In older times families ordered caskets from carpenters.

By Tom Poland, A Southern Writer
TomPoland.net

I hadn’t seen him in 10 years. Him would be the preacher who buried dad and mom. He was preaching down South Georgia way in Sylvania. An early Sunday morning journey was in order. My family in Georgia and I would rendezvous not quite 120 miles away. I wouldn’t be driving so much as thinking and remembering, so I chose the route with the most memories, Highways 321 and 301—two roads downgraded by interstates. Two roads that make you think.

If I told you my journey would take me past the Roaring 20s, mounds of kudzu, sleepy motels, Quonset huts, a tiny chapel, and into Amtrak memories I would not be lying. If I claim the drive took me past caskets for sale by Highway 321 that too would pass muster. If I told you a swallow-tailed kite swooped low over cotton, then pulled up and hovered to stare at me, it happened. And if I reveal that the trip took me through Scandinavia without once boarding an airliner that would be no lie.

“Seeing is believing,” you say. Well, I see you have your thumb out. Hop in.

From Lenoir, Tennessee, Highway 321 arcs eastward, then drops into South Carolina where it passes ancient dunes, rusting mobile homes, firecracker stands, and drought-ravaged silage gasping for breath. And something I have never seen. Roadside caskets for sale. There was a time when people ordered caskets from carpenters, prepared the body, held funerals at home, and buried family members on their property. I trespassed into an old farmhouse of the 1870s once. The back bedroom held three coffins, two adults and a child’s. Never used. Now don’t confuse coffin with casket. A six-sided, tapered coffin accommodates the body’s shape. The rectangular casket possesses a hinged lid for viewings. Coffins? Dead and buried. Caskets, alive and well.

Random scenes flash by like centerline white stripes. That tiny chapel could hold no more than a dozen folk, fewer if a casket and pall bearers are involved.

Welcome to the Museum of Desolation, Demolition, & Ruination. There stands an old service station gnawed to the bone by steel- and cement-devouring termites. Folks in Appalachia would say it’s ruint. Next door stands a survivor. Dignified but abandoned. Just how long will it last?

Highway 321 threads its way through North, South Carolina, where Cat Woman star Eartha Kitt was born. A civil rights fighter, she fought alongside Red Foxx. A house there’s engulfed by kudzu which morphed into the Loch Ness monster, its head peeping over the roof. You might see an elephant.

Here comes Little Scandinavia with its Norway, Sweden, and Denmark. (Over along Highway 70 there’s even a Finland.) In the 1890s, the Southbound Railroad Company laid a line through here. It named the new communities after Scandinavian countries. Well not quite. Put an asterisk by Denmark. Graham’s Turnout took its name after Isadore Denmark, an official with the railroad. That led to the names Finland, Norway, and Sweden.

You’ll see an Amtrak Station in Denmark. One night I boarded Amtrak’s Silver Star at 12:15 am Through Denmark we rolled. We stopped in Savannah and upheaval boarded the train—a drunken woman with an unruly head of hair that looked like she had combed it with a firecracker. She said she sang at a local bar in Savannah, this gypsy chanteuse. Rowdy and bawdy, she looked like a burnt-out go-go girl who went-went one time too many. A business lady, she went from man to man. “My name is Mandy, and I have sweet candy.” The conductor put her off at the next stop.

We rolled on. Moonlit water shone silver as the Silver Star crossed rivers and swamps and tips of estuaries. Perhaps alligators watched as we hurtled by, our diesel breath rattling palmetto fronds and streaming Spanish moss like an old woman drying her hair. That was then; this is now. Along Highway 321 the pale undersides of a juvenile alligator gleam like ivory. Road kill. We see it so much we’ve grown used to it.