Tim and Jonah built a plywood platform bed for the back of the van. We bought two layers of egg-crate foam for the top, making for cushy sleep for Tim and I along the roadside. They put reflective insulation over the van's rear windows to keep out 97% of the light and, thus, the heat. We've got a double-burner propane stove, ice chest and full "kitchen," all of which came compliments of my dad, who had three aluminum bowls, ceramic plates, mugs and forks to spare along with the stove (though one of the burner's sparkers doesn't spark).

We built a solar generator (a single solar panel, a deep-cycle battery and invertor) to power our laptops and cameras. We broke down--because we're broke--and invested in Walmart's deep discounts on oil filters, sunscreen, fish hooks, spray paint (to color the inside of the super-silver Reflectix "curtains") and plastic bins to go under the bed. 

In Mobile we found a local chain of oyster bars where we got two dozen fresh ones for $8 something each and Tim had a fried grouper po' boy. We stayed the night there, in a cheap-enough roadside motel with prices bumped a weight class for Mardi Gras. Along the “scenic” Gulf Coast route 90 Hurricane Katrina seemed to have stomped through last September, not three Septembers ago. Where beachfront bungalows and columned Southern mansions and so many Waffle Houses once stood along the roadside, there’s now vine-choked rubble (piles of brick, cement and wood planks) and cleared lots with "For Sale" signs advertising bargains. It was as hard a thing as I've seen.

In New Orleans we hit Mardi Gras again, and our van stalled in the middle of a boozy, bejeweled parade. A few people were shot along the parade route that day, but our troubles were more pedestrian. Our new/used GMC Safari Extended-cab Minivan busted a fuel pump. We didn't know the problem but some drunk called to us: "Hey," he said, to the idiots with the busted fuel pump and the over-stuffed minivan who stalled in the middle of the parade route, "your fuel pump's busted!"

 We stayed that night in New Orleans, in motel we arranged by lowest bid over the Internet. For waited with 50 or so others in the dingy lobby of a dingy motel in downtown for a decent-enough motel room we got for $120. There were entire families, with little babies and grandparents sitting and sleeping on the floors and couches of the lobby, waiting to check in. We finally did, and then left Gypsy to herself in the room and went to wander the city. God, I love New Orleans. We walked and drank big beers from open containers and finally ended up some place where the locals went on and on about how much the city had changed and how many people had gone away since the storm and the floods.

The Alabama license plates read “stars fell on Alabama” but all through the state the grass is straw and the lakes are shallow mud puddles. A long drought through the South has sapped the land of life. But I think the hardship of this drought is just the most recent. From the looks of it, Alabama’s been waiting for the star’s guidance, for fortune to fall, for a generation or more.

From Atlanta, we avoided I85 by taking the narrow, slow country roads (rt. 34 to rt. 22 to rt. 63, over a dried up Lake Martin to rt. 9 and the sad state capital, where the streets were entirely empty on a Saturday afternoon and we couldn’t find a single open place to eat, then to I65, all the way to the Gulf and Mobile).

Along that route there were towns that were once towns but are now shells, with more boarded buildings than open for business—stubborn towns, barely clinging to their title. All around these towns, in the low hills with scraggly pines, wooden houses collapse in on themselves. They look like brown-capped mushrooms breaking out of the ground. Really, though, they’re returning to it. Broken machines make for striking sculptures: rusted once-red tractors, majestic finned American steel and muscle cars on blocks, mid repair. Some yards are virtual parking lots. It seems hopeful, somehow, as if these machines will eventually be repaired—along with the towns and economies of these broken down corners of America.

The South, of course, has long-since been denigrated by the rest of our disjointed country. What an insult it must be to see the scorn the North and West has for you and your simple, backward way when there’s so much injury here already. No wonder there’s confederate flags flying. I’d want to live in the past—in some Golden Era—if this is all that’s left.

Woke up in Simpsonville, South Carolina. Tim’s parents treated us to a fancy night’s stay at a B&B with a big bed and a hot shower.

¡Que bourgie!

And don’t we look the part.

We got hungry near Chapel Hill, NC and found Joe’s Joint, a straight
-forward, Elvis
-adorned bbq spot down a wet alley, with a $5.45 pork plate special with two sides (fried okra and black-eyed peas, aka “black beans,” for me please).