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

By The Erudite Redneck

Three years ago today, I was up early, just five hours after crashing in a borrowed bed at 1 a.m., dressed, and, before I knew it, barreling south down a highway through the maw of Cincinnati’s Thursday-morning work traffic, which seemed only slightly altered, if at all, by the terrorist attacks two days earlier.

My brother-in-law was driving, hauling me to an airport and a rental car, across the Ohio River in Kentucky. Before long, keys in hand, I faced a decision, which wasn’t that tough of a call at all. How to get home?

Head home, that’s how — and this is something even my Texan wife still doesn’t understand.

Not west through southern Indiana, southern Illinois, to St. Louis and down to Tulsa and over to Oklahoma City, which would have been the shortest route.

No, to home, not just to the house. To my beloved Southland.

So, first, a jag southwest to Louisville, Ky., where a Wal-Mart yielded cheap Kentucky Wildcat T-shirts and a few other items my unexpected road trip left me needing.

Then, south on Interstate 65 toward Nashville, where, just as downtown peeked over the horizon, the simultaneous appearance of a military cargo plane in the otherwise still-planeless sky, and the radio announcement of the evacuation of downtown because of a suspicious package on the steps of the federal courthouse, unnerved me some.

In Nashville, I pulled onto a highway that let me play a little mental trick that put me closer to the house: Interstate 40, which, farther west, splices the state of Oklahoma north and south.

I-40 passes within a still night’s shouting distance from where I grew up. Back then, in the wee hours, I could hear the big rigs screaming on the highway, competing with the rhythmic sounds of the freight trains rattling the rails a half-mile in the other direction at the back of our pasture.

I-40 is a kind of driveway to Mama’s real driveway off a state highway in eastern Oklahoma, and it’s a kind of service road to the Oklahoma City area, where I now live.

I know the road — or feel like I do, even as far away as Knoxville, Tenn. Once, when I imagined myself going to college at the University of Tennessee, I told myself how to get there: "Get on I-40, go a pretty good ways and turn left." So, in Nashville, I could think: "To get to Mama’s, just go a ways west, and turn right. To get home, go a little ways more, and go right again."

My wife claims the only reason I headed south from Cincinnati to Nashville instead of west to St. Louis was so I could see my mama. There is some truth to that, but just a little. I wanted — needed — to be back where people think like me and sound like me, and that ain’t Indiana, Illinois and most of Missouri. Kentucky, Tennessee and Arkansas — that’s home in a way the Midwest will never, ever be.

So, three years ago today, right about now, I was on Interstate 40, already "home" in the broad sense — back in the South — headed west out of Nashville with Memphis dead ahead. One vision danced in my head: an exit, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River, with both a liquor store and a motel.

It’s the same exit you take to get to the greyhound track at West Memphis, Ark. After a quick stop on one side of the interstate, at the store, for a pint of George Dickel whiskey, I scooted under the highway to a random, plain-Jane motel on the other side.

Got a room. Toted my bags in. Called my wife. (First real chance all day — I didn’t carry a cell phone then). Grabbed the ice bucket, headed to the end of the hall to fill it and came back. I grabbed a motel glass and mixed some Dickel with the only thing anyone should ever mix with it: some ice cubes. I turned on the TV, and sat, staring, soaking it in, for an hour or so, until all that was left of that Dickel was a couple of fingers in the bottom of the bottle.

Damn, that whiskey was good. It helped washed down the images on the TV, from New York and the Pentagon, which I had not been able to see since late the morning of the 11th. The news let me take the first little steps back to a connection with the rest of the world.

The radio news in the car all day was eerie. It is extremely rare to get news first from a radio nowadays. ABC Radio and CBS Radio served me well, but getting world-changing news that way was a throwback to Edgar R. Murrow and media history class in college. The medium itself colored the message a little — made it seem even scarier that it was, if that’s possible.

I love radio news. But I’m 40: I was raised on TV news. And on Sept. 13, 2001, I needed a TV news fix.

And, I freely and unabashedly admit that I needed that whiskey. Before trudging down to the motel bar for a catfish plate and a couple of beers before bed, I wrote the location, date and circumstances of my situation on the back label of that bottle of Dickel, which is now on a shelf in my home office. It says: "Sept. 13, 2001 West Memphis, Arkansas en route from Washington, D.C., and Sept. 11 -- '9-11' "

That little bit of whiskey remains as a redneck memorial to the next-to-last leg of a long, drawn-out homecoming the week the world stopped turning.

END