Sunday Drivers
Posted by Paul Woodhouse at May 13th, 2008
Well if the tooting and parping going on outside work and a couple of other street corners was anything to go by on my way home from work you’d be forgiven for thinking that Barack Obama was going to win today’s West Virginia Primary at a canter.
Although I’m not too sure whether the signs the supporters were holding up were asking drivers to “Honk for Obama” or stating that those holding them were “Honkies for Obama.”
In this racially tinged, singed or flamed campaign nothing would surprise.
But as you people wake up to blearily take in the hammering Obama is about to receive here in West Virginia, you’ll probably listen to many a talking head dismissing WV as racist, dumb or dumb and racist.
I seriously have no idea what the rest of the state is like, although it did dawn on me the other day while reading the potential blowout on offer and its reasons that I’d left one Bermuda Triangle of race relations in the UK to find myself in the American equivalent.
Although I was pretty astonished when I learned today that the largest city in West Virginia has a population of 60,000 (wiki stats alert). Bizarre.
Last weekend we travelled back down from Elyria having been to an extended family shindig and decided to drive through Salt Fork - a little state park near Cambridge, OH. And what a great hangover cure that place is. Now this will be the first and last time I ever mention being overpowered by the waft of apple blossom on the breeze, but it hung in the air like the smell of chats and candyfloss at Nelson Fair, or stale piss and disinfectant at Nelson bus station.
How I miss home….
Still, in our infinite wisdom and slightly tipsy on our sudden connection with Mother Earth, we decided to drive back the scenic route.
Now a scenic route over here is not quite the same as a scenic route round the UK. You drive on country roads round Pendle and you can easily see the nearest town or village just over the horizon; and if you can’t it’s soon upon you. Drive the back roads over here and it’s two hours before you clap eyes on a rickety old petrol pump.
America isn’t a place you ever fancy getting lost in. And the part of America where Deliverance drew its inspiration isn’t even a place you want to drive slowly through. You see, the scary part of Deliverance isn’t when everybody is having a spot of backdoor bother with the natives, but on subsequent viewings when the locals seem to be lulling them into a false sense of security by being all chummy.
The more we drove, the more odd little shacks, trailers and beat-up pickups we came across. The scenery was truly stunning, it’s beautiful round here, but Deliverance was really starting to freak me out. I was particularly worried seeming the car cigarette lighter had packed up and the mobile was dead and the gps didn’t have too long to go. As soon as that packed up we were alone - we’d need a local.
Bugger…..and I mean that literally.
As we raced against the clock hoping to find a point of remote civilization we almost careered into some girl walking along the side of the road who simply offered one of those chummy waves as we whistled past her. I could’ve sworn blind I saw a blind cousin loitering in the bushes duelling his banjo.
The mouth was now completely dry and the heart badoinging like a a bee in a drum. I was twittering and fluttering like a petrified budgie. I really needed us to find some kind of road out of nowhere as the gps woman was even telling us that power was critically low.
Then we came to a crossroads and awaited notification from our gps as to whether we needed to go left, right or forwards - there wasn’t a cat in hell’s chance we were going backwards - but not a dicky bird. Total silence.
We exchanged glances and tried to garner a sense of direction from a road sign, but not only was its wording beyond readability, what you could read wasn’t pointing anywhere.
Where the bloody nora were we. Even if we did find somebody to ask that wasn’t going to point us in the direction of their cousin’s trailer and have us for kippers, we were hardly going to find our way home if it had more than two turns.
We hadn’t seen a store, shop or anything other than sparse hints at civilization for over an hour and knew our Garmin still had an hour to go before it gave up the ghost. We also knew wavy hillbilly girl was following us up the road. One wrong move and we would be toastier than a marshmallow at a scout camp.
Then, as the panic was reaching feverish proportions, Steph noticed what looked like a possible oasis of normality among my own invented desert of dysfunction.
We drove a little further and there it was - a bloody garden center - the only store of any kind we’d seen for sixty miles. A tear welled in my eye as I sent Steph out to have a word with the locals. And before you express your disgust at my cowardice, with me and my accent they could’ve mistaken me for speaking in tongues - and we really didn’t want to be mistaken for Pentecostals.
The next thing you know, my door flung open and I was dragged over to a small greenhouse containing 13 begonias and a trailing labilia.
Which one did I prefer?
My Deliverance nightmare had suddenly taken a truly horrific twist……
