Day of Departure

Like the first night of every camping trip, I’m hearing things in the dark. I’m camped with Duke, the English lab, next to a dirt road in Bankhead National Forest just north of Jasper, Alabama and every thirty minutes or so I think I hear the crunch of truck tires on gravel or the scrape of briars across a pants leg. I close my laptop so that my eyes can adjust to the dark and grab the handle of my revolver. I listen. I stare out the windows of the camper, looking for lights. I shine my headlamp on Duke to see if his ears are perked. They aren’t. I lean back and relax.

Duke and I left Columbus, Georgia at two o’clock this afternoon. I don’t know where we’re going yet, but I know we’re heading northwest. Once we gain enough latitude and elevation for me to use a sleeping bag at night, we’ll stop for about five days or a week while I pore through my books on the Walker Expedition. Then I’ll know where to start. Until then, we have a basic direction, but no pretermined route. It’s not a bad way to travel.

Late this afternoon, I stopped for a beer along Alabama Highway 5. Really, I was curious about the bingo. The afternoon was about to become evening and I was thinking about a place to stop when I noticed the first bingo joint. It was a big one – a one-story square building the size of a small grocery store with “BINGO” written over the door. Must be some old folks living around here, I thought. Then I passed another big bingo establishment, then a smaller one, and then two more, all within a quarter mile. After I passed the fifth, my curiosity got the better of me. How could the demand for bingo be so great on the eastern outskirts of Jasper, Alabama? I turned around and parked in the crowded lot, and walked toward the tinted-glass door under the word “BINGO.” As I neared the door, an employee in uniform opened the door and invited me in.

The bingo joint that I visited.

Damn was I disappointed. I had hoped for tables of rowdy retirees, buckets of beer, and a spirited girl in a skirt calling out numbers. Instead – rows and rows of jingling electronic slot machines. Air redolent of cigarette smoke. Gaudy carpet and bare walls. Dim lights except for the screens of the slot machines, which cast otherworldly glows on the faces of the people who sat before them feeding in quarters and rapping on buttons like rats in an experimental cage. I walked between the rows of slots, looking for the bar so I could at least get a beer and ask the bartender why bingo joints – or slot-machine joints masquerading as bingo joints – were so prevalent. I found no one, so I went back to the lady at the door.

“Excuse me,” I asked. “Where can I get a beer?”

“You can’t,” she said. “The county is dry. The town is wet, but the county is dry.”

“Oh.” I hadn’t seen that one coming. Now the attraction of this place was even more mysterious. “Why are there so many bingo joints here?”

“They’re in the county because you can’t have bingo in the town. You can have bingo in the county but no beer, or you can have beer in the town but no bingo.”

“But why so many bingo places? I mean, are there lots of old folks around here or something? And where do you even play bingo in here?”

She pointed to the back. “That’s where you play,” she said. She told me when the next bingo game would occur, but could not explain why in the Jasper area favored bingo over all over games of chance. I said thanks but no thanks. I went back to the truck.

I drove into Jasper and bought a six-pack, then headed north. Duke and I crossed the county line before we made camp and now, listening to the crickets and frogs and – wait, is that a four-wheeler engine in the distance? – I keep wondering at the silliness of the rules that humans can create. Something about a search for order and a willingness to tolerate absurdity in order to attain it. Maybe it’s a necessary trade-off in all societies. Duke doesn’t seem perturbed, though, about rules or four-wheelers – he has stretched out on the cool linoleum floor and gone to sleep. I’m going to crawl up on my mattress and do likewise. There’s a lot to be learned from that dog.