Cornbread Nation 2: The United States of Barbecue (Cornbread Nation: Best of Southern Food Writing) (47 page)

Some events could never be forgotten, even if they happened more than a
century ago. One man stopped patronizing the truck after he discovered that
a driver was a descendant of a Union officer in the Civil War. You often hear
how mountain people refused to fight for the South, but around here they did
fight, and they remembered. The town of Earlysville was named for Rebel
general Jubal Early, and battle reenactments were part of the local social calendar. The Shenandoah Valley, the Breadbasket of the Confederacy, was a crucial strategic stronghold during the war. Our route followed many of the same
mountain passes where Stonewall Jackson's troops zigzagged on the all-night
marches that so beleaguered the Yanks.

Out here, the ice-cream bell was no mere prop but a signal I depended on
when I entered a hollow. The sound of the electric bell hung in the air for
miles around, alerting my customers of B I G L I K's arrival. (Once, the far-flung
ringing wooed a calf that mistook the sound for its mother, broke free from a
fenced field, and followed the truck a half-mile.) Leaning hard on the bell, I
would make a high-speed run to the dead end of a hollow where the state road
hits gravel. On the ride back out, my customers waited in anxious clumps,
sometimes three generations strong. They stood next to battered mailboxes
with hand-scrawled names: Morris, Roach, Shifflett. That last surname was by
far the most prevalent in the region. There must have been several hundred
members of this clan in every nook and cranny of the upper Blue Ridge. The
Shiffletts spelled their name every conceivable way, but they all liked ice
cream.

The beauty of the land spoiled me as surely as did the free ice cream. The
variety of vistas, from roadside cliffs strung with kudzu beards to boulderstrewn, stubbled fields, seemed infinite. Sometimes a thunderstorm would
dance across a valley half-lit by a blazing sun, and the scampering downpour
reeled off a succession of rainbows I would chase but never catch. And always
the Blue Ridge framed the view, with humble names like Brokenback Mountain, old as the continent. These were no majestic peaks to conquer, but worndown, welcoming hills to burrow into.

My boss refused to bother with the county routes, which he'd inherited
when he bought the business. His pride and joy was the one he developed, the
highly profitable city route, the twice-a-day circuit through Charlottesville's
poorest neighborhoods. He usually spent the off-season globe-trotting in exotic realms such as India and Tibet, taking photos of Buddhist monks and their prayer flags high in the Eastern sky. I would tell him he was missing out
on some mystical terrain right in his own backyard. The Blue Ridge had its
own ancient spirits, even if they lacked the faintest whiff of patchouli.

One of the drivers, Dave Brooks, understood my affinities. He was raised in
Bath County near the West Virginia line, so he was no stranger to the mountains. It was Brooks who taught me the county routes, and his enthusiasm for
the people and places stoked my youthful enthusiasm. He truly loved the
Greene and Page runs, and he drove them more often than any other driver. It
was only years later that I discovered that Brooks had been documenting the
routes with his camera.

Looking at his photos two decades hence, I can remember every face,
though I never knew their names, and they didn't know mine. The photos remind me how sharply the bucolic setting contrasted with the dire poverty of
the locals. They came to the truck barefoot and bandaged and black-eyed, in
threadbare clothes and in metal curlers. They rarely displayed jewelry of any
kind-instead a necklace of fresh, red hickeys on the pale neck of a teenage
girl, or the raw insect bites on the spindly, hairy legs of some crone with an
unfiltered Camel smoldering in her sun-blistered lips as she counted out pennies for a popsicle, or the hardened scab on the bloodshot, bulbous nose of an
old farmer who always received his purchase on a cast-iron skillet. (He said
the ice cream was too cold for his gnarled, trembling hands.) It was obvious
many of the children were hungry for more than ice cream, and when the
adults would flash a gap-toothed smile, I could see the years of Bomb Pops
had done their work.

For friends who joined me on the route, this scenario could make for some
unsettling encounters. Those expecting to meet the Waltons were in for a rude
awakening; the amount of roadkill alone proved daunting enough for some.
Not long into the journey, they quietly set aside their cameras and huddled in
a corner away from the sales window when the customers clamored around.
Others used chemicals to try to commiserate with the surroundings. One daytripper ate some psychedelic mushrooms along with his ice cream. Somewhere outside Earlysville, he said he needed some fresh air and bolted from
the truck as it rounded a curve.

As for myself, I got used to the hard lot of the BIG LIK customers. After a
long day on the truck, I didn't spend much time pondering the harsh economic conditions. One of the drivers said we were exploiting these people, but
I couldn't see the injustice. All I saw was my customers happy to see the truck
every week, grateful that somebody hadn't forgotten them. I'd take my cut of grimy, sweat-stained bills from the money box, buy a six-pack of Black Label,
and give thanks that I didn't have to work a real job. For me, the county route
was a paid adventure that I knew wouldn't last, so I relished it.

The truck gave me entry into places otherwise off-limits to outsiders.
Bacon Hollow abutted the Appalachian Trail and the Shenandoah National
Park. It was poor and insular even by Greene County standards, shunned by
most beer-drinking Christians. Bacon Hollow earned its reputation as a place
unfriendly to strangers, especially the county social workers meddling in their
domestic affairs.

They had their own way of talking in Bacon Hollow. They had their own
ways, period. It was not uncommon to see crude effigies nailed to trees. In the
late seventies, a driver got embroiled in a local family feud when a Shifflett
gunned down a Morris. He'd recently had a run-in with this same Shifflett,
who'd invited the driver to join a roadside corn-liquor party. "If you don't
have a drink with us," he said, "You ain't getting out of the hollow this evening." The driver thought it wise to be polite and partake. The victim's family
wanted him to testify as a character witness in the trial. His refusal to take
sides earned him death threats and the enmity of both clans. He was forced to
quit the route lest he become another casualty.

Bacon Hollow hadn't changed by the time I came through. Here you might
get a kid paying with a swiped jarful of old rare coins, and you'd accept the
money even if it probably meant he'd get a whipping. Sometimes, pranksters
would set out boards with nails to give drivers an obstacle course on the way
out. One homestead boasted fearsome-looking deer antlers on its porch roof.
Like many of the houses here, it lay across a creek from the main road. To get
to it, you had to cross a rickety bridge, and there was always some sort of gathering that could number a couple dozen revelers. But there was never a problem. The exiled driver notwithstanding, sic LIK was always welcome here,
and on a good day this was a $ioo hollow. It was a prime example of how the
best customers were inevitably the ones who could least afford it.

More ice-cream hotbeds were over in Page County. An offshoot that included a chunk of the Greene route, this route was typically a Sunday run that
pushed further north into the valley. Brown Hollow was an all-black enclave
with a baseball field dug out of a hillside with a backhoe. The players, ranging
from kids to stooping gray-hairs, were arrayed in their Sunday best, coats off
and shirtsleeves rolled up. Upon hearing the bell, they'd stop the game, and
for a half-hour, BIG LIx was the center of the community.

On the county routes, the ice-cream truck really mattered to people, and
they responded in kind, with courtesy and heartfelt thanks. Out here, the sins of the city and town routes were redeemed. Out here, the ritual hadn't gone
rotten. There was still room for magic, like when I'd reach into the freezer and
toss a handful of ice shavings at a group of toddlers-a little touch of snow in
summer.

As it turns out, the BIG LIx expedition wasn't able to pay its own way. The
truck simply couldn't take the hairpin curves and billy-goat slopes anymore.
Barreling back across Swift Run Gap with an empty freezer, the top-heavy rig
was always nearly out of control. With a few beers and the high altitude going
to my head, I'd ride the brakes hard and BIG LIx would howl like some beast
of burden in pain. Eventually our mechanic, Race, had to install new brake
pads and other replacement parts every couple weeks. The truck rarely
grossed more than a few hundred dollars, and my 25 percent take wasn't much
after you added up the hours.

And so, by the end of the eighties, the county routes vanished, gone the way
of traveling medicine shows and knife peddlers and professional hoboes. Even
before its demise, I had already returned to Richmond. Several bad omens
helped hasten my retirement. Coming back from Greene County at dark, I ran
over a black cat a block from the boss's house, where we usually kept the
trucks. My driving record was spotless until then, but that didn't matter much
to the pet's owners. Not long after, I backed the truck into a dogwood in my
boss's yard, damaging the truck and the state tree of Virginia.

A few years ago, I paid a return visit to ice-cream country. With the exception of the more remote places like Bacon Hollow, I found the area changed
almost beyond recognition. Hordes of the middle-class and the newly rich
had fled the suburbs to join celebrity homesteaders such as Jessica Lange and
Sissy Spacek in the promised land. They had satellite dishes and spacious tract
houses and, no doubt, refrigerators full of grocery-store gourmet ice cream.

The transformation was as sad as it was inevitable. No doubt the poorest of
my former customers, like those in Bacon Hollow, were stranded more than
ever before, left further and further behind by the tide of prosperity flooding
the mountains. BIG LIK wouldn't be much help to them now. No amount of
Bomb Pops could bridge the ever-widening gap.

It was a writing project that brought me back, a story on the displaced
mountain people. My old route beckoned me deeper into the Blue Ridge, and
I found myself parked in front of one of the regular stops. It was a cold, gray
winter day, and the scene was bleak. I barely recognized the house without its
usual curtain of green vegetation. It was now revealed as the bare shack it was,
not a drape on a window, no smoke curling from the stone chimney. At first,
I thought maybe the place was abandoned. Where were the strutting chickens and the yapping dogs? Most important, where were the kids who'd clamored
for sic LIK so many years ago?

Then I spotted a couple of gangly teens behind the house, taking turns on
a cigarette. They said when they were younger, they were devoted customers
of the truck. But ice cream didn't interest them much anymore. They were
standing in the bitter mountain air, they explained, because it was even colder
inside the house. The firewood had run out that morning. We had a laugh recalling some favorites from the truck; they said they were hooked on Screwballs, cherry-flavored ice crammed into a clear plastic cone and packed with
bubble gum at the bottom. I have watched many a wild-eyed kid chuck the
whole thing to get to that buried treasure.

A beat-up Honda compact pulled up into the dirt driveway and whimpered to a stop. A woman emerged in untied high-top sneakers, a thin, faded
coat thrown over her nightgown. She had soft, prematurely graying hair bundled over her worry-lined face. It was the boys' mother. She told them to get
the firewood out of the trunk-some pine scraps from a nearby lumberyard.

Greeting a stranger warmly, she said she remembered the ice-cream truck,
but it hadn't come by for years. That was the least of her worries. She had recently been laid off from her job at the textile mill, and somebody had burned
down the old family home over on Hightop Mountain.

She watched her sons carry the scraps into the house: "Those boys loved
that ice cream." She pulled the coat tight around her and apologized for not
inviting me inside. "Next time you come by, I'll have heat in the house," she
said in her soft singsong voice. Then she forced a smile and shut the door.