Thursday 24 October – Before I fell asleep in the Manchester motel, I wrote in my journal a bit: “Goodness, I am sleepy, and goodness what a lot of work it is downloading pix and naming them and writing up my log. And goodness how out of shape my poetry muscle is. I hope it will get healthier & springier. ... I’m glad to be going to Florida. I would have missed it if I hadn’t, and ignored the whole southeast. Right now I’m in Tennessee, where I’ve never been before. And the wifi won’t work & I’m very, very sleepy.”
Boring, right? Except that it
hits so many elements of my 9,500-mile, six-week exploration. I’m writing and I’m paying attention to
myself. I’m in a place I might never
have visited if not for this journey; I’m headed to a place I have been before,
with a chance look at it in a new way, to stay with a dear friend with whom I
don’t talk often enough. Some things
aren’t working the way they should, but that’s okay, and I’m focused on what I
can achieve. I’m happy, and I’m getting
plenty of rest. One of the biggest
mistakes 21st-century westerners make with their health is stinting
on sleep.
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| autumn foliage in Tennessee |
So all told, I remained in great shape on the morning of Day 32, as I
hit the highway to continue south, and a bit east. I was glad not to skip the southeast, and
especially so as I noticed that this rural part of the country reminds me a lot
of New England, the one area I thoroughly missed on the journey. There were deciduous trees – oaks, and
something whose leaves were maple-shaped but not maple-colored – and the fields
were small, and the hills frequent.
(Frequent hills are more a northern- and western-New England thing, not
the norm along the coast.) Also frequent
were signs announcing that I was entering a new watershed; they came along
every ten to twenty miles. They gave the
name of the watershed, and then the plea or admonition, “Help Keep it
Clean.” How many people think, though,
about the effect of their actions on the watershed unless there’s water
actually right in front of them as they flick that cigarette butt or squirt the
fertilizer onto the roses?
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| Funky little orange mushrooms in Tennessee. |
The road twisted frequently, unlike the superhighways of the west, and
I was surprised, somehow, by the frequency of those hills and mountains. Road signs gave the grade of particularly
steep stretches: for “6% Grade/4 Miles,”
the speed limit drops to 55 for cars and 20 for trucks. My Honda’s cruise control wouldn’t hold on
those steep downhills; I’d set it for 61 and watch it edge up toward 70, then
try holding the car in third gear.
Sometimes that worked; sometimes the brakes came into play.
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| close-up mushrooms |
The grades required a good bit of attention, but it wasn’t all hills,
so I could look out at the passing landscape occasionally. Even under solid cloud cover, the scenery was
lovely. There was one scene that struck
me especially: on Nickajack Lake, I saw
a small island that seemed to be composed entirely of trees, crowded closer
together than you’d imagine they could be.
No dirt, no grass, no rocks: just
trees. That it was on a lake called
Nickajack didn’t make it less memorable.
I’ve just looked up that lake – it’s real; I didn’t make that name
up. It was created when the Tennessee
Valley Authority dammed the Tennessee River in 1967, which is actually rather
exciting. I learned about the TVA in
middle school, probably around 1977, and I honestly didn’t know then, and still
don’t know today, why I learned about
the TVA. But I’m pleased to have seen,
after all these years, one of its products.
I was headed toward Chattanooga, which I learned about at home as a
small child, because there’s a song about it that also includes the word “choo
choo.” There is also, a billboard
informed me, a newspaper called ‘The Chattanoogan.’ Those are two good reasons to learn about
Chattanooga. Drawing closer to the
legendary city, the road changed; there was more traffic, more billboards, more
signs advertising Days Inns and Cracker Barrels and Antique Malls. Too much traffic, too many billboards and
signs. Maybe Georgia’s to blame. There was definitely a sign that welcomed me
to that state, with the sentiment, “We’re glad Georgia’s on your mind.” However, there were also signs that said
Chattanooga was still ahead, and however many times I thought, “Chattanooga,
Georgia,” and even said it aloud to the windshield, “Chattanooga, Tennessee,”
still sounded right. I had said both
about a dozen times each when I saw a sign welcoming me back to Tennessee. Odd.
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| Chattanooga, seen from Lookout Mountain, and a very long way from New Mexico |
Having returned to Tennessee without having more than barely left it, I
gave serious thought to checking out Lookout Mountain and Ruby Falls, the latter apparently
contained within the former. After about
700 signs in 100 miles, I’d been hypnotized into thinking I had no choice, and
took the exit just north of Choo Choo Town.
Driving up Lookout Mountain, I flashed back about two weeks and 4,000
miles to a wrong turn in redwood country.
The trees here were much different, of course, and the drop-off to the
left much steeper, but the road was the same twisty, turny, narrow street,
closely veiled with tall trees, with seemingly no one else around. As I type this, months later, I’m thinking
about driving through the southwest desert – apparently flat, definitely dry,
with cacti and scraggly bushes adorning an endless horizon. If the places I’ve been are so very
different, could I possibly be the same?
Could anyone visit Ruby Falls, or any magnificent cave, and emerge
entirely unchanged? This is a
commercially-operated cavern tour, featuring something ludicrously billed as
the largest underground commercially-owned waterfall in the United States
that’s accessible to the public, or some such.
The number of qualifiers in the statement makes it distracting from the
solemnity of what is, actually, a glorious sight.
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| The Falls - a narrow stream of water, but impressively high. And beautiful. |
Lookout Mountain and the Falls are so heavily advertised, and the sales
pitch so aggressive even after one enters the castle that provides access to
the tour, and the different packages available for different entry fees so
poorly explained, that I walked out of the castle as soon as I figured out that
my lowest-priced option was $18 and I’d have to wait 45 minutes to spend an
hour and a half on a guided tour with a couple dozen other people. I’m like that. But from the castle’s front steps, I got a
view of the valley and the city and the Tennessee River, and I realized there
are too many wonderful things in the world I haven’t seen, and I might be
standing on one of them. I chose not to
leave without checking, and I’m glad I did.
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| Ruby Falls stalactites and other formations |
The tour-guide patter was pretty silly.
Most of what he told us was covered by the small display in the waiting
area that covered the discovery of the cave and falls. The mountain has a natural entrance to a
series of caves that people have explored and used for centuries, from pre-Columbian
times. However, in 1905 a railroad
closed the natural entrance to the Ruby Falls caves, so spelunkers could no longer
get access to them. In 1928, Leo Lambert
and a group of cavers tried to drill an entry into the known caves, and
accidentally hit a series of new caves, without a natural entrance and so
previously unexplored. They crawled
through narrow tunnels on their bellies for hours, discovering gorgeous rock
formations and, eventually, the Falls.
Mr. Lambert brought his wife to visit a few days later – in 1920s dress,
she wriggled on her belly through tiny rock tunnels – and named the Falls for
her. More exploring, more drilling,
elevator installing, castle building, and ta dah! The caves opened to the public in 1930. I feel like I should have heard of them
before driving by them by chance. Have
you ever heard of them?
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| Moss on stalagmite |
The tour begins in a boring, human-carved and –dynamited tunnel,
featuring big blocks of limestone with sharp angles and discrete electric
lights. As the guide starts his patter,
the snake of tourists winds around a corner or two, and then – the good stuff
starts. Multi-colored, glossy smooth
limestone formations in flowing sculptures, weird repetitions, beautiful shapes
and ugly shapes. I do not understand the
need to find familiar shapes in random, surprising rocks. However, Ruby Falls’ formations include an
alligator, a cactus, angels’ wings, tobacco leaves and a burro’s behind, each
with a sign to let you know what nature intended when sculpting this limestone. There’s moss growing underground because of
the electric lights, and although it’s completely unnatural I think it’s
beautiful. And the Falls themselves,
with a well-composed sound- and light-show that genuinely enhances their grandeur,
are marvelous. The owners offer tours by
lantern light on Friday nights; I think that could marvelous in a very
different style. If you'd like to see all the pictures I took in the cave, you're welcome to look here.
The guard warned us before the show started that the lights and music
switch off automatically, so no use begging him for one more minute.
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| Chattanooga, not far from a BofA and Community Pie. |
Back up in the sunshine, I gazed around at the valley a bit more to
re-acclimatize to outside. Then I
scooted into Chattanooga, where the mid-afternoon downtown was very sparsely
populated. It looks like it’s already
undergone some kind of urban renewal, but there were only a handful of people
eating at the artisanal pizzeria and brewpub,
and few other options for lunch. What is
up with Chattanooga?
Georgia was back on my mind pretty quickly, and not the kind of
old-South Savannah or new-South Atlanta that pop into my mind first when I
think of the state. This was lushly
forested, bottom to top, hills and mountains.
This was mountainy-man country.
The trees were mostly pine, and the deciduous trees were mostly varied
shades of green, from light yellowy-green to a dark, rusty green. I wonder if they ever get autumn colors
around there. They still had summery
flowers; exit 296 on the northbound side was awash in long-stemmed flowers in
myriad shades of purply-pink. I would
not have thought there could be so many variations on purply-pink. And the road signs say, “Caution: Bridge May Ice in Winter,” rather than the “Bridge
Ices Before Road” common in my hometown.
Imagine a winter where ice is only a possibility, and not a certainty.
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| If I were a mountainy man, I would know how to forage the Georgia forests for little orange mushrooms. Or something. |
It is really easy to hear pop-country music on the radio in the United
States, and only very slightly easier in rural Georgia than in Washington, DC,
or eastern Massachusetts. So I listened
to a lot of it as I drove, and at about 8,000 miles hit my limit for the second
time on the trip. I think it wasn’t just
the fantasy romance that the country crooners pitch, but the juxtaposition of
that fairy tale with the cruder but no more fictional fantasy of the adult
superstores, which got more numerous in the southeast. I shoved a disc into the player, and cleansed
my brain and emotions with cynical Los Angeleno whammy wavers Concrete Blonde and their
Anne Rice inspirations. I felt better at
once – but I still yearn to be someone’s dream come true and he mine.
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| Atlanta, shortly before sunset. |
Traffic around Atlanta was heinous, but I got a good view of Olympic Park as I dawdled past. It was actually a bit uplifting to see the monument. I do not care
for traffic, for crowds, for lines, but.
But. I do not like going more
than a day or two without talking to anyone but bartenders and desk
clerks. There’s got to be some
balance. The clerk at the Days Inn just off the interstate in Adel, Georgia, did not have time to chat. I fell asleep looking forward
to seeing A.K. and J., and entirely unaware that the next day would also bring
Mr. John the Pickle Man, the most entertaining stranger I encountered on the
whole trip.
