The Southern Route


Jackson is Only One of My Jeeps

On September 29, Saturday, I left Virginia just before dawn with everything I owned packed in my '98 Cherokee named Jackson. He was locked and loaded with clean fluids and filters, blades and belts. Inside the seats were covered with soft clean rag rugs and my T-shirts over the backs, coats and jackets hanging from the head rests.  I'd packed hard behind the seats - raincoat, towels, gloves - but my toolboxes underneath were easily accessible. With the seat down the back held nine totes, four of belongings, five of inventory ready to sell. My quilts were rolled and tied and wedged on top of the totes, eleven quilts in all.

The passenger seat held food for lunch. Behind it was room on top of a tote for a traveling companion's bag. Everything was secured with bungies and I had clear visibility on the side and back. I had cash in the glove box and in my wallet, a debit and credit card, a spare key wired inside the gas latch and ID clipped to the visor. Air pressure, oil, transmission fluid. A last minute fingers-crossed coolant issue and we were ready. I was through the downtown tunnel just as day broke, the toll charged to my plates.

Odds have defied logic my last year in Virginia. When assessing my season in January I have every Saturday and half the Sundays to vend art and four or five dozen food truck gigs. March portends a solid year, 2nd Sunday Williamsburg, VB Flea, Village Days … my customers return, seek me out and my Square Register ka-chings away. Also by March I've laid out my solo exhibit which opens in July - 130 pieces presented over five floors. I've completed sixty paintings and two dozen textiles. Still to go a dozen quilts and at least that many windows. 

In April it starts to rain. And through September it rains most violently on my specific show days. Ultimately 85% of my work opportunities vanish. 

It's around this time I begin to get a sneaking suspicion. 

I work like a banshee. I've mastered, at this point in my tenure with Virginia's extraordinary heat and humidity, a stamina like I had in my 20s. Years of working outside has made me a muscle machine. I've had a routine for three years now, up at four, work through the day on art until I leave for work, mostly standing if not jumping up and off a food truck. I've produced hundreds of pieces of art. My first year vending art I attend forty shows. There are numbers everywhere in my life and I keep them calculated in my head, $1,100 goes into Jackson then a few hundred more. My bank balance continually hovers around five bucks. I keep making it all work.


I'm only a hundred miles into North Carolina when I pull into a rest area. I need to get my bearings. But nothing's shifted in the back and I don't even open the hood. I begin sensing that we'll make this trip through to the end though I have jimmied the coolant issue and it worries me. Destination: Savannah, 4pm to retrieve Traveling Companion #1 from the airport. I pass by a huge Confederate flag on the border and welcome to South Carolina where Littering = Fine + PRISON. Torrential rain and people on the move in both directions. Mud, gravel, the stench of drowned livestock, the overflowed manure and coal ash pits. 

This route was not my intention. My plan had been to drive straight across, lodge in the parking lot of some Missouri Wal-mart, over to Colorado for TC #2 and then ultimately to Portland, my destination. Then things had started happening. TC#1 an Oregonian, suggested coming along and offered to pay for the lodging and extra gas if we took the southern route. Deal. That was the first thing. Thing #2 was that all of a sudden gigs I'd been hustling started coming through. I was acquiring a small but sturdy chunk of change. If fuel stayed under $3 and I truly got my 18 mpg I was thinking I might make it.

When I left Virginia the first time, six months after my brother Marty died there, I had absolutely no intention of ever returning. I'd seen a lot of the east coast including New York City and the Shenandoah valley and believed I could be satisfied with that. That there was stomping ground of mine still untrod - Lee Smith's Carolinas, Hurston's Florida, Gilchrist's Mississippi - made me feel disappointed and something in my heart felt "ouch." Even while boarding the plane to leave, I acknowledged that a heart ouch preceded a sneaking suspicion. But everything was already in motion.

At my son's house in Washington state I quickly make friends with interesting women, we camp, hang out, exchange stories. Once a week I conduct writing workshops at a Denny's in the suburbs of Spanaway. I believe I could love Tacoma, rent a storefront, afford an apartment. I begin my fifteen hour work days devoted to art. I make the cardboard dioramas and the prairie dresses. I sign up for some shows and things sell so I sign up for events for the fall and holidays. A gallery takes my diorama of NYC. I end up clean after false positives result in weeks of finger-crossing. And then I get a sneaking suspicion.

To be continued ...















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