Day 32: Manchester, Tennessee, to Adel, Georgia

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 21^st-century westerners make with their health is stinting on sleep.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.