Southern Tier

On Saturday morning, Eric and I drove back to the Chevron in Wade and it was much quieter there than it had been on Friday at lunchtime. I again got a coffee and sat in a booth, after noting the burning trash outside and the consistent stream of relatively fit blond young girls coming in to buy donuts. Different people were working on Saturday morning. I stayed there for about an hour and then headed to the Wade Post Office to mail a package and buy some stamps. A nice woman, who made it clear that she was new in town, was working and when I arrived there was a man leaning with his elbow on the counter, half-flirting with, half-heckling the woman worker, who really was cute as pie. He, however, was not cute as pie. He told me he also worked for the government so he and this postal worker lady pretty much did the same thing, so he was keeping her company and chatting with (I thought maybe annoying) her as a sign of solidarity. He didn't even really have any pressing business to do at the post office. He kept letting people go in front of him, a few people who'd forgotten their P.O. box keys and a woman with her three wide-eyed girls in tow. The littlest one, who was the blondest of the three (who ranged up to dark-brown-red-headed), kept looking at me -- she was maybe three years old -- and trying to squeeze herself between her mom's legs and the counter. They were well behaved while waiting for their mom to mail a pretty big box, which I learned was full of purses she'd made out of Kool-Aid packages. Some of the women in the post office were saying how cute the purses were and the postal worker wondered if the purse-maker sold them on Ebay. No, she said, she sent them to a woman upstate who sold them for her.

I went then to the library, which actually opens at 8:00 on Saturday (not 10:00, as the Mississippi library website says). It was a nice library and I spent about an hour there trying to clear up space on my hard drive. It was a fruitless task. In the process of trying to do that, I rifled through my old emails, sorting them in new folders by year, and that caused some distress because then I read some old emails that were upsetting. Anyway, I thought it would be good to clean up, clear out, and so I tried to burn a few folders (with like 1000 emails each) onto some CDs, and no, I was foiled. I tried again, and was foiled again. The process went along fine all the way to the indexing part, and then some stinking error code came up. So this was frustrating. I am in the process of trying to make more room on this here Mac and it is trying. I think I need different CDs. I think Eric will figure it out for me. After that, I started reading Willa Cather's "O Pioneers!" and if that book doesn't have one of the saddest sentences about a kitten in the first two pages, man oh man. So, this is the kind of criticism a Ph.D. in American Literature gives about an early novel by a foundational woman author in the American literary canon --- sad story about kitten, page two, hard to proceed beyond . . . but I did. Kitten was saved. Then I moved into the even sadder real storyline.

I left the library so I could drive to Dauphin Island and hopefully make it there by 1:00. When I left the library, I wanted to take a picture of it, so I set my camera on top of my car and went and stood in front of the library. I heard a car coming and looked (as you can see below) and then I went back, got the camera, and started to put my stuff in the car and grab an apple. I then heard someone say something and I looked up and around and this is the exchange:

Older man in truck: "Yeah YOU. You want to buy a fried catfish dinner?"

Me: "Ah, what?"

Older man in truck: "A fried catfish dinner. You gotta eat don'tcha?"

Me: "Ah, I have an apple here and I really have to been hittin' the road right away for Dauphin Island"

Older man in truck (with some audible consternation): "Well okay, (sees two young guys coming out of library) You two want to buy a fried catfish dinner?"

Two guys: "Ah, what? Where?"

Older man in truck: "A fried catfish dinner; I gots some right here in my truck. But there's more at the hall, so come on down there today"


Me right before the man drove up and offered me a fried catfish dinner

So after this went on and I was little amazed by it, I drove off. I did not get lost on my way to Dauphin Island, which has become something to make note of. I drove through Bayou LaBatre, Mississippi, just before heading over the very long bridge to Dauphin Island. Bayou LaBatre is a port of some kind and I stopped on the "scenic route" to take some pictures of boats and Eric called me while I was parked to say he made it to Dauphin Island and rode a bit of the final way with a woman cyclist whose AOL name was Red Hot Kestrel (which, I learned, is a make of bike). Apparently, Red Hot Kestrel wore an Iron Man jersey and Eric said she was a pretty good rider and a very nice person. She nearly hit 40 miles per hour coming down off of the bridge to Dauphin Island. And if you see that bridge, you can see how that might happen. It is a little terrifying when you're heading up to its apex. It kind of looks like a gargantuan version of a Dukes of Hazard launch ramp. You just can't see the descent on the other side.

Eric was to take to the ferry off of Dauphin Island the next day and start the ride on the Gulf Shores side of the water, but as he learned and as Red Hot Kestrel might've told him but didn't, the ferry was closed and had been since the hurricane. Anyway, Dauphin Island deserves a post all its own, so until then . . .