Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (46 page)

I first discovered the power of a Fudge Bomb when I was surrounded by a
family of Blue Ridge Mennonites who hadn't seen the ice-cream truck for a
week. All their Fudge Bombs had run out days ago, and their Sno-Cones and
Chocolate Chump Bars, too. Their sturdy white frame house sat on a hill in
Greene County, Virginia, and I was parked before it in my truck, both of us
coughing up dust after the long climb up the winding gravel driveway. These
people were hurting badly. We were there to help them.

For generations, locals have found this rocky region as poor as a snake. But
it's been a gold mine for interlopers-first the folk-song collectors and then
the government men and the social workers and finally the movie stars here
for peace of mind and land for their trotting horses. The movie stars didn't
buy ice cream, not off a truck anyway. Just about everybody else did, though.
At least, they did back then. This was twenty years ago, before gourmet ice
cream and the culture of instant gratification. If you lived in Greene County,
the only way you could get a Fudge Bomb was from my truck.

A Fudge Bomb is a brown and yellow "quiescently frozen confection" impaled on a stick and molded in the shape of a Sputnik-era nuclear warhead. It
is infused with an equatorial stripe of artificially flavored banana that beads
with tropical sweat when unveiled in the July heat by a Mennonite housewife
in a gingham dress. At the time I was selling them, a Fudge Bomb cost sixty
cents, a crucial dime more than its red-white-and-blue cousin, the Superstar
Bomb Pop, but well worth the extra investment. No mere popsicle, a Fudge
Bomb is a bona fide meal.

The Mennonites are a strict denomination. For them, every day is a holy
day, and they dress and try to behave as such. But there is nothing in their
rules that forbids the indulgence of sweets. And no visiting preacher ever inspired more joy than did the driver of the truck with the BIG LIK license
plates. I would often linger in the shade as the family members gathered on
the green lawn, becalmed by the sacrament of ice cream. The rippling folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains stretched to the horizon as big white clouds drifted
by like so many covered wagons. At such a moment of a bright Sunday many
summers ago, I understood why their ancestors decided to nestle here instead
of pushing west. This perch would do fine until the Battle of Armageddon.

Those were good customers, that family, one of several Mennonite families
on the route. They even bought ice cream for their livestock. They had a goat
named Curly leashed to a tombstone in the family graveyard, a stone-walled
plot near the driveway. His reward for keeping the grass trim was an ice-cream
sandwich. The Mennonites were businesspeople themselves. I'd often pass
roadside stands where they sold homemade peanut-butter pies to the weekend tourists from Washington, D.C.

They were better off than most of my customers, who had little in worldly
possessions other than the junk accumulated on their ramshackle properties.
Yet even the most destitute were no less faithful when that ice-cream bell came
ringing. For them, the unbidden arrival of the sic LIx truck was proof that
even if they weren't among the affluent or the righteous, they would not be
denied their just desserts-even if it meant scraping together a fistful of pennies for a 25-cent popsicle.

Behind the wheel of BIG LIK, in the shadow of the hazy, hallucinatory Blue
Ridge, I believed I'd found my calling, though at twenty I would have never
used such a word. All I knew was that it didn't seem like work, and it beat delivering pizza in a borrowed car. What began as a seasonal job during my time
at the University of Virginia held me in Charlottesville well after graduation.
It wasn't driving the truck that hooked me: I fell for the geography. I'd grown
up in the lowland piedmont of Richmond, and there was something about
this rugged landscape that moved me. Whatever the reason, the mountains
cast a spell that I couldn't shake.

It was naive, to be sure. Nonetheless, I knew in my gut that I was lucky to
gain passage on this route, the only one of its kind in the history of the
Shenandoah Valley, and perhaps in the entire United States. It was a foolhardy
expedition from the start. No sane businessman would have even considered
it, much less actually attempted it. The meandering circuit was carved out of
the ridges and hollows three decades ago by hippie entrepreneurs who didn't
know any better. (One later worked for a spell as a Wall Street commodities
broker.) The route survived until the late eighties, and it was during those twilight years when I drove the truck.

I worked for a two-vehicle renegade independent without allegiance to the
corporate-owned fleets that dominate the industry. My truck was a converted
'71 GMC step van weighted down by a lead-lined, coffin-sized freezer. On the filthy, battered exterior, a painted tin plate promised "Happy Time Ice Cream."
The truck was customized well beyond the BIG LIK tags, down to a Radio
Shack cassette tape deck and a photo of a stoned Sly Stone above the rearview
mirror. Sly sported a floppy, rhinestone-studded pimp's hat and a baked expression of grim weariness that gave warning to all who would pursue the perpetual buzz.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, sayeth William Blake, and
Sly was our road-wizened guru. More than that, he was our very own orisha,
our guardian spirit against the highway patrol, our patron saint of Hot Fun
and Weird Shit in the Summertime. He was also the source of countless
queries from customers demanding to know who in the hell he was. The sixties counterculture was little more than a rumor in these parts. If you said
Woodstock, you were talking about a town off Lee Highway where the only
long-hairs were a breed of pig. The heroes around here were bad dudes on TV
who drove fast and talked trash and kicked ass: Richard Petty and Wahoo McDaniel and Mr. T and the Dukes of Hazzard.

The county routes, as we called them, traversed the farthest reaches of
Greene and Page Counties, southern Appalachian outbacks little changed
since the depression. Just two hours drive from the nation's capital, it was a
world away in every other respect. No maps of the routes exist except the one
in my head. The journey began near an abandoned woolen mill in Charlottesville and ended twelve hours later and a hundred miles away in a synesthesia of smoldering asbestos brake pads and melted Dreamsicles on the hot
floorboard steps. It was a grueling ride for the driver and eventually a money
drain for the company, but the route gave a taste of a bygone era when hauling ice cream by truck lived up to its mythic status as a vital American ritual.

At the time, the ice-cream truck was still a unifying force that transcended
class lines and social status: the haves and the have-nots alike hailed down BIG
LIK for a quick fix. Besides the county routes, there were the town and city
routes, our big moneymakers. The town route included some well-to-do suburbs where some people patronized the truck every so often for the kick of
some half-remembered nostalgia. They deemed it proper parenting to make
selections for their kids: ice-cream sandwiches and "healthy" items. Like the
children, who craved adventurous fare like cherry Screwballs and Elephant
Ears, I despised these parents for their well-meaning stupidity.

The most lucrative stops on the town and city runs were in the poorer
neighborhoods, where dogs and kids roamed unsupervised. From May until
past Halloween, we trolled these anarchic projects and trailer parks every day
of the week, sometimes twice a day, as ubiquitous as the cops and the drug dealers. Some parents decided we were another Pusherman on the prowl; one
irate mother yanked the arm of a BIG L I K passenger to check for needle
marks. For many children, the constant dose of Bomb Pops really did become
an ugly habit. Some groveled and begged for a freebie, ice cream smeared on
their angry, squinched faces. I couldn't much blame them, because it was our
relentless hard sell that fed their addiction.

Even so, B I G L I K provided balm when needed. Once, on the edge of the
town route, not far from the house of a devout female customer who had the
same sprout of chin whiskers you see in photographs of Confederate president
Jefferson Davis, I came upon a cat writhing in the hot tar road, struck down
moments before the truck rolled up. A man appeared from a nearby house
and identified the dying animal. He went back home and returned carrying a
pistol. As his daughter and her friends stood by shrieking, he walked a few
paces off the road behind some bramble. One shot rang out, and another.
Then he ambled over to the truck and bought a Sno-Cone for his daughter.

Next to the mercenary grind of the city and town routines, the county
routes were a revelation. A few miles outside Charlottesville, the manicured,
fenced-in spreads of gentrified horse farms gave way to the great wide-open of
hardcore ice cream country. Heading west of Ruckersville on Route 33, I welcomed the sight of the hog pens and the A-frame coops for fighting chickens
and rusted cars half-buried in the ground. These were the tell-tale signs of serious ice-cream customers. Some houses were strictly for shelter and barely
that. One family, faithful and longtime patrons, resided in an abandoned
school bus parked permanently a few feet off the road.

Out in these green hills and dark hollows, the people were always happy to
see BIG LIK. For generations, most outsiders seen in these parts came only to
plunder. In 1916 and 1918, British musicologist Cecil Sharp made several trips
to the area, collecting folk songs that had survived for centuries. These were
bloody murder ballads and songs about dead babies and assorted domestic
tragedies. From Florence Puckett he got "The Shooting of His Dear" and "The
Cuckoo"; from Horton Barker came "Hares of The Mountains," and from
Leila Yowell, "The Farmer's Curst Wife." From Lizzie Gibson, who Sharp recalled as "a fine woman and regular type of mountaineer who sang very well,"
he got "Pretty Saro" and "Earl Brand." Sharp collected hundreds of tunes,
many dating back to Elizabethan times, and published them in English Folk
Songs from the Southern Appalachians.

At first locals had taken Sharp for a German spy, but it was their own government who proved to be the enemy. In the mid-thirties, federal authorities
evicted hundreds of mountain families to make way for the newly created Shenandoah National Park, the so-called "Playground for Washingtonians."
Popular opinion of the time had little sympathy for their plight.

Some locals did not leave willingly. Melancthon Cliser ran a filling station
and diner called Blue Ridge Lunch at the top of Panorama Gap, a few miles
north from where our ice-cream route cut west through the mountains. Lawmen nabbed the sixty-two-year-old in front of his business; Cliser stood in
handcuffs and delivered a quavering rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner,"
and then gave a speech declaring himself a free man defending his constitutional rights. It took four deputies to wrestle Cliser into the sheriff's car;
meanwhile, his wife and the couple's dog, Boodgy, sat defiantly on the front
porch, even after authorities had boarded up the building to prevent reentry.

There were other ugly altercations. John Mace owned a place near Madison
Run. From a spring on his property, he bottled his own brand of "Health Mineral Water," which he recommended to "all suffering from Eczema, Pimples,
Tettor, or other skin diseases, Stomach Trouble, Kidney Trouble, Nervousness,
or Loss of Appetite." Like Cliser, he refused all offers for his property. After
deputies talked him out of his house, they piled his furniture and belongings
in the yard. Then, with Mace standing by, they burned the place down.

Before it was over, authorities had conducted a forced removal that left
century-old homesteads in charred ruins. Some of my customers were among
the displaced, and they still lived in the shabby prefab houses the government
built for them in resettlement areas. Not a few carried a bitterness against the
feds that time only deepened. It was probably just as well they didn't know
that our ice cream came from a wholesale supplier in Washington.

So BIG LIK was something altogether new here, an intruder come to peddle instead of pillage. We came only once or twice a week, so the people never
got tired of us. On the county routes, politeness was the rule, and the barter
system was often in effect. A carton of watermelon-flavored Italian ice for a
fresh mulberry pie; a Chipwich for a clay-encrusted can of Pabst Blue Ribbon
buried for God knows how long in some secret hiding place. They bestowed
their own names on favorite items. A Nutty Buddy was a drumstick, an Eskimo Pie a chocolate cover, and a Neapolitan ice-cream sandwich a Napoleon.

The locals showed a genuine concern for the truck's well-being. They sympathized with its dilapidated condition and greeted a flat tire with the swift attention of those who know what it is to he in need. The men who helped with
a tow or a tool kit refused any offers of free ice cream as thanks. They were
poor but fiercely proud, and they were quick to forgive as well. One BI G LI x
driver got his kicks swerving at jaywalking animals instead of around them.
Wild or domesticated, all God's creatures were potential roadkill to him. The owner of a dog run down by this assassin had only a stern reprimand for the
driver the next time through: "You could have at least cleaned it up."