Diary Day – Friday, October 17, 2008: (so good, I told it twice)

I’d never been to Rolling Fork before. Wasn’t sure one could visit a place that was, for all intents and purposes, bent on projecting an image of being in constant motion. At least to those who aren’t from the area.

 

But, tonight I found myself squarely in the heart of this almost-ghost of a town…the birthplace of Muddy Waters, or so said every third building out of the three buildings that made up the town square…well, it’s more accurate, I suppose, to say the town rhombus…I should clarify…see, there’s a small creek, Deer Creek, that runs somewhat through the middle of it…somewhat because it curves to the side of the left half of downtown. On the right half, the creek has dried entirely up…so much so that it looks more like a rather well-kept ditch, if a bit weedy, than it does the forefather of a once, arguably active, creek. I was tempted to walk down the side of the bank and across the dry patches just to see how satisfying it would be to say I’d walked across a creek. Of course, by the time I’d retell this story, it would have become a river, or at least a stream with a rocky embankment. In truth, it was simply intoxicating to think I’d outlived an actual creek, however raging it may have once been.

 

I know, that makes it sound like I was bored, but believe me, I was far from it. I thoroughly enjoyed the tour…short as it was, across this tiny village…I mean, it’s hardly large enough to be a town and slightly shy of being the world’s largest trucker plaza, so I’m calling it a village.

 

But, listen, hear me out: it has charm. By the largest, tiny teacupfuls.

 

Surrounded entirely by perfectly square ponds of catfish on one side, and endless rows of soybeans and cotton and fields of unidentifiable plants that resembled large felt tip pens that were somehow both a magic wand and a Swiffer insert, Rolling Fork is also home to the Bottetree Inn…a place that I must now always be in constant contact with so that I may know who is staying here and when they leave, so that I might be able to return the very next second it becomes vacant, without delay or cumbersome obstacle. It’s a house, the Bottletree, I mean; it’s an honest-to-the-Sweet-Lord-Jesus tiny bungalow…can you believe that? It’s like you’ve fallen into a psychedelic, original-art-only Nancy Drew mystery…and Ned’s out back, firing up the red grill, and Bess and George are in the Dutch swing with that random cat that jumped over the privacy fence and killed a wounded moth that you’d swatted out while you were at the patio table responding to email and it scared you and you accidentally passed gas…whatever, the point is…I may have to move to this very tiny bungalow and live out the rest of my natural life.

 

The Bottletree Bed and Breakfast is so perfect it hurts, from your silly bone to your appendix to the vertigo it gave me in my groin…have you ever had that? That tingling feeling that first comes to you when you’re in third grade and the bell rings and you’re still on the playground, the monkey bars, say, and you realize you’re going to be late to class and you’ve never been late to class before? Yeah. It’s that wonderful.

 

The best part though…was the walk we took earlier this evening to the Highway 61 Diner…also equally artistic in concept and design (I’ll have to tell you about Teal’s Onward Cafe another time but it involves Teddy Roosevelt, like about 1000% of the story does, no lie, right down the sketches of bears on the walls), I digress, the Highway 61 Diner, still has its original printing press completely intact in the back dining room, remembering happier days, perhaps, of when it printed all six pages of the local newspaper by itself, in one hour.

 

Now, though, the paper’s a nine pager, is printed elsewhere, probably not in the village, and requires a whole afternoon, I’m sure, to print and read and recycle, but that’s all right…more time to drink your sweet tea and consider new ways to fry catfish.

It was this diner we were walking to when we were faced with a small dilemma: how to cross the street. Small thought Rolling Fork is, when you least expect it, believe me I know, there rises from the creek bed a dangerous, onlinear three and a half-way stop. We were, as far as I could tell, in the middle of this driving hazard and crossing the street was the only option.  There were however several ways to ask the question of how to cross the street. It was suggested we head toward the sidewalk, on the opposite side. We would follow it into town. And no sooner had we crossed the highway, amid Chryslers and eighteen-wheelers and bread trucks and three motorcycles, and started along the sidewalk than it ended.

 

Dead smack into the dirt.

 

Not even a hint of the rest of the sidewalk…it was as if there’d never been a rest of the sidewalk. And somehow that was a beautiful thing to discover. It seemed the sidewalk had begun and ended right there, under a fading pecan tree that hung limply over an even sadder Deer Creek. How could you not sigh.

 

The pun, of course, then, was made that “We knew where the sidewalk ended.”

We’d found it…by accident, perhaps, but all the same: we found it. We even took a picture. The pun was then roundly appreciated, as it was a digital camera and we were able to instantly look at the picture again and recall the three seconds before when we’d taken the picture.

 

It encouraged us, it fueled our fancy, and so we set our minds out to make the most of this Rolling Fork, and have ourselves one Shel of a good time, I offered this part of the pun.  It got a small laugh, but still kept our focus. We weren’t leaving Rolling Fork until every moment could be considered a good time.

 

And, as a matter of fact, every moment was.