Homeboy Ramblings

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It's been a weird day. I must have been having fun because time flew by as if the shadow of somebody I used to know. I went to the greasy spoon to eat breakfast, and I had no longer sat down and ordered coffee than my youngest brother showed up with a smile. He was eating from the blue plate special buffet line and had his one meat and two vegetable standard fare meal.

I call this place a "greasy spoon" not because it ain't a perfectly respectable popular establishment, but because they don't exactly be hiring no gourmet cooks for fifty cents over minimum wage. They always have some sort of greens for the lunch crowd, and my brother needs vitamin K like is in greens and especially collards. I called their menu the old school lunch room diet.

I don't mean to be disrespectful of no school lunch diets either. I personally witnessed what having cheap school lunches did for lots of children. The post-Reconstruction Era lasted a long time in the rural recesses of the coastal plains.

That's because there wasn't any north-south highways in the coastal plains. It's the same way all up and down the Atlantic seaboard from about New Jersey on down to Florida. The old superhighway U.S. 1 that ran north and south from Bangor. Maine to Key West, Florida was considered the western edge of the coastal plains from one end to the other.

InterState 95 acts as that boundary now. Both those roads follow along the ocean-side edge of the piedmont where the foothills of the Appalachian range forced the rivers to contain themselves within the low hills that rise up out of the coastal plains. The rivers could have bridges built across them fairly economically, and that's why there won't no north/south roads built along the coastal plains for a long time.

The people who lived in the coastal plains were pent up along the sand ridges that rose above the huge swamps there. During dry seasons some of the smaller creeks and rivers could be crossed pretty easy. But, if there was a lotta rain further inland the swamps and deltas would fill up with mud.

To travel with the water in the swamps high, a body would have to follow the sandy ridges northwestward until the river cut a channel through a bluff where a bridge could be built to get to their neighbors house on the other side of the river maybe a mile away as the crow flies. These ridges served somewhat in the same way as mountain hollows in West Virginia.

Modern construction equipment and better engineering designs eventually overcame the obstacles of not being able to travel north and south in the coastal plains. That let a lot of through traffic through the little villages and crossroad towns that weren't really set up to receive them and make a buck as they passed through.

That's what brought my mother and father from Mississippi for. The State of North Carolina recognized a need for some help to be brought into the whole state. To their credit the people of North Carolina grabbed their own bootstraps and started changing their own world. It was a hard row to hoe.

The people who farmed the sandy ridges that penetrated through the swamps where the water draining from the mountains gathered before it found its way to the sea were stuck in the same way the people who lived back in the bayous of Louisiana were stuck in their superstitious ways.

They farmed in the same manner they had before the Civil War. They imitated the farming practices of the largest local absentee land owners, and planted and harvested their crops by their time tables. The rebellious ones might consult a farmer's almanac if the knew how to read.

My parents got hired with a whole bunch of other teachers from all over the United States. It was toward the end of the Great Depression, but before the beginning of World War Two. The State passed a law that required an agriculture teacher and a home economics teacher to be hired for every high school in the state.

These educated people were not received well by the backwood populations who not only were independent despite all their faults, but they had pride in their stubborn ways. They still are, but the outside world has changed them. I'm part of that outside world to them even though my family has been here for nearly 70 years. My two younger brothers who were born in North Carolina adapted to the way things are here because they never knew any difference.

I've worked or traveled extensively throughout the coastal plains of the Southeastern U.S. since I was a boy.The states along the Gulf of Mexico from upper panhandle of Florida around to Texas doesn't have a deep coastal plains, but from Galveston Island on down into Mexico the coastal plains can run a hundred miles inland.

The bridge building problem has been persistent all the way around. They had to build highways further inland in order to find high enough bluff and a narrow river crossing to economically build bridges. Until that happened after World War Two there were a lotta isolated places with inbreeding galore. All that is changed now. It doesn't matter whether it's for the better or for the worse.

I worked one summer at a place called Holly's Beach on the Gulf coast of Louisiana. It happened during a sad time in my life. I guess I was trying to drink myself to death, but I'm just not that kind of drunk. Holly's Beach had an long-time sobriquet among native Louisiana cajuns as "The Cajun Riviera".

Before the advent of off-shore drilling it must have been a beautiful place and probably earned the right of being a favorite place for the large population of cajuns to get together. When I was there in the late Seventies the beach was already littered with all the crap that came off those drilling rigs offshore. With this BP spill, the rest of the Gulf Coast and probably all the Caribbean resort islands will be like that too. I guess it's just the way life is. It's also the way death is.
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