Our conversation began over the bicycle hanging from the ceiling. Rachel is an avid cyclist and since she had her laptop open I showed her the website I’d created about Annie and told her a bit of the story. When I asked about the cycling around Sparta she told me that on many of the country roads outside town people have posted signs, BICYCLES NOT WELCOME HERE. There seemed to be some cockamamie association between bicycles and undesirables, such as hippies.
Mariangela grew up in the area, but the family lived in San Diego for several years, and moved back recently. In San Diego, Rachel bought a used white Bluebird school bus, on top of which the previous owner had installed a strip of Astroturf from which he could drive golf balls. She drove it back to Tennessee and has been converting it into a mobile home. An aspiring photographer, her plan is to drive it around the country and take photographs.
“Travel is important to open your mind and expand your horizons,” she told me. “There’s a lot of intolerance here.” The NO BICYCLES signs she sees while riding the country roads are just one manifestation of it. Her gumption and her desire, at the tender age of twenty-two, to indulge the wanderlust that seems to be a part of the American DNA is admirable.
As Albie and I started to leave, a wiry older man sitting at a table by the door rose slowly and appeared to have something he wanted to say to us. He looked and dressed like Richard Petty, the race car driver, down to Petty’s signature feathered cowboy hat. As he extended his hand to shake mine I mentioned the resemblance and though I could barely understand a word he said, a combination of his being somewhat incoherent and in possession of a southern drawl so thick even individual words were hard for me to parse, he seemed cheered by the comparison. We spoke, or rather he spoke, for about three solid minutes. All I was able to glean was that he once played with Flatt and Scruggs (he showed me a laminated photo of himself playing the banjo) and in 2012 suffered a leg injury that required thirty staples to repair, two facts that, as best I could tell, bore no relation to one another. It was tempting, because he was such a character, to sit down and see where the conversation might take us, but for the life of me only five percent of what he was saying was the least bit intelligible. It didn’t strike me at the time, but after many such encounters along our way (though more intelligible), I came to realize that everyone has a story to tell and most just want someone to listen, even to a small part of it. They don’t necessarily want to be famous or to bare their souls, they just want to be heard and known in some small way, even if by a complete stranger. Especially in small towns—Okemah, Oklahoma, would become my exhibit A—people also often appreciated that we’d stopped and took an interest, however fleeting, in the place they call home.†
As we followed Highway 70 west toward Nashville, there was an astonishing number of yard sales in progress. Near Watertown, on both sides of the road, they were nearly wall-to-wall. Clearly this wasn’t a coincidence and we stopped to check it out.
It was a Friday afternoon. Albie and I wandered among tables and blankets and old furniture loaded with mountains of what could only be called “junk.” As I looked, he sniffed. Well-worn toys, beaten up kitchenware, glassware, utensils, clothing, lawn chairs, dolls, lamps, bad paintings, rusted tricycles, battered suitcases, old baby strollers, and tchotchkes of every imaginable shape and description abounded, the flotsam and jetsam of a thousand lifetimes. Oddly, there was even a fellow with shelves of shampoos, soaps, and deodorants, products you can find at any grocery store or pharmacy. Who shops for toiletries at a yard sale?
An older woman sitting in a lawn chair wearing bilious green velour pants and a plain sleeveless white blouse looked at Albie and said, “He looks like he could use some water.” I realized I’d left Albie’s water bottle, a clever device with a little fold down plastic trough you squeeze the water into, in the car.
“Oh, yes, thank you. I have some in the car,” I said. “I’ll give him some soon.” I asked her what was going on.
“This is the Watertown Mile Long Yard Sale,” she told me. “Every year.” She added that homeowners along the highway rent space in their yards for $50 a day so people can set out their wares.
“Can people make money doing this?” I asked.
“Oh, yes!” she replied. “Tomorrow you wouldn’t be able to get down this road it’s so crowded. We get people come all the way from California for this.”
“Really?” I asked, utterly gobsmacked. “All the way from California? You don’t say. That’s amazing!”
What I was thinking was something entirely different. The notion that people would drive thousands of miles and spend hundreds of dollars on gas and hotels and food to look through pile after pile and mile after mile of worthless junk seemed preposterous. There are forty million people in California. Didn’t they produce enough of their own junk to gawk at without having to drive all the way to central Tennessee? It was like people from New Jersey driving to Colorado to buy industrial waste.
Truly, the stuff looked like belongings the impoverished Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath deemed too worthless to take with them when they packed their meager possessions into a jalopy and fled the Dust Bowl for California. Now people were coming from California to Tennessee to repatriate it? Why drive all the way from California just to buy a one-armed Barbie doll when you could have stayed home, bought a new one at Walmart in Fresno, and dismembered it yourself? Ninety-nine percent of the stuff looked like it was either salvaged from a landfill or belonged in one. Actually, one hundred percent of it did but I want to allow for the possibility that I may have missed something, like a previously undiscovered original copy of the Gettysburg Address or Ben Franklin’s kite. All this remained unsaid, of course.
“Anyone ever find any treasures here?” I asked the woman in the green pants once the shock wore off. I wasn’t sure if ten seconds or ten minutes had passed.
“I knew a woman who bought a necklace for $10 and it turned out to be worth $500,” she said. “If I’d bought it, I’d have returned it. But that’s just me.”
I’ll bet it is just you, I thought. Wasn’t the whole attraction of a yard sale the chance to make a score, or perhaps buy some Head & Shoulders shampoo?
As we continued west it became clear that “mile long yard sale” was a misnomer. It was more like ten miles and it was breathtaking to consider so many people hauling so much junk around the country hoping to make a few bucks by selling a few pieces of it, most likely to someone else who would then carry it to the next yard sale and try to make yet another dollar or two from the same stuff. I doubt that even one percent of it ended up being repurposed in someone’s home. But who knows? Maybe some lucky shopper did come away with a find that day.
The yard sales eventually petered out, and just past Mount Juliet the Nashville skyline came into view. Albie and I spent the afternoon walking around the Vanderbilt University campus, justly renowned as one of the nation’s prettiest, soaking up the spring sunshine and accepting the compliments and greetings of dozens of college students, many missing their dogs at home, who stopped to say hello to Albie. I harbored no illusion I was of the slightest interest to any of them.
Again, I wondered what Albie was making of it all. I was starting to obsess about whether he was content being on this trip. He had thus far been an unfailingly good sport, climbing in and out of the back seat many times a day, sleeping in a strange room every night and allowing many strangers to pet him or shake his paw. Did he miss Salina and Jamba and Judy? Was he capable of missing others as we experience it? Did he wonder if we’d ever be home again? Or was it enough just to be wherever I was? How, if at all, did he formulate thoughts that resembled those I projected onto him? He seemed happy and all I could do was to give him lots of love and affection and rub his belly to his heart’s content.
When we eventually did come home, Judy told me something she had kept from me during the trip because she didn’t want me to feel badly—that Salina had been morose since we left. Normally energetic and bouncy, she
missed Albie (not so sure about me), with whom she roughhoused every day. She looked for him, and her mood drooped. He didn’t show it, but maybe Albie missed her, too.
It struck me as slightly ironic that the room we had booked for just one night near Nashville was at a hotel called Extended Stay America. We were in Franklin, Tennessee, a short drive from the northern terminus of the Natchez Trace Parkway.
My fascination with this road began when I read about it in a cycling magazine a few years back. The name, the Natchez Trace, was so evocative.
A trace. One of the definitions is “an indication of the existence or passing of something.” A meteor leaves a trace of light in the night sky. We hope in our lives to leave a trace behind when we exit, something that will mark our brief existence on the planet. Our footprints leave a trace on the trail. Thus, did ancient peoples, Native Americans, and later European and American settlers and traders, wear a pathway through the dense forests of the southland from Natchez, Mississippi, to Nashville that came to be known as the Natchez Trace. By 1809, the Trace was so well-worn it was navigable by wagon. Sections of the historic Natchez Trace still exist; others have evolved into country roads. The Natchez Trace Parkway “commemorates” and hews closely to the historic footpath, but it is not the evolution of it. Construction began in the 1930s and the final segment, the one that allows the modern-day motorist to drive its four hundred and forty-four miles all the way from Nashville to Natchez, was completed in 2005. I had high hopes for this part of our trip, and the Natchez Trace did not disappoint, at least not on the first day. The second was another story.
* Remember, we were roughly following Steinbeck’s route, but in reverse.
† See Chapter Ten: This Land is Your Land.
SIX
Tupelo Honey
Even though the weather improved the farther south we got, we had been climbing high mountains and descending into valleys so the weather on any given day was highly variable. But the morning we started down the Natchez Trace Parkway promised nothing but sunshine and warmth at the lower elevation. The terrain is gentler, the road flatter and straighter, which, along with the weather, made driving the Natchez Trace more relaxing than the winding, sometimes harrowing, mountain roads we’d navigated through Virginia and North Carolina.
Hawks soared overhead, and quail darted over the grassy areas that bordered the roadway. The white and occasional pink flowers of the dogwoods were strewn throughout the forests like tinsel, as if fairies and gnomes had spent the previous day decorating for our arrival. The roadway itself was paved perfection. Its gentle curves and rises allowed us to sit back, relax, and absorb the magnificence of the day. Dozens of cyclists shared the road, and as a cyclist myself I felt a little jealous. This was a magnificent parkway to drive in a convertible; it looked like heaven for cycling. No “no bicycle” signs here; the parkway welcomes them.
As I often did, I reached my right hand back through the gap in the front seats and took hold of Albie’s paw. He seemed to be smiling, and the sun illuminated his gold- and wheat-colored fur.
“You’re a good guy, Albie,” I said. I often spoke to him this way throughout the day—telling him we’d be stopping soon, that we’d have a walk, that he was my buddy, and such. Dogs can be such perfect companions. As I wrote in my last book, Rescued, relationships are so much easier when only one of you can talk. And Albie never complained about my driving, not even on the Tail of the Dragon.
After about an hour down the parkway we stopped at Grinder’s Stand. The old house, which belonged to a family named Grinder and served as an informal inn for travelers on the old Natchez Trace, no longer exists. But a short distance from the site of the old inn is a grave and a monument dedicated to the memory of Meriwether Lewis.
On October 11, 1809, three years after Lewis and William Clark had returned from perhaps the most epic journey ever taken on the North American continent, Lewis, just thirty-five years old, died here. He was serving as governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory by appointment of President Jefferson, and was en route, by foot, from Louisiana to Washington and Philadelphia to attend to financial matters and the publication of his account of the great expedition.
How Lewis met his demise has been the subject of considerable debate, something I discussed with the park ranger on duty, Derek Peck. Was it murder or suicide? The overwhelming consensus among historians is that Lewis died of two self-inflicted gunshot wounds, one to the head that left his brain exposed, and another to the chest. Those who subscribe to the murder theory argue that Lewis had no money on his person when he died, suggesting he was killed during a robbery. The most compelling evidence for the suicide theory is that Lewis survived both gunshot wounds for several hours during which he spoke, at times with clarity, to members of the Grinder family. He never mentioned an assailant which he almost surely would have had he been attacked, and he had appeared to Mrs. Grinder to be in a melancholic state earlier in the evening. Some historians have theorized that he was suffering from malaria, others syphilis—for which he may have been treating himself with mercury—and still others pin his desperate act on alcoholism. Perhaps it was a combination of many of these ailments, both physical and emotional. Those who have made extraordinary journeys often find themselves struggling to adapt to a more mundane life where few people are capable of understanding their experience. Astronaut Buzz Aldrin famously suffered from depression and alcoholism after his lunar mission.
Regardless, for me (Albie cared not), standing where Meriwether Lewis once stood, albeit in his darkest hour, and is now buried, was a way of paying tribute to America’s first great road tripper. After Lewis’s death, Jefferson wrote of Lewis’s “courage undaunted,” and surely anyone familiar with his and Clark’s epic journey would agree.*
A few miles north of the Alabama border we pulled off the parkway into a rest area near a stream where Albie could have a drink and lay down in the shallow water. I’ve always suspected he ended up a stray because someone had hopes he’d be a good hunting dog. But Albie does not and will not swim, and a hunter in Louisiana would have had little use for a hunting dog that won’t swim out to retrieve felled water fowl. But he does enjoy lying down in streams.
About a dozen cyclists on a tour had also stopped at the same spot. Most were in their sixties and seventies; the oldest was eighty-three. One, a fellow from Ocean City, New Jersey, asked about our trip. When I explained we’d been inspired by Travels with Charley he told me he’d made a long road trip, though without a dog, a few years ago: three months and forty-five states, “just to see all the places I’d never seen.” It was becoming a familiar refrain among people we were meeting.
“Did you start in Sag Harbor?” he asked me, showing familiarity with Steinbeck, for Steinbeck and Charley began their trip in Sag Harbor, New York, where they made their home at the time. It was always fun to meet people who shared an enthusiasm for Steinbeck.
“No, we started near Boston,” I replied.
“Are you going to Salinas?” he asked, referring to Steinbeck’s hometown.
“Yes, we’re going to visit the Steinbeck Center.”
“Rocinante is there, you know.”
“Yes, I know!” He certainly knew his stuff.
Another cyclist, a woman from Chicago, came over to meet Albie. She was missing her dog at home and asked if she could walk him back to the stream for another dip. But as soon as she took the leash Albie looked at me plaintively and started to pull gently in my direction. His attachment to me, always strong, was especially so now that he hadn’t seen another familiar face for a week. The three of us walked back to the stream together.
As we approached the Alabama state line both sides of the parkway were lined with wildflowers—yellows, whites, and purples—and more blooming dogwoods. The air smelled faintly of vanilla. It was near noon, sunny, and seventy-five degrees. We had really hit our stride; the road trip I had imagined was now in full bloom, too. The weather, the road, Albie—everything was just ri
ght.
Only thirty-two of the Natchez Trace Parkway’s four hundred and forty-four miles are in Alabama so we were soon in Mississippi. My iPhone was set to play more than one thousand songs at random. Thirty miles from Tupelo, Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey” came on. What were the chances?
In downtown Tupelo we turned off Front Street onto Main and parked in the very first open space, directly in front of the Tupelo Hardware Company. There was a historical marker on the sidewalk in front of the store. In 1946, it said, when he was eleven years old, Elvis Presley’s mother brought him to this store to buy him a bicycle. He had no interest in a bicycle, but a .22 rifle caught his eye. His mother didn’t want him to have a gun, so they compromised and a salesman by the improbable name of Forest L. Bobo sold them a guitar for $7.90 and the rest, as they say, is history. There was a life-size cardboard cutout of Elvis in the window and Albie obliged me as I snapped a photo of him with the King.
It was late in the afternoon, a Saturday, and Main Street was surprisingly quiet except for what I would soon come to think of as the soundtrack of the South: cars, pick-up trucks, and motorcycles modified to make the most ear-splitting racket possible. The peace and tranquility of the afternoon was repeatedly interrupted by the roar of engines and exhaust systems. It drove me to distraction, but surprisingly Albie didn’t seem to notice. Like many dogs he’s fearful of loud noises, such as thunder and fireworks, but for reasons I can’t explain the din from the passing vehicles didn’t bother him one bit.
We found a coffee shop called Crave a block off Main Street, across from the Lee County Courthouse. Though I often felt uncomfortable in the small southern towns we passed through, here the preconceptions that led to such feelings collided with another stereotype that actually happens to be true: that of southern hospitality. I ordered my usual mocha latte and asked if they could also put some whipped cream in a cup for Albie (often referred to as a “puppacinno”), which I offered to pay for. Of course they would give Albie some whipped cream and of course they wouldn’t accept payment. We took a table outside and when the server came out Albie had a big cup of whipped cream on which they had sprinkled a few slices of crumbled up bacon.
The Dog Went Over the Mountain Page 7