July 7, 2025

The mercury was forecast to climb into the nineties, but the men planned to finish before the heat set in. The early morning air was humid, yet cool in the deep shade.  Their target was four miles, a rough endpoint of a stretch of easy descent. They left Grant’s truck at the trailhead and moved forward.

The trail was soft, the canopy thick overhead. They moved easily over the first hundred yards and made a gentle turn. A piece of orange fencing blocked the route, a hand-printed sign warned “landslide,” a remnant of Hurricane Helene nine months ago. Ribbons tied to branches showed the detour. They slogged uphill around the wrecked patch, then turned down onto the trail.

Heading east from Laurel Valley off U.S. 178, the Foothills Trail follows gravelly, rough Horsepasture Road in a kind of arc, then turns west and climbs. The trail builders years ago installed wooden steps at steep points as an aid to casual hikers. The steps intrude on the natural slopes and actually slow progress. From the road level the men climbed three or four stairwells as the trail followed the hard slope.  

The trail repair team had bulldozed an alternate path along the rocky, root-lined first climb. The men stayed on the original trail, following the white Foothills blazes. The trail wound up, up, they bent forward, moving deliberately.  Beyond another sharp upward turn they found a short stretch of level ground. Then more climbing.

At the near-two-mile point the forest opened up a bit, the trail widened. They exhaled, past the worst of it. Ahead they found gently rolling terrain. The trail now was soft, easy going. They quickened their pace past hundreds of hurricane blowdowns, chain-sawed and pushed off the trail. The thousand-year storm had scarred the forest, opening stretches of once-dark woodland to sunlight. It was nature’s way.

At two miles the rolling country inclined upward again. The forest thickened under dense deep-green canopy which, it seemed, the storm had left unscathed. They moved into the heart of the Jocassee Gorges Management Area, a massive expanse of mountain forest straddling the N.C.-S.C. state line, crossed only by winding trails.

The trail inclined downward, curling towards Laurel Ford Creek. At three miles they could hear the laughing of fast water. They glided through young forest growth, feeling the air grow warm as they descended.  

At close to four miles the trail opened to a ladder, recently built, at a ten-foot drop. They climbed down into a lush, moist jungle, the new growth entangled with towering oaks and maples. The ground was muddy, lined with briars and vines, the trail now bordered to the south by a rock wall. They moved forward, hearing the roar of the creek.

They crossed a bridge, paused, sipped water, then checked their map. Virginia Hawkins Falls looked to be another half-mile. The trail ahead faded into thick woods. They rehitched their hydration packs and moved on.

The trail zigzagged across the creek over sturdy bridges. The creek rushed on its winding course, lined by tangled underbrush and fallen trees. The rock wall rose into heavy forest. Young trees grew in impenetrable thickets, blocking the sky, the heavy air grew heavier. They followed the white blazes and descended another long flight of forest stairs to a narrow clearing alongside the falls.

They stared at the cascading water as it gushed over the falls from ten or twelve feet high, raising an airy mist then flowing over a rocky streambed to a quiet pond and west toward Laurel Falls. A large flat rock served as a bench. They both gulped water and ate something and watched the clear water on its picturesque path. Grant, the athlete, climbed down to the water’s edge for a closer look.

The waterfall, the moss-covered rocks of the creekbed, the young growth rising into the treetops, conveyed the sense of deep rainforest transplanted from some tropical place. The dense greenery crept down to the water’s edge. The only sound was the creek’s flow over the rocks.

In 1904 the Argentine-English writer and naturalist William Henry Hudson wrote Green Mansions, a romantic novel set in the Venezuelan jungle that draws the reader into his perception of the mystical beauty of woodland.  As his narrator travels through wilderness, he says, “I felt purified and had a strange sense and apprehension of a secret innocence and spirituality in nature, a prescience of some bourn, incalculably distant, perhaps, to which are all moving.”

The men sat for those few moments within and surrounded by a vast, silent green mansion, a sublime creation of nature: the vernal, dense forest wildness, the humid air of the Carolina summer, the rich woodland soil, the remoteness from crowded places. They rested, watching the falls, feeling the delicate serenity of the natural world.

They stood, their legs stiff from the break, and reversed course. It had been nearly five miles. They trekked slowly up the first set of trail stairs and moved back along the creek, stepping over fallen tree trunks.  

They recrossed the bridges and picked up their pace. At the end of the straightway beyond the fourth bridge they slogged into three short steep switchbacks. The easy outbound descent became a battle uphill. The sun bore down, mosquitos swarmed. In an hour they found the rolling, sunlit trail, and leaned forward into the fast return.

June 30, 2025

Fannie Mae Dees Park, on Nashville’s Hillsboro Village side, has so far survived the bulldozers. The park, a humble green patch, lies in the shadow of the Vanderbilt University and hospital urban jungle, at the corner of a major thoroughfare and a slightly less-trafficked neighborhood street.

In the 1960s Ms. Dees shared a home on nearby Capers Street with her mother. She was known in the area for bringing flowers from her garden to nursing home residents and patients at local hospitals, which would be Vanderbilt a few blocks away and Baptist just off West End Avenue. I read that she got into trouble by taking old jars from dumpsters at Vanderbilt.

The city planners came to seize residential property in the area, including on Capers Street, to cede it to Vanderbilt, Ms. Dees and her neighbors fought the city’s voracious appetite for tearing things down. She hung protest signs on her house and displayed a coffin to symbolize the death of the neighborhood. The battle lasted into the ‘70s, the neighbors lost. Fannie’s home, among others, was demolished. She died in 1978.

A small parcel of land survived the urban rampage and was reborn as a park. Later, a city councilwoman, Betty Nixon, declared it should be named after Fannie Mae. So it is.

In its early days the park was a neighborhood afterthought, the space wedged in the corner between two elementary schoolyards and a tennis court. The grass was mostly scratched away, leaving bare dirt.

In 1973 a neighbor, Ann Roos, asked sculptor Pedro Silva to create a unique structure to distinguish the park. He designed a 150-foot-long replica of a dragon, to be fabricated in a gorgeous, chaotic mosaic of tile sizes and colors, including images of animals and mythical figures and faces. Neighbors showed up and helped lay in the tiles. The work was completed in 1980. Today the park named after Fannie is called the Dragon Park.

The park was three blocks from our early 1980s Nashville home. In the evenings we’d walk over with our kids. We’d sit and watch them play. Other neighborhood couples came, the kids clambered over the dragon’s serpentine body, which seems to emerge from the earth to undulate across the playground. The park had the usual swings and slides, but the dragon drew the kids.  

The Dragon Park became legend for children who grew up in the neighborhood and for many from elsewhere around town and from other places. Some, like ours, left when their families moved away. But they remember.

Years went by, our kids grew up in Jersey and Virginia. The park was spruced up a bit in 1988. We drove back a few times, in ’97 for Sandy’s parents’ fiftieth anniversary, again in ’01 for a nephew’s funeral. A year later we were back for a niece’s wedding. Those trips were distracted, rushed; the kids were years beyond playground age. But the Dragon Park was a benchmark, a beacon. We drove past.

In 2017 the neighborhood association raised funds to renovate the park with the help of Pedro’s son, Tony Silva. The work added new playground toys, the kind with kid-safe plastic ladders and netting and new swings, replacing the old metal swingsets. The bare-dirt play areas were carpeted with durable artificial turf.

Two weeks ago we stopped at the Dragon Park with our grandsons. I noticed the parents of other kids. They were children themselves, in the age range of our kids, when we brought them to the park.

As the park construction completed, the city transformation sped forward. The Vanderbilt University and hospital complex across the street from the park now is a traffic-choked maw of office towers, medical facilities, and parking garages cheek to jowl with shops and restaurants along one-way streets of short blocks, traffic lights, and stop signs. University and hospital staff people, hospital patients, and college kids crowd the sidewalks and jaywalk through traffic.

Multi-story buildings along the main thoroughfare, 21st Avenue, cast shadows over each other. A few blocks over, Baptist Hospital, where our three older kids were born, was swallowed by a large hospital corporation.

Fannie Mae’s street, Capers, is lined with cookie-cutter townhomes and The Village at Vanderbilt, a big upscale apartment complex that offers granite countertops and extra-large balconies with French doors.   

The suburbs reach into virgin space. In our town pastureland is being turned into apartments. Two weeks ago a nearby tract of woodland became, almost overnight, a two-story-high pile of splintered logs, making space for a new subdivision. Some ask, is it all necessary?

But then—it’s been 60 years since Fannie Mae stood outside her home with her protest signs and coffin. Sixty years! Should we expect anything different? Urban renewal. This is the way it is in America.

Why are they bulldozing this forest or that one? We know why. Demolition is the way to creation, the first step in the construction of new single-family homes, condos, apartments, offices, and the retail activity that supports them, the malls, hospitals, schools, and the roads that link all of that. In urban spaces, the Vanderbilt complex, replicated.

Still, we can imagine Fannie Mae watching her home torn down, the remains hauled away. This is the way old people look at these things. Today’s residents of Capers Avenue, the tenants at The Village of Vanderbilt, never knew her. Many, most likely, have never heard of her. For them, the Dragon Park is a five-minute walk, to another world.

June 23, 2025

Sikeston, Missouri, is a spot along I-55 that if you’re not heading there, quickly recedes in your rear-view mirror. Leaving the highway, though, should mean a visit to Lambert’s Café. There you have a chance to catch “throwed rolls.” Yes, that is “throwed,” not “thrown.”

Taking a seat, be ready, because wait staff will pitch fluffy, warm rolls, which may hit you in the head if you’re not ready to make the catch. Our grandsons Noah and Patrick, without being warned, caught three each. You can check: http://www.throwedrolls.com.

An American road trip wouldn’t be complete without a Lambert’s, or Loveless Café, near Bellevue, Tenn., or Rocky’s Grill, in Brevard and Bonnie & Clyde’s in Marshall, N.C., or Cosmic Rabbits in Greenville, S.C., or any of hundreds of odd, one-only eateries across the land, all pushing some kind of dream. Loveless does the Southern thing, Rocky’s the Fifties, Bonnie & Clyde’s, guns and vigilantes. Cosmic Rabbits does tea with a dose of Star Wars.

Lambert’s does have two other sites, in Ozark, just south of Springfield, Mo., and Foley, Ala., about 40 miles south of Mobile. They both throw rolls.

Backing up: our original plan, on leaving St. Louis, was to drive to Memphis and spend a day or two, then head to Nashville, which would have come to about 500 miles. A fallback was a pit stop at Sandy’s cousin Mike’s office in Cape Girardeau. Mike was the mastermind behind the family reunion in Chapel Hill, Tenn., reported here two weeks ago.

St. Louis to the Cape is about 116 miles. From there I guessed we’d get a state road back to Paducah and retrace our steps to Nashville on I-24. Instead, Mike invited us to follow him to lunch. Lambert’s was the place. He mentioned it to his staff assistant before we left his office. I noticed her smile.

We followed Mike for the 30 miles to Sikeston. This was new country for us. Cultivated fields, mostly corn, stretch to the horizon. Eastern Missouri isn’t Kansas, but it’s close. We whizzed by Kelso, Blodgett, Benson, other small towns, counting barns, tractors, and grain elevators shimmering in the Missouri noon sun. The Mississippi winds south a few miles east of the highway. From a distance, Sikeston didn’t look like much.

Lambert’s seems to occupy half a city block. It was Tuesday, but the cavernous dining room was packed. The walls are lined with hundreds, maybe thousands of license plates from everywhere. Model aircraft swing from the ceilings. We sat, I spied something airborne. Noah reached up and caught the fat homemade roll. A waiter standing nearby launched another. Patrick grabbed it in mid-air.

We learned that Earl and Agnes Lambert opened Lambert’s on March 13, 1942 in a cramped building on Sikeston’s South Main Street. Their son Norman took over running the place in 1976. On the website he explains that he threw his first roll on May 26, 1976. He tried to serve rolls to someone, but couldn’t get to the customer through the lunchtime crowd. The fellow yelled, “Just throw it!” So he did, and everyone joined in. “What once was a job was now fun. … We never have been, nor ever will be, a suit-and-tie joint.”  

The Ozark location opened in 1994, the Foley site in 1996. The Sikeston restaurant moved to East Malone Street in 2002.

Lambert’s is a comfort-food place. The menu features country fried round and ribeye steak, barbecue ribs, meatloaf, pulled pork, country ham steak, hog jowl, frog legs, fried catfish, and chicken cooked any way you like. You can get a vegetable plate. There’s a kid’s menu with kid-size portions of all of the above.

I went off reservation and had a burger. The kids had their usual, chicken fingers.

Everything comes with two sides, but the real deal is the “pass-arounds”: servers, all in red bow ties and suspenders, haul around pots of fried okra, black-eyed peas, tomatoes with macaroni, fried potatoes with onions. They don’t stop coming, it’s all you can eat. I thought the okra and peas were excellent. We asked for some rolls to go.

We gawked at the big hall as the wait staff made their rounds. The lunch crowd kept coming, the rolls kept flying. We thanked our smiling server, who said be sure to come again. The lobby featured a Model T, an old telephone booth, and bric-a-brac. I browsed the gift shop, but didn’t feel any of us needed a Lambert’s teeshirt or coffee mug.

I didn’t get to ask why the other locations are in Ozark and Foley. The distances mean Lambert’s is a tour stop for us, with no other reason, thus far, to visit those towns. Really, no other reason to visit Sikeston. We pulled out of the packed parking lot onto the hot interstate. 

As we slogged down I-55 I sensed in Lambert’s a little bit of Cracker Barrels I’ve known, which also push hard on the country shtick. Cracker Barrel Old Country Stores is a monster, with 660 outlets in 45 states. What’s the appeal of all this country theming? Americans like the off-the-highway casualness, the home-cooking menu. They like the rocking chairs and farm implements near the door, the license plates nailed to the walls. Why? They just do.

We sped through light traffic to Caruthersville, Mo., then swung onto near-empty I-185 and crossed the fast-moving Mississippi. Sandy closed her eyes. In a few minutes we were in Dyersburg, Tenn., at the far western end of the state. A friendly lady at the rest stop sent us down U.S. 412 to Jackson and I-40. In two hours we crossed the Tennessee River, in three we were inching through rush hour in downtown Nashville. For dinner, the kids wanted pizza.

June 16, 2025

A walk or car ride around downtown St. Louis shows a mix of shiny office buildings, hospitals and medical schools, and big hotels. Then vacant, weed-strewn lots, boarded up buildings, confusing one-way streets and highways. Then the spectacular gorgeousness of the Arch.

The Gateway Arch, rising 650 feet above the Mississippi waterfront, is a monument and a tourist stop. Planning and initial funding started in 1935. Discussion and debate on the concept plodded on, structures along the city’s Mississippi River shore were demolished. The design, by architect Eero Saarinen, was selected in 1947. Twenty years passed until the Arch opened to the public in June 1967. Saarinen died in 1961.

I read that the arch is a “weighted catenary,” in which the weight is supported not only by the legs but also by the concrete and steel foundation. Each leg is fixed in 29,000 tons of concrete sunk 60 feet in the earth. Each of the 142 sections is an equilateral triangle. The legs are 54 feet wide at the base, narrowing to 17 feet wide at the top. The Arch is designed to withstand 150-mile-per-hour winds.

From the start, the push for a monument was a complicated brew of local St. Louis city boosterism with what supporters promoted as a righteous celebration of the spunk and courage of America’s conquest of the West: the bold trek of pioneers to the vast, hostile territories beyond the Mississippi.

Local officials debated the nuts and bolts of location, financing, contracting, and finally, the design. The work was delayed by federal budget constraints, labor disputes, and engineering problems. All that went on for years, with construction beginning in 1963, 16 years after Saarinen’s design was chosen.

The concept of the monument through those years and even now is entangled with clashing sentiments: the celebration of the stalwart march into the frontier, and remorse among many Americans at the expansion of slavery and bloody annexation of tribal lands that followed.

The 19th century move west conjured up the quasi-religious totem of “manifest destiny,” that held that the United States had a moral right to possess the American continent and beyond. Presidents John Quincy Adams and Jefferson, who approved the Louisiana Purchase, Andrew Jackson, and James Polk lobbied for the settlers. Southerners favored expansion to extend slave territory, northerners fought it. Lincoln opposed it.

President U.S. Grant, in his Personal Memoirs, condemned the push to grab new land that, he wrote, led to the Mexican War and later the Civil War. He wrote that “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war in modern times.”

Later, the U.S. went after Cuba, the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and American Samoa. In January Donald Trump used the phrase “manifest destiny” in his inaugural address, and still talks about taking possession of Canada, Greenland, and Panama.  

Apart from all that, the Arch Visitor Center is by itself worth a visit. The huge store of artifacts, maps, videos, and artwork tell the story of the founding of St. Louis in 1764 by French fur traders who traveled up the Mississippi to trade with Indians. The city became American with the Louisiana Purchase in 1803. From that point, tales of pioneers taming the frontier began.

We drove to St. Louis from Nashville with the Arch as a primary target. We browsed through the museum, then lined up for our tram ride. The trams, which operate in both legs, consist of eight tiny five-seat cars; one leaves for the observation deck every ten minutes. Staff people direct visitors into the cars.

The tram door is glass, showing the Arch’s steel and cable innards and maintenance spaces on the creaky four-minute ride. You get seven minutes to gawk out the 16 seven-inch-high, 27-inch- wide windows. To the east, the brown Mississippi flows past the urban center of East St. Louis, the flat fields of Illinois spread in the distance. On our visit a tug chugged past, pushing barges north against the current.

The westside windows show dense downtown St. Louis. Slightly to the south is Busch Stadium, where the Cardinals play. Beyond are the plains of Missouri, which beckoned the pioneers and give meaning to the Arch.

Yet the Civil War taint lingers. In the foreground is the Old Federal Courthouse, where the infamous U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision was taken. Scott, a slave in Missouri, had been taken to free states of Illinois and Wisconsin, then sued for his freedom. The 7-2 decision declared that “people of African descent” are not considered citizens under the Constitution. Four years later the war started.

We got our three-minute tram ride down, then walked along the waterfront and the lush, lovely grounds. We stepped outside the National Park property onto 4th Street. Grandson Patrick and I crossed and climbed the Courthouse steps and walked down the main corridor. The building now is a tourist attraction with a bookstore offering texts on the Scott decision and the broader history of the era. We saw maybe a half-dozen visitors.

We exited the front entrance and stood on the steps. Above, the graceful curve of the Arch loomed over the city and nearby counties in the two states, welcoming tourists and adventurers. It gleamed in the afternoon sun. The frontier was settled long ago. The complicated stories are still being told.

June 9, 2025

Chapel Hill, Tennessee, takes its name from the North Carolina city. The connection ends there. The Tennessee settlement is far harder to travel to, unless you live exactly in the middle of the state. If not, it’s a long way from anywhere.

We had been there before, just shy of a year ago, for the same reason, the Harper reunion. Most families stage reunions occasionally, usually years apart. The Harpers, Sandy’s family, like to get together. So we drove over again, chugging across three states for nine hours, the last three through drenching rain, reminiscent of our May voyage to Virginia. The grandsons, Noah and Patrick, were with us.

It’s an uphill trip. The little mountain towns along I-40 west of Asheville appear then fall away; Canton, Waynesville, Maggie Valley, Clyde. Tennessee shows up just past the 12 miles of single-lane where crews are repairing Hurricane Helene damage, part of the highway collapsed into the Pigeon River. Traffic crawls past the crews and heavy equipment at work, now eight months.

We flew through Newport and then Knoxville, Oak Ridge, Hariman, Kingston, Crab Orchard. Rain whipped across the highway as we made Crossville, the gateway to Pikeville in the center of the Sequatchie Valley, a magical place where Sandy’s aunt and uncle raised cattle and grew vegetables on 130 acres of rich Bledsoe County soil. They’re long gone, but the place still beckons.

Our trip was a familiar pilgrimage, the fifth to Tennessee in seven months, this time to a park in the middle of the state. The interstate reopened, one lane each way, just three months ago.

At 5:00 PM in Chapel Hill we were hungry. The gift-shop lady recommended an oddly named place, From the Heart, next to a gas station. We found it, a tiny spot with a half-dozen tables possibly salvaged from an elementary school cafeteria. A row of amateur oil paintings lined one wall. Games and toys piled on the counters. We were the only customers.

The young girl who brought menus explained that the owner’s name is Hart, she added an “e” to create the name. The fare was comfort food with a bit of flair, Nashville Hot Chicken, cheese-dosed French fries, really anything you want if starving.

The girl was helpful but reserved. She brought us water and tea and disappeared to do the cooking. Through the front window we could see a flow of folks enter the pizza place next door, ignoring From the Heart. The place offered an impression of small-town quietness, maybe loneliness or isolation, as if hardly anyone ever visited.

I sensed the remoteness of the little place and somehow, of the town. The main street through Chapel Hill is U.S. 41/31, lined by the usual small-town businesses: stop-and-go stations, a supermarket, an urgent care. There’s an auto-repair shop, a couple maybe three churches. City Hall is a storefront. A few residential streets branch away from the highway.

Like many small Southern places, it has its touch of Civil War seediness; a monument to Confederate soldiers uses Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest as its centerpiece, the “t” missing from “Nathan,” and “Forrest” lacks the “e” and “t.” The local modern-day Confederates haven’t noticed.

The land was mainly flat, as it is west of I-65. We had left the mountains a hundred miles back. On the trek across the state we enjoyed the gentle rise and fall of the country as it sorts itself from the Great Smokies and prepares travelers for cotton fields of West Tennessee that show up east of Memphis. Keep going west and you’re in prairie.

The reunion the next day was our main event. Early that morning Patrick and I walked the gravel paths that cut across the wide greenway. A midnight storm had left the lush grass glistening. We detoured off at a steep slope down to the Duck River, which flows with silent quickness along the park’s northern boundary. He walked out on a log and bent forward, looking for living things.

The boys were disappointed that the Harper group that showed up included no one younger than 40. We had heard the last-minute excuses and cancelations. Then the forecast wasn’t promising. The faithful ones were there, the ones who always come, first cousins Mike and James, Deborah, Donna, and Bob.

Sandy’s nephew Caleb drove down from Nashville. He’s the farrier with the easy Southern smile, the forever-young fellow who plays Irish ballads at country bars. His tunes—I’ve heard a few recordings—express a kind of mournful mysticism or devoutness that may limit him in the raucous Nashville music scene. He keeps playing, and shoeing horses.

We circulated, renewed acquaintances, repeated the introductions we made last year. Mike grilled burgers and brat, others laid out the potluck. We donated to the tombstone fund, which Mike and Deborah will use to purchase headstones for the unmarked family graves at Nashville’s Catholic cemetery. We want to know who’s where.

Caleb had brought an Irish football for the boys. We kicked it around in the grass near the pavilion, the three of us, staying in the muggy shade. We could feel the storm brewing.

The guests stretched in their lawn chairs, happy to be there, to recognize other familiar faces and learn a few new ones. We walked past the whiteboards explaining the family tree and its timelines: Michael Farrell, the Irish immigrant, in 1830, his daughter, Annie and John William Harper, their 10 kids and down the line. We could see the need for adding the most recent level.

That would be a project for next year’s reunion, if there is one. The enlarged color photo of last year’s gathering included a few no longer with us. Sandy’s sister, smiling and happy in last year’s shot, passed suddenly in December. Brother-in-law Dale, with a big smile in the photo, died two months later.

The middle-agers and seniors talked and laughed. I stared at the photo. Next year’s party probably would miss a few present at this one. The ranks may get thinner, but younger folks will show up, we hope. We’ll come again, I guess, doing our part.