Last night I was thinking about last Memorial Day, trying to remember where I spent it. And then I did. It was a good memory and I thought I'd share it with y'all.
In our continuing quest to find dog-friendly recreation spots, R & I took off in search of a way to reach a river sandbar that didn't require a boat to get there. A very nice redneck buying tomatoes at a roadside stand gave us directions to "a big ole san-bar, rat down th’road overin Mississippi aways" and even drew us a little map of how to get there on the back of a Hooters napkin he took from his truck.
We found the spot with little difficulty and pulled in to find a parking lot slap full of pickup trucks. Evidently in this neck of the woods gun racks are required to be mounted in the back window of every single pickup truck. Also mandatory are truck adornments of rebel flags: real rebel flags, car tags bearing rebel flags, bumper stickers of rebel flags. As we made our way down to the river we also saw tattoos of rebel flags and rebel flags on ball caps and t-shirts. I was starting to get skeered (that’s how they say it in Mississippi) but R assured me it would be an adventure. (Remember how "Deliverance" was supposed to be an "adventure"?)
Vince Gill and Shelby Lynn were blaring on every radio and the delicious smell of meat on the bar-b-que grills wafted over the white sand bar - which was indeed beautiful, at least the part of it you could see between the masses. Suntanned, skinny shirtless tattooed rednecks, long hair blowing out from their ball caps ("The South WILL RISE AGAIN!"), cigarettes and other, uh, rolled tobacco products dangled from their mouths covered up the beach and each one had an ice chest the size of a footlocker beside them for rapid access.
The dogs were scouting out a spot for us but kept getting distracted by all the good ole boys wanting to pet them and such and I became reassured the locals were not dangerous after all.
There was every kind of watercraft imaginable thick in the water, fuel fumes heavy in the wake and screaming younguns splashing in the shallow water having a grand old time. A little piece of heaven, right there in the boondocks.
Throughout the day we met a passle of kind folks who wanted to share their grilled meat (a lot of which I couldn't recognize as meat I've eaten before and was afraid to ask what exactly it was) and swap life stories. Our dogs made new friends, swam in the river and shared the shade of makeshift shade tents (bedsheets propped up on fishing poles). I've rarely seen such a happy bunch, reaching out to strangers, pulling us in to their great big river family - the same folks there every single weekend of the summer, just like their kinfolk before them for decades past.
Later in the afternoon, after being invited back the next weekend for Jaybird's annual birthday bash ("gonna smoke us a great big-ole pig!"), we loaded up the van and headed for home, happy we live in the South - a place where I'm continually surprised to find people you think you have absolutely nothing in common with but sometimes do...at least for a day.
-frolix