Short Stories, Long Odds

Interstate 40 runs a long way across the United States and it bisects Tennessee from west to east, from Memphis on one end to Knoxville on the other. The distance between those two cities is roughly 380 miles, and Nashville sits in between, the Vanderbilt radius to the Volunteer diameter.

There are many signs as you enter Tennessee from the west, imploring you to try Memphis barbecue or to visit Graceland. Unlike Arkansas, where most of the billboards are either blank or an advertisement selling the billboard itself, Tennessee has plenty to sell you and plenty of things to do and see in metro areas.

Tennessee could use one of those signs at the state line to warn drivers that the highways are not lit and that modern infrastructure does not extend into the hills and valleys, but this is not the case.  Instead you discover this the wrong way, at 8:00 PM on a winter night when the sun has been down for hours.

My bad luck was expansive – I made this drive during a new moon and the hills and trees choked out any hope of ambient light. I thought my Ford Focus would be sufficient to carry us 4,000 miles in a week. Now the headlamps seemed weak, projecting an impotent 20 or 30 feet in front of us and then being swallowed up by the relentless dark.  I thought as we drove that if I were a settler or a trucker or had grown up with woodscraft this sort of contingency would have occurred to me. But I was not, and I did not, and it did not.

It was Saturday so other travellers were scarce. Occasionally a car would be behind us for a while before turning off or we would see headlights in front of us, sometimes on the same plane as us and sometimes elevated and seeming to hang in the sky from the highway divided by trees and height, dappled and sparkling as their glow passed through thousands of branches. Usually, though, we were alone in the middle of nowhere.

With no cars in front of us and none trailing behind, we existed in a sea of black, surrounded by nothing but what gleamed and reflected in the scant glow of the dashboard lights or the radio. I felt weightless, as if we were adrift in deep water that only reflected night, or as if the car were not moving at all and instead the earth spun under our wheels. It was like driving in space, and some how the cloying absence of light even muted the sounds of road.

Diana is ever the faithful navigator and understands that I am a nervous driver, born without a sense of direction. She chose things for us to listen to on my iPod that would distract me from my cloistered paranoia and probably also served to keep the bats and creatures in both our imaginations at bay. Where the GPS system showed only a blue strip of highway extending forever forward and back with nothing on either side for miles and miles, Diana made the radio play songs we knew and could sing, and those songs filled up the darkness with comfort.

It seems like a silly thing for a modern grown-ass man to be afraid of the dark, but the utter isolation made me feel more and more lonely until I was frightened. I can change a tire but if something more severe had happened we could have been in serious trouble, or at the very least marooned in a tree-choked valley for hours until daylight. I had a satellite navigation system and a BlackBerry with a strong signal. I had the internet, if I needed it. But the GPS will not give you turn-by-turn directions to “Get Me Out Of Here” and Google cannot instantly rescue you from being stranded in the middle of nowhere. Our technology does nothing to make being helpless and far away from help any less likely, it only increases the probability of and decreases the waiting time for rescue.

The irony is that my ancestors come from those lands – one of my old editors calls me half-savage – and that even though I can not properly use a compass or make fire from two sticks, I seem to know things about nature I should not. Like how moss grows on the shady side of the tree and not the north. In that innate knowledge maybe I also inherited a healthy dose of Indian wisdom, the kind that sometimes reads like paranoia but to me always seems like pragmatism. An old Sioux proverb, endlessly misappropriated by and wrongfully contributed to writers and social critics: Call on the Great Spirit, but row away from the rocks.

Several days later, having made it out of the land of  Smoky Mountains and Dolly Partons with no incident and only frayed nerves as injuries, we returned to my mother’s house on Sleepy Hollow Lane in Weatherford to collect our dogs and rest before heading home. I related our experience in the Tennessee Valley and she told me about chasing her own headlights on Hungry Mother Mountain when she and my father had taken a trip to Tazewell, Virginia to see my Aunt Opal, thinking it looked like a shortcut on the map.

“And it was,” she said ruefully, “but while it was only ten miles from Wytheville to Tazewell on the map, they don’t show you the 40 miles of winding roads up and down the mountain with no guardrail.”

After the conversation had moved on for a bit, my mother returned to it, apropos of nothing.

“Do you remember going to Virginia when you and your brother were kids?” she asked.

I told her I did.

She said “On that same stretch of road where you felt like you were all alone, your father and I had the same experience on that trip until we weren’t alone at all. We were in that big black Suburban we had – do you remember it?” (I did) ” – and we were driving on a Sunday night and it was very dark, just like you guys were. But we passed a big black van at about midnight and it jumped the median behind us and chased us for 40 miles.”

My mother had started to relate this story as she went the motions of lightning a cigarette.  I have watched her do this thousands of times, and as her last word hung frozen in the air, her head kept nodding like it always has when she pauses in the middle of a tale to fire up. I waited, feeling the hairs on my skin prick up.

“We drove and drove and they didn’t leave us alone, honking the horn and flashing the lights and trying to come up beside us and run us off the road. That van was the only other car we saw until your dad tried to lose them. That’s why we ended up staying in Bucksnort at three in the morning. I had your father’s gun out in case they wrecked us and we didn’t sleep that night. We just kept looking at the door of the motel.”

“What the hell?” I said. “Why didn’t anyone tell us about this before we left?”

“What good would it do?” she said. “You have to drive that road sometime. I didn’t want to tell you before you left, but I thought about it when you said you were scared driving through there.”

So maybe my fear was not nameless after all. Maybe some part of me remembered my mother looking terrified when we pulled into the TRAVELER’S INN off of Interstate 40 in Bucksnort, Tennessee. I always remembered it as her preferring not to slum it in dirty motels. I thought sanitation was why we did not sleep under the covers and instead laid blankets and pillows on top of the made beds. Diana and I did not encounter a black van with a big V-8 block, ballbusting up the road behind to put us in the ditch, but 15 years previous I had, even though I did not properly know it.

The worst part about that fear you get when you are isolated and wandering somewhere unfamiliar in America is not being alone, and it is not being lost. The worst part is knowing that evil exists. Real wickedness is out there, the kind that sometimes – not often, but definitely sometimes – results in a family beginning the day on a happy adventure and ending the day in a shallow grave, lost forever in a forgotten wood where moss grows in the shade.