Road Trip
A Red Stripe sat open on the table and the sun was out. Amy checked e-mail from her laptop. She asked me if I wanted to go online. I actually did think about it, for as long as it took to realize I needed another beer. I said no thanks. Apologies to you all. I wasn't in Mordor, just Florida. There was Internet. I could have gone online and written a post. But that's not why the gods made vacations.
We set out late on a Friday. Since I'm accustomed to nightshift work, I drove all night, west into the mountains, then turned south. Snow squalls dusted at us across Virginia (above), which seems as big as a continent when you take it down the oblique, on I-81. A continent with the character and weather of Just North of Pittsburgh, on four lanes with three trucks to every car. Toward daybreak, near Roanoke, the snow turned serious and piled up a couple of inches. Luke and Amy awoke to a stark landscape of black trees on white hills. You might have thought we'd gone north, not south.
Then we crossed into Tennessee, and the snow vanished and we were a month ahead into spring. By the time we pulled over in Johnson City for breakfast, the daffodils were ready to pop and the waitresses all had Southern accents. The state line, some surveyor's stroke on a map in 17th century London, literally defined a new climate.
We took it. Spring in eastern Tennessee was a tonic. In fact, the whole trip down was like a fast-forward through spring, till southern Georgia, where everything was out and blooming. If you fly down, you get there right away. But you miss the foreplay.
We drove up into the Smokey Mountains, to see what we could see. The heights are mighty; I had no idea anything like that stood in the Eastern U.S. They punch up out of the earth like knuckles of some ancient prize-fighter. An element-god in the earth slugged up through the crust and crumpled it out from within. We hiked among the lichen rocks and pitch pines and lay on the grass high up in the sunshine and breathed it and reached for what they must have meant to the Cherokee.
But that was about all you could do, because if you looked down, or around, you'd see a tourist slough of waterparks, RV parks, outlet malls, hotels, pancake houses. The slop lapped right up to the knees of the range.
Having cast my lot with the Red States, I have to think before I execrate. And a lot of what we saw there in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, I can understand, even if I can't share in it. For instance, in the comedy clubs Amy and I go to, black and Jewish and gay comedians tell jokes about the stereotypes about blacks and Jews and gays. Down in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, the comedy clubs consist of country stereotype comedians telling country stereotype jokes. Very well; even if I don't automatically chuckle at the sight of a guy in bib overalls holding a pig, I recognize the process.
Just so, people in New York go to see, say, "Rent" to be confirmed in certain certainties that they hold about life and what is important. Well, down in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, they go to Louise Mandrell's theater for the same effect, with a different set of certainties.
But damn, does there have to be so much of it? And can't you keep it further away from the mountain paradise? At least in Lancaster County, we tend to keep the tourist hell along a few main drags, so the people who race in from Jersey can go home and think they've seen the Amish, while two or three miles off the main roads the real Amish get on with their spring plowing and manure spreading.
The next day, we drove further south. Around Chattanooga, someone named Ann Coulter is running for mayor. It made for startling campaign signs. We washed the grit and salt off the car, and then headed up Lookout Mountain. There, in obedience to a thousand roadside billboards and painted barnsides, we saw Rock City.
It's a spectacular mountaintop landscape of boulders the size of cargo ships, with just enough space for a person to squeeze between them. It really does look and feel like a fossil of a medieval city.
You can see a long way from up there. Five states, I believe, though the signs claim more.
And back in the 1930s, someone turned it all into a tacky tourist trap -- the Ur-Disneyland. They couldn't really spoil the rock-scape, but inside some tunnel-caves, the park creators installed fairy tale scenes with arrangements of garden gnomes painted radioactive green.
The underground part of it has rules, clearly posted. I wonder what's not allowed in Smokingland?
Tacky, but you can get some good lighting effects, in a David Lynch movie kind of way.
Next stop was Chickamauga Battlefield, just south of the mountain. My Civil War knowledge is so Bruce Catton-based that I am utterly ignorant of "the west," so I gave Luke a book and told him he was in charge of being our guide to the battlefield. This appealed to him and he gave us a great tour, culminating on the low hill where the Northern troops made their desperate stand and avoided a total rout. We hiked till we were tanned. Amy found a set of deer antlers in the woods. The woods and the round hills looked so much like the Gettysburg I know well -- just a random slice of Appalachian turf that happened to be where tens of thousands of men killed or maimed one another.
Then we drove out of the hill country, down into Marietta, we were "home" again, culturally. I don't know what exact clue triggered that. Actual coffee shops, maybe, with punked-out girls behind the counter, or the sloppy but sophisticated restaurant with the Jimmy Buffett-style singer, or the yuppie parents and baby stollers in the square. The culture shift was as sudden and sure as the weather jolt between Virginia and Tennessee.
In Atlanta, we spent the night high atop the city, on the 70th floor of the Westin Peachtree. Amy and I had drinks at the restaurant on the peak while Luke swam in the pool. The restaurant rotates, and we watched the planes come in to Hartsfield, one every 30 seconds at least. We ate a late dinner at the Hooters across the street. Written on a coaster: "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
Georgia now has three flags. I wrote about this fiasco when it was underway. The new Georgia flag is an acceptable compromise, it seems to me. But many people still defiantly fly the old one, and many official sites that have printed (or engraved) versions of the ugly Barnes flag still haven't gotten rid of it yet. And the new one is in official use. To me, it looks more "Confederate" than the pre-2001 flag, but oh well. Atlanta still feels like the only truly racially integrated city I've ever been in.
We had breakfast the next morning at the Silver Skillet, up north of Midtown, a classic old-school diner with Sprite-colored formica everywhere and excellent biscuits and gravy. Some wag had defaced the "Best Breakfast in Atlanta" sign out front by removing the "a-k-f" letters.
Above, Luke and I wait for the fog to burn off from our hotel. We drove that day down into central Georgia, with its red clay, tall pines, and three churches to every two houses. It's not a place I would have gone on my own, but Amy has ancestral connections there, and she's never seen the place. So we went.
In the heart of every county (they come every 20 miles or so, Georgia counties are small by Pennsylvania standards) is a small town, with a faded department store and a brick courthouse from the Cleveland administration fronted by a few columns and surmounted by a cupola. These stand around a green square, which has a Confederate memorial planted somewhere in it.
Amazing little treats lurked in the region we explored, around Eatonton. Like Rock Eagle Mound. It's back in a big 4H reserve, and we had the place to ourselves. Looking down at this creation, at least 1,000 years old, older than any man-made construction I've ever seen in the United States, we wondered, what drove the tribe to gather all these stones and make this work? Or was it rather a life's work of one crazy Indian?
For dinner, we tracked down the Old Clinton Barbecue in Gray, Georgia. Vinegar-based, not tomato-based, the way I like it. Delicious, earthy, and highly recommended.
We went looking for a plantation museum that was on the map, but it was closed Tuesday, the day we were there. But nearby we found a disused 19th century graveyard, and in the pine-scent and sunshine Luke took some pictures.
To be continued
We set out late on a Friday. Since I'm accustomed to nightshift work, I drove all night, west into the mountains, then turned south. Snow squalls dusted at us across Virginia (above), which seems as big as a continent when you take it down the oblique, on I-81. A continent with the character and weather of Just North of Pittsburgh, on four lanes with three trucks to every car. Toward daybreak, near Roanoke, the snow turned serious and piled up a couple of inches. Luke and Amy awoke to a stark landscape of black trees on white hills. You might have thought we'd gone north, not south.
Then we crossed into Tennessee, and the snow vanished and we were a month ahead into spring. By the time we pulled over in Johnson City for breakfast, the daffodils were ready to pop and the waitresses all had Southern accents. The state line, some surveyor's stroke on a map in 17th century London, literally defined a new climate.
We took it. Spring in eastern Tennessee was a tonic. In fact, the whole trip down was like a fast-forward through spring, till southern Georgia, where everything was out and blooming. If you fly down, you get there right away. But you miss the foreplay.
We drove up into the Smokey Mountains, to see what we could see. The heights are mighty; I had no idea anything like that stood in the Eastern U.S. They punch up out of the earth like knuckles of some ancient prize-fighter. An element-god in the earth slugged up through the crust and crumpled it out from within. We hiked among the lichen rocks and pitch pines and lay on the grass high up in the sunshine and breathed it and reached for what they must have meant to the Cherokee.
But that was about all you could do, because if you looked down, or around, you'd see a tourist slough of waterparks, RV parks, outlet malls, hotels, pancake houses. The slop lapped right up to the knees of the range.
Having cast my lot with the Red States, I have to think before I execrate. And a lot of what we saw there in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, I can understand, even if I can't share in it. For instance, in the comedy clubs Amy and I go to, black and Jewish and gay comedians tell jokes about the stereotypes about blacks and Jews and gays. Down in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, the comedy clubs consist of country stereotype comedians telling country stereotype jokes. Very well; even if I don't automatically chuckle at the sight of a guy in bib overalls holding a pig, I recognize the process.
Just so, people in New York go to see, say, "Rent" to be confirmed in certain certainties that they hold about life and what is important. Well, down in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, they go to Louise Mandrell's theater for the same effect, with a different set of certainties.
But damn, does there have to be so much of it? And can't you keep it further away from the mountain paradise? At least in Lancaster County, we tend to keep the tourist hell along a few main drags, so the people who race in from Jersey can go home and think they've seen the Amish, while two or three miles off the main roads the real Amish get on with their spring plowing and manure spreading.
The next day, we drove further south. Around Chattanooga, someone named Ann Coulter is running for mayor. It made for startling campaign signs. We washed the grit and salt off the car, and then headed up Lookout Mountain. There, in obedience to a thousand roadside billboards and painted barnsides, we saw Rock City.
It's a spectacular mountaintop landscape of boulders the size of cargo ships, with just enough space for a person to squeeze between them. It really does look and feel like a fossil of a medieval city.
You can see a long way from up there. Five states, I believe, though the signs claim more.
And back in the 1930s, someone turned it all into a tacky tourist trap -- the Ur-Disneyland. They couldn't really spoil the rock-scape, but inside some tunnel-caves, the park creators installed fairy tale scenes with arrangements of garden gnomes painted radioactive green.
The underground part of it has rules, clearly posted. I wonder what's not allowed in Smokingland?
Tacky, but you can get some good lighting effects, in a David Lynch movie kind of way.
Next stop was Chickamauga Battlefield, just south of the mountain. My Civil War knowledge is so Bruce Catton-based that I am utterly ignorant of "the west," so I gave Luke a book and told him he was in charge of being our guide to the battlefield. This appealed to him and he gave us a great tour, culminating on the low hill where the Northern troops made their desperate stand and avoided a total rout. We hiked till we were tanned. Amy found a set of deer antlers in the woods. The woods and the round hills looked so much like the Gettysburg I know well -- just a random slice of Appalachian turf that happened to be where tens of thousands of men killed or maimed one another.
Then we drove out of the hill country, down into Marietta, we were "home" again, culturally. I don't know what exact clue triggered that. Actual coffee shops, maybe, with punked-out girls behind the counter, or the sloppy but sophisticated restaurant with the Jimmy Buffett-style singer, or the yuppie parents and baby stollers in the square. The culture shift was as sudden and sure as the weather jolt between Virginia and Tennessee.
In Atlanta, we spent the night high atop the city, on the 70th floor of the Westin Peachtree. Amy and I had drinks at the restaurant on the peak while Luke swam in the pool. The restaurant rotates, and we watched the planes come in to Hartsfield, one every 30 seconds at least. We ate a late dinner at the Hooters across the street. Written on a coaster: "The early bird gets the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese."
Georgia now has three flags. I wrote about this fiasco when it was underway. The new Georgia flag is an acceptable compromise, it seems to me. But many people still defiantly fly the old one, and many official sites that have printed (or engraved) versions of the ugly Barnes flag still haven't gotten rid of it yet. And the new one is in official use. To me, it looks more "Confederate" than the pre-2001 flag, but oh well. Atlanta still feels like the only truly racially integrated city I've ever been in.
We had breakfast the next morning at the Silver Skillet, up north of Midtown, a classic old-school diner with Sprite-colored formica everywhere and excellent biscuits and gravy. Some wag had defaced the "Best Breakfast in Atlanta" sign out front by removing the "a-k-f" letters.
Above, Luke and I wait for the fog to burn off from our hotel. We drove that day down into central Georgia, with its red clay, tall pines, and three churches to every two houses. It's not a place I would have gone on my own, but Amy has ancestral connections there, and she's never seen the place. So we went.
In the heart of every county (they come every 20 miles or so, Georgia counties are small by Pennsylvania standards) is a small town, with a faded department store and a brick courthouse from the Cleveland administration fronted by a few columns and surmounted by a cupola. These stand around a green square, which has a Confederate memorial planted somewhere in it.
Amazing little treats lurked in the region we explored, around Eatonton. Like Rock Eagle Mound. It's back in a big 4H reserve, and we had the place to ourselves. Looking down at this creation, at least 1,000 years old, older than any man-made construction I've ever seen in the United States, we wondered, what drove the tribe to gather all these stones and make this work? Or was it rather a life's work of one crazy Indian?
For dinner, we tracked down the Old Clinton Barbecue in Gray, Georgia. Vinegar-based, not tomato-based, the way I like it. Delicious, earthy, and highly recommended.
We went looking for a plantation museum that was on the map, but it was closed Tuesday, the day we were there. But nearby we found a disused 19th century graveyard, and in the pine-scent and sunshine Luke took some pictures.
To be continued
There's more of our trip pictures, including Luke's artistic shots and bigger versions of some of these pics, in this album.
