March 31, 2025

As you drive I-40 across Tennessee, west toward Nashville or east toward Knoxville, you cross the Caney Fork River five times between Cookeville and Lebanon.

Approaching the Caney Fork crossings, drivers see billboards calling out “Canoe the Caney!” Local folks rent canoes, you can test your swift-river skills.  I’ve thought about doing it many times.

The fast-moving 150-mile-long Caney Fork winds south and empties into huge Center Hill Lake. It’s a tributary of the Cumberland River, which flows west for 660 miles from eastern Kentucky, eventually meeting the Ohio River near Paducah. In 2010 the Cumberland flooded Nashville, devastating much of downtown, including the football stadium.

Years ago I camped out at Center Hill with a friend. I think our wives were out of town. We drove from Nashville to the lake and put up a tent. The next day we rented a canoe and fishing gear and paddled out and fished for a few hours. We didn’t catch anything, but we did tip the canoe over and fall in the lake.

These parts are majestic country, but also wild country. We both were new to the area from the urban Northeast, and didn’t have any sense of the vastness of the water wilderness of the region, or of the power of nature to threaten civilization.

Further along I-40, between Crossville and Knoxville you cross the 72-mile-long, 38,000-acre Watt’s Bar Lake, which is formed by the Tennessee and Clinch rivers and the Watt’s Bar dam. The lake borders 722 miles of shoreline and crosses four counties. East of Knoxville and north of I-81 is massive Cherokee Lake, with nearly 400 miles of shoreline, formed by construction of the Cherokee Dam on the Holston River.

In North Carolina, the French Broad River starts as a humble, inconspicuous stream near the little town of Rosman, which sits near the N.C.-S.C. state line about 45 miles southwest of Asheville.

When the river reaches Asheville it’s wide and flowing fast. It then turns northwest, gathering mountain streams and crosses into Tennessee. At the state line it’s a monster. Just past Newport, Tenn., it feeds 60-mile-long Douglas Lake. The river continues west to merge with the Holston River and forms the Tennessee River near Knoxville. The Tennessee flows south into Alabama and Mississippi then west for 650 miles to the Ohio.

Hurricane Helene struck the area on September 27. The French Broad turned ferocious and rampaged through low-lying parts of Asheville. It devastated small communities west of the city.

As the French Broad flows into Douglas Lake it meets the mouth of the Nolichucky River, which like the French Broad flows west from its source at an intersection of the Cane and North Toe rivers near Huntdale, N.C., which is hard to find on any map.

Before joining the French Broad the Nolichucky passes through Erwin, Tenn., a town of around 6,000 on I-26 about 15 miles south of Johnson City. Helene flooding closed I-26 and destroyed Unicoi County Hospital in Erwin. Helicopters evacuated 54 people from the hospital roof. Six people drowned at a plastics factory downstream.

The hurricane flow from the French Broad and Nolichucky increased Douglas Lake’s water level 21 feet in three days. The Nolichucky destroyed five bridges in East Tennessee, including the 320-foot-long Kinser Bridge, used by 10,000 vehicles daily; 14 more were seriously damaged and six were closed. along with 22 state roadway sections that were damaged or swept away.

The National Hurricane Center reported that Helene killed about 250 people, including 106 in North Carolina, 50 in South Carolina, 37 in Georgia, 34 in Florida, and 18 in Tennessee.   

Early this month North Carolina reopened part of a section of I-40 that had been partly destroyed by Helene, one lane in each direction. Traffic crawls along at near-gridlock, 20 miles per hour for 12 miles. Drivers can see giant chunks of asphalt and concrete crumpled in the Pigeon River.

In December of last year, three months after Helene, Congress passed the American Relief Act, which provides $110 billion in disaster relief nationwide. The bill included $31 billion for farmers, $29 billion for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, $12 billion for community block grants, and funds for highways, military facilities, national parks, water supply systems, design studies, and other things.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimated the total cost of Helene at $78.7 billion, $60 billion for North Carolina alone. The state General Assembly has appropriated $1.4 billion for recovery. Democratic Governor Josh Stein has asked for another $19 billion. (Republicans have controlled both the Senate and House since 2011.)

The debate over disaster relief continues. FEMA and state officials have made progress, but parts of western North Carolina won’t recover for years.

Last week fires started in western North and South Carolina forests, the flames fed by Helene’s blowdowns and drought-parched underbrush. A few days ago the Table Rock fire had consumed 10,000 acres. Residents nearby evacuated. We could see the brown pall and smell smoke from 35 miles away.

The vote on North Carolina’s recovery funding was two weeks ago, just before the fires started. Stein said the fires will add to the recovery bill.

Disaster recovery news has faded amid headlines of massive firings of federal employees, tariffs on trade with American allies, and Trump threats against federal judges. Then Americans heard of the Keystone Kops performance of national security officials blabbing classified details about a military operation on an unsecure messaging program. Since then, disaster relief seems so last year.

March 24, 2025

Black Rock arrived again, the same rock-filled fire road ahead of the same twisting near-vertical one-third mile single track, the same boulder crawl. The start was gray and chilly, as it has been in my four turns in the race, and often is in the Plott Balsam Mountains, 50 or so miles west of Asheville.

The mountain junket, a 3.5-mile, near-3,000-foot climb to the Black Rock summit and return, followed by a couple of days our 600 miles from midstate Florida and up I-75, the centerline of Georgia. On the return we zigzagged through backcountry Hernando and Citrus Counties for a couple of hours, past the cattle and tractors, past the faded Trump banners still waving from pasture gates.

We made the interstate at Ocala, then settled into suburban Florida flatland. The trip was an odyssey across near-empty Deep South. After Gainesville, small Florida and Georgia places plodded by, Alachua, Lake City, Jennings, the state line, then Valdosta, Tifton, Cordele. We saw the signs for Andersonville, the death-trap Confederate prisoner of war camp where some 13,000 Union POWs died. We hurried past.

Faster drivers swerve around us. We felt the blur of long miles, the roar of 18-wheelers, the mesmerizing glare of the sun, the sameness of the strip malls, the gas-station and fast-food beacons lining the exits. The emptiness of the landscape is broken here and there by cell-phone towers or big box store marquees.

This is how to drive across America without seeing it. We feel the hypnosis of the highway, Interstate Land. What do we think if we get through it safely. Is God out there, watching? And which God, the God of the fundamentalist Bible or St. Thomas Aquinas’s “act of being,” a God with no name? The road is not where we find the meaning of the universe.

The traffic intensity picked up north of Macon. We crawled through the underside of Atlanta. Our morale improved as we maneuvered off I-475 onto I-285. My spirits grew when I read an emailed invitation to “Flannery at 100,” a four-day celebration of the life of Georgia storyteller and militant traditionalist Catholic Flannery O’Connor in her hometown of Milledgeville.

O’Connor wrote probing, disturbing tales set in small Southern places that spoke to raw human nature. She died at 39. The readings, lectures, exhibits, and music program will recognize her insight into life’s pain as she endured debilitating disease. O’Connor knew about Aquinas’s God. But we won’t make it.

We dodged through the east Atlanta traffic and stayed the night with old friends Sandy and Glen. Sandy and Sandy were childhood next-door-neighbor friends, still friends seven decades later. Glen grew up in Waycross, near the Okefenokee Swamp, 438,000 acres in the middle of deep-rural country of giant mosquitos that reaches into the Florida Panhandle.

At home we recovered from all that.

Runners Elise and Todd, two fast people, hung with me from the Black Rock start, a reprise of last year. The first mile sucks wind from lungs, especially 76-year-old lungs. Footing is a crapshoot over a double track of rocks. The turn off the climb is invisible in the blur of forest.

Our pace picked up for a quarter-mile, then returned to the 31-minute per mile average. Elise and Todd could have sprinted off, but stayed with me. They slogged two hundred feet ahead. One mile.

We eased forward, the valley of Sylva ghostly in mist. The teammates were dots ahead. I breathed hoarsely, placed a shoe, breathed again, placed another shoe. I looked up, they waved. We passed the water-break team. Mile two.

We rounded switchbacks, leaving the weak sunlight, feeling the mountain’s chilling shade. The field of runners was a mile ahead. Solitude dragged us forward. The trail curled around the mountain, then again through shade and back to sunlight. We passed the turn to the finish. Runners already down from the summit flowed past.

We looked up at the single track to the summit, something like a 40-degree incline twisting into thick canopy. We paused, I started, Elise slipped past me and flew up, quickly out of sight. Todd followed me, as he did last year, ready for tragedy. I leaned forward, grabbing for roots and branches. The wind howled.

Near the summit we entered a tunnel of massive boulders, the trail now tamped-down snow and ice. We grabbed at the rock walls. Elise, already on the summit, sent a text: “It gets icy. Be careful.” Todd yelled a warning. We gritted our teeth through the rock chute, dark in the mountain’s shadow. The chill closed in.

From beyond the rock wall Elise called, “Almost here!” We turned once more and felt sunlight and scrambled up the massive boulder, which is the summit. The bleak, spectacular Plott Balsams surrounded us, still winter brown for maybe 60 miles, fading into Blue Ridge blue at the horizon. I sat wheezing, then stood unsteadily for the group photo.               

This was Black Rock 2025. We shimmied down, teetering along the return ice-and-snow-packed trail, grabbing again at rocks and roots, then moving into sunlight.

The three-mile-plus return to the finish was a downhill blur on the mountain’s east side. We crossed the line, the staff folks waved and smiled. We took deep breaths, sipped water, stretched, got the obligatory photo. The mountain loomed through the forest, the summit hidden.

The race crew started breaking camp. They packed their gear, we packed ours. Black Rock signaled to us once again: hard things are possible, mountains can be climbed, complicated lives can be endured and celebrated. We crawled into the van. We’ll be back for the Black Rock climb: a promise to ourselves, and each other.

March 17, 2025

We turned onto I-85 South early, in light traffic. The city fell away, we passed through rural places before crossing Lake Hartwell into Georgia. The cheerful welcome center with the giant peach signals Deep South. Traffic picked up ahead of Atlanta’s suburbs, lanes narrowed into construction zones.

The destination was Brooksville, high on the Gulf side of the Free State of Florida, as its fans call it. The old awkward joke about the state as God’s waiting room has faded, as it became a swamp of evangelical Republicanism. Which may be unfair.

Years ago we saw Cape Canaveral and a few nearby spots on the Atlantic side. A cousin has a winter place in Edgewater, a tiny Intercoastal Waterway village just south of Daytona Beach. The Gulf coastal midstate, Tampa, St. Pete, and Sarasota, along with Orlando have the sunshine and palm trees, but now are kludged with traffic gridlock. Years ago we drove through the lovely old neighborhoods of Tarpon Springs and actually looked at a couple of model homes.

Brooksville is tucked into farm and horse country on the Gulf side, maybe 40 miles north of Tampa. The town is named unfortunately after Preston Brooks, a fanatical pro-slavery Democratic South Carolina congressman. Brooks is notable because in 1856 he nearly beat to death Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner on the Senate floor after Sumner, an abolitionist, had given a speech condemning slavery.

Brooks’ assault was cheered in the South and condemned in the North. A Massachusetts congressman, Anson Burlingame, challenged Brooks to a duel. Brooks accepted then backed out. Several Deep South places, like Brooksville, were named for him, as the Slave state governments marched toward secession and Civil War.

In 2010 some locals wanted to change the name, they were voted down. Anyway, those days are over. Brooksville is a cute, down-home place, no trace of unpleasant  history cling to its small-town attributes.

The point of the trip was a visit to friends, Tricia and Scott. Tricia left Northern Virginia for Florida in 2008. We met at the Office of Naval Research 25 years ago, when the country and the world were so different. She worked in tech support at ONR, we carpooled for a few years, until she headed for the Tampa area and a new career.

We passed through Atlanta in good time, shifting from I-85 to 475 then 75, the long chute to the Gulf Coast. Traffic backed up a bit south of Macon but we did well to the Free State welcome center, with 200 miles to Brooksville.

The ONR years returned to me as the flat scrub of Florida passed. Now those folks, civil servants who study critical technology, award grants to research institutions, and oversee protection of human subjects in federal research are slandered by Trump, like thousands of others, as “waste, fraud, and abuse” and face the Trump buzzsaw of mass firings. The country is so very different.

Tricia and Scott own acreage just outside Brooksville. We walked the quiet, lovely property, glad to stretch our legs. They showed us the cattle and chickens, the farm vehicles and heavy equipment, the barn and Scott’s crafts workshop, filled with finished projects and others underway.

Brooksville, with about 10,000 souls, is the seat of Hernando County, near the geographic center of the state, 25 miles from the Gulf of Mexico—er, America, depending on your point of view. As in lots of places, the courthouse/city hall sits on Broad Street near Main. A short stroll leads to Brooksville Avenue, lined with lovely antebellum-type homes and massive live oaks.

It’s a comfortable place, like many small town centers all over America, the weather being one difference—Florida heat and humidity half the year, which helps cultivate the brilliant sprays of tropical plants, the live oaks, and drifting Spanish moss.

This little chunk of the state is secluded from big-tourist Florida amidst miles of lush pasture sprinkled with Black Angus and “Brangus” cattle, which I learned is a cross of the Angus and Brahman breeds; small farms and some large ones, one-level ranch homesteads and the Withlacoochee River, which meanders through Hernando, Citrus and a half-dozen other central state counties.

We explored the area in Scott’s truck, racing the storm warnings as rain pounded down. We stopped at the produce store of strawberry grower Ferris Farms of Citrus County, which offers an eclectic mix of things, local honey, condiments, spices, candy, and pecan oil. The place is famous for its strawberry shakes, made from the local product. Customers came in just for the shakes.

Quality of life sometimes improves, sometimes gets worse. Hard change is coming. An 800-acre tract near Tricia’s and Scott’s property will be populated with solar panels. A couple of golf courses will take hundreds of acres of pastureland. High interest rates and a glut of unsold homes have sunk the real estate market. A witches’ brew of local and statewide political and economic conditions is changing attitudes and loyalties.

Scott, a Florida man for 45 years, and Tricia are saying goodbye. The couple have purchased land in East Tennessee, a ten-hour drive up I-75. Their plan is to sell the Brooksville homestead and recreate their lives in another rural place, near lakes, mountains and, for sure, colder winters. They’ll bring the cattle, buy more, build a home. Brooksville still will be there, the same place, in memories.

March 10, 2025

Hermitage, a network of strip malls and traffic-choked streets, is a Nashville, Tenn., suburb, named for its central attraction: The Hermitage, home of President Andrew Jackson, the seventh president. Jackson was the first man elected to the office who some called a “man of the people,” a sobriquet now assigned by Republicans to Donald Trump, man of bankrupt casinos.

I had been to The Hermitage years ago. Since we were in Middle Tennessee and Sandy had never been there, we decided to do the tour. We battled rush-hour traffic from Mount Juliet to the city/town of Hermitage. Broad meadows line the highway approaching the property. The gorgeous Greek revival mansion, the third rebuild of Jackson’s first home, stands amidst 1,100 acres of working farmland.

Jackson, who grew up in poor rural North and South Carolina, followed six aristocrats from Massachusetts and Virginia to the presidency. Early in his career he developed a reputation as a hellraiser who liked to gamble and party. He worked as a lawyer, whiskey distiller, land speculator, and slave trader before settling on farming.  In his military career he was known for caring for his troops, which earned him the reputation as the “people’s president” for his two terms in office (1829-1837).

As a boy he served with the Colonial Army in the Revolutionary War and was captured in April 1781. He refused to polish the boots of a British officer, who slashed him across the face with his sword, leaving permanent scars on his head and left hand.  He contracted smallpox at a prisoner of war camp and was released. After his mother nursed him back to health she contracted cholera and died, leaving Jackson an orphan at 14.

He lived for a while on an inheritance, then studied law and in 1788 moved to Nashville. In 1796 he was elected Tennessee’s first Congressman and in 1797 a U.S. Senator, then became a judge with the state’s Superior Court. In 1801 he was made a colonel in the Tennessee militia, then promoted to general a year later.

He became a national hero by defeating the British in the Battle of New Orleans, although the Treaty of Ghent ending the War of 1812 had been signed before the battle. In following years he fought the Seminoles and other tribes with the intent of seizing their land for white settlers. His toughness as a general earned him the nickname “Old Hickory.”

Jackson was again elected to the Senate as a Democrat and elected President in 1828. He invited the public into the White House and a crowd trampled inside, firming his reputation as a man of the people.

The estate now is managed by the Andrew Jackson Foundation. On a chilly afternoon we hurried up the path to the mansion, where a docent gave us an overview. Jackson purchased 425 acres at the site in July 1804 to grow cotton and called it The Hermitage. As he gained wealth he bought more land, which was worked by slaves. When Jackson died in 1845 he owned 160 human beings. He was a southern planter, after all.

In 1830 he signed the Indian Removal Act, which forced hundreds of thousands of Native Americans to move to Oklahoma and Kansas. The removal, called the “Trail of Tears,” caused the deaths of as many as 70,000 Native Americans of the five major Southeastern tribes (Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Seminole, and Cherokee), and dozens of smaller ones.

The Act, America’s descent into ethnic cleansing, was supported by close margins in the House and Senate and by Southern state governments.

Jackson’s removal act offers a parallel to “populist” Trump’s executive order of January 20th that would revoke the guarantee of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment of birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants, thereby rendering millions of Americans stateless. Four federal judges have issued injunctions blocking implementation of the order, one calling it “blatantly unconstitutional.”

As president Jackson fought against what he and his supporters called moneyed interests and speculators and imposed tariffs, which strengthened his reputation as the common man’s president. After leaving office he condemned abolitionists and called for the annexation of Texas.

We walked through the two floors of the house, which has attracted some 17 million visitors since opening to the public in 1889. We admired the beautiful French-made paneled wallpaper in the great hall, which illustrates the story of Telemachus from The Odyssey.

In one parlor is a piano Jackson bought for his granddaughter for $450, roughly the same amount he paid for his original 425 acres. Nearby is Jackson’s study, his bedroom, and the bedrooms of his adopted children.

Jackson’s wife Rachel died in December 1828 and is buried on the property in a tomb which Jackson designed. He and Rachel had no children and he never remarried. His adopted son Andrew Jr., and daughter-in-law Sarah lived in the mansion from 1832 until Sarah’s death in 1887.

 Andrew Jr.’s and Sarah’s daughter, Little Rachel, and their sons Andrew III and Samuel lived upstairs. Samuel was killed at the Battle of Chickamauga in 1863.

The most enthusiastic reviews of Andrew Jackson’s presidency call it “enigmatic.” The Age of Jackson, we may read, argues the idea that Jackson was a bold leader who defended working people against greedy plutocrats and enabled Americans to settle new lands, the lands emptied of their former Native American owners.

“Trail of Tears” historical markers are found along highways all over the Southeast. They remind us of vast human tragedy sanctioned by the U. S. government between 1830 and 1850.  Jackson died in 1845, as the national fight over slavery simmered, before exploding in Civil War.

Rachel’s dignified burial place is visible from Jackson’s bedroom window. The vast acreage of The Hermitage extends out to the wooded horizon. Farm buildings stand about the property, open to visitors. The museum shop offers a rich selection of mementos and Jackson literature and scholarship. We browsed a bit, admiring this lovely place, then drove away, glad to move on.     

March 3, 2025

Death summons memories. It clarifies and purifies them, like iron touched by fire. We had another death, the husband of the sister who died two months ago, in Tennessee. It wasn’t a surprise, he had been expected to pass before her. So we settled in the van and drove off.

In late September Hurricane Helene blew part of I-40 between Asheville and Newport, Tenn., into the raging Pigeon River. At a gas stop I noticed an announcement in The Asheville Citizen that the damaged stretch would reopen March 1. This was February 27. Family funerals can happen any time. We still were shunted to U.S. 25/70 for the 50 miles to Newport.

Ten miles from Asheville the traveler encounters another world. In Marshall, 15 minutes off the interstate, Bonnie & Clydes advertises “Appalachian Cuisine.” The signs on the door announces love of guns and military service and threatens arrest and prosecution if the visitor mentions vaccines or vaccination. But we ordered the bacon, eggs, coffee.

River and mountains intruded for long stretches under harsh gray skies. It was winter, after all. Rain fell hard, the river flowed with anger in whitecaps, waves thundered against boulders, the riverbank lined with storm blowdowns and piles of flotsam. The mission, another funeral, came back to us.

I had known the couple for 47 years, but never knew them well. We saw them for short visits, a few hours, maybe once a year. The husband never showed up at our home. We knew them through Sandy’s phone calls, and her memories.

Eight hours of driving got us to Mount Juliet, Tenn., 25 miles east of Nashville, to the home of her cousin Mike, her Uncle Pete’s son. Pete died a few years ago at 95.

It was inevitable. When folks pass on, their family lives return to mind one way or another. The Harper family formed in the south-center of the state. The sons and daughters left their home place, near Winchester, and moved on. So we talked about all that.

It was the right time and place. Mike went upstairs and pulled out his dad’s, Pete’s last two Winchester Central High School 1944 and 1945 yearbooks, called “The Kickoff.” I was impressed, my own high school yearbook hit the trashcan decades ago.

The books offer a carefree but serious and un-self-conscious portrait of mid-1940s America, which was wartime America. The Class History page in the ’44 book notes, “We have not forgotten the boys from our class who have left to join the service or those who have been called away for this purpose.” The ’45 Class History observes that as freshmen the class had 48 boys.  Only eight remained as seniors.

An honor roll in the ’44 book lists 15 boys who joined the service. Mike’s dad Pete, who starred in football in ’44, did not graduate with his ’45 class; he had left for the Navy and served aboard a ship in the Pacific.

Student life at WCHS, as reported in The Kickoff” seemed oddly, yet somehow happily archaic, frozen in that long-ago time. Of the 29 seniors of the class of ’44, 26 belonged to the Bible Club. Morning class included Bible study.

The Future Farmers of America club for ’44 consisted of 40 boys and one girl, Joan Gaines, who is listed as the “queen.” The Home Economics Club had 75 members, 74 girls and one boy.

The time was 1944 and 1945, the place the deep-central American South. No Black students appear among the senior portraits nor in the student club, team, or activity photos. Like everywhere else in the South, schools were segregated, Black children attended their own school. Strangely, the ’44 book is dedicated to a Black man, “Uncle Bunt,” who informally acted as an adviser to the Future Farmers of America and a couple of other clubs.

In the 1940s and before and for years later in the South, whites referred to Black adults as “Uncle” and “Auntie,” not “Mr.,” “Miss,” or “Mrs.” That is the way it was. In the dozens of photos of clubs and teams, girls wear only skirts and dresses, the dress code did not permit pants.

Among the clubs at WCHS, 13 girls and no boys belonged to the O.G.A. Club, which trained members in the “Order of Gregg Artists” method of shorthand. Certificates were awarded to girls who excelled in taking shorthand, members participated in shorthand competitions.

Students apparently were happy to catalogue each other in personal ways unimaginable in high schools today, that yet now seem almost comical: kids were recognized as “most beautiful girl,” “most handsome boy,” “cutest girl,” “cutest boy,” “most flirtatious girl,” “most flirtatious boy,” “shyest girl,” and “shyest boy.” Couples “going steady” were singled out as “cutest,” “neatest,” “shyest,” and “loudest,” among other such things.

The design of the books show their time. The text was typed with mechanical typewriters in a single font throughout, no italics or graphics flourishes. The yearbook staff recognizes the typists, all girls. Photos show boys in white shirts and narrow ties of the day or their “W” sweaters.

It was Winchester, Tennessee, a small, out-of-the way place, but then too, it was America. “The Kickoff” was one high-school yearbook among thousands of similar ones created all over the country in those years, when senior classes were nearly all girls, the faculties were nearly all women. Eighty years later they are likely all gone.

We talked about Pete, about the family. We went to the viewing and the Mass and the cemetery. We talked with the others who showed up, a few around our age, but then too, a few children and grandkids. We smiled at the young kids, full of pep, but a bit puzzled about why they were there. It was a happy time, a few moments of ritual and then memories, still being formed.