[Hughes] Travels with Gary

I didn’t know when I called Gary Baldwin the other day that I’d be going on a 25-mile bike ride. I just wanted to talk with him about the newspaper he’s published for 13 years in Vicksburg, where my mother grew up and where I’ve lived, off and on, for a good third of my adult life. I’d read The New Times before, just hadn’t paid much attention to it ’til I picked up this month’s issue.

Maybe because I’ve been doing some writing for local media the past couple of months and keeping a more watchful (or at least less oblivious) eye out, I’ve started newly noticing stuff that’s been right under my nose all along. So I tell myself. But what I learned about how little I know of Louisiana Highway 602—or the stretch of it along which Gary and his friend Charles Majors and I rode bikes last Wednesday afternoon—started me thinking.

I live across the street from the Old Courthouse Museum, whose sage curator, Gordon Cotton, went to school with my mom, but I’d be hard-pressed to tell you anything about the place you couldn’t learn from the greenest tour guide. And Gary lives just a few blocks from me, but I’d never met him until a couple of weeks ago. My stock excuse for the blank spots in my local field-of-view is that I’m always on the verge of leaving if not already gone. Of late, I’m hardly ever home—perpetually in-transit when not waystationed at a friend’s house or some coffee shop or bar—and you could say my life lacks structure (a real job, a family, a charitable cause, a man’s-best-friend waiting to be walked), but I’ve about decided the bigger problem is that I haven’t been paying attention and, like that sniveling scrivener Bartleby, would prefer not to. What (a self-deflating) concept!

Gary and Charles and I set out from the parking lot of the off-track betting parlor in Mound, La., a few miles across the river from Vicksburg. I don’t gamble much since nipping a video-poker habit in the bud a few years ago and haven’t set foot inside the Winner’s Circle in forever; yet only a creepy suspicion that I might suffer some sort of relapse keeps me from driving back over the bridge today to find out what all I don’t know about horse racing.

I’m reeling from the crash course in bicycling (I’m abashed, I mean to say) that Gary gave me last night—which I won’t go into here due to the concentration and home study that sorting out the carbon-fiber aero-rim wheels with lentical offset etc. would require. I’ll just say that Gary is a serious cyclist (he finished tops in his category in the first race he ever entered and will participate in the Tour LeFleur in Jackson later this month), but a gracious enough guy, even decked out in full riding regalia, to let me tag along. We toodled leisurely almost to Tallulah before he and Charles said goodbye and left me in the dust.

I also won’t go into detail about the half-dozen dogs scaring me off the road and into the fire ant-filled weeds, except to say I encountered the exact same pack of mutts a second time upon pedaling back along Highway 602 in search of my car key. Along the way I passed Po Boy Don’s, a great little seafood shack in its day, now shuttered but with a sign still there to remind you: “Home of Tim McGraw’s video ‘Down on the Farm.’” Now, that’s one little nugget of local lore I wouldn’t feel bad about not knowing, but how did I not know that Crescent Plantation (also on 602 and still a working farm) is the only such mansion whose basic layout is the same as in antebellum days? Or that Madame C.J. Walker from Delta a few miles down the road, who I’d only ever vaguely heard about, grew up to become one of America’s first black female self-made millionaires?

I’m only just getting to know Gary Baldwin and have spent too much space on myself here to give his newspaper its due. He writes poetry, I’ve learned that much—”a whisper in the shadows of a Civil War town” is his line, the one that inspired him to start his own paper—and The New Times (distributed in five counties, Hinds included) has a literary flair—-the kind your daily papers these days shun as too high-falutin’ or not bland-neutral enough. The current issue contains thoughtful essays on why modern architecture may be too damn complex, St. Louis as “forgotten Mecca,” and “Two Cultures,” scientific and artistic, that could benefit Vicksburg—or any community—by talking to each other more often and stirring up some synergy. The paper’s scope is universal even when its gaze is trained (as perhaps I should be training mine to be) on the minutely, momentously local.

James Hughes is a regular contributor to the JFP.