Heading Off the Grid

This morning I'm in a supermarket Starbucks on the outskirts of Asheville, North Carolina, about to begin the Blue Ridge Parkway portion of my drive.  And so a heads-up: from what I've been able to gather about the scenic little byway that wends through scenic little towns, this may be the last Internet connection I see for a while.  I'll be on the Parkway for several days (I don't know exactly how many, or how far I'll get per day), and the idea is to stay at campgrounds along the way, so it's possible that the blog will be staticky at best for a good while.  I'll check in when and as I can.

Yesterday was a betwixt-and-between day; I should know better than to let those into my schedule.  My task was a simple one: get from Nashville to Asheville, explore Asheville, possibly start a little ways onto the Parkway, find a campground.  It didn't quite go like that.

It was a weird feeling heading out from Nashville without a bed or even a town lined up for the night ahead: I haven't done that since the early days of my trip before crossing into Mexico.  Still, I remembered that it was pretty easy to find campgrounds.  It was a beautiful day with a cloudless blue sky; for the sake of efficiency I jumped on the highway, but even the Interstate threw in some glorious sweeping curves through the rising foothills of the Appalachians.  When I got off on Route 25 through the National Forest and crossed into North Carolina the land got even prettier.

My first check came in the town of Hot Springs, NC, where I'd planned to stop at the spa and enjoy a mineral hot tub soak; apparently you can book those by the hour.  But on a Memorial Day Sunday the parkinglot, and the tubs, were full.  Oh, well.  I drove on, but I'd been looking forward to the driving break, and unalleviated fatigue was catching up to me as I pulled into the charming town of Asheville and started nosing around for a place to get coffee and dinner.

Asheville really was a charming-looking town: cute, collegiate, walkable, with scenic views and attractive restaurants at every turn.  To make a long story short, I never got out of my car.  I spent 45 minutes driving around that town looking for parking, with no luck.  Even the pay garages were full.  On one street, I found a garage on my left with a digital counter showing five open spaces, and as I waited to turn, all five cars in the oncoming lane turned and went into the garage.

Achey, spacy, hungry, angry, and in general suffering a mood that wouldn't be reported in the blog if future Internet connections were assured to overwrite it with forthcoming better ones, I delivered a decisive and not-so-fond farewell to Asheville and jumped on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

By now it was unfairly close to 6:00 pm (I'd lost an hour crossing a time line), the sun was low, and the nearest campground North per my map was a long distance.  There was a closer one South, but right at hand was a Visitor Center, and I pulled in there.  In the last few minutes before it closed I called the Southern campground and asked if they had an open tent space; the woman said they had exactly one, but she couldn't reserve it, it was first come first serve.

At that point I gave up and found a local Motel 6.  It was $80, the most expensive one of my trip, and after a swim in the pool my door card didn't work, and while other Motel 6's had free wi-fi this one charged for it, which I declined to do.  I had a heavy roadside dinner at the Waffle House across the street, learned from a phone message that Walter Becker had died, and went to bed.

It was that kind of a day.

But during my brief dash on the Blue Ridge Parkway, it looked gorgeous.  Today I'm off to try it for real.  And if you don't hear from me, assume I had a wonderful day!

Nashville

My first day in Nashville was grey and wet with a solid, steady rain, but that was all right: I was hanging out with my old friends Andy and Ginger Coffey.

Well, Andy’s an old friend dating back to my rock-and-roll days in Chicago when we were bandmates whooping it up in such raucous fly-by-night concoctions as Rodeo Riot.  His wife Ginger I was meeting for only the second time, but she’s so easy-going, and the two of them are such a happy unit, that I felt I’d been friends with her for years.  I’d picked a Motel 6 near their house, in the “Hickory Bend” suburb near the airport, and after having lunch at a big roadside touristy gift-shop place called the Cracker Barrel I drove on over.

Andy and Ginger have a well-tended red-brick ranch house in a neighborhood of the same, with a garden out front and three energetic dogs within, and a back room sporting—yes!—a couple of drumsets.  Not THAT much water under the bridge, then, despite Andy’s recent cataract surgery and other hints of middle age, and within a few beers of my arrival he I were in the back room crashing through a jam session that made me a person of suspicion to the dogs for the rest of my visit.  The couple then treated me to dinner at a nearby Italian restaurant.

 I think I remember how to play these

The next day Hurricane Harvey finally packed up its remnants and cleared out, and it was a warm sunny Saturday to explore downtown Nashville. 

It was interesting to contrast Memphis and Nashville, neighboring Tennessee music cities.  In both cases I walked a special music district downtown and went to a museum.  But where Memphis had a soft, venerable, half-ruined feel, carrying the scars of its history even to its motel museum and its old musicians pushing CDs on Beale, I found Nashville to be too shiny and corporate.  Maybe it’s the difference between blues and country.  The Nashville music district on Broadway (called “The District”) is center stage to a Brobdingnagian urban renewal of enormous glass skyscrapers, stadiums, modernist event halls, wide boulevards, riverfront parks, all new and gleaming, through which the strip of music clubs functions like a theme street in Disneyworld complete with horse-drawn Cinderella carriages and pedaled party-carts full of singing beer-drinking girls going by.  It was enormously popular on this Saturday afternoon, the streets mobbed and the stacked balconies of all the clubs filled with bright faces.  I did squeeze for a while into one of the crowded clubs to listen to a live four-piece country band belt out some rockin just-add-water numbers about love and trucks, but the waitress hadn’t noticed me by the time the set ended, so I left.

I also went to the Country Music Hall of Fame Museum, which, after all, is a completely unfair thing to compare with the National Civil Rights Museum.  It’s not its fault if its subject is by definition an exercise in self-congratulatory promotion.  For what it is, the Hall of Fame museum is quite good: you come in through a huge atrium complete with restaurants, and walk long halls full of old instruments, stage clothes, lyric sheets, fancified cars (they have Elvis’ Cadillac and the Trans Am from “Smokey and the Bandit II”), and other memorabilia showcasing both the glitz and the work of show business.  Very well done was the audio: it’s a music museum, and the ways they isolated the sound specific to an exhibit—for example a video of Depression-era banjo-picking footage, or a booth where you can dial up famous hits featuring a given session man—worked perfectly, enabling you to move from one aural area to another in a constant flow but with no overlap. 

    Loretta Lynn's dress

Elvis' car

They do have a rotunda for the actual Hall of Fame, with bronze plaques for the likes of Glen Campbell and Tex Ritter, and overall this non-Country fan was surprised to find the extent to which his genes were already imbued with the music.  From Johnny Cash to Tanya Tucker to Loretta Lynn to Steve Earle, I more or less knew my way.  Country music is in fact an all-American story, and while the museum had much more information than I’d known or needed, it’s a story that somehow included me too.

Still, it was $18.00 to park downtown.  Nashville. 

Andy and Ginger were supposed to join me in the afternoon but they never got out of the house, so I went back to them, for one more jam session in the back room and a wonderful dinner out at a Mexican restaurant, with Margaritas on the patio by the grassy hill as the sun set in the blue sky.

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.

And to Beale Street

The second part of my day yesterday didn’t seem to fit with the Graceland post, so it gets its own mini-post.

After checking into my AirBnb—a room in a private house, an old Craftsman in the quiet residential Cooper-Young neighborhood of Memphis—the rain had let up and it was only 5:00.  I could still legally drive...so I headed downtown to see the famous Beale Street.

Beale Street was fantastic.  It’s a tiny neighborhood, really just three or four blocks, but it was blocked off from cars and so full of clubs and restaurants, neon lights, wandering musicians and music lovers, that it seemed a city in itself.  Every restaurant I strolled past smelled delicious; every blues band playing outdoors on a park stage or at the back of an alley of shops was so talented I had to stop, until the old negro manager came at me waving me closer and brandishing the CD for sale. 

It was too early for either dinner or the real street energy, so I wandered further afield in the downtown area—and came upon a minor-league ballpark just about to start its game.  I’d actually heard about this ballpark as a classic old stadium and a Memphis attraction worth seeing, so I bought a $9.00 ticket and went in to see the Memphis Redbirds play the Nashville Cubs. 

It was a lovely stadium, with a great view of the downtown buildings, and slopes of grass above the outfield where families spread picnic blankets and kids rolled or practiced sliding. 

From my position out in right field the voice of the announcer was perfectly overlapped with its echo, rendering all names unintelligible, but it was still fun to watch the hopeful young Triple-A players field grounders and rap out hits before the light applause of the sparse crowd.  One Nashville Cub hit a long arc across the twilight office buildings for a home run, but more entertaining was the foul ball that fell into a vast section of empty dark-green seats near me, with the sound of a fist hitting a pillow, whereupon the woman usher marched off to a populated section and returned with three or four young children to hunt about for it.

Alas, the baseball purist in me is no more, and at 7:30 when I was really hungry for dinner I up and left, with the score still 1-0 in the fourth inning.

Now Beale Street was really jumping, crowded with wanderers and street acrobats, and in addition to the rocking bands fillling the night from their outdoor stages I was confronted with great-sounding music from every restaurant club whose door swung open for a moment.  There was no way to choose, so I picked a place that advertised gumbo above the door, and went in to the King's Palace Café.  I had the bowl of excellent gumbo and a very large beer (the plastic cup read “BIG-ASS BEALE ST. BEER”), and listened to a lone blues guitarist rolling out soft standards like “What a Wonderful World” interspersed with gently mind-bending solos. 

Afterward the night was still warm and not raining, so I drove home through the soft Memphis air with the top down.  And that completed my first day in Memphis.

I've Gone to Graceland

I made it to Memphis on the last day of my temporary driver’s license under a black sky threatening storm.

I thought I’d get the most out of my last driving day by taking back roads from Little Rock.  In many respects my choice merely added hours of boredom: on this side of Arkansas the back roads lie canal-straight to the horizon through open farmland flat to the other horizons.  The day was humid, dim under the low cloudlid that seemed like a swollen belly drooping ragged teats that occasionally spattered rain.  The green land seemed too lush for domestication, sprouting high grasses where not tended, sloppily trimmed to agriculture like a man with a bad haircut.  As I drove past towns and houses words slid off them; they were neither pretty nor ugly, old nor new; they were simply ordinary, simply there.  Small gas stations, big metal barns, family cottages, unevenly mowed lawns.  And yet I was still glad to have avoided the highway.  Not only did I feel safer when the rain turned briefly blinding, but I felt I had more legitimately seen Arkansas.

Meanwhile, I received word from Mexico City that my friend Brett had overnighted my replacement driver’s license to me at my AirBnb address in Memphis.  With that in mind—including a day likely spent waiting for the mail—I got as many Memphis goals out of the way yesterday as I could.  The first of those was to go to Graceland.

***

Well, after all, in Mexico I had visited the preserved home of a renowned national artist at the Frida Khalo Museum.  The least I could do for my home country was the same.

Hardly the same, of course.  Graceland does, it’s true, have a preserved house, in which renowned national artist Elvis Presley passed his domestic hours, but in America the house is surrounded by a veritable city of huge grey-and-blue boxes that comprise a sort of Elvisian theme park, with restaurants, multimedia exhibits, and a ticketing booth like a bus station.

It’s also horrifically expensive.  You do not buy a ticket to the house, or even the grounds, but to one of various “tours,” ranging from the “Elvis Ultimate VIP” tour ($159.00) through the “Elvis Experience Tour” ($57.50) to the lowly “Graceland Mansion Including Planes” tour, which I chose ($43.75).  You then file through an airconditioned terminal, sit in a dark waiting room where you watch a video on Elvis’ life, and finally board a shuttle bus that takes you eleven feet to the attraction you’ve come to see.  On the way you’re handed a rubber-cased video pad with attached headphones, that will be your audio-video tour guide as you move room by room through the experience at a standardized pace.  I slung the pad over my shoulder and forgot about it.

From the outside the mansion is quite handsome in the classic stone colonial style, with a white-pillared entry and shutter-framed windows.  But this disappointment doesn’t last long.  As soon as you enter the front door, the tackiness you expect engulfs you. 

I realize my blog is only adding the billionth exact duplicate of each of these photos—and poor iPad versions at that—but really, there’s nothing else one can do with one’s amazement as the queue moves from velvet rope to velvet rope through the house.  Not shown above are the TV lounge, the music lounge, the squash court, the green-carpeted stairs, and of course the grounds that include the family gravesite in a pillared peristyle with a pool and a statue of Jesus whose pedestal says “PRESLEY.”  Whether one’s tongue is in or out of one’s cheek, one has to click.

Indeed, there was a fine line between the overt absurdities of the young millionaire’s indulged whims, and the subtler nonsense afloat in the zeitgeist from which he picked.  Some rooms in the house were done quite “straight”—by 1950s standards.  The wood paneling, the carpeted stairs, the preponderance of mirrors, the china figurines on glass—in such things Elvis is reflected less as the creative force, more the victim equally with his culture of a runaway prototype domestic industrialism.

What I found missing from Graceland was the artist’s art.  Of course Elvis songs play constantly in the background in the theme park, and over the tour-pad headphones whenever I checked, and I ate my meatloaf lunch in the “Vernon’s Smokehouse” cafeteria to the tune of “You Ain’t Nothin’ But a Hound Dog,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Jailhouse Rock,” etc. on the sound system, but that’s not exactly the same thing.  The mansion has several pianos, but no writing room or sound studio; the museum hall downstairs has framed invoices from the house’s remodelling but no penciled lyric sheets or handdrawn musical notations.  Whatever came out of this young man that changed the world—and something surely did—America chooses to recognize it only in its effects, only in its remunerative capacity.  Only in its mirrors.

I had been routed at last to the gift shop when the skies opened up and a severe downpour came slashing across the theme park.  The parkinglot was a long walk away and the rain wasn’t letting up.  So I spent my last half-hour at Graceland trapped in the mecca of merchandise, eating a $5.00 ice-cream cone from the Elvis-themed sweet shop and humming helplessly along with Elvis tunes.  Eventually I ran for the parkinglot anyway, where my Miata was ankle-deep in a good old Tennessee puddle.