State by State

by Matt Weiland

  “I’m disappointed,” I said.

  We gathered our bags and fishing poles and bottled water, and walked along a paved path until we came to a contrived little clearing along the bank. Stones were conveniently placed so there would be a place to sit.

  “Hey, this looks like a good spot,” Karen said as if she were the first to discover it.

  I stood next to her while she fiddled with the various knobs and switches on the reel, trying to recall what it was her father had taught her that you were supposed to do. It was immediately apparent that she had retained nothing from her childhood.

  “I thought you said you remembered,” I said.

  “I can remember how to catch crabs.”

  “There aren’t any crabs here.”

  “I know,” she said, “but it was a lot of fun.”

  “Let me try,” I said. I swung the rod the way I had seen it done on television but the line did not cast. Nothing I did would make it cast. Ducks floated by. “Maybe these poles are broken.”

  “They’re brand new,” Karen said.

  “Catch anything yet?” a voice called.

  Karen and I turned to see a husband and wife walking toward us along the path. They were both about fifty years old and they were holding hands and smiling. The woman was round and the man was burly. They both had gray hair.

  “Not yet,” I said shamefully. And then I said: “You don’t by any chance know how to fish?”

  “Know how to fish?” The woman laughed. “My husband’s an expert.”

  “I think our poles might be broken,” I said.

  “Let’s see,” the husband said, and he took the fishing pole from me and examined it briefly, and then with a quick flick of his wrist cast the line a hundred feet out into the water.

  I giggled in embarrassment. “Could you tell me how you did that?”

  The man slowly reeled the line back in. “The first thing you need to do is put some bait on this. Do you have any bait?” The man examined the contents of our plastic bag and withdrew a jar of little orange balls. “These are salmon eggs,” he said. And he picked two out and stuck them on the hook. “The next thing you do is hold the rod like this,” and he put his beefy hands around my skinny hands, “and you hold that little button down,” which I did, “and then you pull your hands back,” and he gently pulled my hands back until they were right at my shoulder, “and then as you bring the rod forward you take your finger off the button.” I did as he said and the line sailed fifteen feet out into the water.

  I stared in astonishment.

  “Can you show me?” Karen said.

  And so he did. And then he explained to us what the bobbers were for, and what the lures were for, and how far you needed to cast the line, and how to reel it in once we felt a bite, and how to cut the gills so that the fish would bleed quickly and taste better when we grilled it later that night.

  “Do you have a knife?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Karen said, “we have a Swiss Army Knife.”

  “That’ll do,” he said.

  I kept worrying that I was taking up too much of the man’s day, but neither he nor his wife seemed to mind, and when he had finally told us all we needed to know, and there was nothing more I could think to ask him, we said good-bye. I was sorry to see him go.

  “Good luck,” he said.

  We watched them walk off down the path hand in hand. Then I took the Swiss Army Knife out of my pocket.

  “Maybe you better hold on to this?” I said.

  “Why?” Karen asked.

  “You know …” I said, “in case, you know … you need it.”

  “What if you need it?” Karen said.

  I laid it on the ground between us. We eyed it cautiously. Then we sat down on the rocks and waited. Fifteen minutes passed. The lines remained slack.

  “How long does something like this take?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” Karen said.

  Thirty minutes passed. It was getting noticeably cooler. I looked down the path to see if the man and woman might be returning but the path was empty.

  “Maybe I should try recasting the line,” I said. “Maybe it’s not in the right spot.”

  “I don’t think it’s going to make a difference,” Karen said.

  I reeled the line back in anyway. As I did the hook became tangled and in the process of untangling it the salmon egg fell off into the water. I took out the jar of bait and carefully put another one on the hook. I marveled at my mastery of this task. Then with finesse I recast the line thirty feet out into the lake.

  “Look at us,” I shouted. “We’re trout fishing in South Dakota!”

  Two hours later, after having recast the line multiple times, after having moved to another manmade clearing farther up the lake, after having added far too many salmon eggs to the hook, there were still no bites on either of our lines. By now Karen and I had both grown hungry and cold and stiff from sitting for so long, and so with a great sense of failure we slowly reeled our lines back in and repacked the bobbers and the sinkers and the lures that the man had so generously taught us about.

  “I’m disappointed,” I said.

  “Don’t forget this,” Karen said, and she bent down and picked up the unused Swiss Army Knife. I took it from her and put it in my pocket, and as I did a sad and distressing image came into my head of a small fish struggling desperately on the bank of the pond as it slowly bled to death through its gills.

  I watched a tour bus pull away, its headlights cutting through the falling dusk.

  “Maybe it’s good we didn’t catch anything,” I said.

  “Yes,” Karen said.

  And with the poles slung over our shoulders, the two of us turned and walked hand in hand back the way we had come.

  TENNESSEE

  CAPITAL Nashville

  ENTERED UNION 1796 (16th)

  ORIGIN OF NAME Of Cherokee origin; meaning unknown

  NICKNAME Volunteer State

  MOTTOS “Agriculture and Commerce” and “Tennessee—America at its best!”

  RESIDENTS Tennessean, Tennesseean

  U.S. REPRESENTATIVES 9

  STATE BIRD mockingbird

  STATE FLOWER iris

  STATE TREE tulip poplar

  STATE SONGS “My Homeland, Tennessee;” “When It’s Iris Time in Tennessee;” “My Tennessee;” “Tennessee Waltz;” “Rocky Top;” “Tennessee;” “The Pride of Tennessee”

  LAND AREA 41,217 sq. mi.

  GEOGRAPHIC CENTER In Rutherford Co., 5 mi. NE of Murfreesboro

  POPULATION 5,962,959

  WHITE 80.2%

  BLACK 16.4%

  AMERICAN INDIAN 0.3%

  ASIAN 1.0%

  HISPANIC/LATINO 2.2%

  UNDER 18 24.6%

  65 AND OVER 12.4%

  MEDIAN AGE: 37.2

  TENNESSEE

  Ann Patchett

  I have on several occasions been told that the secret to making money, big money, is to find that place at the edge of town where the real estate stops being priced by the square foot and begins to be priced by the acre. The idea is then to buy as many of those acres as possible and wait for the town to creep toward you so that you will be there, ready and waiting, when the land is converted down into feet.

  I have lived the better part of my life in Nashville, Tennessee, and time and again I have seen this theory put into cash-making practice. Acres that in my youth were so bucolic they were fit only for the laziest of cows and nibbling deer now are the physical underpinnings of sprawling shopping malls and housing developments and golf courses—shimmering expanses of manicured greens where once stood only thickets of blackberries. The cows and the wildlife, not unlike the urban poor, are then forced from their neighborhoods and herded off to distant pastures.

  But why should it be different for cows than it is for the rest of us? This is not a city that can take any pride in its urban planning. Lovely old homes are knocked down, appalling condominiums spring up in their s
tead, traffic multiplies geometrically, Mom and Pop operations issue a mouse-like cry trying to hold back the mighty chains, and then are eaten by those chains in a single bite. This scarcely distinguishes Nashville from any other urban center.

  But for every way this city has changed for the worse there is some other way in which it has changed for the better. When I was a little girl the Klan marched down at the square on Music Row on Sunday afternoons. Men in white sheets and white hoods waved at your car with one hand while they held back their enormous German Shepherds with the other. My sister and I pushed the buttons of our door locks down and sunk low in the backseat. Those men are gone now, or at least they aren’t out walking the streets in full regalia. If the growth and modernization of a city means you get rid of the Klan but have to endure bad condos, I say so be it.

  Nashville used to be one of those places that cared more for your genealogy than your character (in some very limited circles this may still be the case). If your family hadn’t been in the state long enough to remember what Lincoln had done to it, then you might be tolerated but you were never truly welcome. I knew this having moved here when I was five. But too many people have moved here in the last decade to keep up with such technicalities, and somewhere in the transition I miraculously came to be regarded as a local. After all, I remember when the Grand Ole Opry was still lodged downtown at the Ryman Auditorium. I sat on the floor backstage every weekend when I was six and watched Roy Acuff absently let his yo-yo slip down its string and then flick it back again while he waited for his turn to go on.

  When all the changes are assembled and the good and the bad are averaged out, I still believe this place is more the same than it could ever be different, because while Memphis has changed and Nashville has changed and Knoxville has changed, Tennessee the state has not. To understand this you have to go back to that place where real estate still prices out by the acre. Plenty of people made a killing on those deals, but don’t be fooled, many, many more are still holding their land. And yes, the city does push out, but down here the city is an island surrounded by country and the country pushes back hard. There is a powerful root system that reaches far beneath those mall parking lots, and the minute we stop hacking away at it, the plants come back.

  This sounds metaphorical. It isn’t. For all its urban centers, Tennessee is first and foremost a trough of rich, deep soil sitting beneath hot, humid weather. Its role on earth is less to be the home of country music and more a showcase of dazzling plant life. From the ages of eight to twelve I lived on a farm in Ashland City. We called it a gentleman’s farm, which meant that the only thing we did to the land was look at it. We kept a couple of horses that could be ridden only if they could be caught, and a very large pig that fell into the same category. (There is a picture of my sister sitting on top of the pig, her knees demurely together, riding side-saddle.) There were banty chickens named after members of Nixon’s cabinet; the dogs had an uncanny knack of eating them one at a time as their namesakes fell before the Watergate committee. Alongside the well-fed dogs there was an endless parade of cats, rabbits, hamsters, and canaries, but the most abundant form of life were the things that grew out of our untended ground—all manner of trees: eastern redbud and tulip poplar, sweet gum, fringe tree, river birch, and blue beech, frothy seas of white dogwoods, all types of maples, red oak and white oak, black locust, red cedar, and enormous black walnuts tall enough to give Jack’s beanstalk a run for its money. All through the end of summer and into fall those trees dropped their smelly green-hulled nuts the size of baseballs and we tripped on them and skinned our hands. Once a year in a fit of boredom or optimism we would forget everything we knew about black walnuts and scrape off the filthy husks and dry the nuts on the front porch, thinking we would eat them, but they were impossible to get into, yielding a tiny bit of meat for an enormous amount of work. Before we ever got enough together to make a quart of ice cream, the squirrels would come and carry our burden away.

  Mine was a childhood carried out among wild flowers, ferns, and mosses. Days were spent with only the dogs, hacking my way into the thick undergrowth of woods with the single parental admonishment that I should keep an eye out for snakes. I didn’t much worry about the snakes. We had thirty-seven acres, so much room, so much leaf and bark and trunk and bloom, that it seemed impossible that any snake and I would arrive at the exact same place at the same time. Since this was the seventies, the Age of Terrariums, I ran a child’s business digging up moss and selling it to a flower shop in town. It gave me a reason to go out in the summers. I sunk my tennis shoes into the larkspur and spotted wintergreen, ran my fingers through colonies of mayapples. I counted shooting stars, sweet anise, Virginia bluebell and jewelweed, looked out for trillium. The land was my office, my factory, and I would slip beneath the endless shade of leaves, spade and box in hand, and go to work.

  In Nashville we have a Tiffany’s now, a J. Crew, countless Starbucks. But drive out to Ashland City sometime, a scant half hour away. Go down the River Road to what used to be Tanglewood Farm and I can promise you that not one thing has changed except perhaps that the roots on all those trees have dug themselves down another twenty feet or so. Every year the country grows thicker. Every year it inches closer to town.

  Tennessee, with its subtropical summers and mild winters, is a perfect climate for almost any sort of plant. The non-natives thrive alongside the natives. Consider the kudzu vine, which arrived from Japan in the late 1800s in a little thought-out plan to help slow soil erosion. It has since spread an impenetrable web over the South, draping fields, billboards, barns, and forests. If left unchecked (not that anyone has had much luck keeping it in check) it would easily take out the interstate system. So ripe is this state for the explosive growth of plant life that the species have become extremely competitive. “Think of those plants growing in the California deserts,” a botanist friend said to me, and I picture the succulents and flowering cactus that thinly dot the vast stretches of sand. “Those are the plants that can’t compete.”

  Tennessee plants are so competitive that every day is a slug-fest, a deciduous tree blocks off the light to a shrub, a vine crawls out from beneath the shrub to pull down the tree, insects bore into the bark, birds fill out the branches, worms as blind as Homer chew through the soil, crunching the fallen leaves into a thick layer of duff that coats the forest floor. Among the hale and hearty, one of the uncontested kings in the Volunteer State is poison ivy. It sweeps over everything and we leave it alone. We’re supposed to leave it alone. The counselors at Camp Sycamore for Girls, not fifteen miles from our farm in Ashland City, made the point so clearly we could not possibly claim to have misunderstood. “This is poison ivy,” they said, pointing to what seemed to be an entire field. “Leaves of three, let it be. Do not go near it.”

  Lee Ann Hunter and I talked it over one night in our tent with all the balanced consideration two eleven-year-olds could muster. We had heard about the plant but had never seen it in action. Unhappy at camp, we felt certain we could ride its vine out of those miserable tents and back into our own sweet beds. The next night after dinner we took a detour through the forest, back to the very field we had been warned against. Like virgins to a volcano, we threw ourselves in. We rolled in it. We picked it. We rubbed it in our hair and stuffed it in our shirts and ground it into our eyes. Reader, we ate it. What was so bad about camp? It was boring? We didn’t like the food? Some other girl got the better bunk? That part of the story is lost to memory. All I know is that we turned to the plant in our hour of need as much as Juliet had turned to a plant: to transport her out of a difficult situation and into a happier time. Like Juliet, we miscalculated the details. I cannot say the hospital was a better place to spend my summer, but I was out of Sycamore.

  Of course even plant life is subject to change: One tree is hit by lightning, another is up-ended in a storm. I remember our Dutch elm succumbing to the blight that wiped out its kind. One tree goes down and the vacancy is filled in a ma
tter of minutes. Even if this endless expanse of green is composed of different members over time, the land is still pumping out plants faster than anyone can count them. The plants, I believe, have shaped this state more than people ever have. When the success of a crop determines where people will live then who is making the choice as to where we settle? The hundreds of little towns that lie between the cities have hardly changed at all in the years I’ve been driving through them. If a silver oak grew up in the space that the Dutch elm left behind, then maybe a tanning salon took the place of a beauty shop or a hamburger joint became a pizza shack, but as in the forest these changes are negligible in town. For the most part people are poor. The last truly revolutionary thing to come to their homes was electricity.

  On one particularly scorching summer afternoon coming home from a trip to Memphis I decided to leave the interstate and take the two-lane highway down to Shiloh to see the famous Civil War battlefield. The insect life joined their voices together in such a high-pitched screed I could hear it over the air conditioning and through the rolled-up windows of my car. The bugs and plants and I were alone on that highway. I did not see another car for ten miles, and then for twenty. The millions of leaves on either side of the road were so dense and bright you could almost feel them growing. And then I saw a man standing in the middle of the road waving his arms in crosses above his head. He looked like he was trying to land a plane. I stopped the car. It must have been 100 degrees out there on the blacktop. To not stop for him would have been to kill him.

  There was a woman there on the side of the road, leaning up against the car. They both were in their seventies. When I rolled down the window the man held an artificial voice box against his throat. “Ran-out-of-gas,” the machine said. I told them to get in quick before they melted. I would drive them to the station and bring them back.