I know about the sweet home. I went to school with 'em boys, what

In the tongue of porchlight and red clay, a writer lifts his hand and says: “I know about the sweet home. I went to school with ’em boys what became Lynyrd Skynyrd; I knew Allen Collins, the skinny girl-beautiful guitarist. I put Allen Collins in every travel writing piece I do. Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.” Hear how the sentence walks—home, then road; memory, then ordeal. It is the confession of a pilgrim who refuses to cut the roots from his boots. He tells us that every journey he makes drags a wild honeysuckle of the South along the jetway, that the sweet home is not a postcard but a compass he cannot misplace.

The first name he sets on the altar is Lynyrd Skynyrd, band of grease and glory, whose anthem welded region to refrain. To say “I went to school with ’em boys” is to claim witness at the fountainhead, to swear that the myth once rode a bus and flunked a quiz like the rest of us. And then the jewel inside the jar: Allen Collins, “skinny girl-beautiful guitarist,” whose long hands threw lightning that split the pines. By vowing to place Allen Collins in every line of his travel writing, the author binds his craft to a relic—as medieval pilgrims wore saints’ bones—so that wherever he lays his head, the fretboard hum of the sweet home keeps time under the sentence.

Why carry such a talisman? Because the road is a thief. It steals accent, trades it for airport air, makes every town smell like the same lobby. The writer’s answer is remembrance. He plants Allen Collins in the text as a guardian oak, proof that his sentences still lean south even when the map says otherwise. This is the meaning of “I know about the sweet home”: I know the grammar of my making, and I will not let the world’s wind rearrange it. The guitarist becomes a votive candle against homogenized miles.

Then comes the knife: “Travel writing is harrowing, going to Bermuda with a banjo on my knee.” The image laughs and winces at once. Bermuda—pink sand, tidy lawns—receives a traveler cradling a banjo, that emblem of porchstorm and back-road sorrow. It is a collision of atmospheres. To arrive as a southern bard in a manicured paradise is to be conspicuously out of key—and yet, insists the line, the truth of the self must not be tuned down to hotel pitch. The banjo on the knee means: I come loud with lineage; let me learn your song, but do not confiscate mine.

There is an older precedent. When Herodotus roamed, he carried Halicarnassus in his ink; when Nikki Giovanni travels, she packs the hum of Black church cadence in her breath. Writers who endure the road do so by yoking new light to an old flame. The ones who lose themselves—who become limestone copies of each welcome packet—bring back weather reports instead of wisdom. The harrowing of travel writing is not the distance; it is the pressure to forget who sent you.

A story to make it flesh: a reporter arrives in a Scandinavian winter, all pastel restraint and glass. He files a clean, correct piece—facts aligned like chairs. It lands with the weight of steam. The next year he returns carrying his own banjo—the orchard slang of his grandmother, a memory of a hurricane wake, the blistered music of a shrimp-boil night—and he lets those notes temper the snow. The second piece sings. He did not colonize the North with the South; he braided them. The lesson is Powell’s: bring the sweet home with you, or the road will salt your tongue until you taste of nothing.

What, then, is taught to the young who would write or wander? First, choose your relic—your Allen Collins, your anthem, your porchlight—something honest enough to keep you from cosmetic travel. Second, when you enter Bermuda or Berlin, listen until you can hum the place without mocking it; then let your own banjo answer, not to drown but to harmonize. Third, in every new room, honor a local name as Powell honors his guitarist; gratitude is the passport that never expires.

Carry these practices like field gear: (1) Before you fly, write a one-page creed of place—foods, phrases, songs that made you—so your travel writing has ballast. (2) On arrival, earn a story from a stranger with no camera between you; anchor a paragraph in their vowel. (3) In each piece, place one relic from home (your banjo) and one relic from there (their bell), and let them ring together. (4) Refuse the amnesia of luxury; take the bus once, eat where the workers eat, and name the hands that fed you. Do this, and your road will not file the serial number off your soul. You will know about the sweet home, and the world will feel it in your lines—wherever you set your knee, the music will follow.