Forward
© Michael C. Rudasill 1988
Egghead's Note
I have been asked by my good friend, Hootenanny B. Hootenanny, to write some words about this complex and unwittingly profound work. With apologies to my colleagues in the careworn halls of academia, I shall proceed.
This book is first and foremost a novel of ideas. Most are bad, but they are ideas, nonetheless.
My friend Hootenanny is an anomaly. Compared favorably to Faulkner, Shakespeare, and Van Gogh, he nonetheless remains a humble credit to his cultural milieu, unaffected by the trappings of fame and misfortune.
He has been called the Grandma Moses of prosody. If Grandma Moses had painted in polytymbric 3-D and occasionally thrust her head through the canvas for effect, the comparison might be apt.
I have known Hootenanny all of my life. He is smarter than me. He is dumber than me.
As beards are to bards - and sherry to sots - so is our intrepid leader to our now-famous country-western band. Binding the limits of unknown parameters, he is an unpolished gem... almost like a fantastic fictional character being manipulated by a bemused author. If this were indeed the case, his author might himself be supposed to have an Author, infinitely excelling His creations in depth and creativity as we exceed our own fictional creations.
Hootenanny has begun this work with a tale of an unusual event that occurred in our lives not so long ago. Consider it a tone painting.
Renowned critic J. B. Noseworthy has asserted that "The Big Idea" (below), is "...a master touch, reminiscent of Hawthorne's Customs House introduction to The Scarlet Letter." Like many critics, J. B. obviously has some loose shingles on his roof.
But I have written enough. I'll let my good friend Hootenanny speak for himself.
As if I didn't know better.
The Big Idea
By Hootenanny B. Hootenanny
We were sitting in the front seat when it hit us.
It came in fast and low and flint-rock-hard and smashed the ancient windshield into slow-mo ice chips that winked and glittered humorously in the brilliant Florida sun.
The ice chips hung suspended in the air like an anti-gravity mobile for alien infants: like geometrically psychedelized crystalline dust motes, unstrung from the limitations of time and space. They slowly tumbled toward us end-over-end, languidly drifting toward our faces, a glittering cloud that drifted lazily until the bloom of shiny flakes parted and it came in fast and low and flint-rock-hard and plowed us both in the face.
We looked at each other and grinned like skinned possums.
It was a great idea.
Let me explain.
Times had been kind of predictable lately for the members of our little country-western band. Egghead and I, being the band members most likely to spend time thinking, had been brainstorming for a way to get out of the doldrums.
Oh, don't get me wrong. We had it made, according to what some folks said, and we could all agree that we had surely had it worse. The band had just been a mite sluggish lately; we needed a boost to refresh ourselves - to sort of recharge the old batteries, if you know what I mean. After the last world tour, we were plumb tuckered out.
Old Brain-and-Eggs and I had decided to sit there in my genuine antique pickup truck to think of a way to bring some gusto back into our lives. That's when the big idea came in, fast and low and flint-rock-hard, and smacked us right between the eyes.
We would take a trip.
It would not be a fancy, civilized sort of trip, with chauffeurs and butlers nodding like lawn flamingos. It would be a down-home, back to basics, spit-in-the-fire sort of trip. It would be an atavistic adventure, a missing-link, swamp-stomping, chest-beating, genuine-he-person-type camping trip into the heart of Florida. We would head into the last remaining oak-hammock-pine-forest-scrubpatch wilderness to be found on the hump-back ridge that runs down the middle of our beloved altered state: Florida in the natural, forever wild and free.
The massive, powerfully built idea had shattered the windshield of our minds with a simultaneously stunning jolt of joyous revelation. We would be real men. We would answer the call.
We would go and seek the heart of Florida, the unpolluted vestiges of our once-glorious state. We would seek her arrayed in her vestal splendor, in the vestigial remnants of her wild, virginal beauty. We would rediscover our state in her exotic, multi-hued aboriginal garment, clothed in the wilderness itself, and we would save for the generations to come the memory of what Florida was like before the pavement buried her and the hordes of invaders tamed and polluted her.
Destiny had knocked on the gates of our awareness, and we didn't know any better than to open the door.
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