July 15, 2021
There was a spider incursion last night…oh, and another visit from a police officer—the third now. As for the spiders they were like daddy longlegs but not as big and their bodies, instead of being pea shaped were more like husks of rice. I had just laid back with my headlamp on and looked up on the ceiling and there were about five. Then when I started looking around I saw about 20 more and some little ones of a different species. It took a while to get them out as they could drop on a thread or run fast and I was trying to gather them with a hand towel and flick them out the back window. Of course, after re-securing my camper and thinking I was rid of them I found more. Oh well. Sleep with the spiders.
I’m leaving Winchester today but as is the case with most of the places I’ve visited the thread is pulled tight and the material of stories are bunched. It will be difficult to smooth them down and give them the time and space they deserve.
I suppose it was my intention to leave a cliff hanger the other day as a friend pointed out when she sent me a simple email that went like this: Dun dun duuunnnn. I can only blame too many forensic files back in Corryton. Now it simply seems like too much work to keep the cliff hanger going.
Yes, I was visited by the police here two nights ago. Yes, there was another incident in the cemetery when I first arrived. And yes, I was awakened again last night at 12:30 a.m. by a police officer in the same city park. But if that is all you knew…and that I had run into a large, new confederate memorial in my grandmother’s cemetery you would have a skewed view of my hometown and might be apt to have conspiracy theories about proud boys, the KKK and other fringe groups…just as I courted earlier in the week.
I wanted to keep the fear narrative going because fear is the expectation I ran into so much in the past when I talked with people in college (and later in life) who had never visited the South and probably weren’t going to because of everything they’d heard. I wanted to keep that fear idea going because I wanted to lambast that expectation into oblivion which all my other interactions were showing me was the right thing to do. Then I was visited by the police again last night.
Okay, that deserves another Dun dun duuunnnn…….
I was just beginning to fall off to sleep when I heard car wheels churn in the gravel near my truck. The wheels stopped and I heard a car door shut and footsteps. A flashlight moved across the curtains which I had chosen to close after the incident from the previous night. I heard the scratchy break of a police radio and indistinguishable jabber. The light explored the curtains further looking for a gap. Then I heard the scratchy radio go silent and a thick southern voice just outside my window screen—“There doesn’t appear to be anyone here….”
“Hello!” I called out before anymore theorizing could get thrown about.
If I was incredulous the night before I was honestly worried this time. Two nights in a row!!! What the hell was the problem with these people? Is the safety patrol the wake patrol?
“I have a camping permit hanging from my rear view!” I called with a bit of exasperation.
“Did you know your two doors are wide open?” the officer said back to me.
I peaked out the window to the drivers side then popped across the mattress to look out the window to the other.
“Oh my god!” I called out. “I am such an idiot!”
It was also an exhalation of relief. There was a reason for the officer to be here and this time it was my fault!
I find it funny that the picture I posted yesterday of the permit tag on my rearview also shows the state I left my truck in last night when I climbed in the shell to go to bed. A whole day had passed of writing at two different locations, taking pictures, and searching for the last house on my list. But the picture the police officer saw sometime after midnight, in the darkness of a thin waxing moon, appeared as something possibly sinister.
“We’ve had cars abandoned down here” he said. “I just spent the last half hour searching the perimeter. When you come across a vehicle with both doors open you wonder where the occupants went.”
Wow! A cop that explains things before he starts in on the third degree! That’s different. I immediately felt like this was someone I could talk to and I began to explain myself and what I was doing in Winchester searching for home and how much I wanted to defend what I loved about the South.
“Yes, I’ve tried to fight that narrative myself,” Greg said with his thick southern voice. “What you’re doing is good because you’re telling the truth about what you see. We need more of that message getting out. There are too many who try to sensationalize things. But the truth is also that there still are things to fear.”
I was speaking to the police officer through the screen of the open window on my truck. Several times I had to add pillows under my arm to get comfortable. We were alone. He had an automatic handgun on his holster, a yellow stun gun closer to his chest and who knows what other apparatus on his work belt. The bulk of several box-like soft structures made a shelf where he sometimes rested his arms.
“The Ku Klux Klan burned a cross in my mothers yard just back in 2002 when she befriended a black man where she worked. Her friend said he wouldn’t step foot in her town because the stars and bars were flying right at the entrance. She convinced him it wasn’t like that, then, when he finally did come to visit, the next night she had a cross burning in her front yard.”
Greg is a handsome, mid-thirties man with narrow unframed window glasses which he would occasionally adjust with two fingers at the temple. I would have guessed he was in his twenties but when I did the math it added up to more. He was a former marine stationed in southern California fifteen years ago. He had not seen a same sex couple until then. He had not had a black friend until he joined the marines. Now, he was not only a cop, but a trainer of cops.
We talked about the repercussions of the George Floyd case which he had followed closely. His police department now has a duty to intervene policy after Governor Lee recommended departments review their procedures. The Republican governor introduced the duty to intervene idea just a month after the George Floyd incident. It is now required in many large Tennessee metropolises and state agencies for officers to intervene when they see a fellow cop engaged in an unreasonable use of force.
Greg brought up the Rodney King case also. He had watched the recording —that was likely made around the time he was in Kindergarten—numerous times. He talked about how there is a moment on the flickering VHS when another police officer walks toward the scene, stops, sees what is going on and quietly backs out of the frame. Greg says that guy knew he could be held responsible for what was happening.
I told him about my participation in the Rodney King protests that turned into a riot in San Francisco. I was standing at the window of Layne’s Jewelry on Market Street when the plate glass was smashed and gold watches and jewels were flung everywhere on the sidewalk for the taking.
I told him how at the top of Knob Hill a long white limousine had been overrun by the crowd. People were on top of it stomping on the roof. I was at the back door when an African American youth, barely a teenager, pulled open the door and started reaching for a white man with impeccably coiffed hair and a picnic basket on the floor behind the passenger seat. The man was stomping on the basket to get to the opposite side as the teen reached for him with a gleeful look in his eyes.
I put my hand on the teens arm and said, “Hey man, what are you doing?”
It was enough to wake him from whatever dark fantasy he had fallen into.
“See that would never happen in Tennessee,” Greg said. “Too many people carry guns. No one would try that here.”
It was an endorsement of firearms and then he said a few more favorable things before adding that the permissiveness of firearms in the South also made it the most likely place for an officer to be killed. Then he lamented that the constitutional carry law just went into effect July first in Tennessee. That law allows anyone in the state to carry a firearm without a permit. He said that before this law, he could stop anyone carrying a fire arm and ask to see their permit and if they didn’t have one it gave him permission to do a further search. Now he is not legally able to do that and bank robbers and murderers can openly carry guns.
“We got a call the first day constitutional carry became law. A man had walked in to the Dollar General with three guns strapped to him. Now who needs that. He was just doing it because he could. We went there, but we couldn’t do anything about it. We couldn’t even question him. That’s his right now.”
“People have this idea that everything should be like it was during the wild west,” he continued. “But these are different times. Back then if someone stole your possession it might be months before you could get another of whatever it was. There were harsher punishments for a reason. It was about survival.”
Our conversation continued ranging from affordable housing, the role of police in community policing and ultimately what we wished for the world. It was over an hour before we were done.
I started to get the idea that Estill Springs wasn’t as rough as the cases of prostitution, drug dealing and car theft might have led me to think. If he hadn’t been whisked away on a call by then, things couldn’t be that bad.
Greg said he hated the confederate flag.
“It represents nothing but hate and violence. It’s the same thing as people flying the Nazi flag,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, “and it seems to me there are so many better ways to celebrate your history if that’s what you want to do.”
“Most of the people who fly it don’t even know who in their family fought in the war or which great, great, grandfather it was.”
Greg made some interesting points about the confederate flag and its use as a military flag. As a former marine he had a different perspective.
“As wrong as that flag is I can understand how it might fit in with a military cemetery. It’s the flag that was draped over those people’s coffins.”
At some point earlier in the conversation I had asked if there was an African American officer on his police force.
“Yes there is,” he said.
“I just wanted to confirm,” I said. “It was a black man who shined the light in my eyes and wouldn’t take it down until his partner finally saw my permit.”
This fact I was going to keep from you, dear reader, while I played out my little cliff hanger, because as my mind had started to work a little conspiracy theory earlier in the week about colluding police forces, unnamed white nationalist groups, and community spies, it was not until I saw that it was a black man that shined the light in my eyes that I pretty much gave up that idea.
The flashlight shining officer had a very country voice with zero black patois and when for the briefest moment his light had gone across his right arm I was able to relax a bit—even though I hated the way he handled the situation. My already dubious mind just couldn’t go the distance of a black officer conspiring with white nationalist, although in this world, anything is possible and it has probably happened.
I’m just not important enough for anyone to bother with that kind of thing.
Spotty West Goes East 