I woke up and let B sleep in a little since he’d been up late the night before. We got downstairs and checked out, and I was immediately shuttled across the street to Huddle House for Bitch Prevention. See, if I don’t have food and coffee pretty soon after waking up, I turn into an ill, miserable human being. B knows this, so he always is sure to get me food or coffee, even when I can’t vocalize these decisions (I don’t talk within an hour of waking if I can avoid it).

This was very exciting for me, as I’d never been to a Huddle House before. When we got in, I was sent 15 years back in time. Old men in trucker hats sat at the bar, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes — inside! It was a quite a slide into the past. I sat there and watched them, remembering being in similar places back home as a kid and teenager and watching men like them smoke and drink coffee and do the male version of gossiping. Then, my vision was ruined.

A ringing noise erupted, and one of these men pulled out a cellphone and began talking on it.

We now return to 2011, already in progress. Luckily, 2011 had lots of hot sauce for my breakfast and some pretty dang good diner coffee.

After breakfast, we headed toward Oxford. I began to get excited, and the whole prospect of the trip and of seeing Faulkner’s home and grave became very surreal. Part of me expected the trip not to happen, that I’d end up working all summer or something would rear its head. Plus, as I have stated, I haven’t been much of a traveler. I wanted to do these things, but for whatever reason — usually work or money related — I didn’t. It has been hard for me to believe that would change.

We had a little 

trouble finding the house, but this let us get a nice driving tour of Ole Miss, which has quite a beautiful campus. This was our first campus of the trip, as we would see quite a few more. Finally, we got to Rowan Oak and parked in the shadow of trees and made our way toward the house.

The house was much bigger than I had imagined from the outside, but once inside it seemed about right. For some reason, I couldn’t open the door, but B got in and we gave the person on duty (a grad student, I assume, with a copy of Oxford American, natch — I would have killed for such a job in grad school) our $5 admission fee. I let B take the pictures since I’m such an awful photographer.

The house was really lovely. The first room we came to held Faulkner’s custom bookcases which had special compartments at the bottom for hiding his shotgun shells. The closet under the stairs, which I’m quite sure I wasn’t supposed to look in, housed a grinning jack o’lantern that felt like an inside joke. It made me want to come back in autumn.

I loved seeing the walls of his study, written on, and the kitchen. I also got a big kick out of the fact that his wife installed air conditioning right after his funeral, as he had always objected to it.

Being there was a strangely overwhelming and emotional experience, one that is extraordinarily hard to explain. I suppose that after years of reading about and thinking about him and trying to piece so much together, the surreal nature of the visit was to be expected. I don’t have a lot to say about it because it was something that felt like a religious experience, and is so big and so personal and unusual that I truly can’t put it into proper words to describe it or explain it.

Outside, the grounds were beautiful and B sat on a bench while I wandered, taking it all in. I’d seen everything, but it was still a bit hard to leave. We stopped for some photo ops on the porch and headed downtown to the circle to see the soldier and to find the cemetery.

Seeing the soldier I’d read about was so odd, and then when we got to the cemetery we couldn’t find the stone at first. I knew what it looked like from pictures, and it seemed like it would be hard to miss. Turns out, we’d driven right by the sign marking his grave and once found, it directed us straight to his resting place.

No one else was there but us. There were bottlecaps and a die on the stone. We took pictures of me with the stone. I almost stepped on Malcom getting up there, and I wonder where the rest of his family is buried since it’s just him behind William and Estelle, and an empty plot next to him. I ran to the car and got one of my battered copies of Absalom, Absalom!  to bless.

Again, it was hard to leave, but there was no reason to stay. I said a brief goodbye to him and trotted back to the Tahoe behind B, and we were off again, to drive through Mississippi, across Louisiana, with hope of arriving in Lake Charles to gamble.

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I do not mean to offend anyone who loves Mississippi, but once we got out of Oxford, Mississippi went south in more ways than one.

I had always looked forward to passing through Jackson due to my love for the Carter/Cash song of the same name and my adoration of the Sweet Potato Queens.

We stopped for lunch and couldn’t get service at two different places that were open. No one would come to windows, even when we walked to the counter at the establishments. I also discovered that the more emphatically clean restrooms were advertised, the more atrocious and unbearable they were in reality.

We decided the best thing to do was to drive like hell and get out of Mississippi as quickly as possible.

Crossing the Mississippi river was fun, but the flooding we saw was less so. The river wants to change course, and sadly for people who have built their lives there, eventually the river will go where the river wants to go. Nature and the universe win, eventually.

By the time we got to Lake Charles, it was clear that Mr. B was fading and gambling would probably not be an option. By the time we drove around the city and saw the devastation left from previous hurricanes, I wasn’t feeling much up to it myself. We checked around at hotels and the best affordable one we found was a Microtel.

I stayed in a Microtel ten, err, 12 years ago and found it rather nice. This particular one had smoked mirrors on the walls of our room (!) and I discovered after opening the fridge that it had not been plugged in in quite some time. Eeeeeeewwwwwwww. However, the sheets were clean, the bed was comfy, and we found a Mexican restaurant around the way. It was a local place with lots of character. My food and beer were good, but Buck was wanting some food across the Texas border, so he wasn’t as enthralled as I was. We then went to the CVS and bought liquor. Buying liquor in regular stores was novelty that never wore off for me for the duration of our trip.

I slept hard, and soon we were on our way to get our first bite of chicken fried steak.