It’s been (mostly) a beautiful day, headed east (colder) and south (warmer) to Nashville, I think we’re going to land in temperatures none too dissimilar from those we left in Belleville – but without the snow. I guess that’s a plus. Actually, with how much driving we’re doing and how I’m feeling in general – that’s a definite plus.
We’ve spent the last couple of days in the Susan’s clutches in and around Belleville, IL – and such Lovely clutches they be. We’ve gone birdwatching and music playing, we’ve gotten sun and snow and more wind than is at ALL healthy.
Sunday was spent mostly driving from our newfound friends’ house in Hot Springs, Arkansas to Belleville by way of Memphis. We’ve never been to Memphis. They’ve got a big-ass stainless steel pyramid in Memphis. That makes for two big-ass pyramids on this trip (the other was a Hard Rock Café in Myrtle Beach, SC) and of the two, this is by far the bigger ass. It rose on the horizon like only a pyramid can, rivaling every other building on the Memphis skyline – and is we came through the city it dominated our attention.
Soon – however, our attention was diverted by my old friend Meg Zachry, who I haven’t seen in possibly 14 years. It’s good to know she’s still just as vibrant as she ever was, and she looks dangerously close to having totally not aged a day – possibly due to proximity to the giant stainless steel pyramid. She walked us through her gallery of works and we oohed and ahhed over her really Lovely paintings, collages, bronze works, merry-go-round animals and rhinestone rhinoceros heads. We chased her cats and eventually went out to lunch – probably the best barbeque of the whole trip – and then felt the acute need for vegetables.
I swear: I’ve eaten more meat on this trip than I think I ever have in my entire Life. But it’s so, so, so, so very good.
After hanging out with Meg for a couple of hours we hopped back into the car and made our way back north, regretting the fact that we couldn’t pull off and watch eagles anywhere. With the sunlight waning and the miles ahead of us and the lateness of the hour, it was just time to get to stop fucking around and get to Illinois.
My old, old, old friend Meg is forever young. Her cats are as alarmed by this as anyone else is.
Monday however – we DID get to go out and look for birds! Susan new a spot up north and with nothing to do during the day, we figured this was the best use of our time. We drove up north to Alton, IL and wandered the confluence of the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers, wandered a little north, wandered a little south – and watched for birds. I’ve been happily practicing my focusing on and shooting of birds perching and flying and landing and taking off again for just such an opportunity as this and we spent a couple of hours on the banks of the rivers watching for unique beasts. We visited the dam and lock system near Alton and generally had a really beautiful day.
Me and my ladies! Unfortunately, I never quite backed away enough to show off where exactly we were (I had left the car with my BIG lens…) but the Mississippi River as it hits the Melvin Price Locks and Dam in Illinois was completely frozen over and stunning. We watched a couple of barges go through the lock and that was aamaaaazing – and then we went a bird watchin Just a random photographer who gave me definite gear-envy
After the bird watching we grabbed dinner and a nap and then headed back over the river to Saint Louis and a café that Meg had suggested : the Shameless Coffeehouse. With a focus on eroticism and being sexually comfortable, I figured this was an excellent spot to introduce Susan to – and despite my own rather conservative, shy and genteel nature even I felt swiftly at home since Monday night was games night and we were surrounded by chipper tables of people playing Cards Against Humanity, Flux and a couple of other social games, in turn surrounded by erotic art and posters celebrating naked people.
Sue was put out that it was mostly ladies on display and I felt that maybe they just needed the right donors. In any case, after some time spent ingesting their suggestive fare (Kristen had a juicy Farmer’s Daughter and there was more than a little bit of leer involved in the addition of chocolate syrup to my brownie and white foam to Sue’s latte) we made our way over to the Venice Café to play their open mic.
We haven’t been to the Venice in many a year, and though I remember having a good time there – I remembered the most-special thing about their open mic being that there happened to be a hammered dulcimer player there who’d previously ordered strings from House of Musical Traditions. I mostly wanted Kristen to see the place, because it’s SO beautiful. On the downside the garden was closed for the winter. We were interested to see if they’d make an exception for us but as the sign said, there were no exceptions. Sigh. Still – plenty to see throughout the rest of the bar – and on the UPside – the host (Miles Long) was great, the music was marvelous, and we made a good number of connections that are probably going to be really, really useful next time we come through.
We even made the acquaintance of another bad-ass acoustic duo with a lady djembe player. I think ilyAIMY and the unnamed Katie and Aaron project need to play some shows together – because it’s a really, really good match.
Unfortunately I was also reminded of how BAD I am at remembering names and faces as we had about half a dozen ilyAIMY fans come out and I found myself not placing people for several minutes – just being weirded out by how many familiar faces there were… it DID all come together and good times were had – but my brain is just notoriously slow at that stuff. I hope no-one was too offended, because I sure appreciate friendly faces in an unfamiliar town.
Betwixt the tightness of the room, the threat of bad weather and my allergies that seem to possibly becoming something more than allergies AND the fact that we’d been birdwatching all day we hightailed it a couple of hours in to the night and made our way back to the Illinois side to a late dinner and to bed to the sound of distant trains and the howling of the incoming storm.
Morning found us with a semi-relaxed departure time for Nashville, which was good, because the “one inch or less” of snow turned out to be a) substantially more and b) mostly ice. I spent a good amount of time scraping down the Weaselmobile and sweeping snow out of Susan’s carport before we were ready to depart, at which point most of the local schools had canceled or delayed their programming and I was frozen to the bone. We rolled out and have been making our way Southeast ever since.
We’re about half an hour out of Nashville now, and though there’s no snow on the ground it’s about 26 degrees and skies are getting lower and lower and greyer and greyer and the forecast can’t seem to be able to make up its mind as to whether or not the weather is going to hold. We’ve driven through a couple of flakes here and there… if I hadn’t told plenty of people that we were planning on hitting Douglas Corner tonight I might just declare a stay-in-night…
Miles Long, host of the Venice Cafe, is a charming and hospitable man – and talented to boot. Really enjoyed his country drawl. One of the performers at the Venice Cafe Open Mic in Saint Louis, MO. Kristen gets dragged into a pickup band at the Venice Cafe. Yup. There’s always room for… well… you know. Our friend Mike popped in with a dozen or so handmade shakers to make his own chaos at the Venice Cafe Open Mic in Saint Louis, MO… he handed me a shaker. I strapped a jingle strap on him. It was the right thing to do. generally speaking I feel I host a pretty good open mic. But the Venice’s open mic LIST is definitely MUCH prettier!
Tower of Sauron? Or just the observation tower for the Mississippi confluence? Either way it was closed so we couldn’t go check it out. We were looking for a good place to go see birds since Sue had insisted that the Bald Eagles were swarming the ice floes et al…
Whut? Shooting more birds including swans and fish-eating raptors! (I didn’t even notice the fish till I was looking through pics after-the-fact) Wandering the Mississippi looking for eagles – we found pelicans, and I enjoyed watching the pelicans catch fish, but no-one’s ever particularly impressed with pelicans. eventually we heard rumour of eagles down that-a-way… and sure enough, out on the edge of what we could see…. So! Finally I spotted a Bald Eagle sitting out on the ice as proud as can be! Kristen and I WIN! That’s about as close as I was aable to get – and actually it’s only a couple of feet closer than that very first picture was taken, thanks to the magic of a 300mm lens. Still – there it is! A Bald Eagle! … sort of swarming an ice floe! He and his mate vanished shortly after I shot this. This is Kristen’s “yup, I saw some eagles!” sassy walk! After we’d seen the locks and dam we decided to continue on up the road into Alton, IL. Shortly into the trip we’d run across THIS monster. Kristen spoke up and said “oh, the Piasa Bird!!” And Susan was like: “Oh! I’d forgotten about the Piasa Bird!” I was kind of dumbfounded. He was on a billboard with a paragraph-long version of what’s purported to be a Native American store about the above beast. The Native Americans are generally purported to be one of the few cultures NOT to have any “dragon” myths, but this “bird that devours men” comes pretty close. The “real” Piasaw Bird is still not the REAL Piasaw Bird. Also the word “Piasaw” apparently DOESN’T mean “bird that devours men”. That’s a modernized part of the myth. It means “little dwarves” or something like that. Above is the current illustration on the bluffs of Alston, an Anglicized / illuminated version of the much more Native American-styled painting that stood in the area for 5 or 600 years before it was quarried away for the limestone it was painted on. Just as we were about to head home I spotted a speck in the skies of Alston!!! The eagle hunt continues! And I finally got a couple of good shots! Far from being the bird that devours men, we must’ve looked like little dwarves from the vantage point of OUR Piasaw bird!
