Day 5 – Tuesday, 23 May
We slept a little bit later than usual – it had nothing to do with the bourbon, scotch and tequila tasting the night before – and Sharon made some great scones for breakfast, and we took our leave around 10. As we were filling up and putting some air in the tires in Townsend, a couple of guys came up and talked with us about the Caddy.
One of them had a pistol in a holster on his belt in plain sight, and it didn’t bother me or anyone around us. For any readers who live in big, blue cities, this is because guns are morally neutral tools that don’t shoot people.
(But if I were in NYC or Chicago – where the police have been hamstrung and the criminals emboldened by leftist politicians – and sharing a train car or some other “legal-gun-free-zone” with a bunch of recidivist gang-bangers? No bueno.)
We took a short drive on the Foothills Parkway, which climbed to a stretch of ridgeline overlooking Townsend, and then turned back to retrace our steps toward town. On the way back, we came across an adult black bear calmly tearing into a fallen tree, no more than about 12 yards off the road.
After a lifetime spent in farm country and college towns, I can never quite shake the impression that a bear in that situation looks suspiciously like a really big guy in a bear suit. Until you see one tearing a tree trunk into kindling while looking for grubs or whatever bears eat that comes from a tree trunk.
After that we drove for over an hour with the top down through the same sort of pretty, rolling landscape we’d been seeing, before pulling into Wartburg, TN. And yes, the city fathers really fell down on the town-naming front. (“Come see charming Wartburg! Just six miles south of Festerville on Poisonous Snake Road, or take Oozing Lesion Lane for 10 miles from Tumorton.”)
We looked around the very nice little Visitors’ Center for the Obed Wild and Scenic River National Park, and got a map and some park info from the rangers there. It turns out that the first trailhead we found in the park itself is about 6 miles of winding road away from town. We’d never heard of this park, but it was really impressive; I think it’s as pretty as the much more well-known Smoky Mountains park, but much less crowded.
The trails were similar: shady and cool, with a wide creek flowing on one side, and a steep hillside and occasional cliffs on the other. The first people we came across on the trail were some young lunatics doing some rock climbing on one section of the cliffs. The base of that rock wall was recessed just a bit, and the cliff face rose beyond vertical, so that the top of the cliff was extended out maybe 10 yards or more over our heads.
The effect was of a half-bowl of rock, with a cleared space beneath it, and a heavy canopy of trees that shaded the entire area. The climbers were very friendly; they were a group of a dozen 20-somethings, three of whom were female, and they obviously knew what they were doing. They had the right gear – ropes and clips and goofy-looking shoes – and they picked their way up the rock using handholds that I couldn’t see.
A very mellow baby lay in a carrier at the edge of the clearing, and I got him to smile at me. (Or her. I mean, I don’t even know what sex he was assigned at birth, so who’s to say?)
We watched until one of the climbers beneath the cliff top crawled out, upside down just below the spot where the out-thrust rock bends back toward vertical, and lost his grip. He fell for about 10 feet before his friends holding the rope below sent him swinging away from the rock face with some good-natured mockery.
Even though I knew each climber was rigged up with ropes, my heart went into my throat when he lost his handhold and fell. As I passed the baby on our way back to the trail, I pointed up to the guy who had just fallen and circled my index finger around my ear in the universal sign for “cuckoo,” and the baby smiled at me.
He knows what’s up.
Or she. Who can say?
We hiked our way back to the trailhead and then drove up onto the plateau above the cliffs, and hiked out to an extensive series of wooden walkways that give a panoramic view of the park. According to our map, we were looking at Clear Creek from the Lilly Bluff Overlook. (You see, Wartburg? THAT’S how you name things.)
According to a display on the overlook, Obed is a “dark sky” park, due to the remoteness and lack of light pollution there. A poster listed a schedule of night sky observation events, during which visitors can bring their own telescopes, or use those that park rangers will have on site.
That sounded amazing to me, and I really want to come back and see that sometime. I was reminded of a quote from Emerson that has always resonated with me, about what an incredible event it would be if we only got to see the stars once in many years.
Here it is: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!”
Have I mentioned how many things we take for granted?
Back on the road and somewhere near the small town of Deer Lodge TN we saw a series of hand-made signs with directions to the “Redneck Haven Mud Resort.” It doesn’t sound like my usual kind of place, but I’ve got to say that the name closes strong with a mud “resort!” (You can take the Simpsons out of Kentucky, but you may not be able to completely take the Kentucky out of a Simpson.)
A while later we were driving along Route 127 around 10 miles south of the Kentucky border and came across the Alvin York home and burial site. It was after 5:00, and the well-kept, two-story farmhouse was closed, but we saw the bust of York, with a plaque and some carvings on a pedestal outlining some of his accomplishments.
During the WWI Meuse-Argonne offensive, York (a private, but an “acting corporal” – which I assume means the other corporals in the area were dead or wounded) led a squad of 16 guys on a mission to silence some German machine guns. After capturing some machine guns and prisoners, the Germans had killed 6 and wounded 3 of his squad.
Because he was an Ameri-CAN, not an Ameri-can’t, York took the remaining 7 guys and opened up an industrial-sized can of Tennessee whoop-ass (it’s like Tennessee whiskey, only more potent) on the remaining German machine gunners in the vicinity. When it was over, he’d killed at least 25 German soldiers and captured 132, along with 35 machine guns.
It’s Memorial Day as I write this, and even though York didn’t die in battle for his country – he made the guy on the other side die for his, as Patton later advised – we still owe him our gratitude for what he did in 1918.
Twenty-three years later, Hitler welcomed the news that the Americans had entered WWII, because he thought that they were “soft.” Apparently he’d never heard of a Tennessee farm boy named Alvin Cullum York! (I’m with the late great Norm MacDonald on this issue: “You know, with Hitler, the more I learn about that guy, the more I don’t care for him.”)
A little farther down the road, we had some very good Mexican food in a very small town, and then spent our last night on the road in Columbia.
Day 6 – Wednesday
This was mostly a get-back-home day, with about 7 hours of driving to do. But we did manage to get one more stop in, this time to Lincoln’s birthplace, a Historical National Park near Hodgenville, Kentucky.
Once again they had a nice museum with exhibits on Lincoln’s early life, including farm implements, his family Bible, and the pelts of some of the local animals that could kill you in the early 19th century: a black bear, a mountain lion and a wolf.
(They also had a sizeable beaver, which I guess could play hell with you if you happened to have a wooden leg, after previously tussling with one of the aforementioned three predators.)
The grounds included more shady trails, but the two main attractions were the Sinking Springs – which is still flowing in a recessed kind of grotto, and from which Abe likely often slaked his thirst – and a cabin dating from Lincoln’s time, which is enclosed in a columned, stone building at the top of a hill.
Lincoln lived in Kentucky for his first 7 years, and then in Indiana until he went to Illinois at age 21, but I thought it was touching and a little funny how the short films at each of those sites’ centers emphasized their state’s contribution to Lincoln’s character. Kentucky pointed out the formative experiences young Abe had in his first 7 crucial years, and Indiana highlighted how he’d arrived there a boy but left a man.
When the ranger at one of those sites asked us where we were from, Darryll – who has a tendency toward smart-assery that I obviously don’t share – said, “the Land of Lincoln.” The ranger took that in stride, and with a wry grin said something to the effect of, “I guess you guys have to claim Chicago, then?”
Check and mate.
We arrived back home that night in time for a late supper with yet a few more cousins, and I headed home to Florida the next day.
I enjoyed this year’s trip as I had the previous two. One additional good part of our travels was made possible by a set of blue-tooth speakers that Darryll brought along for the trip. We were able to listen to a lot of great, Kentucky-centric and Appalachian music as we drove around the region from which those songs came.
Singers in heaviest rotation included Steve Earle, Tyler Childers and of course Sturgill Simpson. (Though I’m not related to him as far as I know, if Liz Warren can say that Cochise was her great-great-grandpa, I can say that Sturgill is my second cousin, or maybe a half-brother.) (#wemustneverstopmockingher)
One frequently played song was a live version of “Choctaw Bingo,” by James McMurtry – son of Larry, who wrote the great book Lonesome Dove, among others. Even though that song is about the north Texas/south Oklahoma region, its themes and setting – a huge family reunion of a chaotic bunch, a least a few of whom are involved in opioid distribution – seemed to fit the trip.
Like his dad, McMurtry can turn a phrase. Some of the lyrics that we found ourselves singing included mentions of a Desert Eagle (“That’s one great big ol’ pistol/I mean 50 caliber made by/ bad-ass Hebrews.”) and the exploits of a certain Uncle Slayton (“He’s got an Airstream trailer and a/Holstein cow./ He still makes whiskey cause he/ still knows how.” And later, “Cooks that crystal meth/ because that ‘shine don’t sell/ You know he likes that money/ he don’t mind the smell”).
Another song that I kept thinking of was, “You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive.” (My favorite version is by Flatt Lonesome, who have a female lead singer with a beautiful voice that just inhabits the song, but Ruby Friedman has a spare, haunting version that causes chills, too.) Though it focuses on the coal mining areas that are well east of Campbellsville, the opening lines never fail to move me:
“In the deep, dark hills of eastern Kentucky/ that’s the place where I trace my bloodline./ And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone/ we’ll never leave Harlan alive./ My grandfather’s dad crossed the Cumberland mountains/ where he took a pretty girl to be his bride’/ Said won’t you walk with me out of the mouth of his holler/ or we’ll never leave Harlan alive.”
I’m very grateful that my grandparents left the hollers around Casey Creek, Speck and Knifley alive! As beautiful as that country is, and even though my generation tends to romanticize the hard, gritty lives they lived there, they made good lives in Illinois. And without that move, my dad would never have met my mom.
In fact, by the end of the trip, I found myself returning again and again to an appreciation of the long odds against my cousins and I even getting the chance to exist in the first place. Walking through those cemeteries and tracing my convoluted bloodline brought home the fragility of life.
If at any of a hundred turns, any one individual Simpson in any of many generations hadn’t survived what Shakespeare calls “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to” – vulnerable childhoods and dangerous work; wild animals, deadly plants and feuding neighbors; wars and disease and primitive conditions – I would never have been born.
Even discounting all of those odds against survival, each of the Simpson men had to marshall their Simpsonian magnetism and beguile their eventual wives into having their children. Hezekiah Simpson had to close on his Mary in the 1840s, and William Lee Simpson had to seal the deal with his Nancy in the 1870s, and Grandpa Zack had to land his Rose a hundred years ago. (He was 25 and she was 15 when they married, and that’s all I’m going to say about that.)
And that still left dad needing to meet and marry mom. And her parents needing to meet, and their parents, and a chain of many more ancestors back in Germany, while dad’s people were knocking around Ireland and Scotland until they could catch a rickety boat to cross the Atlantic.
Am I saying that it’s a miracle and a blessing that I even get to be here, to live this life?
That’s EXACTLY what I’m saying. And the same goes for you too.
And the fact that we have all gotten to virtually “meet” and get to know each other on this site that the great and powerful CO created on a whim?
Icing on an already delicious cake, baby!
Thank you all for reading about this latest trip, and remember…
Biden delenda est!
Martin Simpson 