Loblollies
Several of you have asked if I’ve either stopped writing a travelogue or stopped traveling. Neither. All that has happened is that my work traveling has fallen into a regular rhythm of trips to New York every other week or so, usually with pretty much the same cast of characters. Most of the time it is pretty ho-hum.
But a few interesting things have happened in any event. For example, in late January, I spent two days in Atlanta getting a colleague at another firm ready for a jury exercise we were planning to conduct in New York (which will be the subject of a separate report). I had not been south in almost two years and as soon as I landed in Atlanta, I realized what a grave mistake that was.
I love the South. Not because I was born in the South or went to law school in the South. Not because my great-great grandmother, White McRorie, was minding her Ps and Qs outside Charlotte, N.C. during the Civil War when she got carried off to Newark, N.J. by a Yankee soldier (by great-grandfather) and ended up with a gazillion bluestocking New Yorker in-laws. And not because most of my family still lives in the South. I love the South because of the loblollies.
Loblollies pines grow tall and straight and they don’t branch out until they are well off the ground. Loblolly needles are long, soft, and pale green. Loblolly wood orange, loblolly cones are reddish brown. Some people call them rosemary pines, or Indian pines, or Bull pines. They line cotton fields and corn fields and soybean fields and interstate highways. They can grow over 100 feet high. According to the dictionary, a loblolly is “a lout or clownish fellow, a thick gruel, or a mud puddle.” According to the Natural History of Trees, “a loblolly is a natural pocket or depression,” which is where they start out growing before they take over abandoned, worked-out, cut-over, or burned fields on the costal plain.
Once when I was on a business trip to Savannah, I found a 19th century engraving of a row of loblollies dividing two plowed cotton fields. My framer in D.C. framed it in a thick redolent dark wood frame with whorled gold flakes – bringing out the movement of the loblolly needles. The image could be nowhere else
but the Southern coastal plain. Again, the Natural History of Trees: “in the southern landscape [the loblolly] is second only to Longleaf in beauty – grand in its trunks like marshaled columns, colorful in its bark. So Loblolly gives to the vast, somewhat mournful coastal plains that loftiness, that movement and singing, which one longs for there, and seems to people with noble lives the sun-bitten stretches where so often no people live.”Whenever I see a loblolly, I feel uplifted. My sister-in-law once took a picture of me hugging a very large loblolly on the grounds of the Pinehurst, North Carolina polo grounds. When I was in law school, I lived in a little cul-de-sac of loblollies on the edge of the Duke Forest. My last September there, Hurricane Fran came through and snapped my favorite, giant red loblolly in two. My grandfather could not believe it. He said to me on the telephone – “Pine trees don’t break. That’s why they make ship’s masts out of them.” One New Year’s my brother and sister-in-law and nieces and nephew drove across the border to Camden, South Carolina to a little-known Revolutionary War battle field. The battle field was an overgrown field, ringed with loblollies.
I spent the whole ride in from the Atlanta airport with my nose pressed against the taxi wind
ow, starting at the loblollies.My time in Atlanta only got better after that. I spent all day working with my colleague on the 52nd floor of a building that a panoramic view of Atlanta. We were on the conference room floor and we seemed to be the only people up there. It was a very southern conference room floor – nice colonial furniture with tiger claw casters, pastel upholstery, bright chintz floor-length curtains, pretty yellow carpets, paintings of old men in green pants. More like the club house of a golf club than a law firm. When we got tired of working, we would tour the floor. My colleague showed me all the Olympic sites, the locations of the most controversial new Starbucks, the huge massive park that bisects much of downtown Atlanta (full of loblollies), Stone Mountain in the distance (scene of Revolutionary War and Civil War activities), the baseball stadium and the airport. It was beautiful.
My colleague is the first woman to be on her very Southern law firm’s executive committee, a 50-year-old blond bombshell who towered over me in very high heels and bent everyone in the firm/on the road/on the telephone/at the restaurant to her fearsome will. Her secretary was so terrified of her I thought at one point she might walk backwards out of the room in bare feet, mumbling. My colleague would call her up on the phone and make what must have sounded like very odd requests but which were actually quite necessary to our jury exercise preparation – “Find out if anyone in Atlanta will sell me a copy of the 1939 original version of the Wizard of Oz!” Or, “Bring Kim a chicken pesto sandwich immediately!” Or, “Call Bell South and tell them I’m busy!” Or, “Kim is till hungry – bring lots of potato chips!”
That night she took me to an exceedingly trendy little restaurant in Buckhead. It had numbers in its name and you entered by going through a heavy velvet curtain. It was misty outside but there was a fire in our trendy restaurant – which dried us out but also suffocated us because I guess some of the mist got into the chimney or something.
We had a long leisurely dinner during which my colleague told me what it was like to be fearsome and imperious as one of the first famous female trial lawyers in the south. She recently married for the first time to a very rich man who is much older than her and does not live in Atlanta. Perfect. As she told me, “honey, like I always said, he’s gotta have one foot in the grave and one foot on the banana peel!”
Being fearsome and imperious apparently also comes with very poor driving skills and an inability to clean windshield wipers. As she drove me home from our trendy nightspot to my hotel, I couldn’t look out the front of the car – too scary. I looked out the side, at the loblollies rising blackly in the misty night. The windshield wipers made hideous screechy scratchy sounds all the way back uptown, making me wince. Every time I winced, my colleague would shriek with laughter -- “Doesn’t that sound just absolutely HORRIBLE?!”
The last thing worth reporting on is the hotel itself. It was one of the (if not the?) oldest hotel on Peachtree Street. It was where Vivian Leigh and Clark Gable stayed during the premiere of Gone With the Wind. It resembled a wedding cake very much. It was not exactly “up to date,” although the bathrooms had recently been renovated, it appeared. My room was about a 45 minute walk away from the elevator. It was larger than my house in DC. Part of it was a turret. The turret had about 5 windows all facing southeast. My bed was placed in the middle of the turret room, equidistant from each of the 5 windows. The bed was one of those Swedish mud mattresses that form to your body and have no springs – like climbing onto a very comfortable pile of clay. Within seconds I was asleep. I woke up the next morning to the southern sun streaming over miles and miles of loblollies through the 5 windows of my turret, right onto my Swedish mud bed. I was very happy.
posted by Anonymous @ 11:55 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home