Long Time Leaving (53 page)

Wouldn't we all like to send a mystery biscuit way back up into the past, to our old folks at home. Stephen Foster wrote that song in 1851, so it's not an
emancipated
slave who is “longing for the old plantation.” He must have run off, and the old folks he escaped from are not the ones he misses.

For me, they're the same. They wanted me to have everything they never had, except the lure of the wilderness. The Depression had been more than swamp enough for them. They gave me to understand that one false step—taking a drink, for instance, or going too far before marriage, or thinking you can find the truth by
thinking—
and the next thing you know you're up to your neck, begging for some kind of, any kind of
mercy—
from Whom? And you're going to get rational
now? …got to think …If I can …just…pull my arms out with my teeth—

And that good head of yours, too, goes under, gurgling. And some bubbles. One last bubble. And on down to the bad place. For good.

The old folks felt abysmal dread underfoot, and they sang, “How firm a foundation is Jesus Christ My Lord.” Faith-based but also empirical: my parents had been poor and scared and unable to go to college, and
church helped them rise in the world. Me, I keep jumping to empirical tuffets. My mother said this, devoutly, about liquor: “Nobody really likes the taste of it.” Apparently people drank purely for infernal reasons. I found that hard to believe. Case in point, here in the swamp: peaty water is tasty. Though it could use more kick.

Pogo's creator, “Walt Kelly, looked, as cartoonists tend to, like his protagonist, roundheaded and mild, but he was a heavy drinker. I knew a man, Morrie Werner, who knew Kelly in New York newspaper circles back in the early fifties. Morrie said Kelly in his cups got crazily argumentative. For instance, Kelly once found, to his horror, that he was drinking with a man who had voted for Thomas Dewey for president. Implacably Kelly undertook to disabuse this man of everything he professed to believe, eventually going so far as to bet the man a hundred dollars that he
hadn't
voted for Dewey.

There was no quicksand
in Pogo.
Every animal was invincibly illogical, a paragon of unenlightened but unsinkable self-interest—except for Pogo himself, who would break in with a cry of “Albert! You suspects one man, catches the WRONG one an’ so you claims the one you IS GOT is GUILTY! Jus’ CATCHIN’ a man don't prove he's a CULPRIT!” It was good that Pogo was on hand (would that he had influence in the White House today), but the thoughtless animals provided the fun and the motor. Albert might have his foot stuck in the muzzle of a small cannon for several days, but he would carry on right along. Churchy LaFemme, a turtle, had no perspective to speak of, even when his head wasn't stuck inside his shell, as it was for several weeks once (a bug and then a frog and briefly a bird served as his “seeing-eye head”). But he would sing, to Miz Groundchuck, the turtle version of “Old Folks at Home”: “Wade on a pond a swan he rover, / Farf farfa weigh…”

Sometimes Kelly got topically political. Deacon Mushrat and Mole, busybody promoters of suspicion, were local; they blended in with the prevailing hubbub of mutual misconstrual. But outside ideologues, mean enough to have broad agendas, occasionally showed up in the swamp. The pig and the goat who looked like Khrushchev and Castro just seemed out of their element, but the McCarthyesque lynx or wildcat named Simple J. Malarkey was a genuine threat, his squinty eyes all the more sharply focused for their lack of pupils. He had a sidekick who looked like Richard Nixon.

The regular Okefenokeeans—even the Marxist cowbirds, who claim to be doves and justify moving into Pogo's house and eating his cookies by accusing him of “thriving only under the thralldom of thrift”—were too full of themselves, too wary of one another, and too just-the-way-we-
are-down-here gregarious to live by precepts or ideals. They would, however, wax philosophical. “Every man's heart is eventual in the right place,” said Pogo in one of his quiet chats with the counterintuitively soppy Porky Pine. But Pogo's most famous saying, which environmentalists in the real world took up, was “We have met the enemy, and it is us.” To be a Southern liberal, you have to believe both those things at once.

You also have to know that no ism covers everything. In
Lure of the Wilderness,
there's a point in the swamp past which none dares venture but the deepest-dyed half-feral swampwise or the insane. That point is marked by a pole with a cow skull on it. The sound track at that point …The music is by Franz Waxman, who also did
Bride of Frankenstein
and, creepier, Tod Browning's
The Devil-Doll.
When I'm writing something I aim to get past that point.

In the movie, Tom Keefer, the swamp rat who holes up way back in there beyond the pole, because the police are after him, is a Hollywood notion, an innocent fugitive played by pre-hitch-in-his-gitalong Walter Brennan. In the novel, as Vereen points out in his introduction, Keefer is “like the swamp itself, adapted to it because he is by nature wild.” He never wears more than a layer of buckskin. “I can stay warm,” he says, “if I just put my mind to it.” I believe my mother stayed religious in that way.

One night in the Okefenokee, I lay on the platform shuddering. It had turned cold, and I had brought just a light thermal blanket, some new material that was supposed to be better than a heavy sleeping bag but wasn't. I turned my mind, or it turned me, to this question: was I feeling miserable enough to sympathize with my mother? I'll never be quite as tall as Dad but close enough. I'll never be anywhere near as
deep
as Mom, orphan girl from Mississippi. To the extent that I am rational today (too great an extent, women have told me), it is in defense against her depths. “He survives a cottonmouth bite in his cheek,” to quote Vereen on his father's character Keefer again, “by going into himself and waiting it out.” Cold reason enabled me to do something like that. But there was no demystifying my mother out of her own morass, as I saw it.

We got to arguing once and she demanded of me—I can't remember what. I just remember saying, as Pogo might have said to her, more vividly, if she'd been a cartoon character, “That's a loaded question, Mom. Any way I answer it will hurt your feelings.”

She did not respond as follows: “Hm. Interesting point. Maybe I'm setting my feelings up to be hurt.” No more than Albert did when Pogo said catching somebody doesn't make him a culprit. What Albert did was give Pogo a skeptical look and say, “It's a good START, ain't it?”

What my mother did was look at me as if I'd slapped her and say in a horrified little voice, “What a thing to say to your mother.” You couldn't get around her sense of herself. She had put her mind to it. So much of the mental energy of the old folks at home was devoted to defense. Now everywhere I roam…

Maybe Vasco was looking for an experience—an experience he could
handle—
that was as powerful as growing up under you, ma'am.

I was still cold. I focused on alligators grunting. Alligators and frogs.

G'nuh.
Big old bull alligator.

Gunk.
Maybe a gator, maybe a frog.

Pweep pweep.
Frogs.

Worked up a little song:

Lost the rest of it with my notes—should've written it down in the logbook. Each shelter had one, where people passing through could register their comments. I remember a couple of them.

At Maul Hammock: “This place is yellow-fly hell.” Followed by, in another hand: “The flies live here. We are visitors. We come to see all the inhabitants, not just the cute ones.” However, in the same hand: “We are making this trip with two over-sixties people. We don't recommend this.”

At Big Water (the next night), “The ‘over-sixties’ are hanging in there.”

Big Water was where George or Georgette lived. It's a tradition, I gathered from the logbooks, for male commenters to call him or her George, female ones Georgette. It is a violation of federal law to feed Okefenokee alligators. And I dare say it is bad practice to encourage them to look to human beings for sustenance. As Slick put it at Maul Hammock: “If an alligator can climb on a log, an alligator can climb up here in our sleep.”

“ing bags,” Hal added.

And yet, I halfway accidentally let George get a catfish head. I couldn't help myself—he begged and begged. Rested his head on the edge of the shelter floor the way a dog will on the edge of your bed, only with his mouth wide open, and looking at us with his good eye. (My mother loved
feeding animals, how appreciative they could be. And—it just hits me now—my mother lost an eye.) Clearly he had figured out what campers find appealing.

Not that alligators can't shift for themselves. Here, from
Okefinokee Album
(alternative spelling), by Francis Harper and Delma E. Presley, a book I recommend, is a story told to Harper in 1930 by Uncle Lone Thrift, an old folk for sure, who lived on the edge of the swamp:

It wasn't George that got my notebook, because I still had it the next morning when we set off on the last leg of our thirty-one-mile trip through what would be, if it were a swamp, the largest freshwater swamp in America. The notes may have disappeared in the confusion after Slick's and my canoe rammed the log another alligator was lying on. Slick, in the back, was trying to take this alligator's picture, and I—in the front, and therefore inches from the alligator when we hit the log-evidently did not do the right thing with my paddle. In fact, this trip was the first time I had been in a canoe without falling out. The alligator didn't even give me a look, just sighed and slid off the log.

You do feel when you paddle back up in there that the world you know is far, far away. There are stretches where you have to fight your way through lily pads, and stretches where you glide over water that looks like black glass with trees and flowers laid onto it by some kind of photographic process, and you dip your paddle and its blade disappears as the flora's mirror images swirl around the handle. And you find yourself gliding into the cypress-lined Big Water, a huge open space in the middle of nowhere. It feels like a cathedral, only not fraught with interpretation.

Because the reservations system keeps the trails so strictly apportioned, we didn't see anybody for the whole trip but alligators and ourselves,
and turtles, sandhill cranes, egrets, great blue herons, white ibises, and anhingas, also known as water turkeys. And occasional water moccasins, but they don't fall down on top of you from trees, as I recall they did in
Lure of the Wilderness.
They shy away from canoeists. As to the alligators, here's another story from old Lone Thrift:

We didn't go in swimming. I asked Jim Petty, a local tour guide, whether anybody gets eaten by an alligator anymore. He said aw, naw, they've never been known to eat people; they prefer turtles and frogs. And mosquitoes?

Petty looked at me funny. I recounted the Lone Thrift story. He said alligators lie around with their mouths wide open “in lieu of perspiring.” They lack sweat glands, so that's how they cool off: by gaping.

Okay, so: the quicksand. Petty said that was a Hollywood concoction— the Okefenokee footing will never go so far as to suck you deeper than your knees or so.

(Later I Googled
“Hollywood+quicksand”
and found that it's generally oatmeal, sometimes cream of wheat. Somebody reminiscing about his work on a movie called
Satan's Children
said they used $138 worth of oatmeal, and that was 1975 dollars. The place where they shot the quicksand scene “was near a cow pasture. After we finished the cows got in there and had a feast. The owner had to keep his cows out of there in case they overate and got sick.”)

I asked Petty whether people still get lost forever in the swamp.

“That's just something you read about,” he said.

What a thing to say to a writer.

Back in 1981
Parade
magazine asked me to go get a sense of the “new” Ku Klux Klan. My photographer friend Slick got a phone number from somebody, and then next thing we knew…

C
heap Klan labor” was the term Slick and I came up with. For access to most surefire story subjects, you have to wade through agents, managers, and aides who wonder exactly what
kind
of story you have in mind and exactly how much time you'll need, and whether they'll get the cover….

But the Ku Klux Klan, these days, is easy. They will put on their robes for you and light crosses for you and take you out into the woods and show you their guns and maneuvers, and they will come out with unguarded quotes.