Rev. Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A., M.Div.

By The Erudite Redneck

Three years ago today, I jerked awake with the kind of fleeting panic that lets you know immediately that something is not right. Nothing, in fact, was right:

Wrong pillow, wrong bed, wrong room, wrong house, wrong town, wrong state. Wrong angle of the sun through a wrongly oriented bedroom window. Wrong voices floating in from downstairs. I jumped up. Wrong floor. That’s hardwood down there, not carpet.

This was not home, and it was not the hotel.

In an instant, the situation I was in came back to me, where I was, where I had been and where I intended to go: home. The attacks of the previous day jerked a whole country out of complacency. They jerked me out of the relative comfort of a decently interesting conference in what is just about my favorite city in the world: Washington, D.C.

My benefactor, the one to whom all those wrong things belonged, in Maryland just outside Washington, was heading back to his office in D.C. After a quick shower and uncomfortable thanks to his wife, I hitched a ride with him to a mall in Kensington, Md., to wait for yet another rescuer, my sister-in-law, who was headed east from Lebanon, Ohio.

By this time of day, about 10 a.m., I had been sitting stiffly at a small table in a coffee shop for the first of what would drag on for eight hours. The goal: to get back to Oklahoma, with airports locked down and no rental cars to be had. Steps 1 and 2: Hurry up, and wait.

There was no TV in the coffee shop. I don’t remember whether I looked at a newspaper or not. I was in a kind of mild shock. With a big suitcase and a brief case to keep up with, neither with wheels, I wasn’t able to go out into the mall, not without lugging the stuff with me.

Besides, there is a rule of life I picked up somewhere that has served me well: If you don’t know what to do, then do nothing – the idea being that waiting for clarity is usually better than making a hasty decision that is no more than a shot in the dark. So, keeping my luggage close, I sat.

And read. My mother-in-law had given me a copy of Rick Bragg’s then-new book, “Ava’s Man,” and I had it with me. I read it from cover to cover, losing myself in his wonderful writing, and the wonderful subject, which is the kind only he can illuminate.

Bragg is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist. He once worked at the New York Times. But he’s from Possum Trot, Ala. (that is a real place, not some publicist’s idea of a joke) – and he ain’t ashamed of it, is damn proud of it in fact.

That’s what imbues him with the kind of empathy that lets him sit and just visit with folks, and soak the life and truth and wisdom and humanity from them. The fact that he is a Southerner and gifted bull-shitter besides allows him to then write words that show, tell, instruct and edify readers all at once. He is someone whose abilities I approach only at my very, very best.

Here’s an example, just a tiny snippet: “God don't tiptoe into a Congregational Holiness Church. He bangs down the door and joins right in.” (Disclosure: I pilfered that and a few quotes that follow from reviews on-line; I can’t find “Ava’s Man” in the mounds of 19th-century history that has taken over my office).

“Ava’s Man” is a biography, with full familial, regional and historical context, of Bragg’s mama’s daddy, Charlie Bundrum. He died in ’58, the year before Bragg was born. Bragg still managed to capture his image, then paint a portrait that made me think I’d met the man myself.

"He was a tall, bone-thin man who worked with nails in his teeth and a roofing hatchet in a fist as hard as Augusta brick, who inspired backwoods legend and the kind of loyalty that still makes old men dip their heads respectfully when they say his name," Bragg wrote.

The grandpa Bragg never knew, and had to reconstruct for himself, and us, was an iconic figure who might’ve taken offense at such a label, if he thought it meant somebody thought he was gettin’ above his raising. He was a Southern man of Southern honor, poor as the red dirt of Alabama. He was a man bad to drink but good at his word, and somewhat of a gourmand (another word that might piss him off) of Southern ’shine: “He never sold a sip that he did not test with his own liver.”

I can think of no type of man more deserving of my admiration than Charlie Bundrum, and I know of no writer I admire more than Rick Bragg – and both allowed me to lose myself in another time and place, when real time, Sept. 12, 2001, and the place, near Washington, D.C., were so unnerving.

I just kept my head down and my mind and heart buried in that book – until it was done. I finished it just before my sister-in-law showed up.

She saw me before I saw her. My wife told me just this week, as I was remembering these days, that her sister thought I looked small and alone. Yes. But Bragg, fellow Southerner, fellow Erudite Redneck, took me away, and kept me as close to home, which to me means a particular kind of people and a particular kind of place, as words on pages ever can.

At around 4 p.m., I shifted from wait directly into hurry-up. Bags toted to the car, car gassed up and pointed west, we headed to Ohio. The trip is a blur, except, oddly, for a stop somewhere in Pennsylvania at a Cracker Barrel restaurant. I remember because I ordered a steak because I’d never known of a Cracker Barrel to have steak on the menu. Odd what you remember.

The Cracker Barrel itself was a continuation of the Rick Bragg-workin’-on-gettin’-home theme. The restaurants, which started in Tennessee, are mild, friendly caricatures of some of the best of Southern kitsch and eatin’.

But what really helped was seein’ my sis-in-law, who brought an air of “home” with her just by bein’ her. She is a Texas gal. She took her mission to “rescue” me seriously, and in her unreserved, hail-gal-well-met sort of way, she did more to settle me down than anyone else could’ve besides my wife or mama.

We pulled up to her house at about 1 a.m., me with no real worries -- no energy to do much else but collapse on another borrowed bed. The next day was to start with another hitched ride, to Kentucky, a rental car with my name on it and another semi-adventurous leg of a long trip home.

END