Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace

by Watkins, Andra

  I never wanted to hear him scream.

  But I rocked back and forth, stomach and bladder insisting upon my full attention. “I’m sure a bathroom is too much to hope for,” I mumbled and tramped into the empty parking lot. Splinters pricked my fingers at the faded brown-and-gold information sign. A bannister drew me to uneven stairs. I readied my lunch on a picnic table tattooed with graffiti.

  My bladder twinged again. I hopped down stairs and sprawled on the leaf-strewn Old Trace. Branches blocked clouds and sky. I wondered whether Meriwether Lewis rode that far south. If he ever walked where I stood.

  My phone jangled. Ghosts whirlpooled through dead leaves in retreat.

  “Hello?”

  “Andra?” Dad’s voice boomed over the speaker. “Where are you?”

  “I’m at Old Trace. Old Trace!”

  “We just drove by there. Didn’t see nobody.”

  “I was………..um………….” How did I tell my father I was communing with the past? With the whispers I heard? Walking fifteen miles alone made me sensitive to spirits swirling in layers. After almost three weeks, their voices wafted along zephyrs blown from the beginning of Time. The Natchez Trace kept me company, and its haunting brought lonesome joy.

  Even though my experience was true, it sounded crazy. I stumbled over words. “I………….”

  “Well, I just sold another book. That makes twelve today.”

  “That’s great, Dad.”

  “Yeah. So, me and your mother’ll turn around and come back. Didn’t see you when we rode by. Can’t figure out why.”

  I hauled myself from the Old Trace. From where I stood, my view of the highway was blocked by trees. I dropped my pants and squatted. Just adding my essence to history.

  Another way wandering souls marked their territory.

  Mom and Dad squealed into the parking lot. Before the car stopped, Mom fled the driver’s seat. “I think I’ll walk with you for a while today, Andra. I called Roy to come and get me, because I’m all better. Sitting around that B and B with ice on my foot was making me stir crazy.”

  “Mom, you haven’t rested your ankle enough.” Banana squished between my cheeks.

  “I iced it! All morning!”

  “Dad!” I joined him at the information sign. “Tell Mom she can’t walk with me.”

  Rather than answer, Dad whipped out his manhood and sprayed the ground around my feet.

  I jumped from the path of the yellow stream and almost dropped my banana. “Eewww! Dad!”

  Mom snickered. “Well, he obviously can’t judge whether I’m fit to walk. He’s got so much gas today, and—”

  “Please, Mom. I’m eating.” I stalked back to what remained of my lunch. Peanut butter became sawdust in my mouth. “I don’t think you should—”

  Mom assumed a stance I recognized as part of my genetic code. Hands on hips. Weight on one leg. A tone that brokered no debate. “I’m going, Andra. I can’t stand to be cooped up anymore. With him.”

  A final yellow rivulet ran to the sign’s base. Dad shook himself dry and zipped up. He reached into a pocket and found a sleeve of peanuts. After he dumped a salty pile into his palm, he offered it to me. “Want some?”

  I took a few steps backward and almost fell over the picnic table. “Pee-seasoned nuts? No thanks, Dad. You enjoy that.”

  He was already popping peanuts into his mouth. “You see this tree?” He pointed to a moss-covered pine. “It’s probably a few hundred years old.”

  “That’s great, Dad.”

  “Some amazing wood along this place. Make some mighty fine tables.”

  “You already bought a table, Dad.” I gestured to the Mercury’s trunk, where his prize took up precious real estate amid flats of water, hiking gear and protein snacks. Nobody could convince him we didn’t have room for an antique table. If Dad took a shine to a piece of junk, he always found a way to bring it home.

  “I can sell it.” He sauntered over to Mom and me. “It’s the mark you leave on stuff. You know, refinishing it and whatnot. Lets people know you been here.”

  I excavated memory. I found my first antique in a barn, along the banks of a muddy river. A dresser of light oak, stained brass highlighting its three drawers. When I put my ear along its pockmarked top, I heard music. The clash of an iron skillet and crackling fire.

  Maybe everything held the record of what came before it.

  EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD

  Sheryl Crow

  I remember the first time I bought an old piece of furniture. Linda and me was just married, and we didn’t have much money. But I knew she liked finery even then, so I took her up to the furniture store and told her to pick out some things. I gave her a budget and all that, but of course she went over. Picked out a house full of too-much-what-all.

  When the delivery truck groaned into our driveway, I watched ’em unload. Chairs and tables and a green-and-cream sofa that’d seat five. White lamps that was shaped like the bulb of an onion.

  I waited and waited.

  For a mattress.

  And maybe a bed.

  At the end of the whole shiny parade, I turned to Linda. “Well, you got all this dining room stuff, and the living room’s packed to the gills, and I appreciate you getting me that tan chair, but where’s the bed?”

  She ran delicate fingers along one of them lamps. “Bed? Oh, Roy. I guess I saw these lamps, and I forgot all about the bedroom. I love these so much. Don’t you?”

  “How much was they?”

  Well, when she told me, I knew we wouldn’t be going back to the furniture store anytime soon. Linda’d done gone and blew our furniture budget for the entire year.

  I started poking around junk places and talking to folks. Before long, I found a Jenny Lind bed, one of them wood head-and-foot boards with the knotty spindles. It was caked with white paint, but underneath was solid walnut. Being a wood man, I could tell when I scratched it a little. I bought it for five dollars and took it home to refinish myself.

  Linda hated it on sight. “Roy Watkins, I am not sleeping on that piece of trash.”

  “Just you wait, Linda. I’ll make this thing the best bed you ever seen.”

  I bought a bunch of refinishing supplies and got to it. Took me almost a week working nights to strip all that white paint off. I repaired a couple of them broke spindles and varnished it. When I was done, I set it up in our bedroom.

  It was the prettiest thing in our house. Even Linda had to agree. When Andra came along, we gave that bed to her. She’s still got it, set up in her and Michael’s place. Sleeps better than any bed I ever had.

  Every piece of junk’s got a beautiful soul. It just takes the right person to coax it out.

  WALKING ON SUNSHINE

  Katrina and the Waves

  Morning sun streaked the pavement as Michael and I ambled along the north-to-south side of the Natchez Trace Parkway. Milepost 301. The start of my forty-fifth birthday. Mississippi Hill Country gave way to pre-Alabama waterways and plains. Michael’s visit was a birthday surprise he planned before I started walking.

  He always believed I would finish, though I still wavered. Wherever he caught me with a cell signal, Michael used FaceTime to encourage, to console, and to tell me how much he loved me. He never questioned my choice to walk 444 miles alone. Never voiced his fears. Never complained about five weeks apart. I gripped his palm and willed myself to be the strength he saw in me.

  To mirror his strength.

  I pulled Michael to a stop and snapped a picture of a discarded toothbrush. People doing seventy in cars didn’t notice trash. It couldn’t compete with the storied scenery. But on foot, I saw it everywhere, neglected bits of humanity tossed along a forgotten roadway.

  Much like Meriwether Lewis. He returned from his conquest of the West, more famous than Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. Desired for his company. Celebrated.

  Until he died of two gunshot wounds on Tennessee’s Natchez Trace.

  On the eve of his thirty-se
cond birthday, he penned an expedition journal entry:

  This day I completed my thirty-first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. But since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

  While some historians called the paragraph a foreshadowing of his supposed suicide, I interpreted it as the personal challenge of an ambitious man who wanted to be remembered for his contributions to mankind. How many times had I admonished myself to try harder, to give more, to do better? Did wanting to grow as a human being and chiding myself when I didn’t make me suicidal?

  As much as he hoped to be remembered, his reticence for self-exposure and his murky death make him hard to know. And I always went for men who were hard to know, though I never understood why.

  On my birthday, I wasn’t thinking about the famous explorer. Meriwether Lewis was days ahead of me, buried under a broken shaft of granite near Hohenwald, Tennessee. I only considered the next fifteen miles. It was easier to skip along behind my husband and admire his butt in hiking pants.

  “Do you know how good you look in those—” I froze near milepost 309.

  Michael whirled on me. “What is it?”

  Silver glittered at my feet. I stooped to retrieve a thin disc, lodged between white line and grass.

  William Clark’s immortal words shouted through Time.

  Ocean in view! O! The Joy!

  “A Lewis and Clark nickel. It was tails up. Right here.” I pointed to the inch of pavement. Clark’s joy flooded my heart as I held it aloft and squealed, “It’s a birthday present. From Meriwether Lewis to me.”

  “No way.” Michael took the chewed-up nickel and inspected its rough edges, its tire-worn surfaces.

  I flipped the coin to block fantastical explanations.

  Because it would just be crazy.

  Meriwether Lewis’s haunting of my life was mythic in our household. When I woke my husband one night, claiming to have heard a man in our bedroom chanting, “You have the complete story,” Michael didn’t question my sanity. He tolerated my tears for a man long dead, my talks with a ghost I couldn’t love, my stalking of a spirit I’d never contain.

  My husband understood me. He knew my soul.

  The nickel reinforced my clarity. It was a sign of my mind’s power to shape Life.

  Before I started my trek, I packed a zip-lock bag of good luck charms. I sat across from Michael at our shared desk, and I scrutinized each item. Cards from readers. A two-dollar bill. A buckeye foraged from a riverbank.

  And a pristine Lewis and Clark nickel.

  “What are you going to do with that?” Michael asked as I crammed everything into a plastic shroud.

  “This nickel?” Sunlight sparkled on its surface. “I’m going to leave it on Lewis’s grave. You know, as a thank you. Or something. I don’t know. I’ll figure it out when I get there.”

  Michael flashed a lopsided smile. “Or he will.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” He resumed whatever he was doing. I couldn’t coax him to talk about my nickel again.

  Until my birthday.

  He cupped the roadside talisman in his palm. “Do you think he knew?”

  “Knew what?” My fingers shook as I took it. On the Parkway map, we were a day’s walk from Colbert Ferry, a stand on the Tennessee River just south of the Alabama/Tennessee state line. Many historians believed Lewis first stepped on the Natchez Trace in northern Mississippi. I looked at Michael, my skeptic husband, whose only faith rested in me. “Do you think this means Lewis was here?”

  Michael closed his hands around mine, enveloping the nickel between us. “He must have, Andra. After all we’ve been through with his story, I don’t doubt this is some sort of message from him.”

  “But—”

  “What?”

  Possibilities swirled through my mind. Was the nickel his blessing of the new ending I made for him?

  I unzipped a pocket and slipped the nickel inside. “This has to be a birthday present from Lewis.” I twirled metal between my fingers. “Why else would it be right here? On this day? With you to witness it?”

  I studied how the earth sloped upward to trees. When I closed my eyes, I listened. For hoofbeats on root-bound dirt. For shouts of men who’d lost a horse. For the deal that sent Lewis ahead while James Neely, a Chickasaw Indian agent, stayed behind. I sniffed the air for moonshine. For evidence of the insanity so many historians claimed Lewis carried with him to Grinder’s Stand.

  But all I had was a nickel.

  I clutched it, and I sighed. When I started out to weave a final story of Meriwether Lewis, I never expected him to participate.

  Yet, he did.

  Another sign magnified my bliss.

  State Line. 1/2 Mile.

  A brown sign with gold lettering, shaped like a shield. For almost four weeks, signs marked the progress of my life. I trekked through swamps, across forests, along the hills of Mississippi. More than three hundred miles of capricious weather. Sleet. Wind. Tornado scares. Pelting rain and blistering sunshine.

  Michael squeezed my hand. When I looked at him, my heart swam in his blue eyes. He touched my cheek. “How do you feel?”

  Emotions rendered me mute. How did I think I’d feel when I walked the length of a state? Elated? Confused? Exhausted? It all frothed inside me, competing for prominence, but elation burbled to the top. If I could walk across the length of a whole state, I knew I could do anything.

  I hurried along the road, toward another sign.

  Bear Creek Mound.

  A remnant of a forgotten civilization, one of many along the Trace. Almost a thousand years old.

  I visited it the year before. Michael and I approached Bear Creek Mound from the other direction, a scouting trip for my novel. We drove into the empty parking lot and ambled through the field. When I wandered beside the mound, I heard a scream buried in the wind.

  Another character bursting through history to claim her place in my story.

  When I stared southward that day, I wondered what was there but never thought I would walk the length of that mystery. The Natchez Trace was a portal to the past. It didn’t reveal the future.

  I turned to Bear Creek Mound. A little boy shrieked across the field. When he reached the grassy hill, he climbed the dirt and jumped along the sunken top. I snapped picture after picture. I didn’t hear his parents when they called him, wasn’t conscious of their departure.

  I was lost in the story of a different child.

  Me.

  Wondering whether my father would’ve stopped to let me run free.

  My life mirrored Dad’s journeys in the car. His obsession with Time. “We made good time.” Or, “We could’ve made better time.” The measure of Time was always Dad’s first announcement once we arrived at our destination. Like the journey was a NASCAR race against numbers on a clock.

  Was that why I always blasted through everything? I never took time to stop, to look, to savor.

  Maybe my Trace adventure altered that dynamic for Dad and me, fifteen mile increments at a time. While Dad inspected every small-town junk shop and lingered with strangers, I memorized crimps in pavement, explored geographic layers and met hundreds of birds. I looked forward to Dad’s stories about his days. Who he met. How he sold books. Even what he ate.

  Schedules were i
rrelevant in the face of waning Time.

  “Are you ready?” Michael walked a few steps ahead of me. Toward another sign. I couldn’t see its face, but I knew what it proclaimed.

  I dragged my feet through Mississippi grass, a state that fed me, housed me and embraced me for twenty-four days. Its people exuded hospitality, charm and backbones of steel. Innkeepers flamed with passion for the Natchez Trace, and they were untiring in their efforts to showcase it, even if it meant struggling in places few people stopped. I dreaded every goodbye.

  “Let me take a couple more pictures.” I listened to the burble of Bear Creek. A few steps, and Mississippi would be a memory. Relationships and nuances I wanted to recall but would never remember in Life’s compression of details to highlights.

  I handed my phone to Michael and surveyed the rusted stays of the brown road sign, tall enough to stand underneath. Entering Alabama. I hung onto metal posts and straddled two states.

  And I smiled. Open-mouthed wonder at my accomplishment.

  “I did it. I walked across an entire state. Me. By myself.”

  Voices fanned the flames of rapture. “We always knew you could. Because we did.”

  I breathed them in. To carry them through northwestern Alabama. Across the heart of Tennessee. All the way to my Nashville finish line.

  When I took Michael’s hand, I didn’t look back. Finished wasn’t done. To be finished was bittersweet, like I didn’t want it to end, but it had to. To be done meant I was through with Mississippi, but that could never be. It seeped into my heart, its landscape spangled with images of my father. Laughing with strangers in roadside restaurants. Buying furniture he didn’t need. Selling books to folks who never intended to buy. My walk became an endless parade of gifts.

  I found joy in claiming them.

  I’M WALKIN’

  Fats Domino

  Alabama started its only full day with a raindrop. It splashed my eye and jarred my contact. While I worked my eyelid to push it into place, Mom cranked the Mercury Grand Marquis. “I wish I felt like walking with you today, Andra, but my ankle still hurts. I guess I’m stuck with your daddy.”