Kudzu Appreciation Society

When you’re crouched in a roadside ditch cutting kudzu you’d be amazed how many people stop to ask you what you think you’re doing. That’s what I learned while making good on a promise to our former managing editor, Dale Irvin. More about that in a moment. The patch I was focused on had taken over an acre or two along the side of Sage Hill Road near St. Francisville. While it hadn’t (yet) morphed into one of those surreal landscapes you sometimes see in the Mississippi Delta with nothing but kudzu as far as the eye can see, the stuff had gotten a good enough foothold to throttle a couple of hundred yards of woods, overcome a fence, and upholster some farm structure (maybe a chicken coop) with a shaggy coat of dayglo green that preserved the outlines but revealed nothing else about the building underneath. If it had been on my property I would have been afraid to turn my back on it, so I was pretty sure whoever owned the land wouldn’t mind my making off with a tendril or two. What I hadn’t counted on was the suspicion this activity would elicit from passers-by. I hadn’t been at it two minutes before a passing pickup truck slowed to a stop. Its occupant watched incredulously for a moment before asking, “You do know what that stuff is, don’t you?” As if I might have been getting ready to light a fuse or kiss an electric eel. Five minutes later I was thigh deep in the stuff trying to wrestle an especially lush and handsome vine free from the tangle when an SUV pulled up and its driver asked with alarm whether I needed help getting free. As if I was being abducted by triffids. I assured her I was in complete control of the situation, for which I received a look that suggested she thought I might be doing something seditious or illegal—perhaps some act of botanical terrorism—before she went on her way.

It’s fair enough I suppose. After all, kudzu is the plant that ate the South, so who in their right mind would ever encourage it? Dale Irvin, that’s who. Many of you will remember Dale, who served as Country Roads' managing editor for eight years until his retirement in early 2013, and prior to that a fixture in Louisiana’s advertising and marketing industry since the seventies. A creative force-to-be-reckoned-with, Dale’s tenure at Country Roads was branded by the torrent of whimsical, creative ideas that poured fourth from him on a daily basis. Upon retirement, Dale and his partner, Dave, exchanged their New Orleans home and B&B for a multi-year commitment to roaming North America from the base of a tricked-out fifth wheel RV that they have so far jockeyed throughout New England, the Midwest, and Pacific Northwest with no signs of slowing down. “At each stop we spend about a month to give us time to really explore an area,” said Dale in an email from god-knows-where, when I wrote to ask what they’ve been up to. “So it is that along the way we discovered a drugstore that still sells ten cent cokes and nickel ice cream cones in Ava, Missouri. And the Saturday night community drum circle led by the town traffic cop. And the charming and artsy village of Saugatuck on the banks of Lake Michigan. And salt bread, from a bakery in rural New York that uses a century-old recipe in which salt causes it to rise rather than yeast. The list is long and growing daily as we circle west of the Mississippi this year.”

Dale and Dave’s other objective has been to explore how well they could live in the small footprint of their fifth-wheel trailer, and to do so with a little bit of style. So instead of the Naugahyde recliners that seem to come standard with every RV they’ve decked theirs out with a singular combination of vintage wicker and those futuristic IKEA furnishings with weird names like Fräck and Kokosnöt. The exterior, though, is plain white, devoid of the colored decals you normally see covering RVs. Why? “Because when this adventure was in the planning stage we happened to be driving down a rural Mississippi road, the sides of which were blanketed with kudzu,” explained Dale. “A blanket that also covered an old shed … and a trailer. A seed was planted in our minds. What if we covered our RV in kudzu? Not the real thing, but a photo wrap like you see on buses. It just so happens we know an award-winning botanical photographer …”

And a former workmate who drives past miles of kudzu on his way to the office every day. Duly dispatched, I gathered my verdant harvest and delivered it to David Humphreys’ Baton Rouge studio for photographing, secure in the knowledge that digital images of same would soon be mystifying northerners, (and delighting traveling southerners), on the highways and in the RV parks of America. Call it a traveling Kudzu Appreciation Society, if you like. And if you are ever driving through Michigan or Maine or Montana and pass a trailer festooned with pretend kudzu, give it a honk and remember you heard it here first. You can follow Dale’s and Dave’s adventures at fabulousfifthwheel.com.