THE SNAKE IN THE BUCKET
On wishes and country kitchens
I AM STANDING in the gravel and red clay on the side of a road in Hale County. Maybe I’ve been standing here for a minute or two. The light has a golden cast, and it’s landed on a fifteen foot high pile of metal and wood. Up the side of the sign is crawling a bright green gnarl of thorns and bright leaves. “DOROTHY’S COUNTRY KITCHEN,” it says to me and everyone else going down the road, which right now is nobody. At the base someone has carefully propped up a plastic hubcap from like a Mazda or a Toyota.
All Polaroids made in the cool and cold of early 2023, with my trusty SX-70 and 600.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch someone waving to me, across the road and up on a hill. He is riding a tractor that’s chugging softly, waving in great big arcs. Even this far away I can tell he is smiling at me. I look back at the sign, the great white cursive “COLA” still sharp against the faded red. “Well,” I think, “better go see what he wants to talk about.”
AFTER FOURTEEN YEARS I retired my trusty steed, a 2008 Honda Civic I drove new off the lot. I had never had a new car before, and had only been driving a car with an air conditioner for a few years. It had gone to a whole bunch of Crimson Tide games, home and away, then back and forth throughout Mississippi and Alabama, got smacked real bad in the parking lot of the Jitney 14 by a runaway buggy, and once just outside the Mississippi Delta it made due as a miniature hotel.1
Somewhere between Oklahoma and Texas late last year it rolled over to 200,000 miles and it was about that time, so I traded it in on a newer, chunkier, hybrid-fueled version with a touchscreen and heated seats and everything. Before I bid it a surprisingly bittersweet farewell I made photos of it just like I would a ‘69 Camaro or a Testarossa at a car show. I forgot I had the round 600 film in the camera and laughed when they came out, because it looked extra special, in a way that made me a little embarrassed and happy and wistful.
“I SAW YOU looking at that old sign,” the fellow grins. He has hopped off his tractor, which looks to be more antique then any car I’ve ever driven, to shake hands. His long ‘locs are wrapped up in a green, yellow, and red bonnet. “I love that sign,” I grin back. “My grandmother was named Dorothy, and she passed around four years ago. She was from Alabama and I would have liked to have shown her that sign.” “That’s funny,” he says. “My grandmother was named Dorothy, too, and that was her place.”
He had come back to Greensboro from Atlanta, and purchased swaths of land once belonging to his family and their neighbors. He was using the old rumbling relic he was riding to carve deep furrows into the earth, going to plant okra, greens, corn, even wrangling into the ground gigantic banana plants.
Over in the corner of the field, facing the road, was a heap of bottles and Golden Flake wrappers and a couple of coolers. “Kids,” he said, who would drive up the little dirt road and sit and drink in privacy. “Look at what was in one of the coolers,” he said, pointing to a gigantic snake still wriggling just a bit despite missing its back half. It liked to have scared him half to death, found coiled in the shut Igloo, its means of ingress unknown. His brother had teased him for shooting the reptile, since it was “a good snake,” but he wasn’t going to take any chances.
The family had a cookout planned once everything was in the field and I promised that if I were back over that way I would come by. We shook hands and I began the long drive back to my neck of the woods, resuming the playthrough of Bleach and Nevermind that for whatever reason I had stumbled onto as the soundtrack for this jounrey.
Later on I would realize that some of the film was lightstruck, but it still looked pretty and you could mostly tell what was going on and what I had been looking at, but maybe not what I had been thinking. Although I hadn’t been thinking much, other than the sky is so blue here, and the world is so beautiful, and once or twice, I wish I could have shown my Nana a picture of that sign, and then I wish I could see my Nana,
I wish I could,
I wish.
“THE SNAKE IN THE BUCKET” is this week’s installment of GORJUS, an occasional dispatch devoted to art and life in the South, preserved by instant film.
If you like it, consider sending it to a pal. Just like anything, some weeks are better than others. I’m gorjusjxn on Instagram, and you can see more Polaroids at McCartyPolaroids.
I only did that once, because, y’all, a 2008 Honda Civic coupe makes for miserable sleeping. It’s been over a decade past and I’m still sore. (But it did enable me to get some Delta pictures at dawn, which was the goal).
Also, amazing, as always these bring joy.
David. That was a copperhead.