The Zombie Tour

Leaving Halifax behind

We spend a day in Hall's Harbour

 "I don't think much about zombies," I said.
     "What?" Maggie glanced at me as she drove through North Georgia toward the eastern tip of Tennessee to catch I-81, the road that ambles along the Blue Ridge Mountains.
     We'd spent the night near Brasstown Bald at the top of Georgia, given that name by the first white settlers who'd asked the Indians where they were and couldn't understand the answer. "I dunno," a settler probably said. "Sounded like he said Brasstown Bald to me."
     Up through Virginia, into New York State to a motel in Binghamton with a show the next night in Historic Downtown Boston, as the sign said. A wonderful house concert in an old brownstone on Massachusetts Avenue and a tour of Boston the next morning by our hosts.
     "I know this is going to be a long road trip," I said, "so I needed something to start talking about."
     "Zombies?" Maggie said.
     See, we talk a lot while driving because it gives us hours to pursue things we never get the chance to talk about at home. Like books, tours, friends and family. Lots of music, too.
     I thought zombies would be a good place to start.
     "Sometimes," Maggie said, "you're just too weird for me."
     "Like now?"
     "Yeah, like now."
   
     I don't understand the fascination with zombies. There must be some social connotation that I just don't ‘get.'
     What is it about Nuclear bombs, or alien gasses or escaped scientific monkeys that turns people into zombies? I think I would go the other way and become a gastrophile. Someone who wanted duck pate' partnered with a very good wine, not human flesh, but that's just me.
      From Boston we headed north, at first planning to stay on I-95 through Bangor and to the border at Calais (pronounced Callas), but we were called by the lure of the Maine coast and left the freeway for Highway One along the Atlantic. It was a very good choice. We stayed in Ellesworth in a little motel attached to a lobster restaurant, then spent the next morning with a Jim and Sue, a couple we'd just met through music, getting their names from another touring musician before dropping in to spend time with them.

Maggie at the rail, returning across the Bay of Fundy on the Ferry, Princess of Acadia

    We became friends and stayed with them on the return trip; or, at least we stayed in a park along a high bluff in their little travel trailer - but that was much later.
     With Maggie at the wheel we found our way to Middleton, Nova Scotia, about 9 o'clock that evening, dragging ourselves into our friends' house. Different friends. This couple had been coming to Florida every year and each time they caught our show they invited us up to Nova Scotia. After 18 years it happened.
     All those years ago Maggie and I were playing in a coffee house in Panama City, Florida. The two of them wandered in just as we were singing the Stan Rogers song, Barrett's Privateers. He began singing along, and when I asked how he knew the words he said he was from Nova Scotia. He'd actually stood on Halifax Pier. We've been friends ever since.
     His wife has read my novel, and I was surprised to see her review of it on Amazon. They live in a magic land with vegetable stands on every corner, sweeping green hillsides and apple trees growing wild along the roadways. Panoramic sweeps of land and sea, and little restaurants serving great ‘Maritime' fare, including ‘poutine' and lobster rolls. We ate lots of lobsters. And haddock chowder and lobster chowder and wild blueberries as the dessert with everything. They grow all along the North Atlantic, a surprise to us, and every stand has a corner dedicated to wild blueberries. In the strange ways of language, Cherryfield calls itself the ‘Blueberry Capital of Maine.'
     We spent a week exploring Nova Scotia, one day climbing the rocks along the Peggy's Cove lighthouse, the next wandering along the rocky beaches of the Bay of Fundy. I should mention we played a few concert dates as well, but it was the land that kept us excited as children. Hall's Harbour, Hampton Harbour, actually standing on Halifax Pier and taking photos of Theodore the Tugboat.
     We ate extraordinary food and met great people. The more we travel the less I know. All I thought I knew was wrong, as it always is. Any preconceptions I carry are washed away with travel and, as a writer, I drink it in like water. The color of houses, the storms at sea, pretty eyes in a crowded pub. Writing takes place ‘after' living. It can't be done while hiding in the dark, because nothing is what we think it is. Travel cures that. We learn, we watch and realize how little we know.
     I love to travel, and am lucky enough to travel with someone who likes me, someone who enjoys riding for days with me and talking about everything under the sun. Even zombies.
     Zombies became the topic of at least one conversation throughout the entire tour, which encompassed 14 states and two provinces. Zombies seem to have international renown, and everyone has an opinion. Some remember George Romero's 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Younger people liked 28 Days Later or I Am Legend. Movies about drooling, mindless living-dead people staggering like drunks down city streets and, though they seem slow, they always catch non-zombies and eat them.

On Halifax Pier, Nova Scotia

     We left Nova Scotia reluctantly aboard the Princess of Acadia, car stowed in the hull as we lingered on deck with hot tea, watching the high shore line through the mist, leaning on the rail while the ferry slipped out into the Bay of Fundy and everything disappeared in the fog. Morning sunlight washed the rippled surface with silver. A small whale stitched the water's surface near the boat and dolphins leapt everywhere. From Digby to St. John's we stood alone in the chill of a Canadian morning, singing songs to the sea. Inside the ferry a large group of white-bearded Amish men sat facing a large group of black-leathered bikers, like two gangs from some odd version of West Side Story.
     Through customs and back down along the rugged Maine coast to stay with our new friends, eat more lobster (a little restaurant outside Sullivan served a Twin Lobster Dinner with 2 Sides for $14.95), with wild blueberry pie for dessert.

A wonderful little house overlooking the Atlantic. Someday, we'll rent it.

       Lobstermen are getting creamed at the docks now, with lobster going there for about 2 bucks a pound. It seems the harder the physical work you do, the less you get paid for it. In the Florida panhandle, where we live, it's the oystermen, the pulpwooders, the cowboys you see standing in line at McDonald's with dusty clothes, sweat-rimmed hats, worn boots and spurs. You don't see cowboys everywhere, but you don't have to look hard to see the ones who do the hard work it takes to keep the bottom propped up, keeping things solid for the rest of us.
     A wearying traffic jam in New York because the George Washington Bridge was down to one lane, construction everywhere. Later that evening, though, we played a house concert in Jersey City at a beautiful home with a fourth floor garden/putting green and the Statue of Liberty standing nearby like a night light. A good crowd, great food at the break and a late-night talk about music and life with some fascinating people.
     We stayed in North Carolina and spent time with the incredible Sally Spring, one of my favorite singer/songwriters in Americana today. So many wonderful singers, musicians, small groups out here right now struggling to find the next gig, unnoticed by the factory-made stars who sell out the big auditoriums. A little like the cowboys, like the mill workers there at the bottom.
     (Support Local Music)
     Anyway....home again after the latest tour and preparing for the next. Our old farmhouse abides, and our black lab waits to climb back in a lap. Another tropical storm rages along the Gulf Coast and we settle back in. I open my computer and, before working on another chapter of my next book, I spend a little time thinking of how wonderful my life is. And I think about zombies. Just a little.