This American Summer

After Atlanta, we drove to the Kim household in Starkville, MS, where we spent a few days relaxing, catching up on sleep, and eating delicious Korean home cooking. After the brief respite, we moved on to Memphis, TN. We arrived in Memphis in time for a late lunch, and we were more than ready to get a taste of some Memphis barbecue.

As soon as we parked in front of Central BBQ, David was ready to pop out of the car for his ribs. The place was a small shack bursting with delicious smells and friendly smiles. Alex got a pulled pork plate and a sandwich, while David and I split a”Rack of Ribs for 2″ that came with four sides, plus an extra side of macaroni and cheese. The onset of food coma was blissful and almost instantaneous. Our appetites satiated to bursting point, we drove on to the home of our Couchsurfing host for the evening, Laura Lou.

The afternoon air felt as lazy as we did when we pulled up to the house, where Laura Lou lives with two female roommates and three cats. They lovingly call their home the Pussyplex - three girls, three cats, you get it. We could do little more than slump on the spacious, squishy couches as we got to know our host; the ‘itis’, as Laura Lou calls it, had settled on our happily fed bodies.

After a while, some family friends stopped by unexpectedly to take Laura Lou out to dinner. We were ready for more adventuring by then, so we said a temporary farewell and headed into downtown Memphis. Our only plan for the evening was to head to a couchsurfing meetup later on in the evening at a local bar. We ended up driving to Confederate Park, a nice small park at the edge of the city. Almost as soon as we arrived, we noticed a cop harassing some people sitting on the grass. The policeman had taken all of their bags and were searching through them while berating them. I discreetly took several pictures of the cop and of his car parked on the grass; once the cop left, David went over to ask them what was going on. Apparently the cop was harassing them for drinking in the park. They also told us that cops tend to just harass people for sleeping in public places, or if they recognize you as a homeless person, whether you’re doing something wrong or not. The ironic part was that according to a sign that had the park rules and regulations on it, parking your car on the grass is forbidden; sleeping on the grass and being homeless aren’t mentioned at all (but alcoholic beverages are).

Two other homeless men lying on the grass saw me taking pictures of the the cop and asked me if I worked for the state or for a newspaper. I told them that I was just a student traveling the country. One of the men ended up talking to us for a long time. He called himself Captain Wes, was missing a finger in his left hand, and gave us a long angry rant concerning his feelings toward the government and war. In the end, we gave him some of our pocket change, told him about our website and what we were doing, and wished him luck.

We then drove to Neil’s Bar to meet some of the local Memphis couchsurfers. We all sat together at two tables on an outdoor porch, listening to a live band and swapping travel stories. The Memphis couchsurfing ambassador also enlightened us on some of the inner workings of couchsurfing, and how the idea started and evolved. After many beers and a lovely sunset, we were ready to head back to Laura Lou’s place and chill for the rest of the evening.

Carrying some beer as a thank-you gift to our host and her roommates, we arrived to find the living room full of people and works-in-progress. One of Laura Lou’s roommates, an aspiring vet technician, Dolly, was painting two pheasants on a canvas. Dolly is a big fan of her famous namesake, Dolly Parton, and has painted the Grand Ole Opry singer several times. A few lamps and many candles lit up the room. A photographer friend of the girls, Tommy, showed us how he used lighting gel samples as filters in multiple exposure shots. The resulting images had a strange desert-hallucination feel - the background was very bright and washed out, while the subject of the photos was seen in red, blue, and green lines of interconnecting blurs. We discovered that when you placed the filters back on your eyes, you could separate the different exposures done with different filters. Tommy talked about how he wanted to implement this technique and other optical illusion techniques when he showed his pieces. This prompted us to tell him about Vaughn’s kaleidoscopic photography techniques.

Laura Lou also had another couchsurfer staying in the Pussyplex - he had been in town the day before, but decided to stay an extra day. Serge is from Vermont and has been working his way to LA on a motorcycle. However, on his way out of Memphis he blew a hole in a piston, so he sold the bike for scrap parts to a portly man named Bob for $150. He had spent the day repacking his gear and mailing things ahead so that he could hitchhike and train-hop all the way to the west coast, where he has a plane ticket to Hawaii waiting for him. Serge went to school in Montreal, majored in neuroscience and minored in psychology; it was fun and educational to swap ideas about sensory and multi-modal perception with him. Later, he brought out his “guitarlele” - a fusion of guitar and ukulele - and led an energetic sing along. We covered classics such as “Oh Susannah” and “Big Rock Candy Mountain,” then Serge performed a hearty rendition of “I Wanna Be Sedated.” By now it was getting pretty late, so when one of Laura Lou’s roommates invited us to go skinny dipping in some neighborhood pools, all but Serge were too tired to join the fun.

Thank you Laura Lou and the Pussyplex for their generosity in hosting us; thank you Central BBQ for that amazing gastronomical experience; thanks to the Memphis couchsurfing community for an evening of good beer, live music, and great stories at Neil’s Bar; and best of luck to Serge - we hope you make it all the way to Hawaii!