I’m running a little behind here, nearly 2 months after returning from bayou country. But, finally, this is my last posting. And, if you read on, the pictures! Readers of my previous trips’ accounts will be familiar with what was a more daily set of dispatches. Each leg of the trip was summarized with a quick dashboard up top: usually the date, the termini town names, distance traveled and the principal routes and places traversed. Then I’d share, very much in current blogday fashion, my observations and musings from each day’s miles while behind the wheel.
I didn’t do that much this trip. Partly that is because age tends to make simply recounting a day’s events without a whole lot of other context meaningless for others to read. (It’s precisely that solipsism that makes me inclined to eschew blogs.) But it was also because I didn’t take very interesting roads to and from New Orleans. Normally on my long road trips the route and the journey themselves are a central part of the experience. But I was trying to maximize my time at destinations and not on the road. I raced through the three legs of the trip on the way down, and the two returning, covering more than 3,350 of my 3,500 miles in just 5 days.
It’s easy with that kind of schedule to focus on putting as many miles behind you as quickly as possible each day. And it’s easy to forget that, fundamentally, you’re on vacation, life is short, and who know when you’ll pass by this way again. There were a few things I almost missed.
* * * * *
In Asheville, NC, I stopped for a longer lunch than I normally might have. Asheville has a surprising concentration of tasty, locally brewed beer. And pleased that I did as I discovered Catawba Valley Whiskey Brown, aged in Tennessee whiskey barrels before it’s served. It has lovely hints of bourbon (except that it’s Tennessee whiskey and not Bourbon County, Kentucky, whiskey) but made for a frustrating lunch since I couldn’t have another one before getting back in my car (and it’s not sold in bottles).
* * * * *
For a few stretches, to break up the monotony, I pulled off of interstates in favor of two-lane roads. US 221, through western Virginia, satisfied my occasional need to feel like I’m in high-speed driving school: careening on winding highway roads up mountain switchbacks around hairpin turns, and down again on the far sides. It sure beats the mind numbingly gradual geometry of most interstates. Not that my car is particularly well-suited for high-performance driving, such as it is. A 1991 Corolla with nearly 153,000 miles, the sturdiest piece of it, undoubtedly, is the muffler I replaced the week before I left.
* * * * *
I stopped in Tuskegee, Alabama, to see the university and the town’s important national sites. The George Washington Carver Museum was disappointing. It was encyclopedic but poorly interpreted. With an interest in public health history, I asked around about sites that were associated with or explained the Tuskegee Experiment. Poor word choice on my part. Everyone thought I was referring to the Tuskegee Airmen Experiment, so called, in which the military endeavored to study whether or not blacks could be trained as pilots for the war effort. In time, over 1,000 black pilots passed through Moton Field near the university and moved into flying roles in Europe and over the Pacific—though never in combat, always in support.
But the experiment I was wondering about was the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment which, for forty years beginning in the 1930s, recruited black sharecroppers from around the university who had contracted syphilis and observed them longitudinally to understand how the disease progressed and spread, untreated. The experiment began before antibiotics were in wide use and treatments for the disease were of questionable help and, often, toxic. But inexplicably, even after penicillin became widely available during World War II, it was not used to treat any of the participants. The least cynical interpretation of this would have required that a control group of patients being observed receive the drug to understand the differences and adhere to some modicum of scientific method. It apparently never happened and, more startlingly, continued into the early 1970s. If there is a way to view it as anything other than cynically and suspiciously, the uncovering of what happened at Tuskegee gave rise to the modern notion of requiring the informed consent of patients participating in medical experiments, and the requirement that research institutes submit their ideas for use of people to the rigors of review boards in advance.
No one I asked in town knew anything about it. And I got some awfully weird looks.
* * * * *
On the day I left New Orleans to return home, I set out before dawn under ominous storm clouds that were just coming into relief in the brighteneing sky. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was to be a day that dozens of tornados marched eastward across the southeast, including the one in Enterprise, AL, that led to the collapse of a school roof on shelter-seeking students. As I darted east-northeast at roughly 60 mph, I listened to Emergency Broadcast System alerts over the radio that talked about imminently forming funnel clouds or actual tornado sightings. Coordinates were given in the form for county and town names. Eerily, they were names I recalled passing through an hour or two before.
Toward mid-morning it was a torrent and I suddenly wondered if I was still keeping ahead of the storms. The names of counties and towns I heard on the radio alerts no longer sounded familiar. I was torn between keeping on at a clip or stopping to see if I could find on my map where the tornados were seen. I imagined what a pinball bouncing around under a glass pane must feel something like I did skipping from town to town generally eastward but veering here and there to shorten distances and avoid the front bearing down from behind.
Morning passed into afternoon and, while the rain continued, the soup of instability lessened as the day heated the air and equalized the differing temperatures the led to the atmosphere’s instability. The alerts slacked off. I drove less aggressively. I felt safe enough to finally stop and have lunch at around 4pm. I was relieved but not a little sad that I didn’t get to see a tornado, at least from afar, which I never have.
* * * * *
But the most poignant reminder for me of how important it is to slow down and take in what’s around me was near the very beginning of this journey. Not two hours into my trip on my very first day leaving New York, I was squeezed off of the highway in central Pennsylvania by a detour of continental proportion. Just west of the Lehigh Valley on I-78, about 100 miles of the interstate was closed because of the Valentine’s Day blizzard (it was a blizzard in these parts) that blew through the day before. Somehow I had missed this little news story (more than a thousand stranded, National Guard delivering food and water by snowmobile, etc.) when I set out and now I was creeping through Amish country on bleak, ice-encrusted county roads at about 10 mph. I fumed at the prospect of missing dinner in Roanoke.
When traffic eased and the roads opened up about 5 hours later, I was consumed with the need to somehow make up time. My driving day was two-thirds over and I hadn’t rolled through half of the miles I needed to. After consulting a map, I plotted a beeline—to the extent that’s possible in western PA—for the nearest interstate about 50 miles away and raced along to try to make up time. Suddenly I was driving through the thicket of crossroads that is Gettysburg, PA. Hmm, I thought to myself, I’ve never actually been to Gettysburg. That, despite believing that the Gettysburg Address is one of the finest pieces of oratory I’ve ever read or heard—parsimonious, patriotic and evocative. Snippets began to run through my head and I could feel a smile creeping onto my face. But before I knew it, I had crossed out of town and into the county. Just like that, I passed through the spot where, in two-and-a-half days of fighting, upward of 6,000 Americans died—3,100 of them ostensibly fighting for the Union in the cause which, Lincoln said, displayed the men’s last full measure of devotion.
About a half-mile beyond town I slowed and pulled to the side of the road to collect my thoughts for a moment. I swung a U-turn and my engine whined back up a hill that was the same one the Union army first saw the Confederates approaching from the northwest. At the top were statues and bronze plaques and other commemorations. I sat in my car staring out across the perfectly snow-glazed fields toward a ridgeline in the north. I got out and walked a few hundred paces in different directions taking it all in. And then it hit me. On my iPod I had Sam Waterston reading the Gettysburg address.
Yes, I’m that much of a nerd.
I returned, cued it up, and listened to Sam read it a few times before finally pulling out and pressing on for dinner. It seemed altogether fitting and proper.
Thanks for reading along.
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Here are the pictures from the trip (with no need to sign in).
And, finally, here is the summary of legs from the trip for those of you who love this part best:
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Leg 1
Just the facts, ma'am:
NYC to Roanoke, VA
505 miles through NJ, PA, MD, WV and VA
via I-80, I-287, I-78, US 222, US 30, I-81 and I-581
Monday, February 19
Leg 2
Just the facts, ma’am:
Roanoke, VA to Meridian, MS
751 miles through VA, NC, TN, AL and MS
via VA 419, US 221, US 70, US 74, I-75, I-24, I-59
Tuesday, February 20
Leg 3
Just the facts, ma'am:
Meridian, MS to New Orleans, LA
425 miles through Vicksburg (MS), Waterproof (LA), Black Hawk Plantation, Morganza, Baton Rouge & New Orleans
via I-20, US 65, LA 568, LA 15, LA 1, US 190 and I-10
Tuesday, February 27
Leg 4
Just the facts, ma'am:
New Orleans to Venice, LA, and back through Plaquemines & St. Bernard Parishes
183 miles through (to name a few, because they’re so great): Belle Chasse, Concession, Jesuit Bend, Naomi, Alliance, Ironton, Point Celeste, Happy Jack, Potash, Port Sulphur, Tropical Bend, Empire, Buras, Fort Jackson, Boothville, Venice, Pointe a la Hache, Cop Land East (yes, really… more later), Nero, Promised Land, Stella, Port Nickel, Braithwaite, Violet, Meraux, and Chalmette
via US 90, LA 23, Tidewater Road, Pointe a la Hache Ferry across the Mississippi, LA 39 and LA 46
Thursday, March 1
Leg 5
Just the facts, ma'am:
New Orleans, LA to Charleston, SC
830 miles (a new personal one-day, one-person record) through Mobile, Montgomery, Tuskegee, Macon, Augusta, and Columbia
via I-10, I-65, i-85, US 80, US 129, GA 44, I-20, I-26
Sunday, March 4
Leg 6
Just the facts, ma'am:
Charleston, SC to New York City
814 miles through
via I-26 & I-95 (boor-RING!)
Total for trip: 3,508 miles
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