I wouldn’t call myself a fan of the courthouse, but I didn’t not like it. Clean lines with an imposing height, it was functional but not some brutalist nightmare of a building. I was dead on that it was built in the 1960’s (1963-4) to be exact. But what really caught my eye was “Lurleen.” The name Lurleen was all over the place. Who the heck was Lurleen? I thought she must have been a great supporter of the University of Alabama. That was true from a certain point of view. Unfortunately, it was all for Lurleen Wallace, former Governor of Alabama, former First Lady, wife of George Wallace. Yes, that George Wallace. When Wallace was ineligible to run for Governor after two terms, he and Lurleen pulled a Ma and Pa Ferguson and she succeeded him as Governor. She never completed her term, though. The less said about her politics, the better (getting called out by Nina Simone in live renditions of Mississippi Goddamn is all I really need to know) but, that aside, I feel for her. She died of cancer in 1968, but it was originally diagnosed in 1961. Her gynecologist told her husband but, at George’s instruction, didn’t tell her. She found out during another doctor’s visit in 1965, but some of George’s staffers knew as early as 1963. For three years she fought cancer and still managed to get elected and still perform gubernatorial duties until her body was riddled with tumors and she was eighty pounds. My point here (and I do have one) is that someone can be so wrong when it comes to one stance (in this case, civil rights issues) and yet a victim to another (womens’ rights). As the Reverend Doctor once said, an injustice to anyone anywhere is an injustice to everyone everywhere. Rights are rights. Period. Full stop. And if a right can be withheld from one group, they can be withheld from another. If more people had more robust rights, there is a (miniscule) chance that we could be complaining about her still living personage today.
When I went to look for a cache, I couldn’t find a way to pull up to it. It was at the edge of a large parking lot and whatever had been there before (it looked like a bookstore) had been demolished. All the entrances to the lot had been blocked off and there were no easy ways to scofflaw into it. Had I been driving my own vehicle, I could easily have jumped a curb, but the rental I had was low enough to make that an unrealistic option. No matter. I parked outside of a Chinese/down home fusion restaurant (that’s a thing?) and took a walk to a standing sign. Looking at the cache page as I walked, I knew that the hide involved a ladder on the side of the sign’s pillar. I walked around the column, looking around for the cache, and saw nothing. I double checked the terrain (T1.5) and then I looked up the ladder. I took a deep breath and prepared mentally to climb it when I saw a magnetic keybox that I had missed. It was right at eye level on the other side of a bar I had been gripping so my hand had obscured it, and I just never looked back at that spot as I walked around. Sure, it took an extra minute of examination to find it, but otherwise easy peasy lemon squeezy. When I returned to the car, I pulled out onto the busy shopping district road, turned back onto I-20, and kept on driving to…
Geocaching While Black 