Old-Timey

The Chool Bus (ch33)

CHAPTER 33: Billie’s speed-bump lesson serves well as the Gang meanders around Arkansas’ hot-spring destinations.

Crossing the Arkansas state line Buck resumed the effort of introducing Billie to “Old-timey” roots music. The song he cued up as they crossed the state line was a portrait of abject poverty. My Name Is John Johanna, famously recorded by Kelly Harrell & The Virginia String Band in 1925. The song is also known as The State of Arkansas and tells the tale of a traveler’s hard luck:

My name is John Johanna, i came from Buffalo town. For nine long years i’ve traveled this wide wide world around. Through ups and downs and miseries and some good days i saw, But i never knew what misery was ’til i went to Arkansas.

Boiled to its essence, the song is about a great human grift known as the “bait-and-switch.” Advertise one thing and deliver another.

“Sounds a lot like the fabled ‘American Dream,’” Jack piped in from the galley.

“Ah yes,” said Buck. “Maybe the song can make its way into Professor T’s analysis of the nation’s ‘fibrillating heart.’” Buck hadn’t intended to start a serious discussion. He just wanted to set the mood as the Bus rolled into Arkansas.

Billie wasn’t concerned with any of that. She had read somewhere about the condition of Arkansas’ meandering roads and kept her eyes peeled for those famous vehicle-wrecking potholes. 

“Be careful, i have family here,” said Billie keeping her eyes on the road. “My North Little Rock relatives are a hearty bunch. Their hospitality is legendary, and their dry wit never fails to put a smile on my face. They’ll welcome you with open arms, but don’t be surprised if they also give you a sideways glance and a knowing smirk. Folksy wisdom and modern cynicism coexist with these guys.

“Some say Arkansas is one of the most beautiful states in the union,” said Billie. And following the meandering highways toward North Little Rock proved her right. Endless green rolling landscape. It kept Billie on her toes and provided no end of fascination for Professor T as it reminded him of the dense wooded areas of Oregon. He kept his eyes peeled for Sasquatch. 

For hot springs action, Arkansas has it in spades. It’s home to several natural hot spring sites, and they were headed for the most famous of them all, Hot Springs National Park. 

But first, the work. The gang met Billie’s relatives for dinner at the North Little Rock Cracker Barrel. “Comfort Food Central,” said Professor T. 

“Well, sure…we, won’t knock ‘em for that.” Billie had made the introductions all around, and now, her aunt, who had never met a stranger, was singing the praises of the many mom & pop restaurants serving authentic southern cuisine for the budget conscious. 

“Billie knows,” said her aunt. “You remember, darling, when the family gathered for Great Grandpa’s funeral, after most of the attendees had gone, we walked to a diner near our house. The one they opened in the early 1960s…remember?”

“Oh yeah, I remember the biscuits and gravy. It was divine,” said Billie. “I still don’t think I’ve experienced any better.”

“But Cracker Barrel is fine,” said Billie’s aunt. “I don’t think your bus would find a place to park at the diner, anyway.”

“It’s all good,” said Jack. “Sometimes you just have to work with what you have.”

“We’re heading to Shorter College in the morning. It’s our next stop for focus-group interviews,” said Professor T. “We’re doing our best to visit a wide diversity of campuses, the big public and privates, the medium size state comprehensives, the Ivy Leaguers, and the small faith-based non-profits. We can’t visit them all, of course, but we want our data to come from a wide variety of perspectives.”

“Well,” said Billie’s uncle, “Shorter is super small, but i’ve heard good things…a community college actually revered by the community.”

The next day, room reserved, snacks obtained, recording equipment in place, Buck, basically a spectator, chair wrangler, and snack custodian, settled on a metal folding chair that felt about three sizes too narrow. He watched as Jack and Professor T, with clipboards on their knees, prepared to capture the data. 

Suddenly, Buck was aware of how loud the creak of his boot leather sounded in the quiet room. Lord, don’t let us look like interrogators, he mused. He watched several participants file in: a grandmother with a worn study Bible resting on top of her nursing syllabus, two young men with tired eyes who probably just clocked off a third-shift warehouse job, and a few teenagers with bright, nervous energy. On the wall behind them the portrait of the college’s founding reverend right beside a framed print of the Jordan River.

Keep your mouth shut and your ears wide open, Buck thinks to himself. We’re here to listen, not run the fence line.

As the conversations got rolling, the rhythm in the room caught Buck off guard in the best way. Back home in Texas, folks talk slow and guard their words like water in August. Here, there’s a music to it…a cadence of soft assents, nods, and the occasional quiet “Amen” when someone speaks a heavy truth. When a young woman started talking about how hard it is to pay for gas to drive across the county line just to make an eight o’clock lab, something inside him ached with familiarity.

That’s the same hill my cousin has to climb, he thinks. Different dirt, same damn hill.

Yet beneath the common ground, he catches the distinct weight of their stories…the generational pride tied to this specific patch of Arkansas ground, the sacred duty they feel toward ancestors who weren’t able to read a book, let alone earn a degree. It isn’t just ambition…it’s stewardship. Faith isn’t just Sunday best here…it’s an engine.

He sees Professor T scribbling notes furiously, catching himself smiling when the grandmother laughs and calls the group to order before he even has a chance to intervene. They didn’t need us to build a bridge, Buck realized, feeling smaller in the best possible way. They just need us to document the truth of what they’ve already built.

As the gang packed away gear, picked up trash, and replaced tables and chairs wrapping up the session, Buck quietly wondered what the singer of that old-timey song about Arkansas would think about the state now. Still strikingly beautiful, but also still plagued by poverty in the south delta, scarce access to public services, and health care.  But after meeting Billie’s relatives and the focus-group session, Buck came away impressed by the folks in the “Natural State” for their razor wit and their built-in resilience. 

NEXT WEEK:
Red Rock, Texas. Then back home for Buck… Corpus Christi

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links

The Chool Bus (ch23)

CHAPTER 23: The Forks take a few days detour South to San Diego, then across the border to Ensenada before the next round of focus group interviews in Las Vegas.

“La Holla?” Buck Wellstone mispronounced the words.

“No… say it like this,” said Jack. “La HOY-uh… it’s based on a Spanish phrase la joya, which means ‘the jewel’. This might, of course, be fake news as another Spanish term, la hoya, refers to a geographic hollow. Or… ‘the holes,’” Jack burst into a juvenile fit of laughter, then composing himself after wiping away tears and blowing his nose. “Sorry, i get a kick out of the way people tend to jazz up the mundane. I mean, the neighborhood around UC San Diego is straight-up gorgeous…pristine beaches, perfect weather, marine life out the wazoo…but it’s really nothing more than a neighborhood of San Diego. Some refer to La Jolla as a State of Mind. And no one really knows why anyone would literally call it ‘the holes,’ perhaps they’re referring to the sea-level caves that can be seen from La Jolla Shores.”

With that, Jack closed his US road atlas, Billie punched the address into Siri’s Drunk Sister maps app, Professor T was engrossed in a book, earbuds on blast, and with that the Chool Bus was underway. Roughly four hours…straight south. They would arrive in time for supper in La Jolla, get a good night’s sleep then up and at ‘em early for the first round of focus group interviews at the university.

***

Buck Wellstone had grown accustomed to accompanying Billie from the passenger seat, keeping her company and exchanging music playlists. Now, Billie has never been a country music fan, but Buck was serving up the classics. And where Billie was familiar with pop-country playing on radio stations, Buck was showing her, for the first time, deep Appalachian “old-timey” Mountain fare, and the open-range cowboy singing poets exemplified by the likes of the Carter Family, Patsy Cline, Hank Williams, etc. 

“Why, this sounds like the tunes they used for that Coen Brothers movie…the one critics said was loosely based on Homer’s Odyssey,” said Billie. The actual music was not all that exciting for her, but she didn’t let Buck in on that as she was starting to warm up to Buck himself. In fact, she was getting a bit worried she might be in danger of falling for the big fella. While first impressions lead folks to regard Mr Wellstone imposing and dangerous, he was actually quite gentle, compassionate, and somewhat vulnerable. Billie, in a word was starting to fall for him.

Now Billie is very good at mental multi-tasking, and as she steered the Chool Bus southward through Pasadena then Irvine she was able to pay attention to Buck’s occasional commentary and his old-timey playlist while her non-binary nature was waging a vigorous debate over the relative merits of sparking up a conventional relationship with… a guy.

First, was she thinking about committing to a person or a type? She knew that dating Buck meant committing to a specific person, regardless of gender. Like, he was never going to understand her on the levels of her female lovers. Does she run the risk of growing tired of that, or can the relationship grow stronger over time like her favorite aunt and uncle…despite the annoying gender-specific quirks to which many hetero couples must grin and bear?

Does going hetero erase a part of me? Her thoughts were working overtime. After all, the common fear is that settling with someone of the opposite sex would make others perceive her as “straight.” She worried whether entering a monogamous relationship would alter how she, or the world, view her identity. So many questions: Did she explore enough? Does she need a more polyamorous arrangement? Would Buck be able to trust her? So many questions. It was getting harder to continue the illusion of full attentiveness and Buck was starting to notice from the broken dialog and self-interruptions. Billie was making more apologies for unfocused responses. She knew she was spreading her awareness too thin for safe driving…she would have to focus on the wheel in the urban traffic zones. When a feeling of tightness in her chest pushed her into a defiant mood, she said something rude to Buck and both went silent for a long moment.

Meanwhile Jack and Professor T were having a spirited debate about the nature of good and evil. Every once in a while one of their voices would cut through the bus’ engine and tire noise. It must have been a banger of a debate. By the time the four hour stretch was through they arrived on a logical equation, an accord, a compromise. This was it: The pursuit of self-interest PLUS aggression or violence MINUS basic human compassion EQUILS generic evil.

As Billie steered the bus into the RV park on the outskirts of Sandog SoCal, Billie apologized for the rude outburst and Buck assured her he was not even remotely offended, he wasn’t explicitly lying as her sudden inexplicable rudeness did hurt a bit.

He too was sliding down that slippery slope…he felt as if it were possible he could fall fairly hard for this contradictory bundle of gentle, fair, beautiful, tough-as-leather, one hundred percent bad-ass bitch.

He never thought he would meet, let alone get hung up on someone identifying themselves among the rainbow LGBTQ coalition…but here we are.

Rolling into the UC Sandog Student Union parking lot, the Forks prepared to roll out the schtick. It was time for everyone to put on their most professional and focused masks. Time to gather some qualitative data from this affluent Southern California corner of our spiritually ailing nation. There would be a week break between San Diego and the next research destination, Las Vegas. In the meantime, the Forks would dip their toes in to the sands of Mexico… they gonna fuck around and find out.

NEXT WEEK:
The detour to Ensenada is ill timed as the Mexican Government cracks down on a notorious cartel kingpin and all hell breaks loose.

GO BACK => Preface and Chapter Links