I crossed the Mississippi at Vicksburg, a great swampy swath before the river and then hills up from the banks. Before I hit Jackson I found the exit for the Natchez Trace Parkway. I had taken this parkway a few years ago a some friend and her sister who were moving from Asheville to St. Paul and wanted to tour the south before resigning herself to the north. We had visited New Orleans and were headed up river and took the Parkway from its southern terminus at Natchez to this point near Jackson. Along the way I recall an episode in which my friend was feeling unwell so we stopped by the side of the road to allow her out of the car. She hurried to the edge of the woods and after a while her sister suggested i take her some water and a towel. As I stepped out of the car I thought to myself, my this ground is soft (I was not wearing shoes since it was so hot) and within a few seconds, my feet burning with over stimulation, I realized I had stepped into a fire ant nest. So here I am jumping around manically brushing ants off my feet and legs while my friend, crouched by the side of the words, wonders what could be more important than her well being.
So I had seen the southern part of this well groomed road with its wide verges and dark woods draped, like set pieces, in spanish moss. And now I figured, if I was going to take a drive, I would take a drive on roads that prohibited semis, and i would see the northern part of road.
The road itself runs along the route of an ancient path through the southern woods. The path was blazed by Native Americans from foraging paths trod down by large game and was later used by the military and the postal service, serving as an important link between the well connected "north" (Nashville and the areas north and east) and ports on the Mississippi river (such as Natchez).
The way the road looks now, with wide cleared, neatly mowed verges belies its origins as a narrow path through a dark and forbidding wood. But it makes current travel by car a pleasant journey with no commercial development and few at grade crossings. As you travel north the woods get less dark, less heavily junglish and occasionally the forest opens up to wide meadows with ancient wooden barns. I headed to Tupelo the first night as darkness fell and checked into a motel 6. It was 10pm and the air had cooled all the way down to 88.
I woke up not to early the next day and stopped by the Wal-Mart to pick up a case of oil for this thirsty (read: leaky) truck. I headed north again on the trace, swiping a corner of Alabama and entering Tennessee. I got off the parkway to fuel up (and oil up). I had wanted to continue further up the trace to Grinder's Stand, the site where, on a fall day in 1809 at the age of 35 the perennially depressive Meriwether Lewis either shot himself or was murdered. An interesting end to the life of a man who traveled to the Pacific when Europeans of the east weren't even sure where it was exactly.
Anyway, I took a wrong turn out of Collinwood and ended up in Lawrenceburg and kept heading east toward Chattanooga.
I made a slight detour north to Lynchburg to see something I had always wanted to see, the distillery where Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey is made. As you enter this very cutesy town you can see the barrel houses holding millions of gallons of whiskey dotting the hills above the hollers. The day was getting pretty steamy and the cool visitors center where I waited for the tour to begin was pleasant. I highly recommend the distillery tour. It is a full tour of all aspects of the distillery, up close and personal, not from a distance and not a tour of some mock up. It's the real thing. 
You can stick your head in the fermenting vats or the charcoal filtering towers and that combined with a 
walk through the highly aromatic barrel house will likely leave you a bit lightheaded. Besides it's free. The only catch is that, hilariously, The distillery is in a dry county and as such you can not buy or consume whiskey on the tour or anywhere else in the county however you can buy "Commemorative Bottles" that are sold to be collected but they are only marginally more expensive than a bottle at your local liquor store and the whiskey inside is, I assure you, completely drinkable. 
Out of Chattanooga I followed the Ocoee (site of the 1996 Olympic Kayaking events) up torturous curves and spitting rain into the Smokey mountains, a place it always seems to be raining, and a place I don't mind the rain. It seems to add to the atmosphere. (It is after all, like the Northwest coast, a temperate rainforest receiving over 6 feet of precipitation per year)Night fell in western North Carolina and eventually I got to Asheville where I shared some of my commemorative whiskey with friends and then headed to a bar to dispose of the rest of the evening.
In the morning I waited for my friends to wake and then took them out to brunch in Asheville before headed out towards Greenville (NC) in the eastern part of the state to visit another friend who also disposed of some of my commemorative whiskey.
In the morning I headed north and a bit east towards Chesapeake, Virginia, part of the Hampton Roads/Norfolk glut of shipping and military complexes at the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay. 
Here I did my last bit of trucking, stopping by Kerneos, a cement importer, to pick up some calcium aluminate cement to be shipped to me to build the bread oven. The truck sagged a bit but made the trip across the 17 mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge Tunnel. and up the long DelMarVa peninsula and up the driveway back home. The clouds from earlier in the day had cleared and it was a cool blue day. This will be the last entry in this blog. Thanks for reading.
I'll now direct you to my blog documenting the building of my brick oven
and the beginnings of a bread business.
No comments:
Post a Comment