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

by Watkins, Andra

  Potato chips. I was still shallow enough to find motivation in junk food. The promise of carbs righted my world’s axis. “Tell Dad not to eat them all before I get there.”

  “He might, Andra. Better hurry.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I munched salty decadence in my parents’ back seat and computed a total step estimate on my iPhone’s calculator. By the time I walked into Nashville, my feet would’ve carried me over one million thirteen thousand steps, almost all on asphalt.

  Backcountry hikers have the luxury, if one could call it that, of varied terrain. Ups and downs shift the impact of movement on muscles and joints, and different surfaces distribute the shock of each step. Climbing rocks and scrambling through steep ravines can ravage a body, much like any long walk will destroy the feet.

  Repetitive motion injuries dogged my steps. A week from the finish, my knees locked up when I rested for more than fifteen minutes. Geography didn’t matter. Bed. Shower. Car. I never forgot screaming legs or mauled feet.

  Even with a positive focus and an intention to find joy every day, agony fucked me in a relentless gang-bang. I hoped it was better for agony than it was for me.

  Before I started my walk of the Natchez Trace, I thought my feet would toughen up, grow accustomed to the abuse. But the gods of the Trace had other plans. Meriwether Lewis was its most famous victim, gone at thirty-five in a mysterious death that would remain unsolved for all time. Did all the faceless people who walked its length, year after year, ache like me?

  Potato chips carried me through my last mile. I was lighter, somehow. I climbed in the car and directed Mom to our next stand: Buffalo River Farm and Studio Bed and Breakfast. We navigated a dirt road and stopped at a red outbuilding flanked by black cattle. Two labrador retrievers bounded around me as I sputtered from the car.

  “Boys! Stop that.” A woman materialized to shake my hand. I marveled at her mud-spattered cowboy boots and relaxed air. “I’m Donna Branch, the innkeeper. You must be Andra. And you must be pooped. Let’s get you to your room.”

  I followed her through her art studio and into her sprawling inn. Relaxed music wafted from a TV area made for Dad. She stopped in the gleaming chef’s kitchen. “Here’s the Keurig. Help yourself to anything. And your rooms are around the corner. Just there. I’ve already turned down your bed, and your towels are next to the shower.”

  I wanted to kiss her.

  Ten minutes later, no one could drag me from bed. Anticipation was another variation on pain, perhaps more excruciating than the physical. My body always did things my mind doubted. Growth happened when I overcame my mind.

  The ceiling fan whirred as I considered my next day.

  Mileposts 375 to 390 included the one hallowed spot I undertook the whole walk to visit. To kneel at the marker of a man whose death was deemed unsolvable.

  Meriwether Lewis never married, though he had ample opportunity to become a father on his Western expedition. While he and his men screwed their way through the West, modern scientists discovered no link to Lewis progeny.

  His expedition journals spanned volumes. Yet, he was still a mystery.

  Did he suffer from malaria, bi-polar disorder, alcoholism, venereal disease or a combination of crippling ailments? If he was often unhinged, as some historians claimed, how did his men spend almost three years in his company and fail to record it? Why were they willing to follow him anywhere, even if he was the only person who believed his way was right? How could he abuse his body for thousands of miles and survive, only to die on the Natchez Trace?

  My walk didn’t answer those questions any more than I knew how Dad processed his father’s lifetime alcoholism. I wasn’t born when his mother drowned in a sea of congestive heart failure. Grainy pictures were my only record of his days in the United States Army.

  To Dad, everything was a story. Stories were his shields. I sifted through words to piece together who Dad was. Where he came from. How he grew into the man who fathered me. For the first time, I understood the plight of historians who interpreted nuggets of Meriwether Lewis’s life. We sift truth from what we’re given.

  I sat up on the bed and rubbed lotion into my cramping calves, but action didn’t hit the pause button on my mind.

  If Dad told me who he was through his stories, why did I question it? When he was gone, would I be able to explain who he was? Or, like Meriwether Lewis, would I only hold a few bits of a thousand-part puzzle?

  I strained to hear over the television. Dad was in the common area, watching sports instead of the latest conjectures about the missing Malaysian airliner. Donna was fresh meat for stories I’d heard for decades. She brewed Dad a cup of coffee he’d hold in his hands but wouldn’t drink. He told her he grew up with cows grazing in fields just like hers. Did I hear tears when he told the story of how his family’s land was flooded by the TVA? I almost called him a liar during his speech about avoiding sugar because of diabetes, but he outed himself when he accepted an overflowing bowl of ice cream and cookies.

  I listened for new nuggets, for fresh clues to Dad’s identity.

  When he shambled outside to stare at the cows, I dragged myself into the kitchen and found Donna at the French doors, watching him. I punched the button on the coffeemaker. “I’m sorry. Dad’ll talk your head off.” Hazelnut caffeine streamed from the Keurig, a nutty scent that made me swoon. “He never met a stranger, even though he feels like a stranger to me.”

  Donna kept her eyes trained on the windows. “He’s my dad made over. I lost him last year, and you know what? Listening to your dad talk is like having my dad back for a little while.” Her cowboy boots scraped through the sliding door to her studio, where she made glass-bound books with coptic binding. Before the door closed, she whispered, “Thank you for bringing him to stay.”

  THE GOLDEN AGE

  Beck

  Them cows. Buffalo River in the distance. I sat on that porch and breathed the scent of my Tennessee childhood. ’Til that moment, I didn’t know it was possible to travel back in time. To feel like a boy in the body of an eighty-year-old man.

  But I did it.

  I sat there and heard my dead father’s voice. Relived the only story I didn’t want my daughter to know.

  We was working in the cow pasture along a creek that fed into the Ocoee River. Cutting burrs off the bank. Me. My daddy. And my future brother-in-law. I reckon I was about six years old.

  Cows charged around us most of the day. ’Bout scared me to death, but I kept working. Them burrs cut into my hands and stuck to my clothes, but I didn’t let Dad know I was hurting. He’d only laugh and call me a sissy-boy.

  I hope I never made my children feel thataway.

  Around eleven in the morning, the sun was beating down on us. Must’ve been right near a hundred degrees. I threw my sickle in the mud and told Dad I was going up to the house, ’cause I knew Momma’d have a tall glass of lemonade for her miracle boy.

  I took off, not even bothering to avoid them cow patties everyplace. But before I could make the bridge, Dad shouted, “Don’t let the troll under that bridge get you, Roy Lee.”

  Well, I didn’t want him to know it, but I was scared of that troll. I heard stuff under there and thought I saw shriveled-up bodies all around Dad’s property. It was why I didn’t mind working next to him, in spite of his drinking all day.

  A drunk was better than no defender.

  Before I knew what I was doing, I wheeled on my heels and ran at him, flailing with bloody fists, while he pushed me back with a hand on my forehand and laughed and laughed.

  “You goddamn sonofabitch!” I screamed through his cackles. “Don’t you tell me about no goddamn troll! You can go straight to hell, you sonofabitch!”

  Dad held me ’til I exhausted myself. I fell into a pile of them burrs while he took out his flask and helped himself to another swig of moonshine. “Want some, Roy Lee?”

  I grabbed it outta his hands and swallowed a gulp of fire or several.

  “You figh
t them trolls like that, and they won’t bother you no more.” Dad slipped his flask in his shirt pocket and started hacking at the creek bank.

  I could almost smell his sweat, could see him just beyond the trees at the edge of Donna’s property.

  I wanted to tell Andra she was fighting them trolls, and she was winning.

  Instead, I sat there on that porch. And I watched my father until he faded out of sight.

  WALKING TO YOU

  Everything But the Girl

  After a biscuit-and-bacon-filled breakfast, Mom and Dad prepared to leave me at milepost 375. “We’re going back to Collinwood to get your compression pants, Andra.”

  I forgot one of my two pairs of compression tights. As a woman of a certain age, I wore them under my hiking pants for extra support. And for vanity.

  Mostly for vanity. I didn’t want to end my walk with varicose veins.

  I hiked away from the Buffalo River Valley, ready to meet Meriwether Lewis. He awaited me at milepost 386.9. A pile of granite and a broken shaft in a pioneer cemetery. I stood at his grave two years before, and I promised I’d weave him a new story. If his nickel wasn’t a message, going back to his resting place might reveal what he really thought.

  If dead people think.

  I hauled myself to an overlook and sat in the sun. As I swung my legs, I wondered what the view was like when Lewis rode there. The vivid green of spring implied Life. Hope. Even rebirth. When Lewis traveled in October, dead leaves were morbid confetti. Was he thinking about Death as he crept toward his own?

  Thirty minutes later, I rejoined the Parkway. No one would ever know what Lewis contemplated in the hours before he died. I procrastinated because seeing his grave would mark the emotional end of my walk.

  I wasn’t ready to move on.

  As I processed that admission, I looked up and saw my parents’ Mercury Grand Marquis, parked in the high-way, passenger door open. I ran. “Mom! Dad! Is that you? Are you all right?” When I reached the empty car, I steered it onto the shoulder and shut off the engine. Mom’s purse gaped on the seat beside an empty sleeve of sugar-free cookies. I grabbed the keys and locked the doors. “Dad!!!” I leaned back and roared. “Daddy, help me find you!”

  Plaid flashed through trees. I pounded down a slope and closed the gap between Dad and me. But I almost tripped over my feet. My father stood there, barely concealed by bushes and weeds. His pants were around his ankles, and mountains of soiled toilet paper surrounded him. He didn’t hear me as he scrubbed excrement from his suspenders, but it didn’t matter, because it was everywhere. It speckled his khakis and sprayed along the back of his shirt.

  The sins of the daughters, visited upon the fathers.

  I tried to scoot away, to pretend I never saw him, but he ruined my escape.

  “Andra! I……uh…….”

  My mouth moved, but I struggled to force something through it.

  Mom came up behind me. “Oh, Roy. When you said you needed to stop, I thought you meant number one.”

  Dad threw another wad of toilet paper on the ground and ran his eyes along the highway. “Golly, I’m glad they’s nobody around.”

  “I’m gonna have to take you back to the B and B to clean yourself up.” She turned toward the car, and I followed. “I wonder whether there’s a big piece of plastic in the trunk.”

  I stepped in her path, scorched her with furious eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me Dad was this bad, Mom?”

  “He didn’t want you to know.”

  “And that’s a reason not to tell a child her dad is—”

  “You’re not a child, Andra.”

  “Fine, Mom. You’re right. As an adult, I have a right to know about my parents’ health. How often does Dad have accidents like this?”

  She became fascinated with the paint on her toenails.

  “How many, Mom?”

  “Oh, not much.”

  “Why do you always talk in approximations? Daily? A couple a week? What?”

  “Well, it depends, Andra. Most of the time, he makes it to the bathroom before it starts.”

  “So—”

  “Twice on the Trace, but we were able to take care of it before we picked you up.”

  I reeled for guilting my father into taking a road trip when he should’ve stayed home. For being too consumed with my own agenda to notice his decline. “My God. He really shouldn’t be here.”

  “He didn’t care whether he should’ve, Andra. It only mattered that he was.”

  Dad barreled from the trees and shrugged us off as we tried to help him into the passenger seat. “You women are making too much of this. I’m all right. Same thing happened to you the other day, Andra.”

  Before I could frame a response, Mom gunned the engine and was gone.

  Would I ever have another adventure with my father?

  Another engine snapped me from my thoughts. I stepped from the path of a blue car and wagged my usual thumbs-up sign to motion them on.

  But the car stopped. Its driver opened the passenger door. His flabby arms wore sleeves of paint, and he didn’t smile.

  “You need to get in.”

  I backed a couple of steps, beyond the range of his grasp. “No, I’m okay. I’m walking the Trace. I’ll be fine.”

  “Come on. Get in. Let me give you a lift.”

  I couldn’t make out his face behind the lumberjack beard. Was he short or tall? Muscular or wimpy? My fingers crept toward my mace. “I don’t need a ride. I already told you. I’m walking.”

  “I saw you walking around 320 down in Alabama. Seen you several other times. You really need to let me give you a ride.” He leaned over the armrest and toggled the handle on the glove box.

  “No. I don’t.” I stumbled into a run before I saw whatever weapon he might have.

  His motor lurched behind me. I squeezed the mace and ran into the forest, weaving between weeds and tree trunks until I couldn’t see the highway. While he gunned his engine, I gulped every oily exhale. Rough bark scraped my knuckles as I crouched behind a gum tree and pulled out my phone. My hands shook, but I fumbled with my lifeline. Listened for muffled footsteps. Rustling leaves and cracking limbs. When the screen finally lit, the upper-left hand corner read NO SERVICE.

  I leaned my forehead into wood and stopped breathing. Since Jackson, Mississippi, no rangers crossed my path. Over 300 miles. A deadlocked Congress left me to fend for myself. I couldn’t summon a ranger or hope for one to rescue me.

  It wasn’t the first time I wished for more funding for the forgotten Natchez Trace and its people.

  Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Engine noise rattled the Trace, but it crescendoed and faded. I crept to the forest’s edge and scanned the roadway.

  The blue car was gone.

  I staggered through a ravine and stopped at the road. Before I could check my signal, the phone vibrated in my hand.

  We’re on our way. Where have you been?

  My fingers tapped the screen in answer to Mom’s text.

  I’ve been right here. All the time.

  If they could hide Dad’s deteriorating condition, I could shield them from worry.

  It wasn’t exactly a lie.

  WALK ON THE WILD SIDE

  Lou Reed

  As I hot-footed it toward the Meriwether Lewis site, my phone chimed again. Visitors. Two people were careening down the Trace to meet me.

  When I invited readers to join me on my Natchez Trace walk, I didn’t think anyone would. Who would take time off to hike a neglected highway? With unpredictable weather and poisonous snakes and biting bugs? I buried an invitation in a blog post and forgot it.

  Until I heard from Lisa Kramer, a writer and reader in Massachusetts. I found her online when she wrote about an Eastern European trip to study movement with gypsies. The more I read, the more I recognized myself. Theater. Writing. Supportive husbands. A yearning to travel. Even though our correspondence was online, I considered Lisa a dear friend.

  But I never expected to o
pen my email and read her message: “I’d really like to come walk with you.”

  Was she crazy? Maybe she’d show up, and we’d loathe each other on sight. What if she was bitten by a snake? Could she sue me? Convinced she was being nice, I turned my attention to my empty screen and typed, “You should. You totally should.”

  Once I hit Send, I forgot about Lisa.

  The next morning, my inbox blinked with another email. From Lisa.

  “I’ve been looking at flights. It’s pretty expensive to fly from Boston to Nashville.”

  Was she serious?

  I did a quick Google search and found several discounted options. “You can afford it if you pick these dates.” My psyche was drunk on the notion that one stranger wanted to take part. “Invite yourself to stay with Tori. She’s in Nashville. At least you’ve met her. I’m staying with her at the end of my walk, and I don’t even know her.”

  Tori Nelson was another person I met online. I started following her because she invited readers to plan her Very Bloggy Wedding. She solicited votes on dresses and makeup options. Even her bridal hairdo. For months, I expressed my opinions, marveling that I sort of knew someone whose balls were gigantic enough to cede her wedding to strangers. How could I not love all six feet of her on sight?

  I couldn’t believe it when Tori and Lisa pulled up next to me on the Natchez Trace. Whoops, shouts and music vibrated through trees. Like life-long friends, I hugged Lisa through an open window, not caring how I smelled. “I can’t believe you’re here!” I shouted as I Chinese-fire-drilled around the car to smother Tori with BO.

  Lisa pushed a screwdriver curl from her face. “We made it happen!”

  They planned to walk the last four miles of my day. A rendezvous at the Meriwether Lewis site. A picnic they prepared. When they motored up the highway, I wasn’t alone anymore. They threw a wall of pink confetti, enough to repel any predator. I was dazzled by girl power glitter.

  Until I thought about the road ahead.

  For my whole trek, I carried specific images of my time at the Meriwether Lewis site. Walking alone along the abandoned road. I knew where to pick up the Old Trace, and I planned to follow his footsteps into the clearing where he died. I would walk across the ruins of Grinder’s Stand and cover the distance to Merry’s monument in silence, my Lewis and Clark nickel cupped in my right hand. Alone, I would kiss the nickel and whisper a blessing, before placing it on Merry’s grave.