"It shall be a perpetual statute for your generations throughout all your generations throughout all your dwellings that ye eat neither fat nor blood."-Leviticus 3.17
The bible could be taken as a warning against roadkill. If the fundamentalist (protestants who believe in the literalness of the bible) majority of South Georgia approached the Jewish dietary laws with the same dogma that they use the bible to attempt to revise the laws of science, wouldn't they adhere to the arguable healthiness of the old testament's recipes and notations on what to eat? Why does fundamentalism exert doctrinal exactitude only when it suits itself?
"And the fat of the beast that dieth of itself, and the fat of that which is torn by the beasts, ye shall not wise eat of it."--Leviticus 7.24
I was happy to leave Fargo, on the road again. Just a wanderer in dixieland, heading east. I had three packages of Lunchables, a beautiful Sunday morning, and a paddle. I tuned the radio to find something interesting. Too many stations, on this sunny edge of the swamp, played fundamentalist rants; blurting preachers with bad English. I was relieved to find a country music and NASCAR racing station.
"...So what was it like when you first met Dale Earnhardt?"
"You know, I was really fright-uned at first. He can be real aggressive, you know. He wants to make you know who he is..."
When I stopped at the banks of the Okefenokee to register a canoe, a couple horn-honkers waved me down - the ladies from Atlanta. They had been tailing me since Fargo. "It'll be warm by tonight, but here's a beer."
They left me there with a cold Anchor Steam.
I slipped the canoe into the water, and a few minutes later, I would be gone. There can be nothing as pleasant as paddling through the black tannic waters of the Okefenokee.
I pushed off from the main channel - the Suwanee River, towards a place called Big Water, the enchanted heart of this giant peat bog. The water route is like a road - dressed in overhanging cypress, blooming lilies and southern turtles. The alligators poked their heads from the water by the dozens, snorting like the night moans of cattle, and spanish moss hung like tinsel for Halloween.
The décor of the Okefenokee is neither a moss, nor Spanish, but a peculiar species belonging to the new world plant family Bromeliacae. It's technically a bromeliad; more closely related to pineapples and those brilliant epiphytes that cling to the Jungles of Central America and the South Pacific.
Along the river's edge hung these evil-looking plants called hooded pitchers. Glands in their hoods create secretions that attract insects. A thin translucent 'window' under the hood gives the insect an impression of an escape route. Rather, it's a cover to fool the insect into entrapment; most likely causing it to fall down the trumpet throat and into the enzyme rich watery base of the plant.
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