If the river engineers silted up history on Bayou Manchac, they washed it away at Natchez in 1933 by dredging a four-mile cutoff upstream that speeded the current and—like Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables—flushed downriver three of the four squalid, lower streets. Today, Under-the-Hill has only five remaining historic buildings, but they have been restored to create the new, American historical mélange of a “shoppe” selling sterling silver spoons and rattles for that darling baby to tourists who snap pictures of the half-sunk boats moldering away in a slough once a raucous street. On the veranda of a “saloon” one can sit with a beverage and try to imagine the landing when it was the first leg on the long and jeopardous journey up the Natchez Trace for boatmen who rafted their heavy cargoes downriver but, unable to overcome the current to get home, walked back to Tennessee or Kentucky. One pair of road bandits, so it’s told, waylaid travelers until the rogues were seized and hanged and buried directly under the Trace so that their remains might never know quiet.
The Delta Queen continued upstream over water slicked by a windless afternoon, and the paddlewheel heaped up the Mississippi behind us as we passed Waterproof, Louisiana, a settlement the river has driven to ever drier ground four times. Since leaving New Orleans, we had been steaming betwixt generally parallel earthen dikes assisted on the east side above Baton Rouge by natural bluffs. Yet the levees were rarely visible from the water, and I had no sense of moving in a 635-mile-long trough all the way to Memphis. It took the Mississippi two-million years to cut out its broad bottomland which thereabouts can be seventy-miles wide but perceptible as a valley only when one is looking from a bluff. For the engineers, it took just a little more than a century to wall in the river and to try to lock it down. They have succeeded for now, so that the actual routes of, say, de Soto or La Salle or even Twain in many places lie “inland.” Where the Robert E. Lee raced northward against the Natchez, today a farmer drags his slow plow, and where some Union gunboat sank, a tangle of willows and weeds grows.
At Vicksburg I could distinguish with binoculars the Civil War cannons on the high bluff. To reach a landing there, we left the main stem of the Mississippi for a “diversion canal,” a piece of the altered Yazoo River once the Mississippi itself; but that particular diversion the engineers did not make: In 1876 the Mississippi shifted itself, as it naturally does from time to time, and moved on westward like a dissatisfied tenant, leaving Vicksburg with only a backwater called Centennial Lake. The Corps—at the suggestion of a schoolboy, so the story goes—then reworked the Yazoo to re-create something like a riverfront.
On the same day Lee began his retreat from Gettysburg, the Mississippi was once more open and free of Confederate restraints, and President Lincoln said that “the Father of Waters again goes unvexed to the sea.” It was, of course, not so much the Mississippi that had been vexed but the humanity afloat on it and living near it. For the people of Vicksburg, the vexation continued from July 4th 1863 till after World War II: Their Independence Day was not a time for celebrative explosions but a call to honor memories by closing doors and keeping inside just as their besieged ancestors had done in caves dug into the soft face of the river bluff during the seven-month siege.
A nicely grizzled fellow full of lore, a Mister Boston, told me of a sunken boat a few miles south of Vicksburg and not far up the Big Black River from where it joins the Mississippi. “That old tub,” he said, “is the steamboat Paul Jones.” He waited for my excitement. I could only look blankly at him. “The Paul Jones,” he said. “Come on! She’s the boat Horace Bixby was captain of when he taught the river to a cub pilot you might know as Mark Twain.”
When we regained the main channel and were moving again toward Memphis, a dangly-legged, goose-necked bird rose from the shore and flapped upriver, and Boston said, “That could be Bixby right now. That’s where the soul of an old river pilot goes. It transmigrates into great blue herons because those are the birds that know the river.”
The sun dropped and glanced fiercely off the occluded water and shot it across with blazing streaks, and I propped back in a deck chair, feet on the rail in deliberate imitation of that famous photograph of Twain on his final river journey, the one he depicts in the last half of Life on the Mississippi, describing how the flow of the river steadied him while recent changes along it gave him discomfiture.
That’s when it came to me that steamboat travel was not much of a way to explore the lives of the people living beside the water because, like the current itself, the boat keeps on rolling, and a passenger belongs not to the shores but to the Mississippi, which answers only to natural laws. Still, to travel a river is to become a momentary part of an eternal affluxion and see how it washes away earthen-borne life to leave only a rich residue of what we all belong to.
PROLEGOMENON
Sometimes writers bring out books underpinned as much by instinctive and spontaneous understanding as by anything they then might be capable of articulating. Only later do they comprehend their work more broadly and become able to address inchoate and incipient ideas: the why of a book. The piece that follows may be an illustration of such a development because now “Not Far Out of Tullahoma” strikes me as a kind of unintended prolegomenon to Blue Highways.
While I’m relying on classical Greek terminology, allow me to add a piece of Latin: This paragraph is a prolepsis. To interpret the vast changes in thinking and traveling spoken of in “Tullahoma” as an expression of nostalgia is an admission of not having traveled far or deeply enough in the United States: What’s been happening along the American road since about 1980 has significantly reshaped the nation, sometimes for the better and sometimes less satisfyingly so.
Not Far Out of Tullahoma
Things were not much different for us in 1949 than they were for many other American families. My father, having hauled us around in the same Chevrolet through World War II, was ready for a new car, and Detroit was again capable of offering one. Six years earlier, manufacturers made a mere 139 civilian automobiles in the United States, and the following season only a few more came down the assembly line. But after VJ-Day, as gas rationing ended, the plants returned to making vehicles for citizens. Postwar prosperity in the United States eradicated not simply the privations of armed conflict but also the lingering ones of the Great Depression, and a new era began that would transform America—topographically, socially, economically—more than any other period since the arrival of European settlers. At the heart of much of that change was the highway.
To celebrate the end of the long, lean, and worry-riddled thirties and forties, my father bought an auto—his first new one although he was at the front edge of middle age—a Pontiac Chieftain sedan. He wanted it to get him to work in downtown Kansas City, Missouri, yes, but even more, to take us onto the open road because he believed almost devotedly a slogan of the time, “See America First.”
For a few years, his preferred idea of a vacation, his two weeks and not a day more away from the law office, was to pick out a federal highway passing through our town—the one nearly at the exact center of the forty-eight states—and follow the two-lane to its terminus. Over several summers we followed U.S. 71 north to International Falls, Minnesota, and on a subsequent trip we took 71 to its conclusion at Baton Rouge. Then it was U.S. 40 east toward the Jersey shore; but the route to San Francisco, I later had to finish alone. The Atlantic City Boardwalk, the San Francisco Embarcadero, Paul Bunyan’s North Woods, and Huey Long’s statehouse became for me, by the time I was fifteen, not remote places but memories only a few days down the highway from home. Maryland and California were not like foreign countries across an ocean—they were just down the road, like our neighbors on Flora Avenue.
Six cylinders and twelve-hundred miles of reinforced concrete patched with asphalt created a sense of the United States and the varieties of being American that no social studies class could ever do. I believed in this country far beyond the morning pledge of allegiance or even the propaganda movies of
the war because I encountered the land itself and the faces and voices that went with it. Highways led to native accents, regional cookery, local hopes and notions and ancient bigotries, the scent of a farmer’s loam after rain, the smell of a Gulf shrimp boat. As different as the miles were, they still lay connected so that I could see the street in front of our house was a continuous strip reaching all of them. Highways made me belong to a nation that almost three-hundred-thousand citizens had recently died defending in battle.
North of Holbrook, Arizona
If there was one book that led me to notions of American connections and helped me feel a part of things, it was a 1950 road atlas. After I’d traveled in that extension of our living room—the Chieftain sedan—and ridden in it along some of those mapped and numbered lines, the main routes in red and the back roads in blue, the atlas became a kind of snapshot album or personal diary. I could prop up in bed on a winter night and take a journey through certain parts of the country and see again stretches of territory that highway numbers or town names elicited: Manti, Utah, with its old stone temple improbably big in such a small place; Frederick, Maryland, with Barbara Fritchie’s home; the buckwheat cakes in Plainfield, Indiana; the Civil War–replica hats (one in blue, one gray) from the five-and-dime in Vicksburg, Mississippi.
In those days, as we were leaving an older economy and social order dominated by rural life, we were still calling the Sears, Roebuck annual catalog, that fat thing city people only slightly less than rural residents depended on, the Wish Book. But my book of longings was something else, a Rand McNally with its seeming infinitude of highways, county byroads, parkways, and even something new with an old name: a turnpike four-lanes wide running through the mountains of Pennsylvania, the home of the most iconic American travel vehicle ever—the Conestoga wagon. President Eisenhower was about to identify the turnpike as the model for a vast national system of super roadways to be called Interstates, things that—as we heard again and again—would let us go coast to coast, border to border, without ever stopping at a traffic light. I was impatient for such a marvel opening up the horizon in front of the long, streamlined hood of the Chieftain.
Without thinking of the consequences of such presumably unfettered travel, Americans began year by year to put an increasing premium on speed as we came to value rate of passage rather than the nature of it, and our roads commenced becoming only means to a destination. If it was good to be able to move across Pennsylvania fast, then logically it would also be desirable to get in and out of those places that for so long had slowed travelers: hotels with the weary lugging of grips up to the fourth floor and cafés serving each order one at a time, cooked to suit a request for “sunny-side up,” or “I’ll take my noodle pie cold,” or “Kedgeree with a bowl of hot blueberry slump.”
Near the eastern end of the turnpike I saw for the first time one of those orange roofs under which lay more flavors of ice cream than I’d thought human minds could devise, and I considered the fake cupola as exciting as the Capitol dome not far away in Washington. I took a color photograph of the restaurant to prove to friends back home that I’d actually visited a real Howard Johnson’s. How long would it take such a chain with vaunted standardized quality to get to our town?
Across the land, if something was faster than what preceded it, if it took less of our time to use it, then it was better. So, in our neighborhood, when the Dari-Delite (its soft-serve as genuine as its orthography) opened directly across the street from the old Duncan’s Drugstore serving hand-packed ice cream, we gave up the infinite variety of an authentic soda-fountain for the limitations of fast-serve. We forgot the legendary concoctions of a knowledgeable soda jerk: juliets, Jersey fizzes, Delmonico frappes, Rex phosphates, and the top-of-the-line Ollie Moore (syrups of lemon, raspberry, and orange mixed with sweet cream and a raw egg, shaken, strained, poured over ice, and carbonated water shot in with force). The old collection I take this “receipt” from, The American Soda Book, says, “There is as much difference between the soda [water] of different stores as between the roast beef of different restaurants.” A proud statement and often true. We could lazily drive right up to the Dari-Delite window, and get in and out quickly partly because there was but one flavor of ice cream, only three types of soft drinks, and three of syrups; even a simple fresh-squeezed limeade wasn’t there. Then we could cart the stuff off to a drive-in movie, our feet scarcely touching the ground.
As the 1960s arrived, family vacations were changing how we saw and interpreted America. Each year we seemed to give up a little more of being travelers to become mere tourists for whom arrival is all, passives to whom travel is done rather than ones who do the travel. What lay between us and Yellowstone or the Everglades turned into miles grudgingly to be got through; small-town America—and cities even more so—became not possibilities for exploration or adventure but transient purgatories to be endured. Because our demi-generation believed so much in corporated destinations, Des Moines offered less than Disneyland, and some Six Flags over Uncle Shamland or Hokum Kingdum had a reality that real Six Rivers National Forest might struggle to match. At first we didn’t perceive the fabricated history of theme parks to be akin to the roofs of the new Grabba-Burger chains, and we thought a Jeep ride through a Texas “ranch” to glimpse a zebra was a grander experience than an evening idle through an Arkansas woods in hopes of seeing a bobcat.
Today, sham-destination excursions seem logical: Americans are descendants of earlier travelers who, commonly, did not leave their indigenous lands to see new territory and meet the natives but rather to avoid strangers (Indians) and get to a particular place and, once arrived, take it up and rename it and remake it as much as possible to resemble where they came from. Think of them: new Yorks, new Jerseys, new Albions, new Switzerlands, new Mexicos, new Orleans. In us has lain a long and deep urge to recast the New World from the Old one. Nomadic hunters walking or boating across the Bering Strait and the Pilgrims sailing the Atlantic went not as travelers but as settlers set on landfall; the people passing through the Cumberland Gap or along the Oregon Trail weren’t moving to see the sights but to reach journey’s end. The American past, the most wheeled history on Earth, is not so much about wayfaring as it is about arrival—not that we’ve ever been all that attached to a place once we do set down.
Of the blueprints and tools we’ve used to lay out and construct this nation, none, it seems to me, is more important than maps and highways, and from the beginning we’ve shown our predilection to move as quickly and comfortably as possible, speed nearly always dominating comfort (consider when you next fly commercial air).
By the time President Eisenhower’s grand Interstate scheme started to look complete in the early 1980s, many travelers began to see that a four-lane takes as much as it gives; after all, everything eventually tends to move toward temporary equilibrium. If you wish a metaphor for what happened as we autobahned ourselves, consider those famous little six red signs once adorning the two-lanes:
PEDRO
WALKED
BACK HOME, BY GOLLY
HIS BRISTLY CHIN
WAS HOT-TO-MOLLY
BURMA-SHAVE
Although advertising a product for men, the boards could have an entire family reading them aloud and watching the countryside closely for the next one:
SLOW DOWN, PA
SAKES ALIVE
MA MISSED SIGNS
FOUR
AND FIVE
BURMA-SHAVE
Those narrow signboards drew out travelers, lured them for a few moments to participate in their passage. But the four-lanes were too big and too fast for such reading, and in states that gave up scenic control of their highways, sky-sundering mega-billboards, readable a mile away, began sneaking up overnight like toxic mushrooms, and their witless messages advertised (for a while) booze and cigs, and later, vasectomy reversals, brassieres for large-topped women, ugly political allegations, religious dogma—all messages a generation of children yet to reach their no
stalgic years may find difficult to remember as things that made them happily feel a part of America.
Independent cafés could rarely afford to move and set up along an Interstate, and so vanished hundreds of Mizzus Somebody’s own blue-ribbon-at-the-county-fair recipe for corncob soup or nut pie à la Bama; gone were places with names like Jimmy Wall’s Catfish Parlor and with it his secret batter and the hard-earned magic in his old cast-iron skillets. Menus no longer revealed a particular locale with its history, and they less often expressed a region and its culture. They had become, from one Swif-Stop to the next Git-n-Flit, lists of ditto food, and the best way to discover where you were was to ask where you were. To be sure, some of the road food of earlier times was of the gag-and-grimace variety because inconsistency was a certainty of two-lane travel. But, as in other things, the absence of quality gave not just meaning but memorableness to a good meal when it did turn up. Passion and memories often depend upon their scarcity—otherwise how should we know them?
Experienced wayfarers learned to laugh off the second-rate supper, aware that, were it bad enough, at least they would have a story to tell once returned home. I realized friends listened more intently to a tale of a wretched oyster stew in the U-Drop Inn than to an account of a five-star dinner or a stunning mountain sunrise. Part of the point of travel is to make home look sweet, otherwise we all might become itinerants with no one staying around to serve us green-chile stew—good or bad. Beyond that, the quest for savory road food, like those little red signs, drew us deeper into the country, made us a part of a place for a few moments. It was even rewarding just to learn the tricks of travel: To find a good grinder (the sandwich with a dozen regional names), don’t inquire at the filling station—ask a librarian, bookseller, pharmacist, a teller at the bank. The old tourist-traps lured in only the lazy.
Here, There, Elsewhere: Stories From the Road Page 17