It’s with an uncertain mind that I leave Chattanooga and head towards Alabama.
Oft portrayed as the home of backwards rednecks, smack bang in the middle of the famed “bible belt”, and part of the deep south, I’m not sure what I will encounter.
The most northern of the main cities is Birmingham, AL, a town with an important role in the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s and where Martin Luther King Jr penned the now famous Letter from Birmingham jail.
As I drive into downtown, just after 4 pm on a Tuesday night, it is absolutely dead. I mean there is barely a living soul in the streets, I see less than 20 cars, and almost expect to see tumbleweeds.
I learn later that the city centre is usually dead, with life only in the outer reaches of the place.
It is in one of these outer reaches that I witness a scene that perhaps sums the city up.
Quietly sipping a beer at Avondale Brewing, the bar tender sees an intoxicated, shabbily dressed old man leaning against his car (which is parked directly outside the open barnyard type doors). he yells out and asks the guy to stop leaning on the car, from which ensues a argument full of expletives, leading to a threat to call the police and a taunting reply of “go ahead you..”
So he does. As the siren sound of a police cars starts to be heard, the miscreant suddenly seems to stumble, fall over and knock his head on the ground, he lies in the gutter motionless as the police arrive and try to awaken him. Which they cannot do.
After 5 mins of trying varying methods, they finally call the paramedics, who soon arrive, and not long after them a firetruck. Apparently the fire truck was at the other end of the block having finished attending to a driver who ran off the road and straight into a stop sign, so mainly responded due to it’s proximity.
Nothing works on the old man – he stays motionless and senseless, so eventually he is stretchered into the ambulance.
(apologies for the picture quality – surreptitiously snapped on my broken phone with a zoom so as to to appear jackal like)
No-one inside, a fairly diverse mix of locals, seem concerned. In fact the general consensus is that he is either:
- faking it just to get admitted to hospital and hopefully a bed and maybe some drugs; or
- he simply passed out from whatever he was intoxicated on.
The former is the prevalent opinion, given the somewhat staged nature of the slip, that his head struck the ground very gently, and one patron even attested that he opened his eyes and glanced to the street just before the police arrived.
Whatever the truth, a police car, an ambulance and a firetruck were all deployed to attend a single man suffering from what look at best to be self inflicted, and at worst fraudulent injuries. Many in the bar thought this was a typical waste of good resources, which can only imply that there is an alcohol and drug problem of significant portion in a town of 200 thousand or so and that this is a common occurrence.
On the brighter side of things, next morning Birmingham put on a bright sunshiney day, allowing me to stroll around its few sites, such as the local baseball stadium (I kid you not – #6 on Trip Advisor’s list of things to do in Birmingham)
and I discover that the attraction of giant Jenga has somehow made it all the way here from the distant Australian home of it’s inventor – the Torenbeek family!
