Travels with Augie

"Hey! Mary Anne! Look! Any place with that name, we gotta try it," I said as we passed the 'Harlequin Heavenly Honkin' Hog Barbecue, Billiards & Brews' sign while searching for the Okefenokee Swamp Park in southeast Georgia. I had tried a short cut. Now we were lost and on a rural blacktop road making good time to who knows where.

Cars crowded the fading, yellow cinder block buildings' gravel parking lot, and from the speakers mounted on the sides of the building, the Eagles blared, "Standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona...."

Walking in, we skidded on the peanut shells scattered amid the brown globs of crusted barbecue sauce, dried droplets of ketchup and mustard, shriveled pinto beans, wilted lettuce and sundry unidentifiable mashed and crushed food brushed from the lackadaisically bused tables onto the avocado-green, cracked and buckled linoleum floor.

Chicken wire caged the corner stage. Anytime you eat at a place with pool tables, PBR, Old Milwaukee, and Miller Lite on special for a dollar and chicken wire across the stage, you can be sure you won't hear too many Clay Aiken wannabes but a whole lot of Kellie Pickler ones. And the revelers will be a little rowdy, a little ribald and a little randy.

On the wall by our table, hung a flyer printed on pink paper saying a born again burglar, now a Harley-Davidson circuit riding preacher, would be at Open Arms Inclusive Kirk services next week, and for a $20.00 love offering he would bless your hog. The flyer had a fuzzy picture of him astride his hog with a nimbus of long, unruly gray hair flaring about his head, and he was dressed in black: jeans, t-shirt, leather jacket and boots.

Our comely server tottered and swayed and clacked over in matching red, sling-back stiletto heels, tank top and stretched low-rider jeans highlighting a callipygian rift. "Welcome," she said in a voice as soft and sweet as a mother's kiss. "Ya'll need a menu?"

"The food's ain't eatable and the coffee ain't much better. But she surely does makes up for it!" smirked the wizened geezer at the next table as she clattered away. The trio of look-likes with him bobbed their heads, chortled and walloped the table.

At another table, a frumpy, tangle-haired woman cussing like a thum-bashed carpenter sniveled in her Miller Lite. "Men!" she said, glaring at the chortling group. "Can ya believe it? He's done gone and dumped me for that bulimic, sassy, little tart. And she's cheaper'n a six-pack of Schlitz." She glowered at her gaggle of friends, who all nodded and slurped their beers in sisterhood sympathy. "I tell you, her and him was a sitting so close together, you couldn't ah poured kerosene tween them. I'd like to sic my dogs on em, I would," she keened. "I'm just plain heart sore. That's just what I am. Just plain heart sore. All my dreams done gone a glimmering."

"Essie, stop acting so pitiful! Besides, you got Shih Tzus," slurred the bejeweled, attractive woman of indeterminate age with alluring, sapphire eyes and beautifully coiffed blond hair stippled with steel gray strands. "Get over it. Earl's sorry. And he don't got no couth neither." Leaning back, she guzzled her PBR, then gave a full-throated belch. "He's so full of hot air, he could blow up an onion sack. Yore well shed of him, I'd say."

"Well, maybe. But ya'll he's all I got. And it really truly hurts. Him dumping me for that LLD." Seeing the puzzled looks on their faces, she said, "Long legged devil."

When our food arrived, I agreed with the cackling and chattering pheromone-crazed geezers seated next to keening Essie's table. The meal was a paean to grease. The barbecue wallowed in a greasy brown sludge. The stewed apples oozed grease. The soft rolls sagged under hunks of slowly melting margarine. Even the sliced tomatoes and lettuce seeped grease. And the iced tea was served in a grease-slicked brown plastic glasses.

But when you frequent the off-traveled road, eschew chains, whether restaurants or motels, and eat or stay at small out-of-the-way places, you expect and treasure the unexpected for they season any road trip. You never know what will happen.

Such as the restaurant in downtown Asheville, NC advertising organic hot dogs. We entered, I'm always searching for the memorable hot dogs of my boisterous, hedonistic (I wish), younger days, like the ones you could find in small, claustrophobic hole-in-the-wall hot dog stands on Assembly Street in Columbia, SC.

Assembly, a block off spiffy Main Street, had an unsavory and tawdry image: pawn shops, bars and pool halls never checked ID's, cheap down home cafes, arcades, army-navy surplus stores and other shops selling cheap goods lined the street. I haunted it.

Hot dog stands on Assembly sold the best ones in town. The crisp, almost charred, franks on steamed, verging on soggy, buns slathered with chili, relish and onions, crackled and spattered when bitten into. And after each bite you always washed or slurped it down with a great big old swig of sugary, lemony, iced tea so sweet and tart it hurt your teeth.

The two melded into a culinary delight. Nothing was finer than lazing with friends on Assembly on a Saturday afternoon during the long, hot, languid, humid days of summer jawing, shooing flies, munching and slurping, ogling and flirting with the giggling, gaggling, hose-sheathed, girdle-cinched, crinoline-skirted girls, as they rustled past.

Our sprightly, svelte server --a far cry from the burly countermen in begrimed t-shirts and draped with condiment and grease bespattered and seldom washed aprons on Assembly --recommended the Kobe beef hot dog. Just $9.50 and it came with a melody of steamed, in-season organic vegetables.

Now, I've never paid $9.50 for a hot dog, and unless inflation gets a lot worse, I never shall. And Kobe steak was on special for $99.00: sides extra. We decided we needed to start looking more closely at posted, outside menus.

A few weeks later, while returning from Camden, SC, we explored a winding rural road through the countryside and found the small village of Boykin, site of the last Civil War battle in SC. In the years since, the village, with many of its original buildings, and the surrounding area have changed little, for most of the enclosing swamp, thickets, forest and farmland is owned by private hunting plantations.

On April 18, 1865, nine days after Appomattox, Confederate and Union soldiers clashed in a brief, bloody, feral melee called The Battle of Boykin Mill. Here, amid thudding mini-balls, hacking sabers, gouging bayonets, and the booming timpani of cannons, a Confederate sharpshooter felled Lt. Edward L. Stevens of the famed 54th Massachusetts Volunteer Regiment; the 1989 film Glory depicted its creation.

The unlucky lieutenant became the last Union officer killed in SC during the long, bloody, agony of the Civil War. On the site is perhaps the only monument in the North or the South honoring the heroism and dedication of both Union and Confederate soldiers.

Augie Beasley, A long time resident of North Carolina, takes "the road less traveled" on his sojourns throughout the south. Eschewing the interstate highways in favor of the slower and aptly more interesting back roads. We want to thank Augie for giving us permission to print excerpts from his annual newsletter

Always entertaining, we appreciate his friendship and as Augie writes "..don't let facts get in the way of a good tale..."