Steven Hunley
07-27-2014, 03:41 PM
We arrive at the motel and settle in with barely enough time to check out the place, and make it to The Olde Suffolk Ale House for drinks with the graduating class, a bunch of old-timers for sure. Makes me think of Walker Evans and Dorthea Lang and black and white pictures of people on porches.
Jed Clampet, Jethro, and the rest of the back-woodsers. I’m getting a little mixed up here with Hillbillies and North woodsmen but give me a break, I’m a stranger in a strange land, and while I’m on a physical journey to the Upper Peninsula, Barb is on a time-trip back in time that would make Herbert George Well jealous. Dillinger, Jethro, Jed, Ellie May, Grandma, Amos McCoy, Walter Brennon, Davy Crocket, Hiawatha, my lovely Barb, I love them all.
Well here we are. The Olde Suffolk Ale House is stuffed with people and not a coon-skin hat in sight. Barb is immediately meeting and greeting folks she hasn’t seen in a coon’s age.
I’m introduced to so many faces and names I can’t remember what name goes with what face within ten minutes. My supreme accomplishment is when I athletically scoot and slide between bodies, holding two Rieslings without spilling a drop. Like Jean Claude Killy on the downhill, I avoid the barriers; deftly slip past them, crossing the finish line of our table. Within minutes some girl kidnaps Barbara and spirits her away. My God it’s getting loud in here! The voices rise up in a crescendo, like they did in the cafeteria during lunch back in high school. Finally Barb reappears and takes me outside to sit on a bench.
We talk and talk amid copious introductions, and an impression is generated in my foolish city-boy brain. It’s something I noticed as far back as Minnesota, at the A&W cheese curds place, and all the various places we stopped to ask directions. People here are genuinely friendly. They are eager to help strangers. What’s up with that? What brings it about? How can it be?
It’s not that way with people in Los Angles, or San Diego either, though I once noticed, just after moving back to San Diego, a barely-perceptible difference. I was riding a bus to the 99Cent Store. When people got off, they usually said ‘thank you’ to the driver. In LA this was a very rare occurrence. In San Diego it was standard operational procedure. Is it that like energy, we have only so many emotions stored up, and if we have to distribute them too often, they run out and each person we deal with from that point gets less?
People from small towns see less people, they interact less. Does this mean they have more of themselves to give? While reading I got the impression people from small towns could be suspicious of strangers, of outsiders, like in Medieval Europe. I’d like to think it may not apply in America the Beautiful, on accounta most of us are here from somewhere else anyway. And besides…E Pluribus Unum.
But what do I know? Where’s a sociologist when you need one?
It occurs to me, like Kurtz’s and Conrad’s pure crystalline bullet, like I was shot in my bloody forehead, Brando and Hemingway-style, that I wasn’t so much A Fool for the City as A Fool From the City.
Could that be it? Was it what they call a Mobius epiphany? Does that make sense? You betcha! Eh?
Steven Hunley 2014 Copyright
http://youtu.be/HSWtc01BlqM The Horror- Apocalypse Now
Jed Clampet, Jethro, and the rest of the back-woodsers. I’m getting a little mixed up here with Hillbillies and North woodsmen but give me a break, I’m a stranger in a strange land, and while I’m on a physical journey to the Upper Peninsula, Barb is on a time-trip back in time that would make Herbert George Well jealous. Dillinger, Jethro, Jed, Ellie May, Grandma, Amos McCoy, Walter Brennon, Davy Crocket, Hiawatha, my lovely Barb, I love them all.
Well here we are. The Olde Suffolk Ale House is stuffed with people and not a coon-skin hat in sight. Barb is immediately meeting and greeting folks she hasn’t seen in a coon’s age.
I’m introduced to so many faces and names I can’t remember what name goes with what face within ten minutes. My supreme accomplishment is when I athletically scoot and slide between bodies, holding two Rieslings without spilling a drop. Like Jean Claude Killy on the downhill, I avoid the barriers; deftly slip past them, crossing the finish line of our table. Within minutes some girl kidnaps Barbara and spirits her away. My God it’s getting loud in here! The voices rise up in a crescendo, like they did in the cafeteria during lunch back in high school. Finally Barb reappears and takes me outside to sit on a bench.
We talk and talk amid copious introductions, and an impression is generated in my foolish city-boy brain. It’s something I noticed as far back as Minnesota, at the A&W cheese curds place, and all the various places we stopped to ask directions. People here are genuinely friendly. They are eager to help strangers. What’s up with that? What brings it about? How can it be?
It’s not that way with people in Los Angles, or San Diego either, though I once noticed, just after moving back to San Diego, a barely-perceptible difference. I was riding a bus to the 99Cent Store. When people got off, they usually said ‘thank you’ to the driver. In LA this was a very rare occurrence. In San Diego it was standard operational procedure. Is it that like energy, we have only so many emotions stored up, and if we have to distribute them too often, they run out and each person we deal with from that point gets less?
People from small towns see less people, they interact less. Does this mean they have more of themselves to give? While reading I got the impression people from small towns could be suspicious of strangers, of outsiders, like in Medieval Europe. I’d like to think it may not apply in America the Beautiful, on accounta most of us are here from somewhere else anyway. And besides…E Pluribus Unum.
But what do I know? Where’s a sociologist when you need one?
It occurs to me, like Kurtz’s and Conrad’s pure crystalline bullet, like I was shot in my bloody forehead, Brando and Hemingway-style, that I wasn’t so much A Fool for the City as A Fool From the City.
Could that be it? Was it what they call a Mobius epiphany? Does that make sense? You betcha! Eh?
Steven Hunley 2014 Copyright
http://youtu.be/HSWtc01BlqM The Horror- Apocalypse Now