Month: July 2016

My sisters and I, and Carol too, have gotten tired of cleaning out Dad’s condo. We’re almost done, but this morning there were still a few things that needed to be done. My younger sister has the flu, and Carol had to drive down to visit her storeroom on Cape Cod. My older sister and I worked for a while, and then we decided to rent a canoe and spend an hour or so on the river.

It was a picture-perfect day, with blue skies and puffy white clouds, and everything looking fresh and green after yesterday’s rain. Both of us had our cameras along, and we stopped every now and then to take photographs. “This is just what Dad would have done,” we said to each other; Dad loved cameras, and he photographed everything.

I brought along Dad’s favorite fishing rod, and the one of his tackle boxes that I kept. My older sister taunted me, saying I was a fish torturer, until I reminded her that the last time she and I went canoeing on the river, which was probably ten years ago, she caught more fish than I did. And I found out why this was Dad’s favorite rod; it was easy to cast with, a pleasure to use.

But it was the middle of the day, the worst time of the day to go fishing. Once, when we were gliding under a bridge, a little sunfish tugged at the line, but I helped it throw the hook and it quickly swam away. My sister and I agreed that this was something Dad would have approved of; sometimes he went fishing to catch fish, and sometimes he went fishing just to go fishing.

After an hour, we ended the Dad Memorial Fishing and Photography Expedition, wishing our younger sister could have been with us. We went back to work on the condo, and before we knew it we had done everything that we could do.

The condo will go on the market this week.

After driving through the wide open spaces of the West, and the back roads of the South, Asheville felt like a big city. What felt like hordes of people strolled the sidewalks of the downtown this morning: young white guys with blonde dreadlocks, young white women in tank tops with elaborate tattoos on their muscular arms, trim gray-haired men (both white and black) in pastel-colored polyester-cotton blend polo shirts, three generations of a South Asian family with two little boys running around and getting into mischief, a young white guy with a long beard wearing schlubby shorts talking to a nattily dressed young black man with a guitar over his shoulder, two aging white hippies solemnly singing protest songs outside a bookstore, two young people sitting on the curb singing ecstatically at the tops of their lungs while one of them whanged at a guitar, a white mom talking with adult respect to her teenaged mixed-race daughters, a man who looked like he lived on the street sitting on a low wall and staring intently at something across the street, a small group of slightly overweight white guys in plaid shirts, two well-dressed attractive young women, one white and one black, laughing and talking to each other and ignoring young men, a family sitting in a restaurant all of whom shared the same face: blank and almost sullen in repose but as soon as they started talking animated and lit from within with humor and warmth. I heard plenty of Southern drawls, but also New York accents, midwestern accents, Appalachian twang, and more. I think I encountered more diversity of race and socio-economic status in one hour than we’ve encountered since we left the Bay Area. It left me feeling a little breathless.

Carol went off to Weaverville to meet with her co-author. I walked over to see the Thomas Wolfe Memorial: a wood framed clapboarded house, immaculately maintained with bright yellow paint and tasteful signage, on a tiny lot, surrounded by high rise apartment buildings on two sides, and a modern interpretation center behind it: the epitome of Asheville, I thought, the museumification of the past and the gentrification and corporatization of the present. At least in Asheville they museumify the past; in Silicon Valley, they forget the past in the hunger for the ideal future that everyone is betting is just around the corner. I took several photos of the Thomas Wolfe Memorial, but it was closed so I didn’t go in.

I walked a little further and there was the Buncombe County Court House, an imposing building some fifteen or more stories high. Judging by the size of the courthouse, Buncombe County must be a county of some importance.

I wanted to do some writing and research today, so I kept walking until I found a cafe with wifi. There are lots of cafes in Asheville; the city is full of Cultural Creatives, and Cultural Creatives like their cafes. I walked past a number cafes in the busy downtown, but some of them didn’t have wifi, two were devoted to chocolate and so could not be taken seriously, and some of them didn’t have any open tables. Finally I cam to the Pennycup Cafe, which had open tables, fast free wifi, and really good coffee. I spent three blissful hours writing until it was time for Carol to pick me up.

We drove north towards Marion, Virginia. Carol pulled over into a rest area to use the bathroom. I put on my shoes and stumbled out of the car, tired and a little cranky, following her towards the bathrooms. Right in front of the bathrooms, she was engaged in animated conversation with a talkative woman in a bright blue shirt. The woman asked me if I were a college professor, and I said no, just a youth pastor. She walked around me, noticed the ponytail, nodded (doesn’t every male youth pastor have either a pony tail or a beard?), then told us all about how she was excited because God had led her to a house up in West Virginia which she and her husband had just bought, after thinking they would stay living where they were now forever. Then she dived into a discussion of religion. Her nephew was a youth pastor, and did I know so-and-so on something-or-other radio? And when I said I did not, she said, How could I be a youth pastor and not know about so-and-so? (I didn’t tell her that after twenty years in the business I don’t waste time on high-profile self-proclaimed experts on youth ministry, unless they are actually directly engaged in face-to-face youth ministry themselves right now, which none of the high-profile ones are.) Carol had to explain that I was a Unitarian Universalist; no, not a Moonie, a Unitarian; then I had to explain what that was; she seemed to approve of the idea of universal salvation.

I really did have to go to the bathroom, and when I came out, she was still talking to Carol, in her sweet Southern mountains accent. She and Carol were talking politics. Carol wanted to know who she was going to vote for; she said Ben Carson. Carol asked, What about Hillary Clinton? She said, in more politely colorful terms than I can put it here, that Hillary Clinton should be in jail. She went further and said — and in this I think she is accurate — that Donald Trump isn’t running for president. Well, he isn’t, is he? He is just putting on a big show, and we’re all enjoying it. “Ben Carson is still on the ballot in West Virginia,” she said, adamant that she will vote for him.

There was much more in the conversation than I can report here. We got in the car, and she was still talking, her husband quietly trying to get her to get back into their car so they could continue driving. As we drove off, Carol remarked that talking to her was refreshing: she had a unique way of seeing things, and of expressing herself. I agreed with Carol; but the women an the bright blue shirt left me feeling a little breathless, just as downtown Asheville had done.

De Soto State Park proved to be a disappointment: no water in the water falls, hikes that were hot and buggy, and loud people driving around the campground at 1:30 in the morning. We decided to leave; the park staff were nice enough to give us a refund for the second night, and we changed motel reservations so we will have only a six hour drive on July 4, instead of an 8 hour drive.

On our way out of the park, we stopped to see DeSoto Falls, which had just a trickle of water plunging down into the limestone canyon.

An older man and woman, perhaps in their seventies, were standing next to us looking at the falls. We all agreed that it would be more impressive if there were more water. The woman was focused on taking photos of the falls, and of the swimmers in the pool far below, but the man was willing to talk. When he had been a Boy Scout, maybe twelve or thirteen years old, his troop hiked all the way up the canyon to the falls, a four- or five-day trek. Some of the adult leaders stayed on the rim of the canyon, and using ropes dropped supplies down to the troop. Carol exclaimed that that was a really good Boy Scout troop, and I said, that’s the trip of a lifetime. Yes, he said, memories that lasted his whole life.

Carol wanted to go to the Sacred Harp singing in Henegar. We drove down off Lookout Mountain, where the park is, into the valley, and then drove up Sand Mountain, where Henagar is. We found Liberty Baptist Church, and I left Carol to sing and eat lunch. She urged me to join her, but after the death of my father two months ago, and my mother’s twin sister a month ago, somehow I didn’t want to sing much of anything.

Instead, I drove around and looked at all the small roadside churches that you find in that part of Alabama. In less than an hour, I drove past a dozen churches — Several different varieties of Baptist, Methodist, Holiness, and a couple that I couldn’t tell what kind of church they were from the name. I lived most of my life in New England, where the churches are most often in town centers or villages. But in this part of the world, most of the churches are out in the middle of nowhere, sometimes at crossroads and sometimes just along an empty stretch of road. I stopped to admire the Happy Home Missionary Baptist Church, a neat and tidy brick building at the intersection of U.S. Highway 40 and County Road 162 in Jackson County. One of the signs out front read: LIFE IS FRAGILE HANDLE WITH PRAYER, and a smaller sign read: Celebrate Recovery Mondays at 7:30 PM.

If you’re a tourist, you’re supposed to admire the old, weathered, broken-down and picturesque church buildings that are no longer used as churches, like Dean’s Chapel down the road from Happy Home Church; I admit to being a bad tourist, because I passed Dean’s Chapel by, spending my time looking at Happy Home Church and imagining how it is used and who keeps it so neat and who drives the two twelve-person vans in the parking lot.

When we got into North Carolina, the scenery grew more dramatic, to the point of being awe-inspiring. Mountains do that: they inspire awe. Mountains in western North America are twice as high, and much craggier, but the Appalachians inspire just as much awe, and maybe even more. To think that huge glaciers ground over the tops of these mountains during the last Ice Age! And the trees that clothe their sides, and the narrow winding roads that adorn them, give you a sense of how big they are in relation to humans, and the blue haze of the humid eastern atmosphere gives a sense of distance, and you get a visceral sense of just how much bigger these things are than puny human beings.

From the sublime to the ridiculous: We were winding along the interstate highway through the foothills of the Appalachians, and I was reading aloud to Carol — Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, a sardonic satire of Western cultural imperialism unfortunately marred by unconscious racism — when she suddenly exclaimed, “An ostrich!” Two ostriches rode in a makeshift ostrich-hauling trailer. The trailer lurched and swayed, and the ostriches looked very uncomfortable, shuffling about trying to keep their balance. As we passed the trailer, I could see a baleful, worried eye looking out over the side of the trailer towards the mountains.

We stopped to eat dinner at a Thai restaurant just off the interstate in Knoxville. The evening was pleasantly warm, so we asked to sit outdoors to eat. There wasn’t much of a view: a scraggly tree, some rooftops going down the hill in front of us, a huge parking lot off to the left. I heard something that sounded like a huge crow with asthma, and Carol pointed and said, “Look!” A Great Blue Heron flew low over the rooftops in front of us, making its croaking call, flying over the parking lot to the left and into the distance. What was a heron doing here? Carol wanted to know. I hemmed and hawed and said, Well there’s a river that flows through town, maybe it was flying to or from the river; but a primitive part of me thought it was an augury, a good omen.

I forgot to tell you about the man we met in the rest area yesterday.

We were sitting at a picnic table eating lunch when an unshaven man walked up to the table, pointed to our car, and said, “Are you from California?” When you’re in a busy highway rest area, you do have to be careful, so I said in a noncommittal voice, “Yep.” “Well, I’m from Washington,” he said politely, pointing to his small pickup truck with Washington plates. And since he seemed reasonable, and not trying to sell something, or beg something, or steal something, we settled in for a chat.

He was on his way from the Olympic peninsula to Florida to visit grandchildren. His wife had flown on ahead, and he was following in their truck. “She doesn’t like to drive all that way,” he said. He was a retired airline pilot, he said, and I wondered to myself if he had had his fill of flying. Carol noticed he did not have a West Coast accent, and he admitted to having grown up in Alabama. Somehow we wound up talking about music, and he told us about his stepson who played folk music with his girlfriend in a band called The Winterlings. We promised to look them up on YouTube.

Then he said, in his polite soft spoken way, if we had heard of Planet X and Nibiru. We said we hadn’t, and he assured us that we could find out all about it on YouTube. It seems there is a planetary system that is on a collision course with Earth. When it gets close, and it is scheduled to do so quite soon, there will be a rain of 70 pound meteors that will ultimately kill off 70% of human life on Earth. I said I was OK with that as long as we were part of the 30% who survived; but he said we were too late for that, the planetary elite has already made their underground bunkers, and they were keeping the existence of Planet X from us so we would not fill up their bunkers.

At his urging, we promised to look into Planet X; he turned to go, and I said, “Maybe Planet X would be my retirement plan.” He said I really should look into Planet X, that it might be true, and I said I really don’t have an adequate retirement plan, so this might be the solution to our problem of inadequate retirement funds.

That was yesterday. Today’s drive brought us through the hills in the middle of Kentucky and Tennessee. The beauty of the landscape appeared in what was immediately before us, like the Queen Anne’s Lace that bloomed everywhere. I don’t see Queen Anne’s Lace out on the West Coast, and when we get east of the Mississippi I like to stop and admire the delicate white umbrelliform blossoms on long, nodding stalks with feathery leaves.

We arrived at DeSoto State Park, where we were to spend the night. It turned out we came at the wrong time of year: the azaleas are not in bloom, it is not the fall foliage season, and the small creeks are dry. We walked to Indian Falls, but there was no falls: only a dry creek bed, and a limestone ledge which presumable constitutes the falls, when there’s water.

We stopped at the campground store to buy propane, and I saw that they had a small garden with carnivorous Pitcher Plants. I’ve always wanted to see Pitcher Plants, so I stopped to admire them. I watched a wasp walk all around the mouths of the plants, but it didn’t go in the plant to meet its doom.

Posted on July 2 due to lack of Internet access.