July 31, 2023

The streets of Wilmington, N.C., are filled with tourists these hot summer days. If any want to cool off, the Wrightsville and Carolina beaches are close. The city sits astride a peninsula, bounded by the fast-flowing Cape Fear River and the Atlantic. The river separates it from tidal marshes and spreading suburbs. The decommissioned battleship North Carolina lies at anchor across the river from downtown.

Beautiful old homes line the streets of Wilmington’s historic neighborhood, which surrounds the old Catholic basilica, St. Mary’s and the First Presbyterian Church. The riverfront is a tourist bar/café strip. Farther uptown is a compact business district, where cotton and slaves once were sold. Pricey two-story condos built as houseboats are tied up along the river, fitted with outboard motors for maneuvering among the quays.

Freighters and containerships sail up the Cape Fear to unload at a pier east of town. Miles of tidal flatness and scrub forest extend from the river to the north, south, and west.

Wilmington once was the state’s largest city. In 1898 a White supremacist uprising against the Black-majority municipal government killed some 60 people. Jim Crow segregationist laws and practices settled in, as throughout most of the South, and racial tensions simmered in the city for decades.

We’ve visited the town a half-dozen times while staying with friends in Leland, just across the Cape Fear. They moved from our Virginia hometown years ago and built their own place when Wilmington-area real estate was starting to explode. Today U.S. 17, the main route down the coast, is lined with new residential subdivisions, strip malls, and golf courses. Signs along 17 point to hurricane evacuation routes. This stretch of coast usually is a target.

From upstate South Carolina the Wilmington trip is a tough one via four interstates, 385, 26, 20,  95, and someday-to-be I-74. On 26 we meet the beach people transiting the sweltering midstate past Columbia en route to the romantically nicknamed Low Country, with its interminable flat scrub woods and marshes. Charleston, Myrtle Beach, and Hilton Head are the big draws.

Apart from Wilmington’s chic downtown and old homes, the visitor may pick up an odd sense of distance, separation. The Tarheel State is a brilliant kaleidoscope: spectacular peaks west of Asheville that meld with the wide central piedmont and its cosmopolitan urban centers, Charlotte, Durham, Greensboro, Raleigh, Winston-Salem. Bryson City, at the far western tip of the state and a gateway to Great Smoky National Park and Tennessee, is almost 400 miles from Wilmington.

The eccentric coastal strip stretches east from I-95. The terrain flattens out. Two roads, I-40 and hybrid 74 cross rural, near-empty country for 100 miles. Eventually the Cape Fear winds by and Wilmington appears, breaking up the scrub forest. North of the city a couple of Marine Corps bases, Camp Lejeune and Cherry Point, and some scattered out-of-the way tidal places are all that line the waterfront. Offshore are uninhabited barrier islands.

Thirty miles south of Wilmington is Southport, a tourist stop at the wide mouth of the Cape Fear, which also is the Intercoastal Waterway in these parts. It’s a pretty spot on the water, rich with pre-Revolutionary War history, and now souvenir shops and seafood places. Beyond the town is south-facing Oak Island, a vacation destination packed with rentals, summer businesses, and expensive homes, which now are being built on stilts.

We drove across the island with friends and stopped at a community marina and walked across the sand. The beach stretches east back to Bald Head Island, and west to Holden and Sunset beaches, as the shoreline curls south.

The late afternoon sky was overcast, promising rain. A stiff breeze whipped the surf. The water was a pale brown, reminding us that the soft, deep beach sand had been dredged from offshore, at a cost of millions, to provide a playground for the locals and vacationers. Sand has been molded by plows into fake dunes, and beach grass planted to anchor them.

We all have heard the stories about what the ocean is doing to East Coast beaches. As the seas rise with worldwide climate change, the coastlines are giving up inches each year to the rapacious surf. Retirees and dreamers who sunk big money into ostentatious beach-facing homes now peer nervously through their living room windows at the flood tides. After each storm a few houses go missing.

We walked a bit, took pictures, sloshed in the eerily warm incoming tide. A few souls stood knee-deep here and there, but the crowd was thinning. I looked out at the horizon, a few faint ship silhouettes broke the line where sea meets sky. On that spit of land on the far eastern rim of the country, the colorful complexity of this huge state seemed remote. The sea, as it roared and crashed on the beach, soothed our spirits.

The narrow, flat, humid Wilmington-Southport strip seems a kind of distant outpost. It could be a last stop for old folks who love the sea but can’t stomach Florida, and for Carolina westerners and mid-staters who need their escape from mountains and work. It was a happy spot, after all, a seaside resting place wedged between the hundreds of miles of tidal desert north to Elizabeth City, just below Virginia, and south to Myrtle Beach.

The remoteness struck a chord. It’s hard to find this place, sequestered from interstates and cities. We know others, Virginia Beach, Ocean City, Rehoboth, all perched at the ends of traffic-choked highways. I thought then of Amagansett, at the far eastern end of Long Island, N.Y., the still-hidden gem of the Atlantic seacoast, that also faces south.

Four years ago Sandy and I drove to the Island and stood on the near-empty Amagansett beach, watching the dark cold sea crash against the sand. Nearby were the cottages my folks rented for our summer trips, unchanged over 60 years. I recalled my little-kid adventures there, before starting high school.

As we walked to the Oak Island parking lot, a warm breeze roiled the beach grass, warning of the coming storm. I looked at the stunted trees, the dark tidal pool, the hazy horizon. This end of the earth is different, a little strange. Someday we’ll pause here again. Maybe.                    

July 24, 2023

Some milestones are worth a deep breath. Starting your eighth decade is one. It came for Sandy this past Friday, between getting home from Philadelphia and a grinding interstate drive to the coast.

The important birthdays resurrect others. In 2021, from the Sunset Deck of the Grove Park Inn in Asheville, we peered out towards the Smokies and Tennessee. Last mid-July, during the weeks-long nationwide steambath, we stared at shimmering Lake Lure, a pretty patch of clear blue below Chimney Rock mountain near Bat Cave, N.C.

I put on a party for her 65th that our Virginia place. I recruited the kids and as many relatives and friends as I could fit in the house. That splendid little celebration set the stage for moving forward; we hope for more of them, after all.

A year later she spent her 66th in the ICU at a stroke center in Bryn Mawr, Penn. Although she can’t remember that Sunday morning, she was in the MRI chamber. It clanked away, scanning her brain. For months after we trooped to specialists for tests and prescriptions.

Four years later everything is different. We left the old world behind for the same reasons anyone does. The Virginia neighborhood seemed old—not scruffy, as if the houses up and down the block were shabbier, the lawns overgrown, the streets potholed. There was some of that. But it reminded us that we’re old. Thirty-three years is a long time in a place.

We saw the same reasons for leaving other retired people see: traffic gridlock that reaches from the interstate to local roads, relentless retail and residential growth, the property tax inflation, the panicky calculations old timers make about that dreary subject, property values.

Arriving here we could see the end of the Blue Ridge from our apartment complex. Virginia has its mountains, but the Shenandoahs are more of a tourist attraction. Here, the low sloping peaks are part of the city scenery. The pale blue horizon is an invitation to explore a wide swath of rugged, nearly empty country, of rushing forest creeks that explode over waterfalls, out to the spectacular fast-flowing Chattooga River next to Georgia.

Greenville is nestled near the northwest-extreme point of the South Carolina pie slice, the coastline being the wide edge. The place is booming, with tech-based industry that replaced the once-dominating textile mills, the low-wage employers that abandoned the area and sent their work and their capital to Asia.

The town doesn’t have a rich historical heritage. No decisive Civil War battles were fought here.  Union troops only arrived after the rebels’ surrender, in pursuit of fugitive Jefferson Davis. The town still had to move forward. Somehow the mountain-piedmont remoteness brought people, and still does.

We came, the idea being to move forward. The family connection is here. Our closest ties, a daughter, son-in-law, and grandsons also are newcomers. They could leave. There must be something else. You like to think that the resettlement decision is final, that your reluctant move is the only one you’ll make.

Our rented place was a base for exploration. We headed to Walhalla, in the northwest corner of the state, beyond Clemson and the big lakes, Jocassee and Keowee. We drove up and down the main street and through neighborhoods of stately homes, and tramped through Oconee County’s three museums.

We drove through Easley, a little closer in, then Traveler’s Rest, a hamlet of cute shops linked to the city by the 25-mile Swamp Rabbit Trail. We headed north into the sticks, past gorgeous but remote rural places on wide stretches of property. Then we turned south and found giant new subdivisions going up in Simpsonville, Mauldin, and Fountain Inn.

We bought a kitchen table from a lady in one of those places, I can’t remember which. But the development resembles the same goings-on in Virginia, Maryland, anywhere else. The relentless home- and condominium-building, on lots bulldozed bare of nature, reprises the construction onslaughts of the 1950s Levittown builders. The difference here is the iridescent-red South Carolina clay that erupts wherever a shovel touches soil.

We looked north, south, east, west. We drove through the city’s pricey “historic districts” clustered north and east of downtown. The antebellum homes are set off by wide wraparound porches that invite the notion of a genteel life of coffee, mint juleps, and neighborly chats.

The city, like lots of others, is broken into subdivisions, all with names, as if a name is required by ordinance: They range from the ordinary, Riverside Glen and Merrifield Park, to the eclectic: Botany Woods, Avalon Reserve, The Brio, Montebello. I feel prizes should be given for names conveying a definitive upscale lilt.

Time didn’t stand still through all this. The apartment, near downtown, the hospital, and doctors’ offices, began to feel like home. We stared at the second bedroom, crammed to the ceiling with the furniture and boxes we don’t need but couldn’t part with.  The househunting jaunts got shorter, more perfunctory. We walked through houses and condos and a couple of those “60 or better” ghettoes where bridge and now pickleball are the rage.

I had a birthday three months after the move but barely noticed. A nurse at the hospital recommended Waynesville, N.C., as a must-see. We drove to the “Gateway to the Smokies” and gazed at the brown mountains, some topped with snow. The Smokies air was bright and invigorating, as it is in Virginia’s Massanuttens. This might work for us, I thought.

We took the long way home on U.S. 276, the winding state road through the Pisgah National Forest. It still was cold when we stopped at lovely, thundering Looking Glass Falls. My teeth chattered as I snapped photos. Within a few miles, in Brevard, the road levels, the chill abates. Then the highway heads into the South Carolina peaks and more hair-raising turns and climbs.

A month later Sandy, not an excuse-maker like me, found a house. She looked at her checklist, jumped on the process, called the sales agent. We crossed Walhalla, Simpsonville, Waynesville and the rest off the list. This is her third birthday in this place. More to follow.

July 17, 2023

The AC is roaring up and down our street. The air was comfortable and cool early last Tuesday, but the forecast called for temps rising to around 95F, with a faint chance of a shower mid-week “It will be beautiful if you can take the heat,” the weather reporter said.

On Thursday I got in my car, which was sitting in the sun-blazed driveway. The dashboard thermometer registered 100F.

The southwestern tip of the Blue Ridge crosses just north of Greenville S.C., protecting most of the state from the violent fronts that slide up from the Deep South to the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast. South Carolina doesn’t get the hellacious weather, the tornadoes and torrential rains that lash the Big Red Three—Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. But it does get hot.

The local-forecast guy, like all of them, perseverates on small temperature variations from this county to that one, one suburb to the next. He made another weak joke about how we can enjoy the sunshine, but didn’t dwell on it. No one is going outside in this heat. The community pool is silent, the water inviting but still.

Millions, including ourselves, have moved south for the lovely, mild weather we usually get. They endured Northeast and Midwest winters, the ice, snow, chilling winds, and dangerous driving conditions three or four months of the year. The northern Virginia winters aren’t like those in Maine or Minnesota, but we got the Potomac Valley humidity. A dose of cold, with the dampness, goes right through all your layers.

Many Yankees dream of the Sunbelt lifestyle and all it brings: warm sun, wide beaches, lush lawns and gardens glowing with azaleas and zinnias. They long to throw away their windshield scrapers and snow shovels. Last winter in these parts we had exactly no snow, zero, zilch. Schoolkids never had a “weather day.” Most of the year we were outdoors in shirtsleeves. When it’s chilly a light jacket usually is enough. Folks lounge outdoors at the downtown restaurants and bars. Joggers are everywhere, golfers never miss a tee time unless it rains.

The Northern immigrants don’t think about the flip side of Southern weather: the suffocating summer heat we’re getting right now, starting before 9:00 AM and lasting until after dark. Most of the Southeast has settled into the low- to mid-90s by June. We’re watching the “heat-index,” the calculation of misery that combines heat and humidity. You don’t want to go outside.

Newcomers know the South gets warm. Going back a couple of generations, the introduction of air conditioning in homes and industry made moving south thinkable, and brought a measure of prosperity to the historically slow-moving Southern economies.

Today, when the heat gets intense, Southerners live in what the climate-change activists call the air-conditioning bubble. They burn fossil fuels to keep cool just as they did in the North to keep warm, making the planet warmer.

A Connecticut friend who didn’t migrate said: “In the North in winter you run from your heated car to your heated house. In the South in summer you run from your air-conditioned car to your air-conditioned house.” Life balances out.

Last week here it was consistently mid-90s in daylight, high-70s at night, no end in sight. We’re heading for hotter this week. Something is different.

The weather reports are covering the scorching heat elsewhere. The mercury would reach 120 in Phoenix and environs, and exceed 110 around Texas, no one knows for how long. Last Tuesday it was 105 in El Paso at 7 PM. It was 116 at 5 PM a few days ago in Death Valley, but the forecast there is a chance for 130.

In British Columbia in 2021, 120-degree heat killed 600 people. The journal Nature Medicine reports that nearly 62,000 people died in Europe from heat-related causes in summer 2022. Europe is looking at another heat wave. The ice cap and the glaciers are melting.

We browsed Jeff Godell’s The Heat Will Kill You First: Life and Death on a Scorched Planet.  Godell joins countless other climate scientists, journalists, and symposia speakers who spell out an approaching worldwide crisis. In 1992 Al Gore published Earth in the Balance and in 2006 An Inconvenient Truth, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize.

In 2017 Gore came out with An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg started lobbying Sweden’s Parliament about cutting the country’s carbon footprint.

The Godell book is harder-edged. He doesn’t report on “climate change,” the neutral term that could mean all sorts of things that may be harmful or not. He writes that the result of excessive heat on the human body is, simply, death. At 102 or 103 you begin to feel dazed and may pass out. At 106 the body experiences convulsions and seizures. At 107, organs begin to fail. A reviewer quoted him: “At the most fundamental level, your body unravels … your insides melt and disintegrate … you are hemorrhaging everywhere.”     

Godell tells of nightmares and tragedies. In August 2021 a California couple and their infant and dog all died while hiking near their home when the temperature rose to 109. That same year a Guatemalan farm worker collapsed and died in an Oregon field during the heatwave.

Higher temperatures are stoking freak weather. In Pennsylvania last weekend, rain beat down in torrents, recreating the woodland outside our son’s and daughter-in-law’s rear windows as a tropical rainforest. The moisture-filled gray-and-black clouds were stalled over New York and northern New England, bringing hundred-year floods to Vermont.

Our flight home from Philadelphia was delayed because of the foul weather farther north. When we arrived home that evening I mowed the lawn to avoid the next day’s heat. The fragile outdoor plants had died. I went for a run in the morning but cut it short, gasping. We hunkered down in the AC bubble.

None of this is new. We hope our grandkids will listen to Godell’s warning after he, and we, have departed. But climate change is a political hobbyhorse. Some—actually many—ask, hey, how about the huge California snows of last winter? The consequences of global warming, grotesque weather permutations including blizzards, droughts, hurricanes, and forest fires, are buried in the science. The science is vastly complex, and the scientists aren’t in charge. Political leaders don’t think 50 or 100 years out. It’s hard to get elected blasting the energy industry.

Americans like their American lifestyle, including their imports from China, the world’s biggest source of fossil emissions. We may all be driving electric cars in 2040. But here’s a guess:  It will be hot. We’ll still be hiding in that air-conditioning bubble.

July 10, 2023

If you’re in Philadelphia, you want to see the Museum of Art, with the Rocky statue at the foot of the stairs. Whether you do or don’t get there, you then want to see the Phillies. If the Phils aren’t in town, you head for Wilmington, Del., to root for the single-A Blue Rocks. They weren’t, so we did.

Philly isn’t loved by everyone, but it has everything, beginning with its heritage as the birthplace of the American nation. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell downtown remind all of us of those sublime moments of 1776.

Boston had the cataclysmic preliminaries: the Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, Bunker Hill. But it was in Philadelphia’s State House that the Second Continental Congress convened in May 1775 to start a year of agonized debate. In June 1776 Richard Henry Lee of Virginia proposed a resolution of independence. Then the giants emerged: Franklin, Adams, and Jefferson, who created the Declaration. The vote was July 4, the document was signed in early August.

We have distant connections in Philly going back a couple of generations. Our son Michael landed there for graduate school, and stayed and married Caroline, who grew up in nearby King of Prussia. They settled near Chadd’s Ford, halfway between the downtowns of Philly and Wilmington, and not far from Brandywine Creek, where the British routed Washington’s colonials in September 1777. In December the colonials set up their winter camp at Valley Forge.

So there’s all that. Anyway, we settled into our seats at Frawley Stadium, a block or so from the Delaware River. The park was more than two-thirds full, a decent Friday-night crowd. The traffic on an elevated stretch of I-95 slogged past beyond the outfield. A group of kids sang the national anthem. The Blue Rocks, a Washington Nationals farm club, took the field against the Brooklyn, N.Y., Cyclones, a New York Mets affiliate. The Cyclones were leading the division at 9-3, the Blue Rocks in the middle of the pack at 4-8.

Michael had bought tickets for front-row seats behind home plate, which at a Phils’ game would go for $1,889 each. For the Blue Rocks game they were $17.

The game moved along briskly, thanks to the new timing rule for pitchers and weak hitting by both teams. In the third inning the Rocks pushed across a run. They held on, 1-0, making some sterling defensive plays. In the top of the ninth, with the fans holding their breath, they got two outs. Then a Cyclone singled. Then a base on balls. Then—a long fly ball.

We watched. The home-plate umpire waved his finger in a circle. Three-run homer. The place fell silent. The Rocks pitcher kicked the mound. The manager pulled him. In the bottom of the ninth the Rocks got a walk, then a single. Then a strikeout. A failed double steal got to two outs. A strikeout ended the game. We didn’t stay for the fireworks.

As we trudged toward the gate I looked back at the brilliant green field. The clean sharp lines of the basepaths, the perfectly cut batters’ circle, told stories of baseball here and everywhere, single-A to the big leagues. These young guys have skills. More than that they have hope. Every fan in the park knew that if the Blue Rocks played even a last-place major league team they’d lose 15-0. The big leaguers would batter the single-A pitchers for a dozen homers, maybe more.

But the kids still have their hopes. Sure, many of the folks at our game would have gone to watch the Phillies that evening if they were at their magnificent home, Citizens Bank Park, just up I-95. The Blue Rocks were a fill-in. But everyone got caught up in the modest thrills of the place, the team of young dreamers, who shuffled off the field while the Cyclones exchanged high-fives. They’ll be back at it tomorrow. In baseball there’s always tomorrow.

We’ve watched dozens of single-A games over the years, cheering for the Potomac Nationals, the P-Nats, at their scruffy field in Woodbridge, Va. A few years ago then-Nationals superstar Bryce Harper, now a Phillie, did a recuperation stint with the P-Nats, the place was packed, the fans screaming. Then a Fourth of July game was delayed for an hour by fog, which meant the fireworks didn’t go off until midnight.

Within a year the owners, in a snit with the county government over funding repairs to the stadium, moved the team to Fredericksburg.

It’s a little quieter in Greenville, S.C., where the Red Sox farm club, the Greenville Drive—named by an awkward association with the big BMW plant nearby, is the only game in town. Their park, Fluor Field, has a replica of Fenway Park’s high left-field wall, the Green Monster. Church and civic groups organize outings to the games. As at all minor league parks, team PR people stage silly contests for kids between innings, and toss teeshirts to the crowd.

At Frawley I read the teams’ rosters: Pineda, Frizzell, Sanchez, Mackenzie, Fox, Kendall, Consuegra, Stuart, from all over America. The Cyclones’ coaches wore the New York Mets logo on their sleeves, reminding the guys what they’re shooting for, the big leagues, the reason they’re playing, riding buses for long hours to away games, staying in downscale hotels.

For sure, some of the magic of the minor leagues has to do with ticket prices, which are a fraction of the price of an upper-deck seat at Citizens Bank or any other big-league park. Still, the game is baseball. The main attraction is the source of all that hope and spunk, the players, some still in their teens, who trot onto the field to the ear-splitting din of pop music and fire the ball around the infield.

The pitcher warms up, the ball thwacks in the catcher’s glove. The batters connect, the sharp crack of bat on ball resounds. Foul balls drift into the crowd, kids and grownups scramble for them, just as they do at Citizens Bank. In the field the players lean forward in their defensive stances. The old guys in the stands somehow feel young again.

Decades ago my grandfather took me to a New York Yankees game. It was 1962, the year after Roger Maris broke the home-run record. He was in Yankee Stadium’s short right field. A batter hit a long fly ball to right. Maris crouched, hands on knees. We watched him watch the ball. A superb fielder, he knew it was heading for the seats behind him.

Maris didn’t waste any motion looking up or leaping pointlessly as the ball landed far back in the crowd. He stared ahead, no doubt thinking about his next turn at bat. He was a star—intense, focused, graceful, from a small town, like many of the Rocks and Cyclones. They all hope to be like Roger Maris—to excel, to make the fans roar with joy, as they watch those young guys, on a hot night in Wilmington, and all over America.

July 3, 2023

Rain crashed down as we were northbound to Pikeville, in east-central Tennessee. A dark sky boiled overhead, lightening flickered on the horizon, thunder rolled. We crawled into town through the deluge, plowing through water as it surged in a flood along U.S. 127, which splits the six-mile-wide Sequatchie Valley. We ducked into a Stop ‘N Go for shelter, then found the Piggly Wiggly for groceries.

The Cumberland Plateau rises just west of town. It faces a long steep cliff to the east called Walden Ridge. The monster rock walls that border the valley stretch north and south for a hundred miles into blue haze. Awesome country.

The drive from Franklin County (last week’s post) felt like a safari. This part of the state is too rugged, too thickly forested, for any decent-sized settlement. Tiny places, Pelham, Coalmont, Gruetli-Lager, show up along the quiet highways then disappear in a couple of breaths. Here and there people are mowing or plowing. They look up as we pass, surprised to see an out-of-state car. Yet the county newspaper reports a schedule of July Fourth parades and fireworks, testament to enduring community life.

This trip, directly across one-fourth of the state, was a first for us. Years ago, coming from Nashville, we’d take I-40 to Crossville then south on 127. Sometimes we’d get off 40 at Lebanon and use U.S. 70 through Liberty, Smithville, and Sparta, then pick up TN 111 through Spencer. The country route became a twisting descent before breaking free on top of the Plateau, then down, down.

Pikeville, county seat of Bledsoe County, is the closest place with a traffic light (one) to Fall Creek Falls State Park, our destination. Long ago, Sandy had family, an aunt and uncle, who lived just outside town. They farmed 130 acres, raised cattle and chickens and grew and canned vegetables that helped them get through the winter. We’d drive out on weekends, eat big farm dinners, sit on the porch and visit, and stare out at the lush fields. As shadows lengthened towards evening the cattle would move slowly from the north end of the pasture to the south, as if to watch the sunset.

The farm they owned is perched in the center of the valley, the Sequatchie River runs along the western property line. The farm nestles on a hillside that forms the main pasture.  Although their place is only five miles east of town on a one-lane road, the view of the soaring deep-green cliffs of the Ridge and the Plateau made the farm seem a kind of Shangri-La. And for us it really was.

They sold the farm when it got to be too much and moved to a comfortable house in town. Soon after we moved to Virginia, and returned less often. Then they were gone. The memories remain.

Fall Creek Falls is a mountain-woodland gem 20 miles northwest of Pikeville. We headed to the park on our first morning in town, climbing back up the Plateau on a hair-raising local road. We took a chance on shortcuts that wound through deep country past signs of the grim side of rural life: rusting mobile homes and pickups, weed-overgrown fields, crumbling barns. The shortcuts turned into lonely backcountry byways, first settled by the folks who moved in behind the departing Cherokees 200 or so years ago.

The park eventually showed up at the end of a short spur off U.S. 30, a quality road we should have taken. At the Nature Center I tiptoed across a suspended, wobbling footbridge thirty feet above Cane Creek Falls, which descends 85 feet to the creek. I could feel the cool draft rising from the rushing water. The park’s main attraction is Fall Creek Falls, the highest free-falling waterfall east of the Mississippi, dropping 256 feet from a rocky cliff.

We gawked at the falls. I climbed down the half-mile trail to the base, a rock-choked series of steep switchbacks. The temperature dropped suddenly near the bottom.  The falls rain down in a majestic, cooling mist. A few folks shucked their shoes and waded close to the cascading water. I watched, thinking about it—but turned back to the trail.

We recalled a decades-earlier visit to the park, a picnic-plus-family reunion, uncles, aunts, and cousins. Some of the Michigan clan showed up, along with cousins and their kids from Knoxville, a few from Dayton. Once or twice we brought Nashville friends to sample Sequatchie Valley hospitality.

Our Pikeville rental came with odd but fortuitous connections that seem mystifying, which makes them more real. The owner had a few years ago purchased the house, on the next block, that Sandy’s aunt and uncle owned in their last years. We walked past it, recognizing the pretty stone facade, the spacious yard. Nothing had changed since I last visited in 2008.

 A woman sitting on the front porch of the house next door called to us. Sandy walked over and chatted, the woman turned out to be Sandy’s cousin’s grandmother. Only in small-town Southland.

We walked the three blocks into the center of town, called, as if by a law of nature, the “historic district.” It was Monday, most of the shops and both of the restaurants were closed. We got ice cream at the ice cream emporium/coffee bar. We sat in a booth and enjoyed our cones, the only customers. Part of the place was a used bookstore piled high with donated hardcovers and stacks of CDs and DVDs.

The most direct route home would be north on 127 to Crossville, then I-40 to Asheville, then south. Instead we drove back on 30 eastbound, up Walden Ridge to Dayton, heading to I-75. The highway runs down the main street of that bustling little place, made immortal by the 1925 Scopes trial.

To reprise just a bit, in The State of Tennessee vs. John Scopes, high-school teacher Scopes (actually a substitute teacher) was accused of violating a state law against teaching the theory of evolution. Later reports revealed that the town decided to put Scopes on trial hoping to generate publicity. The plan succeeded, reporters came from far and wide. Baltimore Sun columnist H.L. Mencken gave the case a jolt by calling it the “Monkey Trial.”

Famed defense lawyer Clarence Darrow, a professed agnostic, assisted Scopes’ defense, three-time presidential candidate and fundamentalist Christian William Jennings Bryan helped the prosecution.

The trial featured Darrow cross-examining Bryan, who complained that evolution taught that human beings were descended “not even from American monkeys but from old-world monkeys.” The jury deliberated nine minutes before finding Scopes guilty. He was fined $100. The verdict later was overturned on a technicality: at the time Tennessee judges could not impose fines more than $50. Bryan died five days after the trial ended.

I parked in front of the courthouse and walked a bit. The sidewalk is engraved with a timeline of the history of the city from 1925 to the present. I read the historic markers and looked at the statues of Bryan and Darrow on the courthouse lawn. The place still gets its publicity. We got back on the road and said so long. Next time at the Falls, I’ll jump in the water.