Launching Ourselves

At the Express Oil Change in Hendersonville in Tennessee, an alert employee noticed we were driving a camper. He got a wistful look as I showed him the features. Taking to the open road is one of those thoughts that crosses more than one mind brought up on the myths of the Great American Road Trip. 

The biggest problem, and any nomad will tell you, is breaking the bonds. We are all programmed to be settled and be social and have friends. Some few of us have an unusual set of genes that reject life as lived by most of us. Others have more of a struggle to break out from the circles of settled living. I know I do. It sounds easy to say good bye, to get on the road, to be excited by the prospect of new horizons, but departure is a wrench. 

We drove away from Barbara and Gary in a prolonged silence. Well I said, I feel like we have launched ourselves at last. Up next- South America! Not so fast pardner… Layne said, first we have to see Johnny. 

I think in some ways being a nomad is easier for Layne as she has a highly developed capacity for connection. Not only has she kept in touch with Johnny for fifty years but she has a whole circle of friends still communicating with each other from their time in Birmingham Alabama half a century ago. This  valet Parker found the tedium of his job made easier with a phone. I think I used to wave a newspaper around she. I was bored. 

I gave them time to reminisce while Rusty and I walked a little around Johnny’s neighborhood. He grew up in Birmingham and is the total opposite to me in that he hates moving, doesn’t like to drive but he has the most expansive curiosity of anyone I know. Layne’s photos of Mexican beaches have captured his imagination but would never ignite the desire in him to go himself. He marvels from his high rise  apartment. 

Only Johnny would give me a thick heavy volume of writings by Giacomo Leopardi as a parting gift and then have the capacity to discuss the contents of the book as though he it was who grew up in Italy, where Leopardi is taught in school. 

And yet the precision and mental demands of operating modern electronics are far beyond him. Luckily he has many friends who drop in to see how his art is progressing who will take time to plug in his various devices and remind him of the deadlines of daily living. 

It’s hard sometimes to tear yourself  away and get on the road when conversation is flowing. “I need to get your picture,” he drawls and frowns and fiddles and prolongs our departure by ten minutes simply trying to compose his phone. 

Especially when you have finished dawdling among the familiar places and are now leaping off at the start of something prolonged. However our goal for our first night was a banal rest area on I-10 just inside Louisiana. We have to be in California by the eleventh for Layne’s dental appointment in Algodones, Mexico the 12th. This means we have many miles to cover along the interstate in a short time. 

We started off inauspiciously when I tried to navigate a short cut in defiance of Google maps instructions. It’ll be dark I said but we can cut a bit across country, it’ll be fun. Actually it was a choice designed to make us start reminiscing about all the other times we thought a good idea was the best way to tangle us up. Getting lost at night in a rainstorm in a banana plantation in Grenada. Driving the wrong way down some old railroad tracks in Bosnia. Backing through a surprised Mexican’s garden in Chiapas. We do, from time to time, get lost. 

It turns out there is a place called the John Stennis rocket testing center that sat right across my proposed short cut in southwest Mississippi. This is the largest rocket testing facility in the world run by NASA and decidedly not open to John Q Public farting around in his camper van looking for a missing Interstate highway.  Which is probably a very good thing to not allow. However I can say it was another occasion when we felt lucky not to be stopped and have to explain ourselves. There are officials all over the world wondering how a cretin like me found his way into their jurisdiction and they were only too glad to see the last of me. That I got out to enjoy the full moon and pee at the same time on a lovely balmy Mississippi night was what led me not to notice which direction the wind was blowing. My lack of attention to details precludes me from being a rocket scientist among other things, though I don’t suppose peeing on yourself and swearing copiously need be a disqualifier. We disentangled ourselves from our various predicaments without getting arrested and found ourselves in the Louisiana rest area across the Pearl River just before midnight.  Our journey to Patagonia had officially begun and happily I had a spare pair of pants packed aboard GANNET2. For just such emergencies. 

Morning Cuppa Tea

Hands up anyone in the class who knew tea is grown, commercially and successfully in the Untied States? Anyone? So let me just say I did my best to follow along as we got our tour at the Great Mississippi Tea Company but the details in the two hour talk got a bit fuzzy. I love tea but apparently I know very little of how it's made. I know more now and I shall pass ones many details as accurately as I can, but bear with me.

Layne found the Harvest Host stop in the middle of nowhere Tennessee, more precisely Brookhaven somewhere northwest of Hattiesburg. She was dead keen to spend the night there. and I was ready to indulge her whim. I thought it was a retail and blending store and wasn't I surprised when we rolled up on a tea plantation of seven acres of bushes, actual tea plants.  

The host, Timmy, was very casual about Rusty who I discovered absolutely loves exploring rows and rows of tea bushes. He was happy as a clam. We were the second RV over fighting and a tour was about to start with the first couple which we enthusiastically joined. Off we went...

Apparently Thomas Lipton, the Englishman famous for tea sales in the US did actually grow tea in several southern states and the problem wasn't the growing. It turned out the tea couldn't be harvested and processed at competitive rates, and you'll soon understand why. Tea is grown where it's grown because it is -in short- cheap to do so. Fact number one I learned!

Timmy loves his job and he explains it very well. Fact #2: tea is the most complex plant in the world and once you get the seedling of cutting into its third year it is pretty much unstoppable and will grow no matter what. They do have drip irrigation on their seven acres but tea plants are strong.

Timmy and his partner Jason inherited 300 acres of land from their grandparents who raised dairy cattle here. They didn't want to raise cattle so they wondered what they might grow, and for some reason they settled on tea which takes years to mature and produce and no one else around grows the stuff. Timmy did say, Fact #3 there is commercial tea grower of some size in every state in the union. Their operation is the second largest in the country and I can't remember who is bigger. No familiar name at any rate.

They sold the cows and all but 36 acres and settled down to grow tea. Their planting and seed growing operation is what you see above, and it ain't much. But what you need to keep in mind is they are expanding, hiring (if they can find anyone who wants to learn tea production) and are even exporting. Before Covid they tell me Fortnum's and Mason's in London sold their tea. That is a well known shop so these guys aren't messing around. Fact #4 : Mississippi tea in a high end London emporium. Their first year they produced ten pounds of tea several years after they started planting cuttings in 2012. The planned production rate is a ton of tea per acre and they have seven acres growing into maturity now.

They sell black, green and yellow tea, which last no one has ever heard of as only in China (and now Mississippi) is yellow tea produced and sold. Fact # 5 all teas come from the same leaves, as the flavor and style is in the processing. Timmy stripped a tea plant showing which leaves are used for which color tea. Only Oolong uses the whole stem. He described it as their most floral tasting tea. By now I was gasping for a cup, like a chocolate addict in a chocolate factory.

Incidentally the weather was perfect yesterday, sunny and 75 degrees, shirt sleeves even after dark and no sweating. Eventually a ground fog came up after dinner and Rusty came into the van and went to sleep as we closed the door on the night sounds and stayed quite comfortable with no heating or cooling required.

Rusty was free to roam and in the morning I got up late - hey! I'm retired! - and wandered around with my camera and occasional views of my dog's tail chasing back and forth between the rows of tea plants.

A neighbor deploys bees to take advantage of late blooming tea plants:

But back to the tour. After we studied plants, growing methods and leaf types Timmy walked us across the road, where locals don't slow for pansy tea tourists ambling along the shoulder... and we entered the world of Chinese tea making. Not that our guide has ever been to the Far East to see where tea has always been grown. They use an agent to ship their piles of equipment.

I can't detail the process as it would take ages, I didn't take notes and I was overwhelmed by the steps but everything is precise,timed to the second and processes are repeated until the desired degree of drying and rolling and  even bruising is achieved. Chinese drying racks for black and green teas which get different lengths of time to lose their moisture:

The roller which came with no manual, no YouTube instruction video or even any warning signs in English. Any paperwork the tea makers needed translating they emailed to a Professor of Chinese Studies at the university for her attention.  

There is a line of machines to dry and roll and curl and sort the different teas desired and all from the same bushes outside. I had absolutely no idea tea making was so complicated. It has so many steps, so often repeated it makes wine making look simple.

You dry leaves repeatedly, curl them so they don't flatten out and even bruise the edges so they release their flavors properly. You pick leaves one day a week and instantly start on this multi step job that takes hours of precision work. From here on I promise to drink my tea, whatever brand it may be, with due reverence and respect.

The Chinese don't build this stuff for export, and the measurements are all metric, even though Timmy thinks of Celsius in degrees Fahrenheit which I think is weird. He says his employee doesn't even are about the numbers. She just knows Green tea gets say 2 unites and twenty seconds at 90 (Celsius) and black gets four minutes fifteen seconds at 60. Where American electric motors can't be used the Chinese send adapters, hoping you can read Mandarin.

The tearoom, the holy grail of the trip. Harvest Hosts welcome RVs, offer no facilities for the vehicle so we dry camp for free and the idea is the hosts are rewarded by selling a little of what they produce. We obliged as you might imagine. 

We got Chai for Layne and some green and yellow tea for me. Yellow tea incidentally is fermented by the Chinese, a process Timmy adapted by putting leaves in a vacuum bag and submerging them overnight in a sous vide water cooker overnight. If you are tempted they do ship, obviously.

The other couple from Illinois in a more conventional forty foot home with all accessories said they were interested in the farming but all they drink is iced tea - barbarians! There were teas for them too of course. 

In the morning Timmy rolled by with our tea orders, Chai for Layne and the mysterious yellow tea for me. I found it quite interesting lightly sweetened. It tastes like strong tannic green tea. Fact #6: Incidentally Timmy says the white tea that has become popular only uses the very tip of the plant and requires one hundred thousand leaves to make a pound of tea. Too fiddly even for his immense patience. I can't even taste white tea so I am not a fan.

Bees humming, birds chirping and yellow tea to hand. Rusty was off minding his tea bushes nose down and tail up. 

Eventually he too slowed down and settled to watch the world, his favorite activity.

Ed the coffee drinker came by and we exchanged thoughts about tea and travel and the hope that the virus will fade away. he has moved full time into his rig and he says they like to wander around looking at small farms and local producers all over the country as his wife grew up in a farming family. The pleasure of retirement on the road is where you find it.

Everything climbs to the apex is how I would translate the poster, I hope accurately. Slightly obscure but the French often are. 

I'm actually quite glad the boys didn't stick to conventional farming making milk or butter or something banal. Tea in Mississippi? Why not.

Teatime In Tupelo

Honey and Elvis Presley. That is what Tupelo Mississippi is known for, and even then I'm not sure how much one can say this sleepy little town in the northern part of he state can be said to be "known." the honey connection isn't and Elvis is associated with Memphis more than Tupelo. Yet this was a town worth seeing.

I will say the drive from Oxford to Tupelo was divine, on a winding wooded road that had me wondering where I'd left my Bonneville. The road dipped and twisted, a perfectly smooth ribbon of black asphalt through the trees, across fields and farms and of course eventually it dead ended into a bland wide straight four lane highway that led directly to La Quinta on the outskirts of Tupelo.

Tupelo is actually a pepperidge tree (whatever that is) and the town is apparently named for that. 35,000 people live there and the big claim to fame is that Elvis Prelsey was born here and survived a tornado that killed 240 other people.

The architecture is firmly rooted in the past, Palladian public buildings and a nod to the angelic on the front lawn seems to go down a treat in a state where constitutional law is a nuisance imposed by "big government." I also found a monument embossed with a high falutin' sentiment that made no sense to me when put into context.

The sign said Those who die for a right principle do not die in vain. Who can argue with that, no one can until...you remember the "right principle" was the right to enslave people. I wonder what Missisisppi would be like if their leaders could get with the program and join the 21st century.

There is great physical beauty in these old towns, some of it grandiose and rather poorly proportioned like the justice building shown above which proudly flies the state flag, a flag that includes brilliantly, the Stars and Bars representing the "right principle" mentioned above.

The cupola of the Lee County Courthouse suddenly looked as though I was transplanted to Florence in Italy. Elegance is a lovely thing, and honestly I wouldnt mind seeing a little bit of it on the streets of Key West.

The British and the French fought over this spot in 1763 and Americans killed Americans here in 1864 when it was called Gum Pond supposedly for the gum trees (tupelos) in the area. The civil war battle of Tupelo gave the city it's modern name. Machine Gun Kelly robbed his last bank here in 1932, an even that brings to mind the Bonnie and Clyde myth making of the era. The brick buildings look like they were here when the bank robbers were in town.

You can see Tupelo had money in the early ears of the last century, the signs were everywhere, just like this entrance to a dust catcher shop celebrating earlier glory days:

The whole Johnny Reb thing is a weird holdover that doesn't mix well with the modern preoccupation with nationalism in the face of some supposed need to fight foreign wars. Around the corner we read of the "right principle" of secession to preserve slavery and here we see appeals to patriotism that in 1864 would have won you no Tupelo friends. So why I ask myself do they keep harking back?

It was a hot muggy day when we visited, the La Quinta was new and we were greeted as though old friends, which sounds corny but was delightful. We went into town to walk around and see what was what. It's less than two hours by car meandering from Oxford so we were well in time for lunch.

Wide streets, clean sidewalks and an air of confident prosperity greeted us.

My wife had been consulting the entrails in her iPhone and TripAdvisor and Urban Spoon agreed: Tea For T'Arts. I love tea so a tearoom sounded perfect. I ended up feeling chronically underdressed as we greeted by dresses and doilies and mercifully, ample air conditioning.

Lunch was a series of sandwiches, cream cheese and pineapple, chicken salad, hot ham and Swiss cheese and so forth. It was great fun and I sucked down the China Oolong till I started to begin to feel revived. I captioned this picture in my mind as "a bull in a china shop":

The tearoom is actually a fund raising mission for local arts causes.we were there the day our tip went o the symphony so it was tea for a worthy cause. Our neighbors were two little old ladies who clearly were locals and dithered for a while over whether they wanted their usuals or were they willing to step out for a change? I sympathized with their dilemma and I silently applauded their decision to stick with their usuals. I do the same when I eat out in Key West. I think it's an affectation of age, one dithers and finally one plumps for the safe choice.

Their conversation was a revelation because in their youth they certainly had stepped outside their comfort zones, and we heard it all. The one on the left started out by admiring the jewelry of the one on the right and it turns out it was an Egyptian cartouche which she had picked up on a trip down the Nile. She quite liked Luxor too it turned out.

I asked our 'waitress' a member of the Tupelo Symphony Board in real life what people do for a living in Tupelo and it seems this little town is a hub for manufacturing and industry. People work here which in times like these comes as a bit of a change from the usual unemployment talk. I'd like to think the make a living wage but that may be a lot to ask.

We had the devil's own job finding Tupelo Honey in Tupelo, which it seems is actually a popular product from northwest Florida Tupelo Honey Facts - Tupelo Honey from Wewahitchka Florida - Smiley Apiaries which is what you get when you don't do your research. We found a delicious German bakery run by a German immigrant, and a delicious chocolate factory operated by someone who knows their chocolate and my wife finally found a jar of her honey.

I want to go back to Tupelo.

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