89 ~ Notes from the American road
Hello, dear readers, I’m recently home from a three-week road trip, with Appalachia at its heart, and stops in Ohio, Tennessee, western North Carolina, Georgia, Kentucky and southern Illinois. It was a mix of work (meetings at zoos to seek support for saola conservation) and some stops of personal interest along the way. I felt like Humbert Humbert in his daily search for a quiet motel.
It’s been some time since I made such a long driving trip through the US, and I am pleased to report that things are mostly well and beautiful on the American road. At least if you get onto the roads, and off the sterile six and eight lane movers of goods and people known as interstate highways. There’s a stark contrast between the dullness of the interstates and the parallel richness of travel on smaller roads, sometimes just a few miles away (time to finally read Blue Highways, by William Least Heat-Moon).
Granted, there can be some nice scenery from the interstate, but not much to feel or experience of America. No one to meet. All that’s on offer at the interchanges for a weary traveler are glaringly lit clusters of the same gas stations, chain motels and chain eateries (Denny’s or Cracker Barrel, anyone?). Bright lights, no cities.
I sometimes tried driving into the random small towns that the interchanges service, but it was hard to find a motel, or at times even a café there – most seem to have been swallowed by the chains and regurgitated in a pile along the noise of the interstate.
Still, it was a good trip, especially away from the multi-laners. When you’re next in Bowling Green, Kentucky, do stop in at Lisa’s 5th Street Diner, where my breakfast of chicken-fried steak with gravy, two eggs and grits came with four biscuit halves smothered in gravy. I didn’t need to eat lunch – for the next three days. Or, wee Elizabethtown, KY has, to my pleasant surprise, the most spaciously beautiful coffee shop I’ve ever seen - “Vibe” on the old small main square. And what better place to get what’s known in those parts as Lexington-style barbecue (characterized by a thinner, vinegar-infused sauce) than at “Lexington Barbecue” on the edge of Lexington, North Carolina. My pork shoulder, sublime hush puppies, coleslaw, bottomless Coca-Cola, housemade pecan pie and coffee came to $15.19.
Keepin’ breakfast real at Lisa’s 5th Street Diner, Bowling Green
If one day you find your way off the interstates westbound toward Owensboro, Kentucky, as you draw near the town of Falls of Rough (explanation: the town sits near a waterfall on the Rough River; still, the Chamber of Commerce might do well to consider a name change…), stop when you see the sign “Peach jam” in a yard. Don’t mind the “Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump” bumper sticker on the car parked in the driveway, and buy a jar from friendly Liz. She’ll point out the tree she and her husband planted last year in honor of a child they lost – a fetus with a likely fatal deformity (herniated diaphragm). Her voice trailed off when she explained that her water broke while she was in the hospital for an ultrasound, and didn’t elaborate if her doomed child was taken through a miscarriage, or an abortion that might now be illegal under Kentucky law (Kentucky allows an abortion only when the pregnancy is serious risk to the mother’s physical health and life - which in fairness, might have been Liz’s case). We connected over our love of homemade jam, and that was enough.
Along the trip I called at the resting places of some others who left this world young. First was the grave in Asheville, NC of novelist Thomas Wolfe, dead from tuberculosis shy of 38. The Asheville librarian at the time Wolfe grew up there later said that as a boy he probably read more books than any other boy in North Carolina. His prolific reading later fed his prolificacy as a writer - he started as a playwright in his teens but his plays were too long for production; the first draft of his novel Look Homeward, Angel ran to more than a thousand pages, and he had more than a million words of new prose with his publisher at the time of his death.
From Wolfe’s grave on a sunny morning in Ashevill'e’s beautiful Riverside Cemetery, I walked downhill to the headstone of O. Henry (dead from drink at 48), and then to the graves of eighteen young German sailors, WW I prisoners of war held near Asheville, who died of typhoid, never to see their homes and families again. Above their names on a large gravestone placed by the Asheville city fathers is a bilingual inscription that reads:
“Nicht grossern Vorteil wüsst’ ich zu nennen
Als des Feindes Verdienst erkennen.
No greater gain for the human spirit
Than a sense of our foeman’s merit.”
As I read it, and each of their names below, a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks circled overhead, calling into the spring air in courtship and renewal.
After Asheville, my Subaru Outback and I wended our way southwest over the mountains and down to Macon, Georgia, where a personal bucket-list item of many years awaited: I left flowers at the curb where Duane Allman suffered his fatal motorcycle accident in 1971, age 24. I left other blossoms just a few blocks away where the Allman Brothers’ bass player, Berry Oakley, met the same fate a year later. Coincidentally (or not… who knows of such things?), a highly creative friend of mine, Russell, wrote this to me a few days ago, out of the seeming blue: “I just read a poem online…about the notion of a chain of being and sensibility stretching across time and different lives.”
That explains as best I can why it felt important for me to pay homage to Duane “Skydog” Allman. He was a significant influence and inspiration to my late older brother and musician, Jack, and Jack was in turn a huge gift in my life, and passed an appreciation of the Allman Brothers on to me. Listen to Duane Allman’s “Little Martha” (here) – there is more sophistication and a greater gift to the world in its 2 minutes 7 seconds than, say, what Mark Zuckerberg did at about the same age (invented Facebook). Allman’s inspiration for the song was the grave of a little girl in Macon’s Rose Hill cemetery, Martha Ellis, who died at age 12 in 1836. And now Skydog rests in the same cemetery just fifty yards or so from her.
Back on the road a couple of days later I passed signs for the battlefield of Chickamauga - after Gettysburg it was the second bloodiest engagement of the Civil War. I had time and so pulled off to visit - I seemed to be on the trail of lives lost young. There among the monuments I found one honoring my homeys who took part in the battle:
My final stop before turning toward Wisconsin and home was Cahokia, near the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. A thousand years ago Cahokia was the largest settlement north of what is now Mexico. It’s an extraordinary place, right here in our own midwest backyard. Before Cahokia was mysteriously abondoned centuries before Columbus landed, it was a sophisticated, six square-mile town, with a large mound at its center, on which once stood a residence (probably of a chief and/or spiritual leader). This main mound, one of 120 mounds scattered across Cahokia, still stands - 100 feet high and 1,000 feet long. Nothing else like it can be seen in the United States.
Some miscellaneous observations from the American road:
-Biscuits extend farther north and west than do grits. Grits drop out of café menus by southern Illinois, but there I was still given a choice of biscuits or toast with breakfast (biscuits all the way for me, or cornbread when it’s an option).
-I love that three of the south’s tastiest vittles are made from corn, the quintessential America grain: grits, cornbread, and bourbon. Buy and eat (and drink) American.
-It is my pleasure to report that native southern Appalachian brook trout still swim in this world. The 20th century was not kind to this distinctive trout (first logging in the Great Smokies, then the introduction of competing brown and rainbow trout), and it takes some effort (and hiking) to find them, which I did with success in the mountains of western North Carolina (in Nantahala National Forest). This time it was pure catch, awe and release.
-Things I saw less of in the mid-south than in Wisconsin: roadkills, and “Trump” or “Stop the Steal” yard signs. Not sure what to make of that, and the connection between the two…
-Billboards I saw more of in the mid-south than in Wisconsin: those for injury litigation lawyers (lots of smiling middle-aged men in red neckties promising a big settlement for your pain), and Jesus. In fact, the two probably make up close to half of all billboards in northern Georgia and southern Kentucky. And in some ways they offer the same thing: “Call, and I will save you”.
There was also this one, something of a sad summary of America astray:
-Jesus is also a lot on the radio among the hollers and the hills – maybe a quarter or a third of the FM stations. Not really my thing, but “there are a thousand ways to kneel and kiss the ground” (Rumi), and the ether holds worse demands for our attention than Savior radio.
-About equally common in rural areas of both places: angry guys (read, afraid) in a hurry in black pick-up trucks. I’m not sure what they’re afraid of, or what they’re fleeing to or from – and they may not, either.
Yet equally common both north and south are kind and friendly people, just trying to make their ways in the world. These include John, a Macon local who took this stranger by the collar and showed me various places around town where the Allman Brothers, Otis Redding and Little Richard did their distinctly creative, American things; Taylor, the proud hometown local girl who guided my tour of a bourbon distillery in Owensboro; and the family from Gujarat that runs the Royal Inn motel in Elizabethtown.
These United States remain as crazily beautiful, vulnerable, and gifted as ever, and it was good and rich to be immersed in it for a few weeks.