Licensed to Flee! But Harvey Catches Up

First of all, Pepin and I are fully legal again!  My replacement driver’s license, overnighted from Mexico City to Memphis on Monday, did take an extra day to get to me (while I sat checking the status on my laptop with the tracking number), but on Wednesday morning the DHL delivery man came up on the front porch of the Craftsman home where I was staying and knocked on the screen door.  I opened the package on the dining room table to find a brand new Washington State driver’s license with my picture on it.  Yes!  Round trip from Omak Washington on July 18 to Memphis Tennessee on August 30, with a detour through Mexico City, arriving just a day after my temporary license expired. 

Many thanks again to Brett Duel for winging it my way!

The day I spent waiting for it, Tuesday, was interesting.  With my temporary license having expired I couldn’t legally drive, nor at first did I want to leave the house for fear of missing the delivery.  In the morning, after a tracking check showed the package still in Mexico City, I snuck out and drove a few blocks to breakfast at an IHOP, but the sight of a police car in the parkinglot made me nervous enough to scoot back afterwards with no desire to test my luck again.  So I spent the day in my immediate Memphis neighborhood.  A humid mugginess shrill with crickets weighed down the residential streets of aged bungalows and frame houses, and it was a good day to spend sleepily indoors reading.  My host, Jonathan, was out for most of the day and I had the creaky old house to myself along with his two quiet dogs locked in the kitchen.  For lunch I ambled around the corner, through knee-high grasses invading the sidewalk, to a big empty box of a restaurant with “Payne’s Bar-Be-Que” hand-painted on the side; the rib sandwich in white bread soon soggy with BBQ sauce was delicious, and later I found that Payne‘s was a starred entry in the Memphis guidebook.  In the evening I walked the other way, to a clean, hip intersection at Cooper and Young where several cute restaurants gathered; I sat on the patio at a pricey little place called The Beauty Shop (with appropriate decor) where I had a superb apple and arugula salad with a side of light, fluffy corn fritters and a banana-blueberry crepe for dessert.  I was the only person walking on the suburban streets past the quiet homes under the single row of streetlights—how different from Mexico—and I felt very much the stranger, but although some dogs barked at me and a ring of silenced crickets followed me I made it back to my AirBnb with no trouble.

On Wednesday, equipped with my new license, I went to the National Civil Rights Museum, which is located next door to the preserved downtown motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968. 

 The wreath marks the balcony where King was standing when he was shot. 
The cars have been added as period detail.

The museum chronicles the struggle of African-Americans from slavery on up in a series of well-arranged rooms featuring statues, videos, artifacts, recordings, and walls overloaded with accessible and pertinent information.  The main focus is on the key events of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 60s, culminating in Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech and his death.  It’s an immersive and powerful museum, well worth seeing.

Afterwards I had intended to spend another evening rocking out on Beale Street, but the museum left me emotionally drained, perhaps in combination with the book I’m reading (I’m revisiting “Tender Is The Night”), and all I felt like doing was wandering down to the waterfront and staring out over the Mississippi River for a while. 

With all the times I’ve crossed the country I’ve never actually done that.

Yesterday, then, Pepin and I were back on the move, original license plate, replacement driver’s license and all.  It’s a short run on the highway from Memphis to Nashville, my next stop, but again I chose the smaller roads.  I was rewarded with a gorgeous drive through rich farmlands, where slope after open slope gleamed with the bushy dark green of a cotton crop, and the bright grass meadows all sported big rolls of hay like gigantic corks left on a green blotter after a party.  In the town of Linden I also found the perfect smalltown lunch place, called Dimples, whose three tables were snuggled into the corner of a general shop piled high with toys and knickknacks, and whose husband and wife owners were so friendly that while I was chatting in the back room with Kevin I lost track of time and Renee had to come back and tell me my burger was done. 

The drive got even more scenic when I intersected with the Natchez Trace Parkway and came up toward Nashville that way; the parkway had frequent turnouts for Indian paths (the “trace”) and overlooks, at several of which I stopped.

 The Natchez Trace, the original path that the parkway follows

But Hurricane Harvey (now a “Tropical Depression”) was moving faster than I, and though my drive began in sunshine, by the time I hit the Natchez Trace Parkway the road was winding between great bumpers of blinding white thunderheads that seemed to grow from the green hilltops, or sometimes missing and having to duck under them with a quick spatter of rain and a swing of the canvas top over my head.  It seemed somehow appropriate that when I neared Nashville and got back on the superhighways for the run to my Motel 6, the sky smeared into an undramatic grey and the steady rain commenced.  But when I checked in things went to the next level, as a Tornado Warning siren suddenly revved up and the Motel 6 clerks ran around making sure everyone was in their rooms.  I spent yesterday evening peeking out at the low clouds and furious rain, as the howling siren started up periodically to rise and fall for a few emergency minutes, but the tornadoes never came.  The siren awakened me at midnight for one more peek through the curtain, then I slept again.