Thru Day 28: fotos with text, like blackbirds in a pie

SLIDELL, LOUISIANA | TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 2010 - I am up late at the Deluxe Motel, in Lucinda Williams country, workin' hahd to bring you people who are actually workin some small amount of entertainment, some word from far-flung places.

I will start with the freshest pics, and work back to DeLand, where the fotos last left off. Well then.....

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Truck passing

This is something we're working on. the blurriness of it all. how we pass through places so quickly, even in the slow lane. how do we talk about these places? how can we set about photographing them in a somewhat honest way? some of the first blurred fotos of course were accidents. But now we're trying to control the blur. So this is the road coming into Slidell, us in the slow lane, at night, looking for a motel just far enough out of town so that it might be quaint, safe and cheap. truck passing.

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Ocean Springs, Mississippi

this is an arty little town. Maybe Slidell might be cooler still, but this is a good spot, just east of Biloxi. A friend of Andrew, back in DeLand, told us about this place. Otherwise we'd never have found it. The Government St. Grocery bar felt like Seattle. We cooled our heels there. Late afternoon light. People smoking at the bar, watching Deadliest Catch, skinny humpbacked bartender with gravel drawl. We happy, ate right there with the smoke.

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Adrienne on the porch at Beauvoir

This place is the Confederate answer to Mt. Vernon, Geo. Washington's old farm near DC. In Biloxi, it was one of the few structures to survive Katrina. An old plantation. Everyone else there for the tour was from towns nearby, and a few from Texas. Seattle? We had to repeat that. "Seattle. Washington." The guide was none too pleased. He just left the words hanging, in the breeze, under the trees.




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The view from the front porch of Beauvoir. Place was built in the 1840s. Jefferson Davis lived there awhile.





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with some reservations, we put the "powered by biodiesel" decal on the rear window of the camper shell today. ideally, powered by biodiesel. When available, powered by biodiesel. You get the idea.




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more blur

this time, just west of Destin, FL, after we slogged thru Panama City ad nauseum, finally reaching untrampled dunes white and cold as snowfall






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Seaside, FL

how could this be spooky? go see for yourself






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slash pine alleys

all thru florida we passed slash pine planted in perfect rows. they are beautiful as you pass by, at top speeds of about 62 mph. similar to the way rows of corn pass by, radiating out from you one after the next, but different





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Apalachicola, FL

that's a shrimper beyond the trucks, Sunhippie, home port Key West. beyond that is deep water marsh. you can feel the deep water, even if you can't see it





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I liked this old white building, also in Apalachicola. Turned out to have housed a printing press on the ground floor for years. Most of the equipment still there. I liked the sway in the roofline and eave.



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all thru the Big Bend area of Florida, sort of inner Panhandle you could also call it, you come across beaches littered with gorgeous stump driftwood. Seems like it would have to have been cypress trees, but you don't see too many live ones along the shore, so I don't know. Birds, mostly pelicans and cormorants, dot the pilings.










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 at the confluence of the Ochlockonee and Sopchoppy rivers. Adrienne is reading the New York Times, about the imminent closing of the last sardine cannery in the U.S., in Maine. I still need to read the article, to see if they got any of it right.










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a night shot of our neighbors at the waterfront campsite. turns out he'd driven an 82 toyota diesel years ago himself. "Be good to the diesel and the diesel'll be good to you," he told me. And many other things. Including the fact that he had retired in 1979, again in 1993, has been in every state in the U.S. at least three times and every Canadian province three times. Many more things too, like last year he and Carol drove 40,000 miles during an 88-day voyage. He was from Sebring, FL, apparently a professional vagabond. Nice guy.

Adrienne has some impressive night shots, of stars and the tent. You will have to come to the house once we get home to see those.




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Blur No. 1 | Live Oak Island, Florida


looking south over marsh grass to the gulf of mexico. this mistake got us going on the blur series. lovely stuff.  very honest. free and unfettered.






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Yellow Truck getting a drink. 

Closing in on 228,000 miles now, yellow truck is allowed the occasional drink of 15W 40 heavy duty oil to soothe his tired rings and seals. We want to keep him happy, carefree, like our fotos.







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Where the sun doesn't shine


This is one of hundreds of windowless chicken houses we've seen coming down the coast. It's the new factory way. The chickens are raised these days in near complete darkness. If you haven't already, check out the documentary Food Inc. Pretty compelling, interesting stuff. Really worth seeing.

Back to DeLand, finally, here is a muscular green pickup truck leaving the riverside park we like. That's a tank of nitrous in the bed. Apparently this truck is speedy. 




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Dave Heeren and me. Dave put Adrienne and I up for several days. Among other talents, patience being high on the list, Dave can find any book, comic or rare architectural artifact that you never knew existed, but covet as soon as you see it. Often it is a gift, it's a gift for you, from him. No problem.






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Empty plastic jug and grapefruit




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the garage under the cottage


this is part of the south wall, a collage of memory and function. It's a sacred spot.






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red marble poem


We set this marble on the back of the camper shell before leaving DeLand. We did so in the same spirit as the sages who write poems in the forest and then drop the paper into a river. We let the marble go. It contained memory, dream and all our unpaid receipts.  



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