Adventures Off, On and Up the Parkway

My journey up the Blue Ridge Parkway is complete, I’m back in the world of Internet connections, and this morning finds me in Charlottesville, VA, where I’ll be staying for the next four days.  Try as I might to amble, I’ve arrived in range of my writers’ retreat a week before it begins.  Seeing this coming, I booked an AirBnb in Charlottesville for the week, to finish needed edits to my novel and explore the area.

Charlottesville, it’s worth noting, has been in the news lately for a neo-Nazi demonstration, of all things, which led to street violence and pulled our strange, still-untested President Trump into a swirling media scandal.  All I can say, arriving in this bucolic little college town where the sun is shining and the birds are chirping, is that I wouldn’t tar a whole town for the actions of a few, but I’ll be keeping my eyes open.

On to a recap of my parkway adventures.

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It had been nice to finally pull out my tent again, assemble its poles, and spend a night camping for the first time since before entering Mexico.  There are several woodsy State Park campgrounds along the parkway, and for my first night I stayed at one called Daughton (which had me humming “The Only Living Boy in New York” as I set up the tent); it had signs posted warning of a bear in the area, and I slept a little uneasily, starting awake whenever the wind flapped the rain fly just outside my head, but otherwise I spent an unmolested night.

Not so with my next day, when I made bold to leave the parkway, and almost didn’t make it back on.

Halfway through my second day I decided to make a quick detour into the city of Roanoke, VA, to have lunch and run a few errands; afterwards I was hoping to get as far North as the “Peaks of Otter” campground.  It was a shock to leave the parkway’s quiet, scenic lanes for the truck-shrieking run on a superhighway through the billboards and strip malls of real life, but I found cheap parking in downtown Roanoke, did my errands, and went to a pleasant-looking restaurant called “Corned Beef & Co.” where I ordered the Cobb salad.

That thing gave me food poisoning the likes of which I’ve rarely had in my life.  Suffice to say that by the time I left the restaurant I was recalculating for a closer campground called “Roanoke Mountain,” even if I had to drive South, and by the time, a little later, when I got to my car, I was recalculating for the closest motel I could find.  Google Maps got me to a Days Inn four minutes away, where I parked, endured the chatty clerk who wanted to talk Miatas and India while checking me in, seemingly oblivious to my white face and propensity to bend double with pain, and made it to my allotted room just in time to run into the bathroom and be sick.

I spent the rest of that day, blurrring into night, recovering in the bed, and by morning I felt wan but better.  Being sick on the road is no fun, and when I saw that the day had dawned in a steady downpour I felt obscurely that my time on the Blue Ridge Parkway was done.

Instead I headed straight for an attraction to which I’d intended to detour later: Poplar Forest, a one-time rural retreat of Thomas Jefferson with a house designed by him.  It was a quick drive on regular roads through rainy Virginia towns and landed suburbs, and I required Google Maps to find it in its warren-like neighborhood of little streets and red-brick houses, but it’s a curious place, well worth seeing.  It does, in fact, have a handsome and characteristic octagonal house designed by Jefferson.

The attraction is fairly new, as the house is almost entirely a reconstruction: it had several owners after Jefferson who did extensive remodeling, interrupted by a fire in 1845 that gutted the whole interior, and it’s only recently that it has re-emerged in its old clothes, as it were, thanks to a non-profit corporation.  The restoration work is still going on, and workmen were hammering in the unfinished interior as we few visitors got the rainy-day tour.  We asked more questions, actually, of the workmen, who pointed out the different types of wood used for doors and tables, how they sourced the period door hardware, etc.  It was interesting to visit a half-complete restoration project, and see the skill and attention that goes into it.

But even in shell form you could see Jefferson’s whimsies, like the two-part bedroom with the bed in a wall in the middle (enabling morning access to either side), and feel his rationalist spirit in the soaring 20-foot-high central dining room, a perfect cube lit by a great skylight.  (Photography wasn’t allowed indoors.)

Afterwards I went into nearby Lynchburg with the daunting task of finding some gentle road food for my stomach.  My radar, at least, was working pretty well: I picked out a coffeehouse called the White Hart Café, found a parkingspot right outside the door, and it turned out to be a homey, friendly spot where I could order a bowl of hot oatmeal with brown sugar and bananas—the perfect meal to settle my stomach.

Thus restored, I decided to forge back onto the Blue Ridge Parkway in the late afternoon despite the rain.  I’m glad I did.  The little blue Parkway sign off the regular road ushered me back into its secret world with some its most breathtaking scenery yet, in a footbridge stroll across and along the James River made even lovelier by the damp day.

The rain had lightened when I set up my tent at the Otter Creek State Park campground, getting me only slightly wet, and I was snug and dry inside by the time it trappled down harder again.  I spent a cozy and slightly cold night (somehow it’s become Fall) with no bears, and by midnight no rain taps on my tent roof, just the chuckle of the nearby creek.

I got an early start the next morning (yesterday), and drove the rest of the Parkway, past mountain valleys throttled and foaming with rising clouds, through misty woods where opening fans of sunlight angled over the road, around spots of sun into which dripping trees rained golden coins, over airplane-high vistas of a night-green forest shaved about in half-inch-deep cutouts of clover-green farms away to the bright horizon. 

At last the sign for my exit appeared, and with a sigh I returned again to the normal world.

Farewell Blue Ridge Parkway!

Photo Essay -- The Blue Ridge Parkway: Driving Nirvana

The Blue Ridge Parkway is, quite simply, driving at its best.  I picked up the parkway at Asheville, North Carolina, on one of its little connecting turnoffs marked with a discreet sign, and at once entered another world.  There are no streetlights on the Blue Ridge Parkway, no towns, no shops, no trucks, no billboards; there is only the perfect two-lane country road curving gently through the bosom of Appalachian mountain farmland, on and on, at a steady contemplative 45 mph.  “Parkway” is the perfect word for it, as the whole experience is well-arranged: turnouts for views are solid, frequent and labeled, campgrounds and visitor centers appear regularly, various “attractions” are provided on the route like reconstructed log cabins and mills from the 19th Century.  It's a bit artificial: no matter.  The experience is the drive, and the soft hum of tires through a lace of shade on the smooth blacktop, as on the right another vista opens over the Blue Ridge mountains in oceanic pastels, and on the left a hillock meadow appears like the smooth green skin of a grape, reminds you of why we have cars in the first place.  Sometimes you have to exit the parkway and return to regular roads—for food, for gas.  You don’t want to.

As far as mountain drives go, the great quality I found in the Blue Ridge mountains was quietness.  Where the Sierra Gordo of Mexico seemed newly reared from the Earth and almost still in motion, the wooded ridges and valleys of Appalachia speak of the peace of long immobility.  These shapes are here, they seemed to say, and will be for a long time.  The range reminded me of a room of furniture put under tented green cloths for long storage.  The day of their renewed movement is not yet come.

Car note: the Blue Ridge Parkway is a dream drive for a convertible, and I’ve never seen so many out on the road.  Mustangs, BMWs, Audis, Porsches, little GM roadsters, all with their tops down and drivers’ hair blowing in the 70-degree Labor Day sunshine—plus enough Miatas to form a club.  I had a Miata conversation at one overlook with some guys who pulled their silver NB Mazdaspeed in next to me; they commiserated over my dent.  This is to say nothing of all the motorcycles—and, yes, bicycles.  You need to bring the right car to the Blue Ridge Parkway, and I was glad I had one.  By Monday evening my open-air company was mostly all gone, and on Tuesday Pepin and I practically had the vistas to ourselves.

It was nice to set up my tent and camp again!

My campground, at Daughton State Park, in the morning

The Mabry Mill, one of the Parkway attractions

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.