Karl and I drive along the Madison River on our last night in Yellowstone and see people swimming. We pull into a parking lot and put on suits and walk down to the water. We wade into the cold and swim and let the current carry us around until we’re tired and hungry. Then we go back to the Minnie and take showers. I make a fairly decent dinner in our play-house kitchen and we wash the plates and put them away and drive on.
I believe the Winnebago has set me free. It has made me swim in cold rivers and eat pancakes with strangers and turn down obscure roads with no worry about where I have to be or when. I believe it has set many people free, old people and people with children who go off and see what this country has to offer because of their motor homes. Maybe they don’t hike, maybe they don’t shoot the rapids or explore the wilderness, but they are out there. Who am I to say how others should spend their vacations?
I believe this is the Fourth Great RV Truth: People who don’t like them have never been in one.
I feel like I went out to report on the evils of crack and have come back with a butane torch and a pipe. I went undercover to expose a cult and have returned in saffron robes with my head shaved. I have fallen in love with my recreational vehicle.
And I have fallen in love with Karl, which I can see now was the point of the story. The vast open spaces of America, as experienced through the twenty-nine confining feet of motor home, have restored us, though we both feel worried when we drive back to Billings and turn the Minnie in. We walk over to the sales lot, full of ideas. We could drive home, or drive in the direction of home and see where we end up. There is a beautiful thirty-foot Airstream Classic on the lot, and for a minute we think an Airstream would be just the thing to keep us like this forever. But at some point before we pull out a credit card we come to our senses. We know we have to make this work without a motor home, which, after all, is nothing but love’s powerful crutch. I know what would happen if we bought that Airstream, what our friends would say. We would never be welcome to park in front of their homes. We would be drummed out of polite society. We would be refugees on the road. We wouldn’t mind.
(Outside, June 1998)
Tennessee
I’VE BEEN TOLD that the secret to making money, big money, is to find the place on the edge of town where the real estate stops being priced by the square foot and begins to be priced by the acre. The idea is then to buy as many of those acres as possible and wait for town to creep towards you so that you will be there, ready and waiting, when those acres are converted down into square feet.
Having lived in Nashville for most of my life, I have seen this theory put into cash-making practice time and again. Acres that once were home to lazy cows and nibbling deer are now the physical underpinnings of sprawling shopping malls and housing developments and golf courses—thickets of blackberries mown under to make way for irrigated expanses of manicured greens. The cows and the wildlife, not unlike the urban poor, were forced from their neighborhoods and herded off to distant pastures.
Nashville is not a city that can take any pride in its urban planning. Lovely old homes are knocked down, appalling condominiums spring up in their stead, traffic multiplies geometrically, mom-and-pop operations issue a mouselike cry trying to hold back the big-box chains, and then are devoured by those chains in a single bite.
But for every way this city has changed for the worse, there is some other way it has changed for the better. When I was a little girl, the Klan marched down at the square on Music Row on Sunday afternoons. Men in white sheets and white hoods waved at your car with one hand while they held back enormous German shepherds with the other. My sister and I pushed down the buttons of our door locks and sank low in the backseat. Those men are gone now, or at least they aren’t out walking the streets in full regalia. If growth and modernization means getting rid of the Klan while bad condos spread like lichen over tree trunks, well then, let’s hear it for modernity.
There was a time when Nashville cared more for genealogy than character. (In some very limited circles this may still be the case.) If your family hadn’t been in the state long enough to remember what Lincoln had done to it, then you might be politely tolerated but you would never truly be accepted. I knew this, having moved here just before I turned six. We were Californians, and we may as well have been Martians. But then there was a shift—too many people moved here in the last two decades to keep up with who was from where. Somewhere in all the confusion I became a local.
If the changes that Nashville has seen just in my lifetime could all be put together and then averaged out, I would contend that this place is more the same than it could ever be different; because while Memphis has changed and Nashville has changed and Knoxville has changed, the state of Tennessee has not changed. To understand this you have to go back to that place where real estate prices out by the acre. Plenty of people made a killing on those deals, but don’t be fooled: many, many more are still holding on to their land. And yes, the cities do push out, but down here the cities are islands surrounded by an ocean of country, and the country pushes back hard. There is a powerful root system that reaches far beneath those mall parking lots, and the minute we stop hacking away at it, the plants come back. This sounds metaphorical. It isn’t. For all its briskly evolving cities, Tennessee is first and foremost a trough of rich soil sitting beneath hot, humid weather. Its role on earth is less to be the home of country music and the meat-and-three, and more to be a showcase of rampant plant life.
Between the ages of eight and twelve, I lived with my family on a farm in Ashland City outside of Nashville. We called it a gentleman’s farm, which meant that the only thing we did to the land was look at it. The daringly modern house my stepfather had built was as substantial as a sheet of folded notebook paper. Whenever it rained the dirt in the basement turned to mud and poured beneath the laundry room door. Mushrooms the size of salad plates popped up overnight—entire mushroom cities—in the shag carpet of my sister’s bedroom. All the doors had been stained outside the summer the house was being built and were covered in petrified insects. The shallow swimming pool was so burdened by frogs that even if we had done nothing but haul them from the water with the skimmer net night and day we couldn’t have saved them all. We kept a couple of horses that could be ridden only if they could be caught, and a very large pig that fell into the same category. (There is a picture of my sister sitting atop that pig, her knees together, riding side-saddle without the saddle.) There were banty chickens named after members of Nixon’s cabinet; the dogs had an uncanny knack of eating them just as their namesakes fell before the Watergate committee. Alongside the well-fed dogs there was an endless parade of cats, rabbits, hamsters, and canaries, but the most abundant form of life was the flora that sprang from our untended ground: all manner of trees—eastern redbud and tulip poplar, frothy seas of white dogwoods, all types of maples, red oak and white oak, black locust, red cedar, enormous black walnuts. In early fall those walnut trees began to drop their smelly green-hulled nuts the size of baseballs, and we tripped on them and squashed them with the car. Once a year in a fit of boredom or optimism we would forget everything we knew about black walnuts and scrape off the filthy husks and dry the nuts on the front porch, thinking we would eat them, but they were impossible to get into, yielding a tiny bit of meat for an enormous amount of work. Before we ever got enough together to make a quart of ice cream, the squirrels would come and carry our burden away.
My childhood was spent with the dogs, hacking my way into the thick undergrowth of woods with the single parental admonishment that I should watch out for snakes. I didn’t much worr
y about snakes. We had thirty-seven acres—so much room, so much leaf and bark and trunk and bloom—that it seemed impossible that any snake and I would arrive in the same place at the same time. This was the seventies, and I ran a terrarium supply business—digging up moss and selling it to a flower shop in town. The land was my office, my factory, and beneath the shade of endless leaves, spade and shoe box in hand, I would go to work.
In Nashville we have a Tiffany’s now, a J. Crew, countless Starbucks. But drive out to Ashland City sometime. Go down River Road to what used to be Tanglewood Farm and I can promise you that not one thing has changed, except that maybe by now the house has rotted away, and the roots under all those trees have dug themselves down another twenty feet or so. Every year the country grows thicker. Every year it inches closer to town.
Tennessee, with its subtropical summers and mild winters, has a perfect climate for almost any sort of plant. The non-natives thrive alongside the natives. The kudzu vine arrived from Japan in the late 1800s as part of a poorly thought-out plan to help slow soil erosion. It has since spread an impenetrable web over the South, draping fields, billboards, barns, and forests. If left unchecked—not that anyone has had much luck keeping it in check—it would take out the interstate system. Kudzu exploded, but then Tennessee excels in the explosive growth of plant life. “Think of those plants in the California deserts,” a botanist friend said to me, and I picture the succulents and flowering cacti that thinly dot the vast stretches of sand. “Those are the plants that can’t compete.”
Tennessee’s plants are so competitive that every day is a slugfest: a deciduous tree blocks the light to a shrub, a tendril reaches from beneath the shrub to pull down the tree, insects bore into bark, birds fill out the branches, worms as blind as Homer chew through the soil, crunching the fallen leaves into a thick layer of duff that coats the forest floor. Among the hale and hearty, one of the uncontested kings in the Volunteer State is poison ivy. It sweeps over everything and we leave it alone. We’re supposed to leave it alone. The counselors at Camp Sycamore Hills for Girls, not fifteen miles from the farm where we lived, made the point so clearly we could not possibly claim to have misunderstood. “This is poison ivy,” they said, during a long, hot hike at the start of my second week of camp. They pointed to what seemed to be an entire field. “Leaves of three, let it be. Do not go near it.”
Lee Ann Hunter and I talked it over that night in our tent with all the balanced consideration of eleven-year-olds. We had heard about the plant but had never seen it in action. We felt certain we could ride those three leaves out of our miserable tents and back into our own beds. The next night after dinner we took a detour through the forest, back to the very field we had been warned against. Like virgins to a volcano, we threw ourselves in. We rolled in it. We picked it. We rubbed it in our hair and stuffed it in our shirts and ground it into our eyes. Reader, we ate it. What was so bad about camp? It was boring? We didn’t like the food? Some other girl got the better bunk? I don’t remember that part of the story. All I know is that we turned to a plant as Juliet had turned to a plant before us: to transport ourselves out of a difficult situation and into a happier one. Like Juliet, we miscalculated the details. I can’t say the hospital was a better place to spend the summer, but we were out of Sycamore.
Plant life, like all life, is the subject of constant revision: one tree is hit by lightning, another is upended in a storm. I remember our Dutch elm succumbing to the blight that wiped out its kind and it seemed like the vacancy it left behind was filled in a matter of minutes. Even if this endless expanse of green is composed of different constituents over time, the land still pumps out plants faster than anyone can count them. The plants, I believe, have shaped this state more than people ever have. When the success of a crop determines where people will live, then who’s making the choice as to where we settle? The hundreds of little towns that lie between the cities have hardly changed at all in the years I’ve been driving through them. If a silver oak grew up in the space that the Dutch elm left behind, then maybe a tanning salon took the place of a beauty shop, or a hamburger joint became a pizza shack, but as in the forest, these changes are negligible. For the most part people are poor. The last truly revolutionary thing to come into their homes was electricity.
On one particularly scorching summer afternoon, coming home from a trip to Memphis, I decided to leave the interstate and take the two-lane highway down to Shiloh to see the famous Civil War battlefield. The insects joined together in such a high-pitched screed I could hear it over the air-conditioning and through the rolled-up windows of my car. The bugs and the plants and I were alone on that highway. I didn’t pass another car for ten miles, and then for twenty. The millions of leaves on either side of the road were so dense and bright I could almost feel them growing. And then I saw a man standing in the middle of the road waving his arms in crosses above his head. He looked like he was trying to land a plane. I stopped my car. It must have been 110 degrees on the blacktop. Not to stop for him would have been to kill him.
There was a woman on the side of the road, leaning against their car. The man and the woman were in their seventies. When I rolled down my window the man held an artificial voice box against his throat. “Ran-out-of-gas,” the machine said. I told them to get in quick before they melted; I would drive them to the station and bring them back.
But the woman didn’t want to go. They both got car sick and neither one of them could ride in the back. My car was small. “I’ll stay here,” she said. “I’ll be fine. There’s plenty of shade.”
So I drove the man fifteen miles to the gas station while he told me the unbearably sad story of his life in the flat monotone of electric speech. Cancer of the larynx. Once he was sick, his wife left him and took the kids. He got laid off from the factory. He had to go back to the country where he’d grown up, see if he could farm some on the land his father had owned. Hard times. This new wife was nice, though, that was a plus. At the end of every couple of sentences he’d thank me, and I had to tell him to stop. He told me I could drop him off at the station and he would hitch a ride back, but we didn’t see another car the whole way there.
“I can take you back,” I said. “I’m just out driving around. I don’t have anyplace I have to be.” It sounded suspicious, but it was the truth.
I waited with him at the station even though he kept trying to shoo me off. He thought there was going to be a car heading back in his direction but no one came; after a while there was no choice but to relent. He said he would take the ride only if I let him pay me. We argued politely about this. I reminded him that were the roles reversed—and they could be reversed—he would never take money from me. Reluctantly, he raised the voice box to his throat and agreed with that. I drove him back to where his new wife was waiting. Just as it was over and we had said our goodbyes, he leaned back in through the open window of my car and put five dollars on the passenger seat, then turned quickly away. It broke my heart in a way that was all out of proportion to the greater sadnesses of life.
It was lonely out there on the road after he was gone, lonely when I pulled into Shiloh an hour before the park closed. More than ten thousand men from the Union and Confederate armies had died here in April of 1862. It took very little imagination to see this place the way it would have been that spring, dogwoods and cherry trees and apple trees all blooming in the mighty undergrowth, the energy it would have taken the men to fight their way through the trees in order to come to s
ome sort of opening where they surely would be shot. The Union dead are buried on a hill with a view to the Tennessee River. It is a lovely spot, with a cool breeze coming off the water. There is a small white marker on every grave. Outside the gates of the cemetery is a copy of the Gettysburg Address on a metal plaque. The Confederates are buried in a mass grave that lies at the bottom of the hill, but they at least are all together, and they are home. I did not pass another soul in the park save the ranger at the gate. He asked me to leave when it was dark.
If anybody tells you Tennessee has changed much, tell them to come out to Shiloh. Tell them to listen hard to the stories of the men you pick up on the road on your way there.
Had I grown up in the city, I might feel the loss of my early life. I might look at one building and wish for the happier day when it had been something else. But I grew up in Tennessee, by which I mean the country, and out there everything stays exactly as I remember it. The plants are the enforcers, they keep it this way. The only story they’re interested in is their own.
(from State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America, 2008 [Ecco])
On Responsibility
I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE for much. I do not have children who have to get to school on time and wear matching shoes and be taught the difference between right and wrong. I do not have a job in which the well-being of a company or the safety of the nation or the health of anyone at all is resting on my shoulders. I have a couple of plants I must remember to water. I make a point of paying my taxes on time. I take care of myself, but that’s not worth mentioning. I pitch in and help other people when I can, but they are people who could find the same help elsewhere if I went on vacation. When I think of whom I am responsible for, truly responsible for, I can whittle the list down to my dog and my grandmother, and it just so happens that last week they were both sick.