Shakesthegrounds Rumblings

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Hugs, everybody!

[Shakesthecoffecan]

SO I now have $24.00 in a coffee can.

I am going to start on another can this week.  It is a chock full o' nuts can.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Saturday night I was over at a friends house,t hey were playing music and conversing as they tried to navigate from one song to another. Some how the subject can up of an acquaintence of one of them was headed to the big Harley rally in Sturgis, South Dakota and broke down before he got there.

"You know what the name of the place was? Ten Sleep."

I was like "Wow, Ten Sleep, Wyoming."

He asked if I had been there, I said no, I had been near there and knew people who had been there. Then they sang:

[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3G2ob_gWp4[/youtube]

And Ennis smelled that shirt, hoping to catch a wiff of the lodge pole pine. All that remained was a memory.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

I tell people that if it wern't for funerals I wouldn't ever get out of town. When Lynne announced her plans for her mothers memorial service , I jumped at the chance. I am shallow that way, and others.

Friday morning, with Crybaby safely exploring her new surroundings, I pointed the silver bullet west, intoned Mamie to clean the way and climbed the mountain, Lovers Leap, the way I could drive with my eyes closed having over 30 years experience at it, the ever changing landscape, the old buildings I used to stop and photograph now replaced by replaced by prefabs steel structures what housed a business one year and have set empty ever since.

The way familiar to the state line with Tennessee, where I always peeled off and went to college and late alumni weekend. More lay beyond, but it was the road I was not familiar with, the towns that were vague to me. That day, crossing the state line I was met with dust. The air was full of it. The mountains in the distance were obscured, the wind rocking the silver bullet worse than the semis.

In Baileyton, Tennessee, I pulled off I81 and got some gas. It was time for luncheon and I noticed a BBQ food truck set up in a parking lot next door. It had one of those metal carport structures set up with tables, a semipermanent restaurant of sorts. I got me a sandwich and a Dr. Enuf, the man at the window wondering where all this dust was coming from. He had thought the day before ti was blowing from the truck stop parking area across the way but it was everywhere today. I ate in my car.

Down past the end of I81, on I40, headed west through the sprawl of Knoxville, five lanes and signs that still gave milage in miles and kilometers, a relic of the 1982 Worlds Fair, and off to my left the Sun Sphere. That oddball tacky golden structure where it will always be 1982. I 75 should be coming up. Watch for the signs, ear bud in my ear to the mechanical woman could tell in "in a quarter of a mile, exit right onto I75 South". Five lanes at 75 miles and hour and the phone wrings. It is the office. Bless her heart this agent has to tell me that she doesen't know if she is going to be able to show that house or not this weekend. So and so's mother has to be hospitalized and so for but if she does where does she find the key. She is an only child. Nothing in the world exists except what she has going on right now and that does not account for the 8 years she has worked with me. I tell her to look on the show card and it will tell her what to do but I have to repeat myself because at the same instant mechanical woman is telling me to exit left onto I 75 south.....

[Shakesthecoffecan]

The text from Lynne came to be before I left saying she had forgot to pack DVDs. I was still packing, if you could call it that. I packed a bottle of whine that was never opened, not because I didn't pack a bottle opener but because it was not needed. One well traveled bottle of Winking Owl Shiraz awaits.

I looked around, I pulled out boxes. I could not remember what the year was when I last watched it. Could not remember who was living then or what the drama was. Brokeback was missing. I had no idea what I had done with it. I suspected it might be in the safe, and I had already locked the safe and sent myself an email saying I had locked the safe in case I had any question later as to its status. I saw Ciao, which I watched one time but really liked, and Were the World Mine, which I recently saw with commercial interruptions on Logo at 4 am recently when I could not sleep, and Shelter, it was up on the shelf. O-well. It would be nice to see it again.

I did not bring the sage that I said I would. I had to go back in the house and grab a bunch of shirts when I realized sitting in the driveway I had not packed any. Had not looked under the hood, had not bought gas. I was just going. I had finally, after half a century got comfortable enough that I could just get in a car and go.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

At 204,000 miles, the Silver Bullet still runs like a top, but the CD player is f'd up and my Ipod was dead and I had not packed the cord to charge it. I did have a radio. As soon as I reached Marion I tuned into 89.5, WETS in Johnson City, Tennessee, the first public radio station I ever seriously listed to and the gold standard by which I will always judge others. After 30 years it is still a golden meeting ground of blue haired classical devotees and left wing Appalachian Activists.

George McGovern was dying. "A family spokesperson reports that he is in the final stages of his life and resting comfortably in Hospice care surrounded by his family. The 90 year old former Senator has been unresponsive since Wednesday."

I was treated to the audio portion of a 2005 documentary about McGovern, and how the 1972 Democratic Convention brought conventions out of the smokey back rooms and into the lights of the TV. I would argue that had probably started 4 years earlier when the whole world was watching. It was my first exposure to politics. Age 9 when I learned how to hate. Validated two years later when when the eventual victorr of that race came on the TV and said he would resign the presidency effective noon tomorrow.

By the time I reached Knoxville the signal had faded and presumably the senator could have too. I was delighted however to find many other public stations and just generally cool ones playing bluegrass and classic country as I made my way down the road, looking for Athens. I had already decided Athens was as far as this road was taking me. My calculations put me sling shotting around Chattanooga about rush hour and I had no desire to get in that mess. At Athens, Tennessee l left the Interstate and stopped and got me a Nutty Buddy and took a right out of the gas station onto Rt. 30, and into the mountains.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

Here, I was cutting fence. This road would take me some place I had never been before, never seen. Signs in years for candidates I had never heard of, knew nothing of and did not want to know. 50 miles an hour, did I mention it was a beautiful fall day in sprite of the dust, which was still everywhere? It was the temperature perfect, the road winding, Rt. 30 changing from William Jennings Bryan Highway at a bridge being redone. It was reduced to one lane with a stop light to regulate it. A sign there reading that the delay would be no longer than three minutes. Since I was the lead car I had to stay on the ready for the light to turn green.

I crossed over that wide river and landed on the Old Washington Road, which carried me to Dayton, a little town where you have to be on your toes or you'll miss your turn. Take a right and go down two blocks where the bald headed man in polyester pants is sweeping the funeral home parking lot. Then climb, climb again. Somewhere, there is no sign that I saw, is the border with the central time zone. Only my all knowing phone could tell me that now I would have to subtract an hour from the time on my dashboard.

Here were the sought after leaves, yellow and red and rust and an occasional wild purple like a tunnel opening out unto a dusty vista of the valley below. A sign said this road was part of the trail of tears, the route the Cherokee had travelled when President Jackson decided they were not worthy to remain where they had lived for centuries and needed to to go "Indian Territory". Down, down the switch backs that my phone was showing me was just a crawl forward. Down the mountain. Down to Pikeville.

Here my quandry, turn south and take a more direct route to my destination or continue west thru McMinnville. I elected south on 127 and was glad I did. The beeline road went down the valley for miles. The Sherriff not paying any attention sitting in the middle school parking lot. Here were farms and cattle and horses and churches with inpronouncable Cherokee names like Ewtowah. The clouds gathered and I took off my shades. Lonely places. I soaked them up into my soul.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

At Dunlap, I got on Rts. 8 and 111 and climbed the mountain again. A nervous four lane where a couple billion years of history could be seen in the excavation of the road, like a mural that just came as a result. Up ahead a road block, flashing lights slowed the traffic so that approximately 30 uniformed officers could assist in the towing away of a broke down semi, a livestock carrier, empty of contents. I wondered it they had had to effect a transfer there on the road. Soon I was up on the plateau and took a left on Rt 399, which I think was called Shooting Range Road. It was two lanes and carried me far into the country, and up behind another semi, loaded with a sweet mash I suspect having to do with the local distilleries, it travelled 15 miles and hour for a long way and I cracked my windows to inhale the sweetness of the grains, but not so much or so close as to be pelted by the hard bits falling off of it.

Intersection ahead, please turn left. Ah hell no.

I passed through the oddly named for that region community of Gruelli-Laager. What lost bunch of northern Europeans had settled on this place I wondered. I would have to read up on it later, the constant mental calculations with the dash board time piece ever reminding me that trying to arrive at a place one has never been before in the dark is always a GDBOAUS.

[Shakesthecoffecan]

The Sweet Smelling Semi pulled off onto an unnamed gravel road, never to be seen again and I was left to navigated the last set of switch backs into the valley, into Franklin County where I crossed over the interstate 24 that I would have no use of, and on toward my destination. Time for the GPS again. In the potential shadow of a water tank with Nissan on it I set in my Nissan and goodled Tims Ford Rustic State Park. I wonder if the car detected it was near its birthplace?

Down Rt. 50, the Veterans Memorial Highway, toward Winchester. First however was the very well preserved town of Decherd, pronounced as far as I could tell "deckard". Here the train was passing though town so I had chance to look at all the old store buildings, home now to occasionally run antiques stores, and a hardward store gone dark.  Ear bud in my ear, I approached the birthplace of Dinah Shore in the rush hour traffic, maze of strip malls and CVS, Republican Headquarters and "in a quarter of a mile (DING DONG) right on (DING DONG)" both the phone was ringing from home to see  if I had made it and a deluge of text messages betwixt Lynne and Wayne discussing a shopping list with the admonition to Drive Carefully.

Up by the court house and the square lined with old businesses and a right turn on High Street. It was like the cuttin' horse road twixt Rocky Point and Lightning Flat. Take a right, talk a left, take a right, take a left. Drive, drive, drive. Cross a bridge. Welcome to Tims Ford Rustic State Park, and Golf Course. Cabins, this way.

But before I could reach it, after every other obstacle had been exhausted, here come a flock of Guinney Hens. There were about 2 dozen of them. Dumbest birds that ever lived, sharing one brain cell betwixt the entire flock. I can remember as a kid watching a regular chicken go out into the road to coax a Guinney on the rest of the way across. They were in the process, stopping (each one) to scratch at the pavement. I rolled down the window and asked them why they won't already roosting.

She come running out of that non rustic cabin like I'd come home from Iraq.

[Penthesilea]

Maybe she was the one coming home from Iraq.