Covid killed Todd Yannayon in September. He was 59 years old. I stopped to take pictures of his abandoned store and Gina came out of her trailer. She lives alone across the Trail of Tears from the store with dogs and chickens. She lived in that trailer with Todd for 14 years. He was her fiancé.
She gave me a copy of Todd’s funeral program. It includes a picture of Todd on the motorcycle they rode together. She misses the riding. The program includes her as “girlfriend” in a list of kids, sibs, steps and in-laws. It includes a page dedicated to a poem that Todd wrote when he was in high school. Gina’s grief sits between two comas.
The store includes five or six ancient wooden buildings deteriorating rapidly. She has asked his sons to help, they’re in their thirties and living their lives. It’s theirs, not hers, and they don’t have time but she lives across the road.
There is barely noticeable concrete bridge that crosses a tiny stream just down the hill from the store. Gina lobbied the state and the bridge is now the Vincent “Todd” Yannahon Memorial Bridge.
It was her willingness to be vulnerable with a stranger, her gentleness with the dogs, her overwhelming loneliness that make Gina such a wonderful subject to write about. She deserves better words than mine.
Following the Indian Removal Act of 1830, a group of Indian nations consisting of the Cherokee, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, the Muscogee and the Seminole (the “five civilized tribes”) were forcibly relocated from their ancestral homes in the southeastern United States to areas west of the Mississippi by the United States government. Along the way, thousands died of exposure, disease and starvation. I rode parts of the Trail of Tears.
Two nights ago, I stayed at Jackson’s Trace motel in Sylacauga, Alabama. In the morning, Alexander from two doors down told me he had chest pain and that he’d had open heart surgery, he yanked down the neck of his t-shirt to show me the scar. The shirt was stained and already so stretched it didn’t take much yanking. He said his house had burned down and his car had been vandalized and that he needed to meet with the judge. Cornelius, another neighbor, was born and raised in Sylacauga and wanted to talk about the Revival. He’s unemployed looking for a job.
I stopped at Heart of Dixie Harley Davidson in Pelham, Alabama to pick up a quart of oil. They have at least one black customer.
Heart of Dixie Harley Davidson
White guy in golf shirt, Bermuda shorts, flip flops in a parking lot asks about The Revival and me. I said I was here to talk with people I might not agree with, to try to break through the media filter. He said, “I’m with you. I watch Tucker every night”. He was on his way to the waterpark with his wife.
I motored past a roadside stand selling jellies and pickles and turned around and went back. I got some blueberry jelly for Jane and some sweet pickles for me. Jayde was a victim of sex trafficking by men in the Marine Corps and unable to escape. Her mother hadn’t believed her. She’s 36 and has been in the program for two months. She talked for several minutes.
City of Lights Dream Center is a 12-month support program for drug rehab, victims of domestic violence, poverty and the like. They asked me to write about them. Photo left to right: Jordyn, Jayde, Kim, all in the program. The jam and pickles were twelve bucks, I gave them a twenty and told them to keep the change.
I chatted with Hehe last night at the Redwood Inn while I was doing my laundry. She’s fourteen going into her sophomore year. Her parents are from Mumbai and own the motel. She’d never been to India and wanted to hear about it, wanted to know if I’d liked it. I told her that Jane and I were engaged at the Taj Mahal. Hehe has three sisters, two are in college. It looks like Grandma lives here, too.
In the Army, Billy T was a friend and roommate. He was from Chattanooga. I thought I’d try to look him up.
In Leeds, not too far from Birmingham, Vicky owns a cafe called Laney’s. Her daughters, Sharon and Laney, do the managing and cooking, Sharon’s daughter, Lillian, makes the biscuits. Hot and buttery and crispy brown on the outside, served with pepper gravy, those biscuits are so worth the sore butt of getting there.
They were sitting at a table near the coffee pot and when I filled my cup and they asked about my trip; I told them I was wandering the south talking politics with people I might disagree with.
Laney told a story about a cop escorting her out of a local dirt track car racing event for being overly affectionate with her girlfriend. She told it like it was a family story she’d told many times. Her mother and sister laughed with her as she told it.
I parked the Revival and walked the streets of Marion. In the drugstore, the girl behind the cash register said hello. I said my wife worked in a drugstore when she was in high school and we got to talking. She’d graduated in May and is going into the Air Force in the fall. I told her that I’d joined the army after high school.
There’s a fine line between curious and creep. Two old ladies approached the register. Rather than skulk around while they paid, I told her to take care and we bumped fists, enlistee and vet, and I got back on the bike.
Two or three miles down the road from Marion, I stopped to talk to TJ sitting on his horse, Red. TJ lives on a farm down the red clay road from where I pulled over. He lives with his folks raising cows and sheep and growing melons. He’s ridden bulls in the rodeo, just a couple of times, and sometimes races Red. Red’s a fast horse. TJ graduated in May, he’s thinking about welding school in the fall, but sounded tentative. I told him about the girl at the drug store. She was a classmate.
I pulled off the road and down a little track under a bridge to pee. There was pickup parked there. Twelve years ago, Cleveland retired from his job in Cleveland, he’d been a mold maker in a foundry. He grew up near Greensboro and now he’s home, fishing for catfish. His daughters and grandchildren are coming from Ohio to celebrate his seventy-fifth birthday on Tuesday. He already had two nice fish in the bucket. I didn’t ask him how he came to be called Cleveland.
Chris woke me up this morning at 6:00 when he started his truck just outside my window. It’s a diesel flatbed and damn it’s loud. Chris’ company is CH Mechanical out of south Georgia. They’re moving a veneer drier from Camden to Greenville, they’ll load the last semi this morning. Chris has horses and a wife in Georgia. He talked a lot about the horses. And about a broken neck he got in ‘95 that partially disabled his right arm. After the holiday, he and his crew will spend another six weeks living in motel while they put the drier back together. When I talked to him last night, Chris was slurring his words, lean-on-the door jamb drunk.
Yesterday morning at Waffle House, Inez was my waitress. I told her I liked her name, she smiled and told me it was her grandmother’s name. She had a gold tooth.
Once in a while, when the road is good and the air temperature and humidity and the thrum of intake, ignition and exhaust are just so, motorcycling creates its own ethereality. Yesterday was like that.
Last night I walked from my motel down the hill to the Chevron station and bought a can of Corona. I handed the kid at the counter some bills and change and he noticed that one of my coins wasn’t a quarter, it wasn’t a US coin. He offered me a quarter for it. I told him that it’s probably worth fifty cents some place, but he could have it for a quarter. He’s gotten a lot of wheat pennies and a couple of silver certificate dollars over the years. The beer was cold.
