Innholdsfortegnelse for June/July 2021 i Garden & Gun

EDITOR’S LETTER Asheville Calling REMEMBERING THE ULTIMATE ROAD TRIP—AND LOOKING AHEAD TO NEW ADVENTURES DAVID DIBENEDETTO Senior Vice President & Editor in Chief Diarmid Weir/Alamy Stock Photo In the autumn of 2001, I gave myself an enviable assignment. I hit the road for four months to follow the fall migration of the striped bass from Maine to North Carolina. The migration is a natural spectacle (and a fisherman’s dream), as tens of millions of stripers course down the coast to their wintering grounds, accompanied by whales, freewheeling birds, and baitfish on the run. I left New York City, where I lived at the time, in an SUV loaded with fishing gear, a tent, waders, a wet suit (for free diving), a kayak on the rack, and a notebook filled with…

LETTERS “I found Barbara Howar’s book when I was a teenager in the 1980s, and it spoke and sang to me” ME AT-AND -THREE I was so excited to read about my high school hangout, Valle’s—formerly the Italian Rebel—in Memphis (“Fork in the Road,” April/May 2021). This place holds many fond memories for me and is run by the sweetest family ever. Laura Ruth Collierville, Tennessee I enjoyed reading “There’s the Rub” (Books, April/May 2021). When I was in college in the early seventies in DeLand, Florida, the only place you could get anything smoked was at a little place on the outskirts of town that had a takeout window. That article got me thinking, and I can’t remember any barbecue places in Central Florida that weren’t Black owned. They…

MUSIC Standing Tall A MEMBER OF THE BLACK FEMALE SUPERGROUP OUR NATIVE DAUGHTERS, AMYTHYST KIAH SHINES ON HER NEW SOLO ALBUM By Matt Hendrickson Styling by Elise Fife; hair and makeup by Ren Allen PHOTOGRAPHS BY JENNIFER COLE RODRÍGUEZ The most indelible moments in music come when a song raises the hair on the back of your neck and makes you put your fist in the air and stomp your feet. From classics such as Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam” to more current numbers such as “Sweeter” by Leon Bridges and Tyler Childers’s “Long Violent History,” some of the most powerful tunes can also soundtrack a movement and become a force for change. “Black Myself,” by the East Tennessee singer-songwriter Amythyst Kiah, is one of…

BOOKS Megawatt Dreams WHY HENRY FORD AND THOMAS EDISON’S SOUTHERN PARADISE FIZZLED By Jonathan Miles Calling the idea audacious is almost criminal understatement. Imagine it: A pristine new megacity rising from the hills, bluffs, and fields of Northwest Alabama, an urban center ten times the size of Manhattan but unlike it and every other city in most every way. Its architects envisioned a unified but decentralized constellation of miniature farms and villages stretching seventy-five miles along the Tennessee River, a shining city atop not one hill but hundreds. Most of its residents would work part of the year in factories and part of it on their own farms, as though with one foot toeing the future and the other planted in the past. Powering it all would be clean renewable…

ASK G&G Call of the Wild GATOR VIBES, HIGH HORSES, AND MIRACLE MIGRATIONS By Guy Martin ILLUSTRATION BY BRITT SPENCER Q Took a house on a bayou off Mobile Bay. What’s my gator problem? A Can you run on water faster than a dolphin can swim, twenty miles per hour or better? No matter how you get permission from gravity to do it—lifelong prayer, a passing ski boat, suprahuman adrenaline—a peckish Alligator mississippiensis swims that fast. So, when you’re cornered on your morning dip, your best hope is to hydroplane at greater than a dolphin’s velocity. En route, please channel your inner gazelle by springing five or six feet above the water occasionally, since that’s how high gators lunge to snag low-lying prey. This’ll sound counterintuitive, but consider patronizing a…

DRINKS Whiskey Shiver THE WELCOME CHILL FACTOR OF THE FROZEN IRISH COFFEE By Wayne Curtis PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHNNY AUTRY Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry The Irish coffee was invented in the 1940s near Shannon, Ireland, and made the leap to the United States in the 1950s, when the Buena Vista Cafe in San Francisco made it famous. The drink then swiftly showed up in restaurants around the nation, but the full story of its rise is complicated and contentious, involving competing claims of airport bartenders and Irish publicans, and disputes over cream versus whipped cream. Too much to get into here. But know this: The piping-hot concoction of coffee, cream, and Irish whiskey would soon collide with another drink trend, and to the good fortune of all. Ice…

JUBILEE Rocket City’s Jamaican Flair IN RAPIDLY GROWING HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA, GET A TASTE OF THE DEEPER SOUTH BY JOHN T. EDGE PHOTOGRAPHS BY LYNSEY WEATHERSPOON Illustration by Michael Spitz Business cards for Island Twelve Shipping and Nicole Nickerson, “North Alabama’s Jamaican Realtor,” share counter space. A Bible open to Psalms lies alongside. “Exodus,” the Bob Marley classic, lopes through ceiling speakers. A delivery driver, here to pick up foam boxes of braised oxtails, buys a pair of miniature boxing gloves embossed with the Jamaican flag. Soon, they will sway from his rearview mirror as he drives the Friday lunchtime streets of Huntsville, Alabama. M&K Jamaican Restaurant began about four years ago at a nearby gas station. Today it’s the most vital among an array of Caribbean restaurants in this fast-growing…

SAN ANTONIO, TEXAS BIG BEND NATIONAL PARK BOQUILLAS, MEXICO Lyrical Rewind GRINGO HONEYMOON HOW an OFF›ROAD ADVENTURE INSPIRED the CLASSIC TEXAS SONG By ROBERT EARL KEEN Brent Humphreys RALPH WALDO EMERSON NEVER MET THE SLIM DUCK. HE never met Gray Dude or Ginger. And he certainly never crossed the great American West in a ’67 Barracuda convertible. But had RWE experienced anything akin to making a road trip with a bewitching heartthrob like the Slim Duck, he might have tempered his opinion about traveling being a “fool’s paradise.” If traveling is a fool’s paradise, then hand me those sunglasses and pass the beer. I’ve been a fool for traveling since the last quarter of the twentieth century began, and I made my virgin road trip to Los Angeles with the…

Manatees or Bust THE GULF COAST COASTING THE GULF A LOLLYGAGGER’S IDEAL ITINERARY By PAM HOUSTON A PERFECT ROAD TRIP BEGINS AT HAPPY HOUR, at Superior Seafood and Oyster Bar on St. Charles Avenue in New Orleans, for a dozen (or maybe two) oysters on the half shell and a frozen French 75. I know frozen drinks are for teenagers, and I am not one, but that combination of gin, champagne, and lemon juice makes its own special mignonette that forms a lazy river from my mouth to my belly, and since that is what I had the first time I went to Superior almost a decade ago, it is hard to imagine one without the other. Arrive early and sit at the bar. Oysters are fresh, cold, plentiful, and seventy-five…

INNS High Hampton’s Next Act THE BLACKBERRY FARM TEAM HELPS USHER IN THE NEXT CHAPTER OF A FABLED NORTH CAROLINA MOUNTAIN RETREAT By Elizabeth Hutchison Hicklin PHOTOGRAPHS BY TIM ROBISON Courtesy of High Hampton “High Hampton was cherished by the McKee family for so long that we all really want to do what’s right for the property” For generations, much of High Hampton’s summer-camp charm stemmed from the resort seeming impervious to change. The getaway served as a time capsule in the heart of the Blue Ridge in Cashiers, North Carolina, where days consisted of morning waterfall hikes and lazy afternoons spent fishing and swimming in the property’s fifteen-acre lake, ringed in banks of pale pink mountain laurel. Evenings hummed with Scrabble tournaments and bingo. It was a place where…

Come On In A new must-stop in Kentucky Amy Sinclair If you happen to find yourself anywhere near Louisville, Kentucky, this summer, be sure to check out the new Garden & Gun Club at the historic Stitzel-Weller Distillery. Walking into the cozy cocktail bar, you’ll feel as if you just stepped into the pages of the magazine—that is, if the magazine could hand you an old-fashioned or a Paper Plane and offer you plenty to nosh on, from pimento cheese to charcuterie plates to a bowl of boiled peanuts. It’s my kind of place.…

Cover Camper Transforming a vintage travel trailer into a one-of-a-kind road-ready masterpiece Gately Williams The Road Towed travel trailer on the cover was restored by Florida’s Heintz Designs from a vintage 1967 frame. Founder and CEO Tim Heintz works his magic on all manner of recreational vehicles. We fell in love with the trailer at first glance, and then hit the highway. To see more of Heintz’s work, visit heintzdesigns.com. If you’re new to RVing, check out Go RVing (gorving.com) for advice and a guide to modern vehicles, rentals, and trip planning.…

SPORTING SCENE Down East Beacon A NORTH CAROLINA MUSEUM HOLDS ON TO SPORTING HISTORY AND COASTAL CULTURE WHILE LOOKING AHEAD By T. Edward Nickens PHOTOGRAPHS BY GEOFF WOOD It’s a curious item to cause a stir, amid the canvas paintings, the boat models, and the astonishing collection of antique and contemporary hand-carved decoys from the Core Sound region of Eastern North Carolina. But causing a little stir is what Joel Hancock’s great-great-great-grandfather’s whale harpoons are doing. Hancock, a retired insurance executive, and his wife, Susan, crowd around a table with Karen Amspacher, director of the Core Sound Waterfowl Museum & Heritage Center, and Pam Morris, the museum’s collections manager, as Hancock hands over a pair of forged-iron harpoon spikes, pitted with age. The soaring twenty-thousand-square-foot museum on the “east’ard end”…

Field Notes Journey along with a sportsman “There’s a certain honing of spirit that comes in the pursuit of fish and game,” writes Garden & Gun contributing editor T. Edward Nickens in his new book of true adventure tales, The Last Wild Road (Lyons). “I leave the woods or water with a more purposeful set of my shoulders, sharper of mind.” Nickens has spent decades writing about his sporting escapades—flats skiff fishing in the Caribbean, wading Appalachian trout runs, and hunting across every holler and hill in his home state of North Carolina. Here, he threads his stories from Field & Stream with powerful reflections on losing his father as a boy and finding a mentor in a marine sharpshooter who taught him to connect what’s wild inside to the…

HARVEST A Taste for Heirlooms A PAIR OF VIRGINIA GROWERS DIG INTO THE SOUTH’S SWEETEST WATERMELONS By Debra Freeman PHOTOGRAPHS BY JOSHUA FITZWATER My grandmother used to laugh and say that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. She mainly used that quip whenever I told her some obscure fact I’d read, like why women’s shirts button on the left. Although she’s passed on, I can imagine her saying that now about my obsession with heirloom watermelons. It all started two years ago after I read about the famed Bradford watermelon. Nathaniel Napoleon Bradford crossed two watermelons—the Lawson and the Mountain Sweet—to create the variety in the 1800s. By the 1860s, many considered the Bradford the most important watermelon in the South, praised for its sweetness and with a rind…

THE BEST OF SOUTHERN HOMES, GARDENS, STYLE, AND MORE GOOD HUNTING COLLECTIONS Instrument of Funk MUSICAL RENAISSANCE MAN JON BATISTE CAN TRACE HIS LIFE IN MUSIC WITH MELODICAS By Jonathan Miles PHOTOGRAPHS BY WINNIE AU Jon Batiste’s professors at the Juilliard School in New York were so disturbed by it that they called in a psychotherapist. One of his hometown mentors, the jazz icon Wynton Marsalis, was likewise appalled. “Get that thing off the stage,” he’d gripe. Even workaday subway riders, herding past Batiste’s underground performances, might’ve thought something was off-kilter, unusual, all that incredible virtuosity funneled into…what’s that thing even called, anyway? “Melody horn, melodion, harmonichord, mouth piano…” Batiste is inventorying the names for the peculiar instrument in his hands, the source of all that former tension but also,…

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE OXFORD, MISSISSIPPI GREENVILLE, MISSISSIPPI Return Trip RIDING SHOTGUN JOURNEYS into the HEART of MISSISSIPPI By JESSICA B. HARRIS I AM NOT A DRIVER. AS ONE WHO HAS SPENT HER entire adult life in New York City, I have never needed to know how to operate several tons of metal on an asphalt track. Now, however, after more than a year of sequester and confinement, I find myself wishing that long, long ago I had mastered the rules of the road. I muse back on good times spent riding shotgun or simply rolling along in the back seat without a worry about navigation or speed limits, with my eyes free to view the countryside and the roadside attractions. As my mind goes over the multiple road trips I have…

Toward Home MISSISSIPPI DELTA MEMORY HIGHWAY DRIVING with MY EYES CLOSED By WRIGHT THOMPSON IF THE PRIESTS WERE CORRECT FOR ONCE AND I WERE TO ever go blind, if my world went to shadow and black and I couldn’t see a solitary thing, I submit for your consideration that I could still drive from Yazoo City to Greenwood, Mississippi. I know this journey cold. Surely you’ve got a road like that. A drive you can make without thinking, each turn and straight carefully wrapped and stored in the closets of your memory. I’ve ridden this road hundreds of times. The first was when I was just weeks old. The last time was a week ago. The first left took me down a wooded hill away from my uncle Will’s house, where…

CAJUN RIFF THE ROOTS of CHEF ERLING WU-BOWER’S ACCLAIMED COOKING›and HIS OUTLOOK on LIFE-TRACE DIRECTLY BACK to HIS LOUISIANA HERITAGE, a CULTURAL GUMBO of BAYOU FISH CAMPS, NEW ORLEANS JAZZ CLUBS, and a FAMILY WHO GIVES IT to HIM STRAIGHT By T. EDWARD NICKENS Photographs by PETER FRANK EDWARDS IT’S A BIT OF AN IMPROVISATIONAL PERFORMANCE TONIGHT. For starters, Erling Wu-Bower is a long way from Chicago, where his mash-up of cross-cultural cuisine has won him accolades, including status as a three-time James Beard Award finalist. He’s worked the kitchens at some of the Windy City’s upper-echelon restaurants—among them Avec, the Publican, and Nico Osteria. In the spring of 2018, he opened Pacific Standard Time to glowing write-ups in the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, Wired, and elsewhere. But he…

OUR KIND OF PLACE Breakfast with the Dogs A LOVE LETTER TO THE QUINTESSENTIAL BEACH-TOWN HANGOUT By Mike Grudowski PHOTOGRAPHS BY JACQUELINE STOFSICK I never head to the Lost Dog Cafe for breakfast unless it’s a special occasion: a visit from out-of-town family, say; or the week of our anniversary; or a Thursday. I’m not particular about it. (I might go there to celebrate when I finish writing this.) Part of my excitement, I guess, comes from being an expat Midwesterner transplanted to the coast near Folly Beach, South Carolina, just south of Charleston: Breakfast! On the beach! Part is the expectation that once I’m fed and caffeinated, adventure may follow: a boat ride with friends, or a beach walk looking for dolphins. Part of it is sentimental: My wife…

CONTRIBUTORS Robert Earl Keen WRITER Brent Humphreys “Fans always want to know the backstory”—Robert Earl Keen on the true tale behind his song “Gringo Honeymoon” “People start clapping as soon as it starts and sing along with every chorus,” says the Texas-born singer-songwriter Robert Earl Keen of his 1994 hit “Gringo Honeymoon.” “Fans always want to know the backstory.” He delivers the goods on the song’s origins in “Southern Roads” (p. 103). As a touring musician with nineteen records, Keen is a road-trip authority. His favorite parts? “The first hour on the road and the first hour after arriving at the destination—anything and everything is possible.” This summer, he’s rereleasing Western Chill, an hour-long behind-the-scenes video recorded last year at his Snake Barn Movie Ranch Studios in Medina, Texas. Pam…

Social Chatter GARDENANDGUN.COM AND BEYOND WE ASKED... It’s not a Southern road trip without… On Facebook and Twitter, readers told us what completes the perfect summertime adventure. A pecan log roll from Stuckey’s and a stop at a fireworks stand. David Lantrip SEE ROCK CITY signs. Cindy Thurman Locklear The Allman Brothers, Chris Stapleton, Alabama Shakes, and Patsy Cline. Dena Corbin Yoder A fried clam dinner at Howard Johnson. @trecoal Seeing the rocket at the Alabama welcome center. Samson Katz Boiled peanuts from a Crock-Pot in the back of a gas station. Holly C S Broyles A stop at the Piggly Wiggly—whether we need anything or not. Theresa Rivera Rousseau Coke and a pack of Nabs. @Owlsforinda A Little Debbie Oatmeal Creme Pie warming on the dashboard. Lawana Adcock-Downey…

INTERVIEW Dual Roles HOLLYWOOD FIXTURE WILL PATTON RULES THE AUDIOBOOK WORLD, TOO By Will Cathcart Austin Hargrave / AUGUST You most likely recognize Will Patton’s face—you may have seen the prolific actor with Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck saving Earth by drilling a nuclear weapon into an asteroid in Armageddon. Or coaching with Denzel Washington in Remember the Titans. The South Carolina native is arguably the only good thing about the Kevin Costner film The Postman. And lately, he’s starred as Garrett Randall in the hit TV series Yellowstone, and in the Oscar darling Minari. But you may also have heard Patton without realizing it: The quiet, knowing grit of his singular voice has come to define the audiobook genre. He reads in a charismatic whisper, the actor of choice…

JUBILEE A CELEBRATION OF SOUTHERN FOOD AND DRINK ANATOMY OF A CLASSIC Wild Grilling A WHOLE-FISH RECIPE FROM FLORIDA THAT’S PERFECT FOR THE BACKYARD By Kim Severson Food and prop styling by Charlotte Autry; hogfish provided by Key West Shrimp CompanyPHOTOGRAPHS BY JOHNNY AUTRY The surprises came fast when Jeffrey Jew left Washington, D.C., and started cooking on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Jew, once a contestant on Top Chef, had gotten used to a steady supply of fruits and vegetables from Amish farmers in Pennsylvania. It was a different game in Florida, where he moved when his partner, Jim Steiner, took a community banking job nine years ago. “It’s so tough,” Jew says. “You’ve got only four or five months when you get good produce, then it gets too hot.” He…

WHAT’S IN SEASON All Hail the Queen CELEBRATE SUMMER IN THE SOUTH WITH THE CROWN JEWEL OF THE CORN FAMILY By Jenny Everett ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN BURGOYNE Kevin Gillespie has been anticipating Silver Queen corn season each year for most of his life. “I have a clear memory of being outside my Granny Geneva’s house at a picnic table, shucking Silver Queen and hulling lady peas in the summertime,” says the Georgia native and executive chef and owner of Revival in Decatur, Georgia, and Gunshow in Atlanta. “Granny grew lady peas. Her neighbor grew Silver Queen. So they swapped. She got the grandkids to do the work because we knew there was fried corn for dinner if we did!” Developed in the 1950s, Silver Queen gained rock-star produce status in…

SOUTHERN STYLE The Art of the Sleeping Porch WIND DOWN WITH FLAIR IN THIS NOSTALGIC SUMMERTIME HAVEN By Haskell Harris Styling by Kate Malpeli; vase, stylist’s own PHOTOGRAPHS BY BRIE WILLIAMS Back before air-conditioning, the Southern sleeping porch served not only as a novelty, particularly for children who thrilled to snoozing outside, but as a necessity. On summer nights, when the air inside a home became stifling, families retreated to these welcome spots—often repurposed screened-in porches—to drift off to sleep in makeshift seasonal beds. Sleeping porches have even appeared in such films as 1991’s Louisiana-set The Man in the Moon, in which a young Reese Witherspoon stays up late in just such a structure with her character’s older sister to muse about life. To keep the tradition from fading into…

HOUSTON, TEXAS LAKE DE FUNIAK, FLORIDA The Slow Lane RIDE OF PASSAGE SALUTING the SPIRITS of OLD FLORIDA By TAYLOR BROWN Cedric Angeles WE CROSS THE FLORIDA LINE AT NOON, thundering through forests of spindly back-road pines. Tar snakes slither before us, gluing the road together in kinks. We’ve been circling Georgia’s Okefenokee Swamp—the most primeval of Southern wilds, which survived the drainage attempts of former Confederate officers and the ravages of forest fires said to rain ash and smoldering moss on towns downwind. It’s 1999. Spring. I’m sixteen years old. My father and I are riding our motorcycles in echelon, our boots kicked out on the pegs. We’re on the way to my grandmother’s house, around the swamp and across the Panhandle, to Fort Walton Beach. My father loves…