“It’s so many miles and so long since I’ve met you / Don’t even know what I’ll find when I get to you.” Train Song, Vashti Bunyan
In On The Road by Jack Kerouac, Sal Paradise follows a constant rhythm of movement in order to gather the life experience he believes Dean Moriarty has, and that he must acquire. Chasing something unnamed, and immaterial, a fulfilment of sorts.
For myself, and for many of us, immaterial grief has guided me in the days of the abyss toward a shroud of warmth, as well as deep desolation. The body can take so much of it. New Orleans is, in every fashion, a city of loss and reconstruction. What is ours, and what is permanent? At the mouth of the bayou, a priest-chronicler in 1721 describes the land as a “place of a hundred wretched hovels in a malarkey’s wet thicket of willows and dwarf palmettos infested by serpents and alligators;”. From 1721 to now, all has been stripped from the beginnings of New Orleans, and buried, and rebuilt – yet the willows and the serpents remain. It’s always worth noting the way the devastation of the slave trade has shaped the rural South, but as Hannah pointed out to me, Louisiana particularly still carries its past of slavery on its forehead. Hannah told me in Oak Alley Plantation, a gardener and an enslaved person named Antoine succeeded in grafting pecan trees.
Many of my favourite shows, recommended by Hannah, take place in the rural South, namely Sharp Objects and True Detective. On our road trip from Georgia to Alabama to Louisiana through Mississippi, I am plagued with visions of Reese’s adaptation of Creature from the Black Lagoon, bodies in swamps, the green humid stickiness. There’s a lot of things I don’t know and a lot of things I do – like Jeff Buckley I know about what’s real and what’s not, and Louisiana is the dream humid parallel of Alabama, a fantastical mystical world, suffocating deaf heat.
Whispers of a snake-handling church, a seance, visions of relinquishing suffering. Reese and I find ourselves on the side of the highway getting devoured by mosquitoes. We talk about the breadth of human experience. Reese suggests reading my tarot when we get home, I say I have no questions, no doubts. I feel PJ Harvey’s conviction: in the rain in the evening, I will come again. I am sort of inevitable which is fun, I’m in your walls. I wonder nothing, I am The Oracle, so I know everything.
“The trees are broken because of tornadoes, or hurricanes.” Says Reese. I ask her: Lightning? She says no, when trees are struck by lighting they either split in half or catch fire and turn white. Driving into Mississippi we see white trees amongst other evergreen rich canopies. If the bayou is a wet thicket of willows, Alabama is Appalachian density and vastness. Chickens! Cows! And baby cows, and horses, of all beautiful colours. I dream of living on a farm, I dream of open fields that never end.
Between Johnny Cash songs on the car stereo, and gas station tea, I tried to finish South of the Border, West of the Sun. I don’t know what I’m trying to tell you – I am trying to say I’m filled with fear and grief, that everything scares me. I am trying to say I have so much life sometimes I don’t know what to do with it. That my life is a fever dream and I am wading through it in the dark with eternal Lexapro joy.
Who would’ve thought that one of the best trips of my life would be to Alabama? The friendships I have been allowed the sanctuary of in this timeline mark the unrelenting passing of time. In a world that pushes women to find meaning and worth in partnership, what is more healing than being able to reach your arms out and feel the tangible immensity of love in close friendship? What is more freeing than embracing the people which weave the fabric of our will to survive? I hadn’t seen Reese for nearly three years, which felt immeasurable to me as she is my star.
I would have loved a rural life where all that surrounds is loving community and open plains. I have never lived in a house. I would like to give my cat space to run, and myself somewhere to read and write under the shade of the trees. I have seen my life on the road with Reese, I know what love looks like because I have friends that drive me through state after state so I can just see and observe. I saw my future while getting devoured by mosquitoes in the bayou. I hold my life tenderly in my hands. I want to live on top of a mountain in silence, but I do not want to eat American food.
I am drinking an extreme amount of spearmint tea to see if it flushes out the Red40 before the microchip in my brain starts running ads.
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