The Alabama Experience; Vineboy

No, no, no. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, no, no. No, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no. No, no, no.

No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no.

No, no, no. No, no, no. No, no, no. In the summer of 1982, I'd been in Birmingham about three years, I was seized with an idea,

that is the curse of journalists, to be seized with that idea, that I was discovering in this place, a wonderful quality of life, a terribly clumsy and pompous sounding phrase, but that's really what it was, was the quality of life. It was a terrific place to live. Here I was discovering, having come from supposedly more sophisticated places, I was discovering this wonderful place to live. And I wanted to do some kind of feature, some kind of regular thing in the paper that said, folks, this is a terrific place, let's appreciate it. They're called dog days because Sirius, the dog star, rises and sets with the sun between mid-July and September. That's what my dictionary says. I say they're called dog days because it's so hot and disgusting outside that all any self-respecting dog wants to do is lie under the porch with its tongue lulled out, and wish it could die swiftly and painlessly and go to a very cool place, preferably one with a constant breeze and lots of slippers to chew.

Dogs are smarter than people, dogs park under shade trees or porches or directly in front of an air conditioner vent. People go on vacation to places like South Florida and stand in line for hours at places like Disney. Frankly, what a lot of people think is a vacation, I think, is insane. The Disney world in Orlando, for example, posts signs advising people of how long they must wait in line to ride on a machine. Sometimes the line is an hour or more for a 90 second ride. I read about restaurants down there advising people to bring hats and cool drinks so they won't get sunburned and dehydrated while waiting in line to get into the restaurant. And the cost? One day admission is $31 plus tax. A four-day pass for a family of four is $400. And that's before the first dollar has been spent on food or logic. But I won't rant or lament or carry on about the absurdities of popular culture. I reckon the stuff I do for recreation would bore most people to death.

So we'll say as the French do, shank on, I sound good, which means you say potato, I say potato. Besides, it's too hot to rank. It's too hot for anything. So let's have an easy breezy adventure that will take us to one of the sweetest places I know. We're going to the north end of Little River Canyon on the Cherokee de Cab County line via an unusual route. Pack a lunch if you like or plan on stopping along the way, bring towels and swimwear, perhaps a long chair and a book. Also a camera. On today's trip, we will approach the canyon from the east through Center and Cedar Bluff. On US 411, three miles past Leesburg, the road splits. We'll bypass the Clarence E Chestnut Junior Bridge and stay on what is now business 411 into the center of center. Funny thing about these business routes, they're the ones that go into downtowns where all the business and congestion are supposed to be.

But most of the business got sucked out onto the bypass that was supposed to bypass the congested business area. There's a moral there somewhere, but if we think about it too long, we'll miss all of center, population 2300, seed of Cherokee County. Good sandwiches, burgers and local gossip are available at the J&J diner in downtown Cedar Bluff and they have an all you can eat, catfish fry on Friday and Saturday nights. Or you can pick up a picnic at the Pigley Wiggly as you continue on Alabama 68. After another five miles of Lake Country will come to the farm village of Galesville. Now we'll turn north, left on Alabama 35 toward Fort Payne, for about 11 miles drive across the grain of the land, rolling farmland, hay fields, mountain sides, real heartland stuff, the road winds and twists over a ridge. Then, just before the bridge that crosses the little river at the Decap County line, there's a dirt parking lot on the left, pull in and walk down the stone steps to the rock flats beneath the bridge. As the saying goes, you have arrived.

The panorama that opens before us is one of the most breathtaking in the state, where at the head of an enormous gorge that drops off to one side. A large area, perhaps three acres of rock flats stretches above the gorge. At every season, even every day, the water patterns on the rock flats are different. I have seen this spot, as it is now, during the dryness of mid-August, with a small channel of water filling little pools and dropping over the edge into the abyss. And I have seen it during wet seasons when the water races by and thunders in a vast curtain over the falls. Always different, always beautiful, always a place that beckons to me in my imagination. This is public land. It was made for you and me, as the song says. But it offers no protection from nature or human stupidity. In other words, no fences, lifeguards, safety features, mornings, comfort stations, snack bars, and so on. It's just there, with a handy parking lot and good highway access, yours to enjoy for free.

A four-day pass for a family of four is zero dollars. So be careful, don't litter, treat it nicely, and pray that nobody comes along with a bright idea to turn it into a theme park. Three routes will bring us back to Birmingham, back the way we came. Down Alabama 35 to Fort Paine and U.S. 11 or I-59, or left at the end of the bridge onto Alabama 176, the scenic route along the west rim of the canyon to Alabama 68, then west to U.S. 11 and I-59 in Collinsville. However you go, or whatever you do at the canyon head, be sure to tuck a little bit of the scenery into your imagination to pull out when summer in the city, as the song says, wears you down. I believe that if you do a journey ride, getting there is actually much more than half the fun. Unfortunately, in this day and time, the way most people get anywhere is by rather dispiriting means, either by flying, which is a form of purgatory, as far as I'm concerned, in my opinion.

Or by driving on interstates, which is even worse, interstates as I've written are kind of a tube that contain a world apart from anywhere else in the United States or even in the world. And I find that a very empty way to travel. It's efficient, sure enough, I mean you get there, but it gives you nothing. Someone had said that this ordinary little village, 10 miles west of Auburn, is the Kudzu capital of the world. So while traveling one day from Opelike to Tuskegee and search of other things, I'll draw a few miles out of my way to have a look. I figured there might be a columnon, might be a banner over Alabama 14 proclaiming the Kudzu capital of the world, and perhaps a gift shop with a quotable and photogenic proprietor selling Kudzu seedlings. As if the world needs Kudzu seedlings. Kudzu flavored taffy and Kudzu vine placements. Wrong guess.

I drove all over town and saw nary a leaf of the stuff. I did see a village, population about 350, stretched along a two mile piece of Alabama 14 on the western end of Lee County. A few pecan orchards, peach trees, a railroad track with a little swath of a park adjacent where one, if one is so inclined, may picnic at a public table under a public oak tree there to hear the birds Twitter and the roosters call. In short, it was what you might call a pleasant but unremarkable piece of East Alabama settlement. For tile, verdant, quiet, but for the odd freight train, road traveler, bird call, and the clatter of a teenager's call outside the grocery. Alas, no Kudzu capital, no story. Hey up there, Dobin let's hit the road for Tuskegee, and then I saw the church.

When you travel the country roads, you see a lot of country churches. If they were built more than 50 years ago, they usually have some small dash of ornamentation, such as fish scale shingles or rusticated brickwork. Though graceful, they are usually predictable and ordinary. So that's why this church made me say, whoa, oh, there, Dobin, I look critically at buildings for part of my living, and I've never seen a better piece of work than this low chupoka United Methodist church. It was built seven years ago for $65,000. There are big city churches that probably spend $65,000 on light sockets and sink faucets, yet it makes as bold an architectural statement as the grandest cathedral. Architect Nicholas D. Davis of Auburn took a simple a-line sanctuary design and added a European-style courtyard to the entrance. Then he put in octagonal windows and repeated the octagonal shape in the courtyard and interior details.

Dating back to early Christian or Byzantine designs, the octagon or circle symbolizes family unity. In place of a conventional steeple, he erected a narrow window, rising sharply from the pitched roof that sheds light on the altar. And the crowning touch was that he plotted the angle of the sun and found that between 11 a.m. and noon, the sun comes in the steeple window and lights up the huge cross that adorns the altar. The result is a boldly modern building, yet one that resonates with traditional forms and feelings. It is highly visible on its site, but the wood cladding keeps it modest and the steeple rises only to treat top level. Those combinations of strong presence and modesty and modernism using traditional elements are some of the toughest challenges to architects. In addition to winning a bunch of awards for the design, Davis pointed out that good designs are not only found in cities, they don't have to involve monumental and costly buildings, and country churches don't have to be boring boxes. Sorry, no Cudzu capital in Lochipoca, but this church was a more precious discovery. It is what every church should be, inviting, comforting, protective, inspiring, attractive, expressive, and enduring.

Get up, Darwin, on now to Tuskegee. We'll come back some Sabbath morning when the sun shoots through the steeple window and illuminates the cross. People love trains. They're still the romance of the rails, even Amtrak. It allows you equipment, never on time, seldom on time, bad service. It seems to take forever to get anywhere you want to go. People love it. They just love the train experience. I do, too, I think it's certainly the most civilized way to travel. People are just fascinated by trains, and I think rightly so. I could lecture at some length, but I'll spare you on how America through its public policies allowed our railroads to go right down into the privy. But whatever we have left in the way of railroads, folks love it.

Life is full of surprises. The surprise of the moment, a pleasant one, is that Amtrak's guff breeze is still running. That's a surprise, at least to me, because when Amtrak inaugurated the service nearly two years ago, I was delighted, but skeptical. For one thing, Alabamians are carloven folk. For another, few people would voluntarily spend two and a half hours to get from Birmingham to Montgomery, or seven hours to get to Mobile when it can be driven in 90 minutes and four and a half hours respectively. And for another, the service depends on a grant from the state of Alabama, and we all know what the state's finances have been like lately. So I figured the guff breeze, a passenger train between Birmingham and Montgomery, Greenville, Evergreen, Bruton, Atmore, and BAME in it, was a nice dog that wouldn't hunt. But next month, we'll make two years that this three-car train has been plattering up and down the old LNN Hummingbird group, so I'd best call it the little train that can, or at least, might be able to.

The guff breeze, technically Amtrak train number 519 and 520, is actually an extension of the Amtrak Crescent number is 19 and 20. The big train that runs daily between New York City and New Orleans. When a southbound crescent gets to Birmingham, it drops one locomotive, two coaches, and a club car. These become the guff breeze, which then totals down to Mobile. On the return trip, the breeze comes north to Birmingham and hooks up with the northbound crescent and continues on to New York. Service now is much the same as it was when the guff breeze started operating, two middle-aged coaches, and one somewhat more modern club car, which serves snacks, sandwiches, and drinks. But Amtrak has improved the timetable. It now takes just under two hours to get to Montgomery, and five hours and 45 minutes to reach Mobile, according to the timetable. I agree with the writer who said an Amtrak timetable is nothing more than a helpful suggestion.

Trains are subject to breakdowns, grade crossing collisions, bad weather, and other physical or metaphysical occurrences. Sometimes I think that if it rains in Botswana, Amtrak runs late. Which it was one day this week when I hopped the breeze to Montgomery. The southbound crescent pulled in at 12.35 pm, a mere 50 minutes late. After all the uncoupling and break-testing in Hortknot, the breeze moved out at 12.56, or 41 minutes behind the schedule. By 12.57, even before the train had cleared the platform on Mars I have new downtown, I had moved from my coach seat and was installed in the club car, which is my idea of heaven. The train shuttered and clattered over switches, hit the main CSX transportation track, just west of 14th street, and headed south. It was a pleasant uneventful trip to the capital. The train rolled past the city jail, Titusville, Grace's gap in Shannon, past forests and brush that streaked by in the bright sunlight. There's a short tunnel just below Shades Creek, then the tracks cut through Helena and Alibaster, past mountains of lime and the pits from which it is dug, lumber mills, the Alabama power company solar generating station in Shelby County, and over the intersection of two rail lines in Polira.

Nowadays railroads pass along the backside of everywhere. From the window of a train, you see the trash piles and poverty shacks and factory scrap and deep wood. It's still the old south, with a satellite dish in the front yard. Then through Jemisin and Thorzby, carved by US-31, past peach orchards and lumber mills and wood yards and embankments fresh with golden rock. After a stretch of bottom land that tells you you're near the Alabama River, the conductor announces Montgomery in five minutes. Across the river, then through a freight yard, and into downtown where the train stops at a marvelous little depot. An old grain terminal sits at the edge of Montgomery's lovely riverfront park near the foot of Lower Commerce Street.

The Montgomery Amtrak station has been built into the grain silos. It's neat. Disembarked, or an Amtrak's language, detrained at 3pm, 47 minutes behind schedule, and watched the little train trundle down the heat haze tracks toward Greenville and Point South. Mine was a refreshing trip, just long enough to remind me of the delights of train travel in Alabama. The south has always been the most fascinating region of the country, whether it's Mankin calling it the Sahara of the Bozark to the various Vs. Napols, Atturn in the south and so on, to the various traveling books about the south. The south has always been this fascinating place, you know, Florence King in her first book, Southern Ladies and Gentlemen, said that you could put up a chain link fence all the way around the south. And declare it the world's largest insane asylum. I wouldn't share that view. I would say you could put up the fence and call it the world's largest and most colorful theme park.

But the south has always had foreigners to come and pronounce upon it. And in fact, not to, certainly not to toot my own horn, but I think that some of the best commentators about the south are not native because when you're a native, you see things they become much more familiar to you. I wonder a lot if the kind of journalism that I do requires exploration. The day began with one of those good to be alive September mornings. The air was clear, cool and fresh, full of the promise of autumn. At A.H. Parker High School in the Smithfield neighborhood of Tuft Streets, Birmingham, the day began with a shooting in the park. A rescue squad and ambulance and the police were summoned and the press arrived in its usual hasty fashion.

The rescue squad would patch up the victim. The ambulance would carry him to a hospital. The police would pinch a few alleged perpetrators. And the press would tell a million people if they cared to listen that a student was shot in the parker high school parking lot. All a great metropolis would know about Parker high school was that a kid got shot in the park. I have a different story to tell about that morning at Parker high school. I saw a morning full of promise and optimism of human effort and honest achievement in the parker high school classroom of Perry L. Anderson. Anderson offers discipline to children who live without rules. He offers direction to children who haven't won. He offers motivation to children without a strong sense of purpose. He offers self-esteem to kids who feel worthless. If you've tried to guess who Anderson is and how he achieves all this stuff, you might think he's a football coach. And I admit that some of the same values Anderson teaches could come from a coach.

Discipline motivation, sense of purpose, self-worth. But these kids aren't knockin' heads. They're using their minds and voices. They come to Anderson's room to sing. For 23 years Perry Anderson has been the choral director at Parker high school. In this room apart from the din and distraction of their daily lives, these children come to learn Mozart and Haydn, Brahms and Bach. And they come to be part of something important. Sure, every school has choir practice, but these kids are different. Not because they're underprivileged, though some of them are. But because their surroundings and a culturation work against what Anderson is trying to instill. Standing up straight does not come naturally to a kid who has never been told to stand up straight. But you've got to watch your posture. You have to keep it all the time. And if you keep the real case, expand it. You won't have trouble doing that. Inunciation and articulation are not taught on black top basketball courts. Dippfung, Firmata, Day Crescendo are not commonly heard words on center street.

And you can bet your lunch. There's a whole lot of standing up straight and enunciating and articulating and talking about dip thongs in Anderson's rehearsal room. He is constantly cajoling, coaching, reminding, repeating, stressing consonants, pushing vowels. He is always on, always in charge. And he does this for five classes each day plus rehearsal before school at 7.30 a.m. and for two hours after school. So there really is no miracle here. It's just hard work day after day, year after year, inspiring kids with little inspiration to give their best. He has 175 students in his music programs, all of them voluntary. They want to sing, but Anderson believes they want to discipline challenge even more. Students give what they know you require. They will rise to the occasion, he says, noting that he has some students who only come to school because of the choir.

We talk about his challenge of trying to teach fine music in the harsh world of an inner city high school. I refuse to give up. I believe there is some hope. It's important that we save these kids who have some purpose in mind. Anderson says. So dear friends, that's my report for today. A student was shot at Parker High School one day this week. On the same day, 150 students got another shot of Perry Anderson's unique contribution to their lives. Why did I try to put forth certain ideas that I hope will provoke thought if not actual action. I hope that I don't, and maybe one does tend to go over the line a little bit on this, but I hope that I don't just stir up the mulch for the sake of stirring it to see what floats.

While the word provocative certainly is misused a lot, I do consciously think about provoking thought, not necessarily provoking temper, although I do that as well. Music We'd like to hear your questions and comments about this program. Call us at 1-800-239-5233 or write Vine Boy. The Alabama Experience Box 87,000 Tuscalusa, Alabama 35487. Music