“A cork,” I wrote in Garden & Gun’s 2007 Holiday issue, “is a great thing in a whiskey bottle for the pleasure of pulling it out. Let’s see if I can spell the sound: f-toong. That’s if you pull it straight out. If you give it a little twist as you pull it, there’s a squeak—no, a chirp, a tweet even—that drowns out the f and even the t. Interesting. That never really registered with me before. Sort of squeeoong.”
I like trying to spell noises. The next thing I knew, early in 2008, I had this End of the Line column. I’ve had it ever since, for sixteen years. “Rooterbegger” is how I quoted someone’s pronunciation of rutabaga. How many columns give you that kind of service?
I am a born columnist: Give me a hole and I’ll fill it. Starting with Georgia’s Decatur High School Scribbler, I have had eighteen regular columns in as many publications. Weekly, thrice-weekly, monthly, semi-monthly, quarterly, and (this one) bimonthly. They come and go. This one has lasted longest, by far.
I like connections. My late friend Chet Atkins, the great guitarist, could, and would, play “Yankee Doodle” and “Dixie” simultaneously. You might never have learned that, if you hadn’t followed this column. And how about the musical genre called hick-hop? In welcoming that fusion, this column provided a quote from Snoop Dogg: “We stick our hand in at the same time and we grab the same piece of chicken. I look at Willie and…that was one of the greatest moments of my life, when me and Willie Nelson grabbed the same piece of chicken at the same damn time.”
Not everything this column has covered was a good mix. Kanye West trapped on a plane by white-boy worshippers, for instance. But how about Florida Man—the legend and the interviewee—in the context of my beach wedding? This column was there.
Maybe my pal Stephen King will always be afraid of okra. Okay. The Weeki Wachee Springs mermaids can drink underwater!
Some people say Oklahoma isn’t Southern. I said it is so that I could bring in Roger Miller, the poet of things that people actually say, like “I’m on TV here locally” and “with the help of my finaglin’ uncle” and “Thunder roll and lightning flashing, right through the middle of it I’ll go dashing. Goes to show how far I’ll go for you, ’f ’yont me to.” It’s that ’f ’yont! And that finaglin’!
One more Oklahoman: Abe Lemons, who coached winning basketball teams—I watched him do it—involving not just Black and white players but also Native American and Mexican American ones, by stressing simplicity: “There are really only two plays, Romeo and Juliet and put the damn ball in the basket.”
Maybe these columns’ readers were not surprised to be shown what a virtuoso William Faulkner was at portraying barefootedness, but did they know he shared Aretha Franklin’s disdain for air-conditioning, or how much he enjoyed salmon croquettes?
This column has welcomed conflict. Has pitted collards against kale, for instance, head-to-head, not only in the context of roots music but also in a pot. (In neither connection did the kale hold up.) This column also checked New York City biscuits for irony (like an ironic mustache?) and found banana pudding.
Murkier was my childhood mystery—not to say complex—involving Eelbeck cane syrup. That column and the Garden of Eden one (hoeing naked), and of course the one that included my beach wedding announcement, and of course the one about my wife, the artist—these were the most romantic. Also, the myth of Naphtha, the Indian maiden, and her tears, on the beach.
This column made that myth up. This column also featured another original folktale, of angels squabbling about whether to save Earth. More modestly, we looked at preserving what is left of lower Louisiana—either one chunk of pavement at a time, or just loosely, in the spirit of Jimmy, our bayou-hardy cat, who has been there for us underfoot. Even more essential, at a higher level, has been the great Barry Blitt, who has done me the undeserved honor—given that I frankly don’t look like anything much—of illustrating every column.
“Those corks,” I wrote in that early G&G commentary. “I’ve pulled them so many times now tonight, trying to decide which one has the better tone, that they’ve lost their music…They’re not tight anymore.”
No one wants this column to get like that. I pass it on to someone less loose than I have become (as columns documented my sciatica, my anosmia, my beard). I believe I got all the meat I could off this chicken bone.
