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37 Articles

WHAT’S ONLINE

.01 PODCAST Listen Up If you’re a fan of the outdoors, you’ll love The Wild South, G&G’s new podcast. Cohosted by editor in chief David DiBenedetto and contributing editor T. Edward Nickens, the show features interviews with legends of the sporting world as well as those next in line to pick up the torch, all while digging into the conservation issues that impact the land we love. You’ll also hear about raising kids in the outdoors, along with plenty of stories of successes—and failures—in the field. Go to gardenandgun.com/podcast or search for “Garden & Gun” on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Season One guests: OUTDOORS ICON FLIP PALLOT CHEF ANDREW ZIMMERN FLY-FISHING GUIDE HILARY HUTCHESON AND MORE LISTEN AT: gardenandgun.com/podcast .02 RECIPES Eat Your Bourbon In his…

Battle of the Biscuits

EDITOR’S LETTER Follow me on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter) @davedibenedetto As this issue was going to press, a pitched battle was taking place on gardenandgun.com that reverberated across our social media channels. For our annual Southern bracket, this year we asked readers to vote on the best takeout biscuit in the South. Just narrowing down the initial field to thirty-two entrants was a thorny task, with national and regional chains, convenience stores, and local favorites all in the mix. Then we unleashed the bracket. Immediately, things got heated. And hearts got broken. In the locals section, my own favorite, the sausage biscuit from Sewee Outpost in Awendaw, South Carolina, went down early. Among the gas stations, Golden Pantry’s sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit, straight from my Georgia youth, fell…

Battle of the Biscuits

“Weeding is one of the best ways to overcome writer’s block for me”—Cynthia R. Greenlee, who wrote about South Carolina moonshine makers (p. 140) Cynthia R. Greenlee WRITER The journalist and scholar Cynthia R. Greenlee’s creativity comes through in her stories: her James Beard Award-winning essay on grits for VICE, for instance, or the article for this issue on a family of moonshine makers in South Carolina (p. 140). “But as much as I love writing, I need to do other things to open up the other parts of my brain—like gardening,” she says. “Weeding is one of the best ways to overcome writer’s block for me.” Recently, she’s been “rewilding” her Durham, North Carolina, front yard and tending to her side garden, which she planted with swaths of purple…

“Reading G&G is like having a constant conversation with old and new friends”

Find us on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and TikTok @gardenandgun THREE CHEERS I enjoyed reading “Art’s Rising Vanguard” (April/May 2024), and now I’m ready to create! Andrew “Honey” Hopkins has a love for the beauty of life and captures it through his paintings, antique hunts, Champagne moments, and reimagined aristocratic lifestyle. Sepia BakerNashville, Tennessee I was so very happy to see Andrew LaMar Hopkins on the cover of the April/May 2024 issue. I whooped when I pulled it out of my mailbox. Nancy GilbertsonNew Orleans, Louisiana I keep the most recent issue of G&G on my bedside table and read a bit at a time. It’s like having a constant conversation with old and new friends. Shannon KellyAugusta, Georgia NO THANK U As a properly raised Southern lady, I…

“Reading G&G is like having a constant conversation with old and new friends”

Tyler Florence’s Sizzle Reel

Tyler Florence has spotted a tom turkey, one of two dozen meandering in the driveway of the home he shares with his wife, Tolan, and three children in her Marin County hometown, just north of San Francisco. “I’ve been outside twice today to get the mail,” he says with a laugh. “This turkey has been eyeballing me!” The bowhunter plans to head to Sonoma the next week to bag one, and if he succeeds, “I’ll smoke it, shred it, and make a big gumbo out of it.” ¶ As the fifty-three-year-old native of Greenville, South Carolina, bounces with enthusiasm between topics—the spring turkey season, his cast-iron collection, the secret to the multistep sous vide fried chicken he serves at his Wayfare Tavern (a dollop of buttermilk brine in the breading…

Tyler Florence’s Sizzle Reel

The Bonnaroo of Bamboo

Don’t call it a revival, or a celebration of history, or even a renaissance. That’s not what the BambooBash is about. The annual get-together does bring a passel of bamboo fly rod makers and restorers and vintage tackle collectors to the banks of the Little River near Great Smoky Mountains National Park. There are piles of classic Pflueger Medalist reels, and you might find, and be able to cast, a fly line nearly a hundred years old. But this gathering of folks who are simply bonkers over bamboo rods is as much about the now and the next as it is the past. Each spring, for more than twenty years, enthusiasts have converged like a hatch of mayflies on the property of Dock’s on the River Motel, just outside Townsend,…

The Bonnaroo of Bamboo

It took a full decade after Amy Parker Anderson and Huntley Rodes first met in the New York City fashion world for the pair to realize, over a chance dinner, that they shared a love of golf. The next time the two got together, they did so with Rodes’s friend Jenna Walter, a former Division 1 player, for a round on the links of Gaylord Springs in Nashville, the city all three now call home. As they made their way across the greens that day in 2021, in outfits Rodes describes with a laugh as “barely cobbled together,” the conversation kept returning to the lack of stylish clothing options for female golfers. Over beers and pizza after the game, the trio wasted no time mapping out what a line of…

Have a conundrum of your own? Email editorial@gardenandgun.com Nothing says Flora-Bama louder than a pair of flip-flops. I’m a menswear designer and retailer originally from a small town in Mississippi, so don’t get me wrong—I’ve had many a great time down around Gulf Shores. But if you’ve ever been in one of my shops, you’re probably expecting my answer to the question of whether it’s okay to wear flip-flops beyond the water to be a big old heck no. Six and a half days out of the week, I’m comfortably in a coat, tie, and goodyear-welted shoes. Flip-flops, however, are more a state of mind, and I think you can pull ’em off in a way that can feel, against all odds, kinda refined. You’ve gotta be careful, though…in more…

Fresh Snorkeling

It may look a touch absurd, donning snorkeling gear to lie on one’s stomach in a shallow mountain stream, face submerged, head swiveling to spy creatures invisible to terrestrial passersby. But the world a river snorkeler becomes privy to makes any absurdity worthwhile: the red flash of saffron shiners, the traffic-cone orange of tangerine darters, the camouflage of mottled sculpins, the pinkish tint of rainbow mussels. Here on the Blue Ridge Snorkel Trail—ten unofficial, do-it-yourself sites over ten counties and nine rivers in Western North Carolina—signs detail noteworthy species you might see if you bring a mask or goggles along. “These are places people are coming to swim and float anyway,” points out Luke Etchison, an aquatic biologist with the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission. He cocreated the trail, which…

Fresh Snorkeling

Back to Mayberry

Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father’s Journey, The University of North Carolina Press, $28 Halfway through Looking for Andy Griffith: A Father’s Journey, Evan Dalton Smith’s deep, knotty dive into his adulation for the late actor and North Carolina icon, I found myself reminded, weirdly, of another book: Prague, Arthur Phillips’s 2002 novel about twentysomething expats in Budapest in the heady wake of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. Phillips’s nostalgia-plagued characters find real life to be somewhere out of reach, “trapped in the amber of some heirloom era,” as Phillips wrote about the book, or dwarfed by the “glories of the future and the fairytale splendor of the past.” They go about the novel plagued with suspicions that real life is happening in Prague—that’s the joke of the title—while they’re stuck…

Back to Mayberry

Strolling down the gravel path at the Broyhill Equestrian Preserve last July, I felt a sense of déjà vu. I’d never visited the Western North Carolina venue, home to the Blowing Rock Charity Horse Show, but my mother and grandmother had, and it seemed familiar. The scents of oiled leather and citronella fly spray mingled in the crisp piney air of the surrounding Blue Ridge Mountains. A loudspeaker crackled, and I heard hoofbeats thundering—the smells and sounds of my childhood. My stomach fluttered, anticipating my own moment in the saddle, even though that wasn’t to come. Not this weekend, at least. Although its atmosphere is reminiscent of other equestrian competitions, Blowing Rock has an impressive pedigree: The two-week affair is the country’s longest continuously running horse show, and celebrated its…

Mike Harmeier hated the name almost from the start. The Texas native cut his teeth in the mid-2000s, playing country covers at any Austin bar that would have him. A highlight of his set back then was a version of Tracy Byrd’s 1994 hit “Lifestyles of the Not So Rich and Famous,” in which Byrd sings that he doesn’t drink champagne or eat caviar but prefers “RC Cola and a MoonPie.” Between marathon gigs at honky-tonks like the Hole in the Wall and the White Horse, Harmeier was writing his own material, too, and when an offer came to go into the studio with some Austin friends, he needed a name. Without much thought, he came up with Mike and the Moonpies. “The alliteration was funny to me; we were…

Coconut Rum Comes of Age

A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINKDRINKS You recall, of course, what triggered the mutiny on the H.M.S. Bounty. You don’t? Well, it was a theft from the captain’s private provision of coconuts, a transgression that set in motion the infamous uprising. “There’s nothing more refreshing than coconut water,” the accused thief notes in the novelization of the event. “Such a tempting sight, a great heap of them.” If pineapples symbolize hospitality, let us consider coconuts rather than apples the symbol of temptation. After all, beyond being a tasty, nutritious fruit, the coconut is perhaps the most useful product of the tropics—the Swiss Army knife of the plant kingdom, as some have called it. It quenches thirst and supplies oil. You can weave the shell’s fiber wrapping into rope, turn…

Coconut Rum Comes of Age

Firing Up Eggplant

Most chefs will tell you their best recipes start with a memory. For Silver Iocovozzi, one in particular stands out: his grilled eggplant smothered in a bright mix of seasoned tomatoes, a dish he first tasted on a beach in the Philippines. Iocovozzi, who grew up in North Carolina, runs Neng Jr.’s in Asheville with his husband, Cherry. Iocovozzi’s father was an American serviceman. His mother, Neneng, is from the Philippines. (Her nickname is Neng, and he was so much like her when he was growing up, people called him Neng Jr.) The tiny restaurant has become a national darling for a menu that marries Filipino food with Appalachian ingredients and technique. The eggplant, a favorite with diners, began on a visit to his mother’s homeland in 2018, during a…

Firing Up Eggplant

College Town Tastemaker

Morning rain streaks two plate-glass windows tucked into a redbrick facade. Three coffee drinkers, one with her nose in a book, perch on bentwood stools beneath a pressed tin ceiling, elbows on the white countertop. Stocked with cinnamon-dusted morning buns and ready-made sandwiches, a pastry case hugs the front door. Bags of artisanal masa and bottles of small-batch fish sauce line trim blue shelves. The vibe is Borough Market, London. The music, in this music-obsessed college town, is low and inconsequential. At Birdies, a new market café in Athens, Georgia, the soundtrack that matters is the hum of neighbors talking to neighbors. Once beloved for Saturday football and cheap beer, college towns like Athens have evolved into hives for creative entrepreneurs who want to live culturally rich and neighborhood-focused lives.…

College Town Tastemaker

While touring a farm outside Baltimore a few years ago, chef Kat Petonito and her team spotted gemlike orange fruits, wrapped in thin papery husks, sprawling across the soil. The farmer lifted the bug net so they could take a closer look—and enjoy a taste. “He plucked a couple off the ground and handed them to us to snack on,” says Petonito, the executive chef at Washington, D.C.’s the Duck & the Peach, La Collina, and the Wells. “I was expecting a sour, gooseberry-esque taste but was met with a completely different flavor and fell instantly in love.” The mystery fruit, she learned, was a ground-cherry (also called a husk cherry), and it has since become a seasonal staple on her menus. “Most caped fruits are tart, but that’s not…

Heir to the Smokehouse

Over his more-than-fifty-year quest to make world-class cured hams and bacon, Allan Benton has remained a perpetual student, always open to the secrets that salt, smoke, and time have yet to divulge. “Even after five decades, I’m still learning, and there are surprises,” says the famed owner of Benton’s Smoky Mountain Country Hams, in Madisonville, Tennessee. A big one came last summer, when his son Darrell left a successful career as a radiologist and returned to Madisonville to work with his father producing what might be the country’s most praised pork. “I was not expecting that,” Allan says. “I thought he had it made as a doctor. But he’s the happiest I’ve seen him since his childhood.” As Darrell walks through the Benton’s facility—housing a shop up front, curing and…

Heir to the Smokehouse

Lone Star Laboratory

In Ted Flato’s youth, summer days often meant snorkeling in the Nueces River, cooking outside over an open fire, or ambling through persimmons, prickly pear, sotol, and sedge grasses at Kickapoo Ranch, his family’s estate on the western edge of Texas’s Hill Country. Nestled along four miles of the river’s banks, the land had been in his family since the 1930s, but Flato’s parents made it their own, constructing for their visits a one-room rock shelter void of running water and electricity. “It was like Little House on the Prairie,” Flato says, “and a lovely way to grow up.” In time, the family outgrew those rustic accommodations, and in the 1970s, his parents commissioned the revered modernist architect O’Neil Ford to design a house more in keeping with their vision…

Lone Star Laboratory

Making an Entrance

STEP NO. 1 DOOR JAM KNOCKER Arrange flowers and greenery in the basket of Michael Healy’s solid cast-brass door knocker for a greeting that delights the senses ($140; michaelhealy.com). PAINT Now that the United Kingdom–based Little Greene Paint & Paper’s rich hues have crossed the pond, those aiming for a striking first impression can try such offerings as Adventurer, the plum tone seen here ($52 per quart, $108–$155 per gallon; littlegreene.us). STEP NO. 2 WARM RECEPTION WALLPAPER What better way to feather the entrance of a nest than with this new wallpaper from the British fashion designer and illustrator Giles Deacon’s collection for Sanderson, a bird-egg motif that pays homage to Victorian studies of the natural world ($362 per roll; williamssonoma.com)? LAMP AND SHADE Return home to a golden glow…

Making an Entrance

Plein Air Palette

In the deep Lowcountry shade of a pair of gnarled live oaks, artist Gret Mackintosh’s three-year-old son, Mack, draws fleeting chalk masterpieces on the bluestone hard-scape abutting the screened porch and the garden beyond. Fox, the family dalmatian, picks his way along familiar paths snaking through lush beds planted with heirloom camellias, azaleas, and gardenias as well as hardy cast-iron and tractor seat plants. Native fern varieties such as Southern Wood and Cinnamon also thrive in this suburban Charleston garden’s dappled sunlight. “When I bought the house, there was nothing back here but these old live oaks. Every single thing has been planted by me” In a back corner, Mackintosh’s painting studio anchors the small but abundantly green space behind her home. Built by her ex-husband and his team at…

Plein Air Palette

Her frame looks like four Popsicle sticks jammed into a marshmallow. She commands attention due to her great height and awkward body composition. She is fluffy and top-heavy, gangly and unsteady. “What type of dog is she?!” they ask. They all ask. June Bug is a mutt, but I decided to make up a breed for her, something illustrative. Her face resembles that of a golden retriever, but her lineage is actually a mix of, in descending predominance, Siberian husky, Great Pyrenees, and rottweiler. She is stubborn like the first, independent like the middle, and aloof like the last. For her, it’s a nearly feral combination. She’s an Appalachian Golden Wolf, I say. While Appalachian Golden Wolves—as I have observed and classified them—are gruff, outdoor creatures, they are also sweet,…

BabyLand Dreams

I found myself at BabyLand General Hospital, the home of the Cabbage Patch Kids, on a lark. Late last year, I attended a writing residency at Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences near Dillard, Georgia. Winding my way through the North Georgia mountains, I saw one billboard after another advertising the tourist attraction, in Cleveland, with an image of one of the dolls, a round-faced, ruddy-cheeked girl with pigtails. Once one of the most popular toys of my 1980s childhood, Cabbage Patch Kids can still be found on store shelves, though they seem of a bygone time, a relic of the era before electronic doodads like Nano Pets gave way to the gaming boom. I hadn’t thought about the dolls in decades, but the ads ignited my nostalgia.…

BabyLand Dreams

Market Research

Last year, my son had to write a poem about me for Mother’s Day. My kids have been dealt an assignment like this before, so I braced myself for the sure-to-be-eye-opening experience of reading his unvarnished thoughts regarding my private life. The observations both he and his sister had made about me in the past highlighted things I didn’t even know about myself. This new work of art proved no different. The stanza “My mom goes to the grocery store every day / It doesn’t matter if we need anything, she always finds a way” couldn’t be more accurate. But what Theo fails to mention is that I actually hate going to the grocery store for all the mundane things— broccoli, cat food, toilet paper, milk, eggs. As with any…

Market Research

THE JOY OF GOING

Should we have stayed at home, / wherever that may be? —Elizabeth Bishop, “Questions of Travel” COMING AND GOING, PACKING AND unpacking. Where’s the green sweater? Oh, in Italy. Don’t we have a wok? Yes, in North Carolina. They’ve canceled the flight. We’re missing Tori’s birthday. We missed Carnevale. Really, the windows need washing. I forgot to plant the bulbs before we left. Who will house-sit the cats? Water is leaking out of the fridge? Yes, the cousins are coming to stay for two weeks. We live in two countries. When we’re in one house, the other sends subliminal messages: Come back. Surely one home in the place you love most is best, with vacations in other magnetic locations. Is that true? But where is the place you love best?…

THE JOY OF GOING

ITALY OFF THE BEATEN PATH

1 Ponza Catch the ferry at Terracina in Lazio, and soon you’re on an enchanting island with a picturesque village stacked along the Tyrrhenian coast. Blue, red, yellow, and white boats bob in the harbor, and you can hire one to take you to hidden coves. Or ride a Vespa into the hills covered with wildflowers and find your own hidden beaches. The vibe is relaxed, even retro. Lively seafood restaurants, cobbled lanes, tumbling bougainvillea and jasmine—this is the island paradiso one dreams of. At the Grand Hotel Santa Domitilla, you swim in grottoes, one cool, one warm. Odysseus is said to have spent a year on the island. Easy to see why. 2 Sansepolcro This handsome market town in the valley of the Tiber is home to “the greatest…

ITALY OFF THE BEATEN PATH

THE BIG APPLE OF MY EYE

MY HUSBAND, A BORN-AND-RAISED New Yorker, tells me, a Southern lady who has lived in Manhattan for more than thirty years: “You go to book readings, museums, the opera. You’re more of a New Yorker than I am. I don’t like to do any of those things.” This is true. When my husband “takes me to the theater,” he walks me from our Upper East Side apartment to Times Square, treats me to lunch, and then deposits me at the theater door. This works out well for us because he doesn’t have to sit through “a bunch of people talking or moving around” (a.k.a. dancing), and I don’t have to sit beside him as he stews about the money we spent on his ticket. All my husband needs is Central…

THE BIG APPLE OF MY EYE

HOMES AWAY FROM HOME

1 Shinola Hotel DETROIT, MICHIGAN Detroit borders Canada, dips below zero degrees in winter, and long epitomized the American Rust Belt. And yet the Motor City, making a cultural comeback, shares a kinship with the South, thanks to the twentieth-century influx of Southerners, mostly Black, who moved here looking for opportunity. The Great Migration gave the world the soulful sounds of Motown—Berry Gordy’s family relocated from Georgia—and much more. The Shinola Hotel, a recent extension of the Shinola brand dreamed up by Texan Tom Kartsotis, expands the company’s celebration of American craftsmanship. It marries a pair of rehabilitated historic structures—a former department store and a sewing machine factory—with three new buildings, all filled with contemporary art. The compound straddles Parker’s Alley, lined with shops and eateries curated by Shinola creative…

HOMES AWAY FROM HOME

PASSPORT FOR THE PALATE

TASTE AND SEE IS THERE A POPULAR RESTAURANT DISH that hasn’t been endlessly photographed, filtered, and fine-tuned on social media? Probably not. But be thankful that no one has yet found a way to send taste through your gadget. For the adventurous eater, travel brings new horizons. ¶ Taking a trip with an accomplished chef is among the most fulfilling ways to bring context to cuisine. Chefs put words to flavors and aromas that can be elusive, and encourage travelers to understand food through their own experiences and stories, building a bridge between near and far. ¶ Here are three tours to expand your gustatory horizons. 1 Mezcal Memories SOUTHERN MEXICO The cooking legend Bill Smith ran the kitchen at Crook’s Corner in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for a quarter…

PASSPORT FOR THE PALATE

Over Yonder NORTHWEST OREGON: From late May through October, some ten thousand rosebushes in Portland’s 1 International Rose Test Garden burst into bloom. Varieties include Southern favorites like the pink Savannah and the pale-yellow Fairhope. WASHINGTON: A short walk from the fish vendors and the flagship Starbucks in Seattle’s Pike Place Market, North Carolina native Art Stone launched 2 Honest Biscuits to share the gravy-topped delicacies his grandmother taught him to bake. MONTANA: Since 1900, 3 Chico Hot Springs Resort has lured travelers to its restorative waters, but nowadays, folks also come for a twelve-course sampler menu of Paradise Valley flavors at its Tasting Room, helmed by Nashvillereared executive chef Dave Wells. WYOMING: At the 4 A Bar A guest ranch, horseback riding trails weave through the Medicine Bow Mountains,…

CARIBBEAN BREEZE

YOU COULD BE FORGIVEN FOR ORGA-nizing a junket to the British Virgin Islands around three simple steps: (1) plop yourself in a lounge chair near the shimmering turquoise shallows; (2) order a round of Painkillers; (3) repeat as needed. But should ambition strike, there are ample reasons to venture out and get your feet wet (most often literally): The Baths, for one, the spectacular and photogenic playground of massive granite boulders that form grottoes and crystalline tide pools on the southwestern tip of Virgin Gorda. The timeless beach bars (the Soggy Dollar, Ivan’s Stress Free Bar, Foxy’s, et al.) along the southern coast of Jost Van Dyke. Pilgrimage-worthy restaurants like the Sugar Mill, in a candlelit four-century-old building on Tortola, the largest of the archipelago’s fifty-plus islands. Storied blue marlin…

CARIBBEAN BREEZE

THEIR TIME TO ’SHINE

AS A BOY, HOWARD CONYERS TAGGED ALONG WITH HIS FATHER, HARRISON, to auctions and estate sales all across their native South Carolina. A longtime professional welder and farmer, Harrison might pick up a vintage washing machine at one stop, perhaps a pea sheller at the next. He’d often let his young son make the bids, directing Howard when to raise the paddle and when to let it fall. In the early 1990s, Harrison, who is now seventy-two, joined a group standing around a machine at an auction. “I didn’t know what it was,” he recalls. “But the other fellows didn’t know either.” Harrison forked over ten dollars and took it home. A bootlegger friend then helpfully explained what the contraption could do: crush corn into meal. And with a heap…

THEIR TIME TO ’SHINE

Run, FORREST, Run

THIS YEAR MARKS THE THIRTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE RELEASE OF FORREST GUMP, A FILM SOUTHERN IN ITS SETTING AND SENSIBILITY, AND GLOBAL IN ITS RESONANCE. The movie sprang, of course, from the eponymous 1986 novel by the late Winston Groom, who was a Garden & Gun contributing editor. When asked how the film version affected his life, his favorite response became “I upgraded to a better brand of toilet paper.” ¶ That’s because upon its release on July 6, 1994, Forrest Gump—directed by Robert Zemeckis, and starring Tom Hanks, Gary Sinise, Robin Wright, Mykelti Williamson, and Sally Field, among others—took the world by storm, earning nearly $700 million at the box office and six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, for Hanks. ¶ Three decades later,…

Run,
FORREST,
Run

DEEP CREEK COMMUNION

ESSAY I WOULD HAZARD TO SAY THERE AREN’T MANY world-class writers who spent their last days hanging off the back of a garbage truck, smelling of “piss and green mayonnaise.” Harry Middleton did. And Middleton, who wrote principally about his life among mountain streams, was a world-class writer. Because he has been nearly forgotten, I want to say that right up front. I first heard of Harry Middleton from my cousin Tye. Our fathers were brothers, but only my uncle Jerry was a fisherman. He and Tye actually named one of their cats after a famous fly, the Rat Faced McDougall. Uncle Jerry tried to teach me and Tye fly fishing on a Rocky Mountain stream when we were eight. When one of my backcasts set its hook in my…

DEEP CREEK COMMUNION

Memories Measured in Catfish

DANGER: ALLIGATORS AND SNAKES IN AREA. STAY AWAY FROM THE WATER, read the signs tacked to the rails of the creaky wooden platform behind Ray’s Millpond restaurant. But we were a horde of children on summer vacation, and reading, for those of us who could, was the last thing on our to-do list. Hyped up on fried fish and sweet tea, my cousins and I were bound headlong for the swamp. I was normally a cautious child. But here in Ray City, in South Georgia, along the overgrown berm of a pond long abandoned by its namesake gristmill, the sunlight waning through the pines and moss-drenched cypresses only added romance to the peril. GATOR! A little voice yelled and someone pointed to a floating log. You could barely hear the…

Memories Measured in Catfish

Something in the Water

My visits to Hot Springs, Arkansas, begin and end with filling a water bottle at the public jug fountain on Central Avenue. A carousel of spigots pour out the bounty: odorless, pristine mineral water that fell as rain four thousand years ago—when the pyramids were under construction in Egypt—and percolated deep into the earth, only to be forced up a fault line and out of the Ouachita Mountains to the tune of 700,000 piping hot (143°F) gallons a day. My childhood self, an annual visitor to Hot Springs National Park from my hometown of Little Rock, did not appreciate this miracle of geology. But if the science was lost on me, the fact that the fountains mysteriously emitted swirling vapor, and that I could dip my hand into a trickle…

Something in the Water

The Southern Agenda

SPORTS The New Old Ball Game BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA In 1991, Chicago’s Comiskey Park became a parking lot, bequeathing the title of America’s Oldest Baseball Park to Birmingham’s 10,800-seat Rickwood Field. Built in 1910, the spearmint-green, mission-style gem had been home to Birmingham’s minor-league Barons and Negro League Black Barons, as well as, from 1912 to 1927, Crimson Tide football. Even Lynyrd Skynyrd played there—a 1974 concert included the band’s new single “Sweet Home Alabama.” Since the Barons left in 1987, though, Rickwood had served as little more than a restroom for birds, and it appeared an errant feather away from collapse. But the Friends of Rickwood, preservationists who raised $2 million, put more sweat into the park than any team that ever played there, and reinstituted minor-league baseball on the…

The Southern Agenda

A Hard Day’s Nap

You write about food, you get hungry. You write about naps, you get a little fuzzy. But there’s work to do! A nap, according to Winston Churchill, is “the refreshment of blessed oblivion which, even if it only lasts 20 minutes, is sufficient to renew all the vital forces.” I am tempted to say, “My vital forces and I will be back in twenty minutes,” but there’s work to do! Did I say that already? By work I mean, for instance, trying a tricky nap thing recommended by Salvador Dalí. The surrealist artist took naps that were less than one second long. He would sit up in an armchair with a metal key in his hand. Below the key-holding hand, he would place a metal plate. The moment he fell…

A Hard Day’s Nap

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