The AHQ Tour Update #5
Konrad unsuccessfully tries to wrestle the Update Editorship away from the Editor.
6-21-02
Written by Dorcas Smucker
Tom gets a horror-movie thrill out of the snakes (Editor's note: Let's not forget the crocs!), Konrad likes the swate tae, I like the fried okra and big old houses, Paul likes the cheap gas prices, and Byran likes the accent.
In keeping with the wildlife theme, here I present a green reptile thing. I think it's a chameleon (pronounced "shame-lee-on"). The tour guide thought it had just crawled off the grass. I'd rather put in pictures of more crocs, but much to my disappointment I haven't seen any since Okefenokee.
Actually, we all like the food. Most of the group doesn't go into raptures about okra like I do, but it is really good. In fact, today I had this southern stuff that as near as I can tell is made like this:
Fry 1/2 cup chopped onions, 2 cups sliced okra, and 2 cups thinly sliced yellow squash in a bit of oil. Stir in half a cup of mixed cracker crumbs and corn meal, along with lots of salt and pepper. Serve hot.
Then you need some peas too. Peas, you understand, aren't peas like you and I know peas. Those are garden peas. Peas look more like beans, and one lady informed me that these are actually purple-eyed pink-pod peas. (Or maybe it was pink/purple.) If you read the picture captions, you know that Tom likes alliteration. So he liked the name of the purple-eye pink-pod peas, if not the flavor.
Then if you serve all this with sliced tomatoes and swate tae, you really have a feast.
None of us has gotten real excited about hush puppies, those golf-ball size dense deep-fried cornmeal and onion appetizers.
Lookit what they got me! A radio, compass, binocs, and knife with a plastic titanium blade all for hunting crocs! Just call me Croc-Man!
The Croc-Man in action.
But of course there's more going on in our lives than food. Like travel. Friday we drove from Fair Play to Montezuma, Georgia, where everyone apologized profusely for how few people showed up for the program. "We've never had such a small crowd," people said. "It's always the smallest crowd they've ever had," Konrad says. (Editor's note: But we'd have sung to a brick wall for the fantastic meal they gave us afterwards.)
Konrad is our official quartet shirt-ironer.
6-22-02
The next morning we took off twenty minutes late for Florida. Paul thought the guys should learn from my example of admitting that it was my fault, since Tom and Konrad have a way of making their own weaknesses someone else's fault. (Editor's note to himself: Edit my name out of this paragraph before sending update.)
The Editor with some of his little friends.
David showed us where his mom grew up, then we dropped him off at his grandma's house so he could attend his cousin's wedding. Then we had the day to relax.
So how do you entertain three young, modern, wired, educated guys? Golf? Lattes at an internet cafe? No, no. We looked up a Goodwill store, shopped at a dollar store, ate seafood, and walked down main street in the tropical evening, admiring the beautiful old southern mansions. And they enjoyed it, yet another example, as I've mentioned before, of their quality and character. (Editor's note to himself: Definitely do NOT edit this paragraph.)
Konrad took this picture after dark with a time exposure. This was a big old mansion in the middle of Marianna, FL.
I was also looking for garage sales and the guys wanted to see rednecks. We both got our wish when we followed signs off the highway and found a yard sale way back along a red dirt road. Paul asked the two women there what there was to do in the area. "There's a rattlesnake roundup out toward Tallahassee," one of them said, her voice so smoky that Tom later said she could be their next bass singer if Konrad retired.
"So you have rattlesnakes around here?" Paul said.
"Yeah, we got a stuffed one on the wall insahd," the other woman said. "It's about seven feet long. That's about average."
We asked about plantation houses, since I wanted to see one. No, this wasn't a plantation area, but there's a historical place down past Blountstown.
The Editor and Konrad pose for the camera, each showing his best side.
So we drove to Sam Adkins park, which had a little colony of buildings moved in from all over the county. There were log cabins and a schoolhouse, a hundred-year-old house that was the fanciest in the neighborhood in its day, and a little country church that turned out to be the first one that the local Mennonites, including David's grandparents, had used back in the early days.
Kon found some reading material in the old schoolhouse that was a little advanced for him, but he did his best and stumbled through it.
The most striking thing about the houses was how much thought they put into keeping them cool. They were carefully positioned to catch the breeze, the ceilings were extra high, and the kitchen with its wood cookstove was often in a separate building.
I can well understand why keeping cool was such a priority. Today when we left church it was about 85 degrees and raining. If you know anything about relative humidity and dew points, you know it takes an awful lot of water in the air to condense at that temperature.
Time to retire on another sultry summer night. Stay tuned for the updates on Byran's ministry calling, Konrad's attempts to get Paul arrested, and the church that's not Mennonite when they're in the basement.
Dorcas Smucker is a monthly columnist for the Eugene Register Guard newspaper. Look for her column "Letters from Harrisburg" in the Oregon Life section or on the web at www.registerguard.com.
We were at this gas station and I looked over at this van and said hey, that guy has his picture on his van! So I told Kon to go over and take his picture with his picture, and he did. Not everybody has their own likeness plastered all over their mode of transportation.
Contest Miscellanea
Entries from the last contest ranged from spiders to lizards, with snakes and crocs being the most popular guesses. I'd have another contest but I haven't thought of a good question yet.