roasting. The conductor occasionally apologises over the tannoy and free water and snacks are passed around. At three hours late the conductor walks through to personally apologise, mentioning the obvious, that America is a ‘poor country in many ways’. I regale passengers with tales of a magical place called Europe where trains are plentiful and fast and cheap (ish; I leave the UK out of the fantasy). To put it in context, it’s just 314.3 miles by train from Birmingham to NOLA, a journey that took 12 hours. It’s 355 miles from Paris to Toulouse, a journey that takes just under 5 hours on a TGV. 

We stutter our way South, finally reversing into New Orleans at 2am, five hours late. I ask for a compensation form and Amtrak customer services laughs. Luckily my host is a night owl so was awake to let me in. He is also all biceps and chiselled torso, wandering into his kitchen naked except for a hastily wrapped scarf acting as a flimsy loin cloth … ah the joys of AirBnB.

New Orleans (NOLA), Saturday, 25th June, 2022

 

NOLA is the epitome of ‘so much to do, so little time’, with activities generally divided into eating, looking at stuff, and music. I have an ever-growing list of recommendations but as always the best option on the first day in a new city is just to wander. Admittedly it would have been better to check the weather before making this plan, as I soon realise on stepping out from my air conditioned apartment. It is mercilessly hot; 36 degrees on the gauge but taking into account the wet bulb temperature, the Gulf’s reverse equivalent to New York City’s winter wind chill, it’s feeling about 45. Welcome to climate change. Kim Stanley Robinson’s opening tragedy in The Ministry for the Future, where millions die in a heat wave because people can’t sweat enough to cool down, doesn’t seem that far away.

I blame the creeping lethargy for the loss of my navigational skills (always embarrassing when a geographer gets lost). After several diversions in the wrong direction, I begin to realise I’m going to need a paper map: the diminished detail of a phone sized screen is no match for a city bent along a very large river. 

Starting at the French Quarter, it is as the postcards depict: all low rise colonial architecture, boujie shops, restaurants and bars, mule drawn carriage tours, interspersed with tat and massage salons. I find a yarn shop … yes, it’s 45 degrees in the shade but I buy yarn. There are sheep in Louisiana apparently, just not on the coast.

In the French Market, lazy ceiling fans and jugs of iced tea keep the tourists cool, as cafés and stalls offer jazz and dixie classics, oysters and ‘gator burgers, cocktails and mouffelleta. 

Outside the French Quarter, there is the gentrifying neighbourhood of Bywater, with craft breweries and cafes tucked away between pastel-coloured wooden houses in tree lined streets. In the time honoured tradition of deindustrialisation, warehouses have been converted into artist studios, and their walls are now canvases for riotous murals. The whimsical JamNOLA is designed purely for Instagram; fun but not worth the $34 plus tips.

My strategy of walking 20 minutes then stopping at the nearest cafe/bar for liquid may have underestimated the need for water: beer and iced tea are no substitute. As the music started to wind up in the French Quarter, the rest of me started to wind down. The lack of sleep, and excess of heat, alcohol and luminescent pink created a slightly hallucinogenic effect not helped by night tours appearing on each block touting vampires and other hauntings. 

 

The scourge of Amsterdam-style ‘drink while cycling’ trolley cars and various other moving parties needed to be sidestepped. The final convulsion before complete bodily shut down was discovering that Bourbon Street, a place held in high reverence in my imagination, is in fact a study in urban ruin. The jazz and blues has dissolved into R&B sound systems and MCs, each trying to out-compete each other to attract roving hens’ parties and frat boys. I fell into a taxi heading for bed at 8pm.

Sunday-Monday, 26-27th June 2022

Recovered, and prepared for the heat, Day 2 starts, as all days really should, with beignets and iced coffee at Verte Marte, a hole-in-the-wall bodega famous for its takeout. There’s a quietness in the streets this early (9am ish). No crowds, no competing sound systems; just a few morning walking tours and the locals going about their business unimpeded by the hoards. I find a stoop and slowly cover myself with icing sugar. Cookery school adds to the food stains on my t-shirt so some fresh air and lazing about in the bayou seemed like a good idea for the afternoon. 

Honey Island swamp is enclosed by the arms of the Pearl River, and our captain, Ally, couldn’t be more of a cajun stereotype if he tried. Growing up hunting and fishing in the bayou, he regales us with exploits including tales of the Honey Island Swamp Creature (in cajun, the rougarou, or sasquatch), and catching an alligator with his cousin ‘by mistake’ and having to shoot it, putting six holes in their boat. He was 12. I ask the obvious question: ‘you had a gun at 12?’ Of course. When having to explain to their parents why they'd put six holes in a boat, it was their mum they most feared. The power of the matriarch is embedded in the Cajun greeting, regularly shouted across the river at other boat crews: ‘How’s your mum, and them’ (‘them’ being everyone else in the family of lesser importance than your mum).

Ally takes us into the nooks and crannies of the bayou, finding the alligators that we all want to see, who obligingly pop up in expectation of snacks and then hang around a bit to stare and generally freak us out with their jurassic appearance in a world where humans like to think we're the apex predators. 

 

Other swamp dwellers make cameo appearances: a raccoon family among the tangled roots of trees have learned that if they dip the crocodile pellets in water to soften them then they can eat them too, assuming they stay out of the way of the alligators. Kevin, the wild boar, keeps his distance. Herons stand stock still, ankle deep, waiting for lunch to swim by. ‘I wiiish I could fiiish as good as those birrrds’, says Ally. I wish I could bottle his accent, with its elongated vowels and rolling ‘r’s, and take it home. We pass the occasional cabin that might feature in Deliverance (including one resident bravely checking his anchor submerged in the same space as the alligators) but in signs of swamp gentrification there are now also some very boujie summer homes on the water.

 

If lazing about in the swamp generates a hazy slowing down, cruising the Mississippi has the opposite effect. This working river is all flow, industry, grinding metal and alteration. Paddle steamers still take tourists on afternoon, day or overnight trips and I sign up for the two hour history tour on the Creole Queen to the site of the Battle of Chalomet (better known as the Battle of New Orleans between British and American forces). It’s a proper paddle boat, no propellers the captain reassures the several hundred passengers who’ve paid for authenticity.

At this point we weren’t paying much attention to the tannoy as we discovered that our tickets, clearly stamped ‘No Lunch’, are being accepted at the buffet. I load up on ‘a bit of everything’ (gumbo, jambalaya, salad, more bread pudding) and find a window seat while lawyer, turned historian, Charlie Cheeseman, in a bass voice to die for, gives an informative and hilarious history of the settlement, the attempt by the British to reclaim NOLA and their eventual defeat. A Johnny Cash song dedicated to the battle is played and disturbingly I realise I know it. Somehow obscure US pop culture made it onto a very rural dairy farm in NSW and infiltrated my childhood playlist: ‘we fired once more and they began to running down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico’). The boat docks at a pier downstream and we can stretch our legs at the very non-descript battle site: a big open field, the remains of a defensive dyke, a reconstructed plantation house that has nothing to do with the battle, and large trees hung with Spanish moss.

 

The 40 minute cruise back included Charlie’s impassioned retelling of what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina (2005), and FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) do not come out of it well. The French Quarter is the highest ground and damaged the least, while to its east and west (from Esplanade and Canal streets) is reclaimed land below sea level. During the flooding many people drowned in their attics, unable to cut themselves out (it is emergency procedure in Louisiana now to keep an axe in the attic). For some in the city, FEMA's decisions, or lack of them, rank up there with desertion or dereliction of duty at least. 

 

NOLA is still marked by the tragedy even 17 years later. The expressway into and out of the old city passes the Superdome: an edifice to concrete modernity and human misery etched into the mind’s eye of anyone old enough to remember the aftermath. The city hospital that couldn't be fully evacuated is still mostly derelict, with a section only recently rebuilt by a university. The remains of the old bridge over Lake Pontchartrain has been left as a memorial. The last building with shreds of the blue FEMA tarp, a school still unrepaired, is visible from the boat. NOLA’s new levees look no more than a few metres high but are now reinforced with concrete cores and withstood Hurricane Ida in 2021, which is just as well as locals mutter concern in every bar room conversation that the weather and the ocean is already so hot that a bad hurricane season is expected.

One advantage of the flat landscape means that walking and cycling is a good way to get around NOLA’s various quarters, despite the heat. I choose a bike tour of the famous above ground cemeteries and the Garden District on a slightly cooler day with some cloud cover and the cycling generating a nice breeze. The cemeteries are practical: no one wants to see corpses floating through their streets when it floods. Vaults keep the bodies where they are supposed to be and often include a neat stacking system: a fresh body gets the top shelf and the previous occupant, now nicely decomposed after a year and a day, gets moved to the bottom.

 

The Garden District is southern ostentation at its best. The genteel streets are quiet and tree lined while the houses, previously occupied by plantation and slave owners, are copious Italianate and neo-classical mansions. The tour includes the obligatory celebrity spotting with big ups to those that contribute to the community (well done Sandra Bullock and John Goodman) and not a lot of love for Nicholas Cage who wants to be buried in the city but couldn’t pay the plot fees. After a couple of hours the midday heat kicks in again so it’s onto the Trolley car (the oldest continuously operating trolley in the world) and down the very boujie St Charles Avenue. For only $1.25 it’s a bargain although there’s only a handful of lines.

 

While there is plenty to keep the visitor active in the day it’s really the music and night life that draws the crowds. While the Bayou created Cajun Zydaco, with its washboard and off beat two step, NOLA created Creole 'second line', the jazz beat that marks out the sound of Frenchmen Street (where the real music now happens). The city is a titanic improv session, as musicians wander in and out of sets, joining bands for a number or two and then moving on. Performers are so laid back they are almost sliding out of their chairs, and so practiced that while one is having a solo other band members can step outside for a cigarette and collect tips … they know how much time they’ve got till they need to be back on stage. There is never a cover charge but the rules are generally one drink per set and the band plays for tips so be decent about it. 

Never have I felt so comfortable going out on my own into the wee hours. I park myself on various bar stools with assorted cocktails. I graze along Royal, Frenchmen, and Decatur streets to Envie Coffee House in the early hours. I sit outside and meet Desmond, an artist, at the next table. Sadly my taxi comes and I am now forever left wondering what if I’d just cancelled the car and spent an evening chatting with Desmond. NOLA has that effect. There’s no hassle: chat, don’t chat. It really is the Big Easy. Do your own thing, don’t bother anyone else, enjoy. As my driver, Gail, said the next morning, everything is laid back in NOLA: ‘we walk slow, we talk slow, everyone here has some creativity’.

Tuesday 28 June 2022

 

Food is NOLA’s other big attraction. In the space of three days I tried everything from ‘hole in the wall’ to the uber cool Bacchanal, a European inspired outdoor restaurant where you pick your own assiette of posh cheese and/or meat, to which they add an extraordinary amount of trimmings (crudites, bread, olives, chutneys). With just one morning to go I still have several items on my list of things to try. Cafe du Monde’s production line of beignets is more impressive than the actual product, churned out in their thousands and thrown into a paper bag, accompanied by a paper cup of iced latte. I figure the ten minute walk to Cafe Maspero is not really enough to justify a bowl of crawfish etouffe but it’s a NOLA specialty so has to be tried.

Then the stroll to Mothers is in the same direction as the railway station so I queue with the locals for PoBoy with grilled gulf shrimp to eat on the train, picking up their famous Debris au Jus (yep, all the meaty bits that fall in the pan from the slicing of roast beef for PoBoys) and bread pudding (third variation with brandy sauce) to ensure all food groups are catered for. Hands down one of the best meals you can have if you're flexitarian.

I roll into the station at the same time as The City of New Orleans: a giant of a train, double decker but with a dainty little compartment below the main seating area for women to powder our noses. There is an observation car on this line, one of the reasons that many people tell me they choose AmTrak despite its many deficiencies. Windows extend up into the ceiling allowing the landscape in, along with America’s underclass and poverty that should not exist in a country this wealthy: derelict terraces, decrepit industry, twisted and tamped metal, tyres and industrial waste on the outskirts and in the inner cities hurried through.

An Amtrak train crashed in Missouri the previous night killing three (two on board, one in the dump truck it hit) so I was not feeling totally secure, but at least we left NOLA on time. But the optimism for a scheduled arrival soon dissipated as we ground down to the speed curfew during the heat of the day and shunted into a siding to allow a train to pass. There’s no WiFi. According to the conductor: ‘The broadband in this region is terrible’ so Amtrak stopped paying for it. Geographic inquality between the South and the North made manifest in infrastructure disparity.

We skirt Lake Pontchartrain, its other side unseen, then chug slowly through bayou. The earth gradually becomes more solid, the trees bigger, the sky full of threatening rain, and finally we roll into Memphis, Tennessee, an hour late. Just after midnight my hotel is looking scarily locked up until the receptionist eventually appears and lets me in.

 

Going South, Part II: Sweet Home, Alabama

Birmingham, Tuesday 21 June, 2022

Not for the USA a high-speed rail network with punctuality. 90 minutes late departing Atlanta, I take this to be part of the country’s glorious exceptionalism: trains will run slow and behind schedule. We trundle through Georgia then Alabama, sitting in icy AC while outside climate change rushes past in a heat wave hitting 40 degrees. Cleaved between the jagged edges of forested ravines and peri-urban industrial parks, the slowness reveals frontier style main streets of small town southern America; grand homesteads, porches and chairs, shacks with little porches and one chair (southern hospitality, there is always a chair). White, weather board Baptist church steeples compete for congregations. Deer meander in fields, turtles sunbake on creek-bound logs, and an eagle settles into a tree.

I chat with the young man in the opposite seat: 28 years old and this his first trip outside California where he was born. He is part of post-Covid mobility in the USA; changing jobs, working online, looking to move to a state where it’s cheaper to live or where there are more appealing medical, abortion and/or tax regulations. He has been travelling 50 days, staying for stints in New York, Savannah (GA), and now on his way to New Orleans, trying different cities before he decides where to settle.

As we creep eventually into a shimmering Birmingham, one hour late and in a new time zone, I’m starting to suspect that the strange smell following me around was coming from the cardigan I had picked up off the pavement in Atlanta. Clearly the light dusting I had given it was not enough. 

A short walk from the station there is an actual functioning bus service, hourly, mostly empty, handily dropping me right to the hotel on the edge of the city near the airport. The location is a food desert and while my cardigan dries after a good beating in the sink, a taxi gets me to the nearest strip mall for supplies. I did think about walking but the usual configuration of expressway splitting cities into two or more pieces prevents any urban meanders. The white driver, maybe late 30s, early 40s, is polite and chatty but warns me to ‘be careful’ as it’s ‘not a nice area’. I push him to say why: is it poor? Not exactly. In fact one of Birmingham’s wealthiest neighbourhoods is nearby. It’s not violent, exactly. But he feels the people there might steal something.

After some time in the USA the codes for things not said begin to emerge. ‘Not a nice area’ is code for ‘people of colour’. ‘It’s the South’, with an eye roll and a shrug, means someone’s being racist. While the legacy of slavery is not confined to the South, nor to the USA, those states of the Deep South that had been most dependent on an enslaved plantation economy (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina) are still marked by high levels of poverty, inequality and racial discrimination.

Valerie, a middle-aged black woman, is my taxi driver for the return drive back to the hotel. Another migrant from California’s high cost of living, she has a day job she loves in health care but drives taxis between shifts because she likes meeting folk. She knows that there are people in Birmingham who ‘think differently’ (code: racist). She knows that many are ‘sincerely friendly’, but ‘It’s the South’ (eye roll). Acknowledging ongoing constraints, such as being the only woman, and only one of three black members on a corporate board, all her ideas (e.g. the city providing public transport or setting up employee buses to help get people to work) are ignored, although the latter may also be rejected because they are distinctly ‘socialist’ in the lexicon of American individualism. 

Montgomery, Wednesday, 22 June 2022

I am sweaty at 7am having had to run back twice to the hotel for sunglasses and then a USB cable, but in time for the hourly bus. The driver helps me use the bus system's ‘change card’. ‘I got you’, she says. It’s a phrase I hear often: from restaurant servers, drivers, my Texan family in Atlanta, my Spanish hiking companions in the Pyrenees last year, my friends. They got me.

The driver is familiar with her passengers, and there’s a lot of chat about ‘love’ with a man sitting near her. A few people get on and off along the back streets of Birmingham but there is never more than six. I am, again, the only white person on public transport. Dropped off 20 min from the Hertz pick up point in a very industrial part of town the other side of the tracks, I jog to the yard to arrive only 10 minutes late but it was a pointless expenditure of energy. Hertz refused to rent me a car despite my booking. My international credit card that I’ve used around the world and all across the USA with other companies, doesn’t have a US zip code attached to it and is therefore unacceptable to Hertz. That’s some extreme exceptionalism even by USA standards. Ten minutes of remonstrating gets nowhere so I run thirty minutes to the next two rental yards before finding an available car (thank you, Enterprise).

I am now dripping in sweat. While waiting for my pick up, an older woman returning her vehicle is asked by the young agent, wearing her sun hat indoors, if she has left her gun in the car. She hasn’t but this is a question they are now required to ask all customers as a matter of course: over 20 guns a week have been getting left behind. The agents can’t touch the gun and the car is out of use until police come to take the weapon away. Firstly, I say in my imaginary arguments with the gun lobby, if your gun is in the glove box where you will eventually forget about it, how is it going to defend you should you actually find yourself in a gun fight? Secondly, if they mean so much to you, why are you forgetting about them and leaving them behind!

Finally, getting a car at 0930, 90 minutes late, just like Amtrak, I take off to Montgomery, driving through thick forest and past a Big Peach (nice to see it’s not just Australia). The capital of Alabama, with no train connections, is the birthplace of the modern civil rights movement in the USA. In 1955, Rosa Parks famously refused to give up her seat for a white passenger, and her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, co-organised by a young pastor in the city, Dr Martin Luther King Jr. Mrs Parks (and I have learnt not to be an informal Australian in the South and to address people properly) has her own dedicated Museum with multi-media and static displays. But it is the Equality and Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Legacy Museum that encapsulates the breadth of the struggle and its continuing impact: drawing out the links between a slave society, with its engrained racialised hierarchies and creation of a threatening black imaginary, to today’s experiences of racism for Black Americans, including police shootings and the highest incarceration rate of industrialised countries.

A mix of archival material, video, artwork and interactive holograms highlight the numbers: more than 12 million kidnapped into slavery, more than two million died at sea, more than 4000 murdered/lynched, and many, many more unknown and uncounted. It is too easy for these statistics to become incomprehensible in their magnitude and repetition, so the Museum has created a space where the numbers become a thing felt within the body: starting from the small opening room where projected dark waves and the noise of a storm threaten to submerge the viewer into the fear that someone in the belly of a slave ship must have felt. By the time I got to the section on lynching I was close to tears. 

The Museum, situated in a warehouse space, has thousands of visitors a week, from across the USA and internationally, and by the afternoon it’s heaving with young and old. In contrast, the EJI has also created the National Memorial for Peace & Justice, to remember those lynched in racial violence well into the 20th century; mostly men but women and children as well. This is a sacred space. It’s quiet: an expanse of lawn left empty through which a path winds up to a covered structure, open on all sides, with rust coloured boxes listing counties and the names of those known to have been murdered in each one. 

This literal counting of the dead signifies that these deaths must count for something: hope, perhaps, that humanity does better in the future. The walkway gently descends so that the metal boxes begin to hang over the spectator. A wall fountain at the deepest point honours the many 1000s more whose names are unknown. Outside there are sculptures honouring activists, past and present, and highlighting ongoing violence such as police shootings that for some are an extension of the lynchings of the past.

The museum and memorial are part of the EJI’s wider call for justice in the form of a ‘truth and reconciliation’ process so that the trauma of slavery and its legacies can be healed. They have already established a process of ‘community reckoning’ where the descendants of those murdered can gather soil at lynching sites that is then stored in large jars at the museum.

While much of contemporary Conservative and Republican politics rails against the idea of looking back in order to move forward, clearly there is a need for some kind of reckoning with this past. The desire for segregation and denigration and walls and keeping the other in their place isn’t going anywhere. Which might go some way to explaining the level of security and metal detectors at the entrances to the Legacy Museum and National Memorial. 

I’m guessing the city of Montgomery was attempting an act of reconciliation when it noted on the city seal both its role as ‘Cradle of the Confederacy’ and ‘Birthplace of the civil rights movement’. The secession convention, forming the Southern Republic, was held from January to March 1861 in the city, and the first White House of the Confederacy was established here. There’s still a Confederate Memorial Day in some Southern states, and it's an official state holiday on the 4th Monday in April in Alabama. Just to wind people up further, Alabama also has a Robert E. Lee day on the same day as Martin Luther King Day (the 3rd Monday in January). Local councils require permission from state authorities (Republican since 2003) should anyone want to remove a confederate statue (the Alabama Memorial Preservation Act, 2017) of which there are many more than I thought there would be in my naivete.

Driving back to Birmingham, about 20 minutes or so from Montgomery, on a high cutting on the left of the highway, in full view of the world, a large confederate flag flies above a memorial for the Alabama Sons of Confederate Veterans. The League of the South are based just an hour north of Birmingham, still advocating for secession and hosting well known antisemitic, white supremacist and former Grand Wizard of the KKK, David Duke, as a guest speaker at their 2022 annual conference. 

Calhoun County Confederate Memorial, Janney Furnace Park, O’Hatchee, Thursday, 23 June 2022

It doesn’t take much desk research to find the nearest Confederate memorial: a museum tucked away down a country road with no signage except to Janney Furnace Park. The ‘furnace’ is a ruined forge used in the civil war and later destroyed by Union forces, but the main memorial is a three piece black granite wall engraved with the names of those from the County who volunteered for the Confederate army. Between the lists of names is an etched likeness of Robert E. Lee on one side, and local hero, John Pelham, on the other. The five flags of the confederacy are flown behind the memorial, and a stacked row of seats is set in front. A metal box for visitors includes a sheet of ‘True facts you will never hear or see in the classroom’ about the Civil War.

Next to the memorial is a small, one room county museum presenting in display cases and wall galleries a local history of the area. It includes indigenous artefacts but also, inexplicably, a lot of knives from a range of eras and countries. Mostly it is Civil War memorabilia and an interpretation of how this 20 mile area in remote Alabama became connected to global conflicts: the British-American fighting in 1813 that entangled First Nation communities, and then, as its called here, 'the war of rebellion' or 'the war for Southern independence'.

The museum is only open a few days a week and at 10am on a Thursday morning I was the only person there. The docent, a genial veteran in his late 60s, gives me a personal tour for almost two hours. The civil war takes on an heroic narrative with women invisible or in their usual war time role of cradling the hero on his return. Origin stories take a turn away from slavery towards victimhood in a conflict redressing the injustice of an unfair economic relationship between a wealthier south subsidising the north. A painting at the entrance to the museum, one of the first to be seen, is the image of an enslaved man who, the story has it, on hearing his ‘Master’ was killed, joined the Confederacy in his honour. And so it goes: the battle over ‘truth’ and ‘history’ and ‘representation’, the defence of heritage and nation, continues. 

In late March, early April, the surrounding park is used for re-enactments of local Civil War battles by members of the Sons and Daughters of Confederate Veterans (although you don’t have to be an actual son/daughter of a confederate veteran to take part). They also had a medieval re-enactment society, jousting with watermelons or soft weapons. It was shut down for being too dangerous in what I’m guessing some local people thought was another example of political correctness gone mad.

Driving away from the park, the violence this small county has seen is muted by the serenity of the landscape through which history passed. As always taking the long way home, I crossed lush countryside, wooded hills, corn and vegetable fields. Rivers became lakes dotted with boat houses and decks shaded by old tree canopies. Homesteads are tucked behind trees, shaded from the heat, but the occasional dirt track reveals run down, off grid, trailers as well.

In need of a sugar hit, I stop at a Trading Post emblazoned with ‘God Bless America’. The shopkeeper, a grizzly middle-aged man, also had a large knife collection including samurai swords and a Game of Thrones replica for sale, as well as Amish pickles, jams and assorted sweets. I made a joke about how the knives were a nice change from guns. He said he kept his gun in his car so he can calm down before he gets it but he had a baton under the counter, which didn’t make me feel any safer. He argued a better strategy was to get close enough to an attacker to bite their ear off as a way of deterring further violence. I couldn’t work out if he was being serious but he discounted my chocolate so that was nice.

Going South, Part I: A Midnight Train to Georgia

 

 

There are many things about the USA that I love but its rail network is not one of them. If we were to measure greatness by public transport then America is most definitely not ‘the greatest country ever in the history of the world’ (as is often suggested by some in National Conservative/MAGA circles). But the responsibilities of being a grown up in recent years had led me to thinking how much I missed the freedom of my backpacking days, and so with all the optimism of my 25 year old self, I bought an Amtrak USA Rail Pass (ten journeys in one month) and planned to go South.

In fairness, Amtrak in the summer of 2022 was still not up to full speed post-Covid19. Fewer trains were operating and the ‘daily’ Crescent from New York to New Orleans was more like ‘every few days’. When it did appear on the schedule it became fully booked very quickly. On the upside, this would indicate a desire for train travel in the USA despite the best efforts of the airline and car industries to run it into the ground. On the downside, what became increasingly clear as I journeyed south, north and east over the next two weeks, was that no one in government cares enough to invest in it.

I eventually managed to work out how to get to New Orleans via Atlanta, Georgia, and Birmingham, Alabama, returning to New York the very long way around via Memphis and Chicago. And so it was, clutching my pass and my roller bag, that I departed a hot New York City on time … and shunted straight into trouble. Progress involved movement at the speed of crawl interspersed with stuttering to a grinding halt as our train became entangled with other east coast lines in a state of chaos after a signalling failure. Stray passengers were pushed onto any available train going their way, including the Crescent which was then also delayed by the same signal failure creating a bottle neck and a 90 minute wait for another train to pass because it’s a single track system throughout much of the network. Delays are exacerbated by freight companies owning the tracks and passenger trains always having to give way.

At least we could rest in what are the widest, most comfortable train seats I’ve ever had my butt on: at last something the MAGA folk can truly claim is great. The footrests are still too far away to be any use to me, but the full leg recliners and deep backwards inclination make up for it. Sadly for the romantic train traveller, there’s no longer any dining car unless you’re in ‘bougie’ class (those who can afford the extortionate rates of the sleeper cabins, at about $600 a leg), but there’s diner seating where food from the café can be eaten, and some trains still have the glass enclosed observation cars.

Unfortunately, the spacious seating was increasingly encroached on by, firstly, the middle aged man next to me lovingly yelling at his daughter on the phone, then someone’s sports match, the latest tiktok dance, and the young couple in the morning playing the same song over and over and over again.

The spacious seating was also not enough to make up for the raging air conditioning. I added two more layers in the night to the T-shirt but wondered if any of the seasoned travellers with thick blankets and sweats on would mind if I snuggled up next to them. Instead, I managed to twist into various pretzel shapes and got some sleep, interspersed with regular horn blasts to keep wildlife and people off the tracks, while dreaming of punitive measures for those that refuse to wear earpods. Missing much of Virginia and North Carolina, time passed with people and scenery coming and going as we picked up speed in the night and made Atlanta in the morning only an hour late.

24 hours in Atlanta (20th June)

Given that I was supposed to be emulating my backpacking youth, I had chosen Motel 6 for my first flop house; a chain that ranks 358th on aggregated hotel booking sites and is priced accordingly. It was too early to get my room but the receptionist let me stow my bag, and wash and change in the staff toilet while slowly letting my nostalgia for backpacking resolve itself into reality. I had to remind myself of past travelling rules that accommodation should be cheap and the food good, so a quick check of the interweb and it was off to the famous Atlanta Breakfast Club.

Unfortunately, I hadn’t checked the interweb to find out if Georgia has a Juneteenth public holiday (which it does), and the crowds from the morning celebrations commemorating the end of slavery in the USA were now queueing at Atlanta’s best breakfast venue. I clutched my ‘75th in line’ ticket and waited outside in the 35 degree heat with dozens of others under marquees and other scraps of shade. A DJ kept us entertained with old school and contemporary R&B, Soul and Blues, interacting with the crowd, giving a shout out ‘to the woman in the cowboy hat’ (that would be me and it’s not a cowboy hat). A mimosa bar is handy for the parched.

My place in line ticks down over the course of two hours but then seems to stall at 30. At this point I start to suspect that being a solo traveller has some disadvantages in the South as families and groups of friends are seated ahead of me. As the sun creeps ever closer to burning my legs, I am joined on my bench by a Texan family on their way to Florida for holidays. We start to chat and when they get the call for a table ahead of me (I’m still at number 30) they insist I join them: mum, dad, sister, two daughters, two cousins, and a musty backpacker.

The Dad, in real estate, leads the questions as we wait for our order: how is the UK different; are there black folk there; what about the royals; what about music? I ask questions in turn: are they worried about school shootings? They’re not. They’re from Houston and urban schools have enough security. He’s a hunter from his childhood and his wife also shoots, mostly tin cans these days. He also loves his BBQ and proudly shows me pictures of a two metre long pit where he smokes and cooks his own meat.

When the food comes it is various combinations of southern comfort: fried chicken, eggs, bacon, waffles and pancakes, fried green tomatoes on biscuits for me. At this stage I have to ponder the question: exactly how many chickens get fried in the USA each day? I order a side of fruit to feel a bit better about the carnage. Before we eat, Dad gestures that there will be grace, and we link hands around the table. He thanks God for the food, his family and being able to meet Miss Melissa today (and it will be only south of the Carolinas that anyone is EVER allowed to call me ‘Miss’ or ‘baby girl’). I thank the universe for their generosity, kindness and curiosity. Amen. With mouths full the questions continue. ‘Do Americans eat a lot?’ I hesitate out of politeness; they laugh. I can only say ‘yes’. Then comes 'What do British people think of Trump?' That’s a long answer, and then I want to know ‘why is there so much religion in US politics’, which is another long answer. It’s cash only at the end and as I only had a card the Dad takes the bill. We tussle but he insists. It is Southern hospitality. Amen to that.

Walking off brunch that became a late lunch, I wandered past the CocaCola museum and CNN headquarters, towards the Sweet Auburn Street historic district, through a neighbourhood populated by despair. In the 1950s and 60s, Sweet Auburn Street was a centre for black businesses, churches, and civil rights organising with Martin Luther King Jr’s Ebenezer Baptist church and the offices of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference still present. A National Historical Park charting the history of the movement sits opposite the King Centre where Dr King and Coretta are buried. Murals on building and park walls commemorate other civil rights leaders including John Lewis, Ella Baker and Evelyn Lowery. But step back behind the façade and it is derelict and deprived.

In the Historical Park Visitor’s Centre the story of the civil rights movement includes the familiar footage of opposition to school desegregation, with KKK leaders and white folk using the ‘n’ word. A Black mum with two young kids, maybe 5-7 years old, looks uncomfortable, as was I, hearing these words in a room of mostly Black visitors and reflecting on the capacity of humans to be so afraid and so cruel as a result. She steers her children out of the room saying ‘I don’t think this is suitable for my babies’, but I do wonder how we teach this to kids. As we walk away, me a little in front, I overhear her explaining ‘there was a time in the past when these things happened and there are still some things like that today, but education is what’s important’.

And yet, the USA, and the UK, is in the throes of a culture war that wants to remove an education that might make white folk uncomfortable in coming face to face with our ancestors’ complicity in violence and cruelty towards people of colour, and even worse, in coming face to face with our own complicity today in the legacies of that violence and cruelty.

I potter back to the Motel 6 to shower and sleep, picking up an abandoned cardigan lying on the pavement near the hotel that will save me having to find a new one tomorrow to stave off the Amtrak AC.

Returning to Happy Places (Reflections on Familiarity and Time)

 

The force of tectonic plates crashing into each other at the speed of deep time, rounded out by several thousand years of grinding glaciers, created not only the Pyrénéen chain but the great gash valleys that run up to its wall. From Luz Saint Sauveur, one winding gouge abruptly ends at the Cirque de Gavarnie, a majestic amphitheatre of granite and limestone layers that buckle and fold around each other.

I am returning to this happy place, its familiar grooves and peaks, largely because I haven’t had time to plot out and prepare a new route this year. But then mountains are like that Zen river no one ever steps in twice. Turn left instead of right, go up a little higher, at a different time of day, with different weather, and it’s somewhere you’ve never been before. By the time I’m at the base of the Cirque’s largest cascade, with dozens of other walkers, thunder is repeating itself rapid fire, echoing around the concave wall, followed immediately by lightening. Then it’s a race, storm versus human, and we run, in hiking boots, to the nearest shelter as wind, heavy rain then hail arrives. 

This Cirque, at this moment in time, is a landscape I’ve never met before: dark and moody and crashing turbulence overhead. A few hardy souls continue to go forward but I wait it out with a large hot chocolate. In an hour it’s over and I wander down, slightly damp, through humid forest and pasture, the river, well beyond Zen reflection, now a torrent to my left.

The rest of the week is unsettled, skirting squalls and thunder, and requiring the additional effort of on and off and on and off again rain jacket. But the clouds bring light and shadow into the valley, and rise and fall over the Cirque so that its outline shifts each day. When it clears a little I decide I should have a crack at Pic du Péméne, le petit if not le grand summit. It is the usual sharp incline from valley floor to estive plateau and then long lacets up to a ridge, a drop down the other side to skirt the small pic and rise to the ridge again, this time facing a steep rocky bulge to the top. 

I stare at it, decide against it as it’s hard to see where the path goes and if there is any scrambling or severe drop offs, and have a picnic instead as vultures and eagles soar past at the same level. I walk back to the foot of the bulge once more, without backpack and poles to see if lightness helps, but still decide against it. I have figured out that my fear is not so much the drop off but getting half-way up and not being able to get down again, which would be excruciatingly embarrassing.

But then, as always, someone appears, running up (really, running!); a local out for a stretch who has the advantage of growing up in this magical kingdom. I follow his lead, crawling up for the first few metres safe in the knowledge that he’s too far ahead to see me, but then eventually talking myself into standing. Catching up with him at the penultimate cairn, I decline the last 50 metres as the short crest ends in a sharp scramble with jelly leg inducing exposure. The view is the same.

Before he disappeared down the mountain my guide pointed across the valley to a notch in the skyline above the Cirque and recommended I walk up there. I thought I had misunderstood as the Cirque is 1500m (ish) at its highest, and from where we were standing, very much the vertical wall. But on the map this notch has a name, Brèche de Roland. It is legendary as a 100m high ‘door’ between France and Spain that can be accessed behind the Cirque following the contours of classic mountain terrain: long lacets through steep estives, then plateau, shorter lacets over steep rocky trails, plateau, then even shorter lacets across steeper scree shoved to the side by thawing torrents. Throw in fording a few gushing glacial streams powering their way down to the valley floor and it’s a fun day out. 

Initially following the lead of other hikers was a bad idea as it turned out they were 20-somethings who had been raised by Isards. I eventually found my own way following cairns, more or less, and after four hours, crossing a final ridge, the world as I had known it was now inverted: above the height of the main cascade on the other side of the Cirque; above the clouds that rolled up the valley; looking down on minute others looking up from where I’d been two days before in a storm. The upper layers of the Cirque, the tucks and folds of ancient rock, were in full view. An elegant refuge sat in an impossible position hanging onto the mountain side at the base of a steep moraine mass that people ascended and descended up to the brèche, to and from Spain. It is beyond words, beyond spectacular.

Despite the sense of deep time such places generate, at the scale of the human I only had 30 minutes to linger with rain predicted for 2pm. I asked the refuge guardian how difficult the descent straight down into the Cirque was and his response was pragmatic: ‘there is an immediate drop off the other side which you have to climb down and if you slip you’ll die’. So I’ll be going back the way I came then! Even with the best of maps, the unfamiliar is always a challenge; a metaphor, if you want to stretch it, for much of human angst. 

Returning to the recently familiar but now in reverse, the boulders, roaring streams, steep moraine and lacets must be approached differently with gravity pulling downwards into clouds and out again. I disappear and am thankful for my GPS that continues to ping out a route. However, the predicted thunderstorm doesn’t appear apart from a few drops and one desultory rumble and I emerged into Plateau de Bellevue above the village in warm sunshine. 

After the usual routine of washing me and clothes I wander up to the world’s most beautiful bar, facing the Cirque by the stream, just outside the village, for tea and tarte de myrtille. Slowly all the walkers and riverside sitters thin out and dissipate as clouds thicken and time approaches evening. I sit and ponder nothing for an hour or two. It's a strange pastime, to hike to the top of things, sit for 30 minutes or so and then hike back down again. I notice the difference between through-hiking, when you need to get somewhere as justification for the effort, and up and back for no reason other than seeing something. In the meantime, the cloud finally comes down completely, and the Cirque, and pondering minds, begin to sleep.

Familiarity can of course be a very useful thing, particularly when not carrying a map. Having already walked the section from Gavarnie to Refuge Baysellance three years before, a section that is basically the walkers equivalent of an A Road, there were some vague landmarks imprinted in memory … a statue of Mary, a refuge … that gave a general sense of confidence I was walking in the right direction until hitting the familiar red and white balisage of the GR10. The walk along the valley and upwards was as beautiful as I remembered it: early morning cloud eventually cleared from the contours of a valley; reaching Barrage Ossoue and its familiar river plateau; and the knackering long lacets and rocky corniches with precipitous drops into valleys below.

But then, passing the familiar grottos carved into the hillside, with the refuge almost in sight, for some inexplicable reason other than just tiredness, I missed the clearly signed intersection and started following unfamiliar cairns towards the Vignemale glacier. Not seeing anyone behind me still didn’t register a warning and instead I dug in deeper until an additional hour of faffing about on scree slopes finally got me backtracking to the right turning. Arriving late at the refuge, tea and chocolate cake were required to ease the pain and indignity of stupidity but there was still enough light left to watch groups going up and down Petite Vignemale before sunset. 

As usual, the refuge was rammed (it’s one of the last Saturdays of the season) and a wall of noise. Two young women sit next to me and start teaching the group of older men in the corner how to play ‘pick up sticks’. Two Spanish on the other side play chess. There are card games, chatter, beer, coffee, beer. I knit socks. Dinner is in two shifts and I’m at a table of mostly Spanish who politely chat in English for my benefit. 

In the morning the wind is cold and strong and I worry about the Spanish who are climbing Vignemale today. Walking with my back to her north face feels a bit rude, but I am on unfamiliar trail again, over a boulder field towards col d’Arraille, well in sight at 2583m. Boulder fields require care, intense concentration, and ideally long legs, to avoid turning an ankle or sliding with loose rock into a ravine. The stream of narrative in the head has to quieten for a few hours and focus: three points on the ground, testing for movement, transfer weight, three points on the ground, and so it goes downwards over rocks, moraine, and lacets, lacets, lacets. Marmots occasionally startle me but they are fat and lazy from summer grazing and can’t be arsed doing any more than peeping a few times and loping away.

With my GPS strap broken, time was tucked away in a pocket and no longer readily accessible, but reaching Refuge d’Estom, beautifully positioned next to a lac at the foot of Pic de la Sède, I know I’m hungry and an omelette is inhaled along with the last of the cheese. Time then stretched out the walk down this final gash valley to Cauteret, with its racing cascades and soft forest; the sun roasting trail, becoming path becoming road, and the now familiar routine for finishing in a happy place: hotel, washing, a spa treatment at the Thermes, a glass of rosé, and reflection on having so little time despite the evidence of millions of years around me. 

 

(Gavarnie to Cauteret, September 2022)

 

Meeting the (Dutch) von Trapps

Cirque de Gavarnie is a natural wonder: 3000 metres at its widest, up to 1500 metres from its base, a 422m waterfall to round out its list of attractions, this natural amphitheatre has been carved out by the movement of the earth over millions of years. With just a 90 minute easy walk or donkey ride from the village to the foot of the cascade, it is unsurprising that in the summer season hundreds arrive daily to see this astonishing colosseum: bus loads of French, Spanish, British, and other assorted world travellers, scouts and school trips.

Among this maelstrom of humanity, let's meet the Dutch von Trapp family; a collective of four adults and six children ranging from three years old to tweenies, in all their tall, blonde glory (and yes, I know the von Trapps were actually Austrian but go with me on this one). 

I truly admire the effort of parents that want to bring their kids into nature, to march them up to a plateau to admire the view, even when the kids may not actually want to be marched to the top, are not that impressed when they get there, and can't wait to get back down because that's where the ice cream is.  

I appreciate that they might not have been used to so much ascent, even if it is Walking 101, but the von Trapp seniors were not put off by their children's lack of enthusiasm ... bless them. As I passed them on the way to Plateau Bellevue, they cheerfully ploughed on, accompanied by what I imagined was a Dutch rendition of 'These are a few of my favourite things'. 

I passed them again later that day, bundled into the nooks and crannies of shade next to a river, trying to manage their small humans' hunger, fatigue and the call of nature, which involved holding the smallest human over the stream so they could free flow their pee into it. 

At this point, just a gentle reminder of outdoor etiquette ... while I appreciate that Cirque de Gavarnie is a relatively easy stroll, with a hotel and three course meal at the end, giving it the appearance of an extension of 'home space', please don't let your kids pee in the pristine glacial streams that run past the camp site and through the village, that people bath in and drink from. It's public commons, not your own private toilet. The same goes for the man who's job it is to sweep up the crap left on the path by the donkeys ferrying people up to the Cirque. 'What a great idea', I thought to myself, 'collecting all the crap to put on someone's garden'. Mais non! His job is to shovel it straight into the same pristine glacial stream that, to emphasise the disgust, people drink from and bath in. 

Two days later I was really impressed to meet the Dutch Von Trapps again at Refuge Baysellance, a solid three hours for adults of upward hiking, along narrow, rocky paths with some steep drop offs. The three year old had been in a carrier but all the other kids had managed it under their own power. While missing their matching clothes made out of curtains, their infectious energy nevertheless took over the refuge, and children and noise bounced off the walls.   

I was less impressed that, due to a miscalculation by the refuge guardians of how many Von Trapps there actually were, I was relegated out of a comfortable bed in a room they now commandeered to the worst spot in the refuge: top bunk, under the slanting roof with only a handful of centimetres between head and hard surface, on the far side of a snoring man between me and the ladder down, with his wife and child's head on the opposite side meeting mine in the middle. Boxed in, there was no getting down to pee until everyone else was up in the morning, so I tried not to dream of pristine glacial streams. At breakfast, snoring man finds me, not to apologise for keeping me and everyone else in the dorm up all night, but to ask if his son can have his refuge slippers back that'd I'd accidentally put on in the dark, despite there being dozens of other identical pairs lying around that he could have used.

The Dutch von Trapps, on the other hand, having slept soundly in their own room, were gleefully up, packed, and ready to descend with what I imagined was a rendition of 'So long, Farewell, Auf Wiedersehen, Goodbye' carried on the wind and fading out as they disappeared into sunlight and mountains sprinkled with saccharin.

[Note to self: to avoid the appearance of misanthropy best to wait till after a good night's sleep before writing notes, or think of a few of my favourite things 😇]