Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (15 page)

“That’s me.”

“I been hearing about you, but damn. I thought you’d be some butch she-man.”

What did that mean? Feminine women couldn’t accomplish feats of endurance?

I stood straighter. “I really appreciate your letting me walk through the construction site.”

“Oh. Yeah.” He grabbed his walkie-talkie. “I got a lady here. She’s gonna walk your way.”

“A what?”

“A lady. In a green jacket. I need you to hold traffic and let her walk through.”

Radio silence ticked through seconds. “She hot? This lady?”

“Come on, man.” He cut his eyes sideways.

“Well? Am I?”

If laughter is the great uniter, we bonded. We were still laughing when he clicked his radio and said, “Just hold traffic, okay? And let her walk through.”

He waved me into a sulfur cloud, and I plunged in before he could change his mind. My teeth knocked together when my foot hit the overpass. As I hurried along the empty lane, every worker tipped a hard hat. The other flagger awaited me at the end, a line of cars and campers snaking behind him. He waved me over. “You got another bridge like this one. ’Bout a half mile ahead. I tole ’em you was coming.”

“Thank you!” I took a few steps and snapped a picture of Trace improvements.

It took almost three hundred miles to encounter an improvement project. The federal government diverted funds from its eighth-most-visited National Park, because few people would protest. Bigger populations lobbied for restricted funds, while I walked over swaths of pavement missing white-and-yellow lines, stepped around open potholes and photographed acres of discarded trash. The Natchez Trace remained a version of Nowhere, forgotten by those who were supposed to preserve it.

But as I inched my way closer to the Meriwether Lewis site in Tennessee, I only cared about one thing. Congress cut ranger patrols, closed restrooms and left many Trace stops forlorn, but I started my walk knowing Meriwether Lewis’s grave might be closed.

Would it be open the day I got there?

At the end of almost two miles of construction, I expected to find Dad gloating, “I sold all them books! Who’s the best salesman, huh?”

The Trace stretched northward, barren. A world emptied of my father. How I would miss him when he was gone. Emptiness tripped me, sent me reeling. On my knees, I scrolled through my Trace time with Dad. I tried to record snatches of conversation for play back when I ached for our banter, but he always froze. He would force me to remember.

But Memory wouldn’t be enough to capture him.

People forget the nuances of a voice. Photographs smear lines. I practiced Dad’s speech patterns by writing them, and I mocked his voice and mannerisms. But I’d never be able to conjure him. The well of memory wasn’t deep enough to remake a person.

I brushed grass from my pants and stumbled into another sign.

Old Trace. 1/2 mile
.

The Old Trace was an earthy gash, eroded remnants of the original trail. I sought out those strips of sunken dirt. Hollows amplified the echo of Time. A stampeding herd of buffalo. The thwack of arrow against bow. A lone boatman, surprised by a thief, pounded to death for his treasure.

I never wanted to hear him scream.

But I rocked back and forth, stomach and bladder insisting upon my full attention. “I’m sure a bathroom is too much to hope for,” I mumbled and tramped into the empty parking lot. Splinters pricked my fingers at the faded brown-and-gold information sign. A bannister drew me to uneven stairs. I readied my lunch on a picnic table tattooed with graffiti.

My bladder twinged again. I hopped down stairs and sprawled on the leaf-strewn Old Trace. Branches blocked clouds and sky. I wondered whether Meriwether Lewis rode that far south. If he ever walked where I stood.

My phone jangled. Ghosts whirlpooled through dead leaves in retreat.

“Hello?”

“Andra?” Dad’s voice boomed over the speaker. “Where are you?”

“I’m at Old Trace. Old Trace!”

“We just drove by there. Didn’t see nobody.”

“I was………..um………….” How did I tell my father I was communing with the past? With the whispers I heard? Walking fifteen miles alone made me sensitive to spirits swirling in layers. After almost three weeks, their voices wafted along zephyrs blown from the beginning of Time. The Natchez Trace kept me company, and its haunting brought lonesome joy.

Even though my experience was true, it sounded crazy. I stumbled over words. “I………….”

“Well, I just sold another book. That makes twelve today.”

“That’s great, Dad.”

“Yeah. So, me and your mother’ll turn around and come back. Didn’t see you when we rode by. Can’t figure out why.”

I hauled myself from the Old Trace. From where I stood, my view of the highway was blocked by trees. I dropped my pants and squatted. Just adding my essence to history.

Another way wandering souls marked their territory.

Mom and Dad squealed into the parking lot. Before the car stopped, Mom fled the driver’s seat. “I think I’ll walk with you for a while today, Andra. I called Roy to come and get me, because I’m all better. Sitting around that B and B with ice on my foot was making me stir crazy.”

“Mom, you haven’t rested your ankle enough.” Banana squished between my cheeks.

“I iced it! All morning!”

“Dad!” I joined him at the information sign. “Tell Mom she can’t walk with me.”

Rather than answer, Dad whipped out his manhood and sprayed the ground around my feet.

I jumped from the path of the yellow stream and almost dropped my banana. “Eewww! Dad!”

Mom snickered. “Well, he obviously can’t judge whether I’m fit to walk. He’s got so much gas today, and—”

“Please, Mom. I’m eating.” I stalked back to what remained of my lunch. Peanut butter became sawdust in my mouth. “I don’t think you should—”

Mom assumed a stance I recognized as part of my genetic code. Hands on hips. Weight on one leg. A tone that brokered no debate. “I’m going, Andra. I can’t stand to be cooped up anymore. With him.”

A final yellow rivulet ran to the sign’s base. Dad shook himself dry and zipped up. He reached into a pocket and found a sleeve of peanuts. After he dumped a salty pile into his palm, he offered it to me. “Want some?”

I took a few steps backward and almost fell over the picnic table. “Pee-seasoned nuts? No thanks, Dad. You enjoy that.”

He was already popping peanuts into his mouth. “You see this tree?” He pointed to a moss-covered pine. “It’s probably a few hundred years old.”

“That’s great, Dad.”

“Some amazing wood along this place. Make some mighty fine tables.”

“You already bought a table, Dad.” I gestured to the Mercury’s trunk, where his prize took up precious real estate amid flats of water, hiking gear and protein snacks. Nobody could convince him we didn’t have room for an antique table. If Dad took a shine to a piece of junk, he always found a way to bring it home.

“I can sell it.” He sauntered over to Mom and me. “It’s the mark you leave on stuff. You know, refinishing it and whatnot. Lets people know you been here.”

I excavated memory. I found my first antique in a barn, along the banks of a muddy river. A dresser of light oak, stained brass highlighting its three drawers. When I put my ear along its pockmarked top, I heard music. The clash of an iron skillet and crackling fire.

Maybe everything held the record of what came before it.

EVERY DAY IS A WINDING ROAD

Sheryl Crow

I remember the first time I bought an old piece of furniture. Linda and me was just married, and we didn’t have much money. But I knew she liked finery even then, so I took her up to the furniture store and told her to pick out some things. I gave her a budget and all that, but of course she went over. Picked out a house full of too-much-what-all.

When the delivery truck groaned into our driveway, I watched ’em unload. Chairs and tables and a green-and-cream sofa that’d seat five. White lamps that was shaped like the bulb of an onion.

I waited and waited.

For a mattress.

And maybe a bed.

At the end of the whole shiny parade, I turned to Linda. “Well, you got all this dining room stuff, and the living room’s packed to the gills, and I appreciate you getting me that tan chair, but where’s the bed?”

She ran delicate fingers along one of them lamps. “Bed? Oh, Roy. I guess I saw these lamps, and I forgot all about the bedroom. I love these so much. Don’t you?”

“How much was they?”

Well, when she told me, I knew we wouldn’t be going back to the furniture store anytime soon. Linda’d done gone and blew our furniture budget for the entire year.

I started poking around junk places and talking to folks. Before long, I found a Jenny Lind bed, one of them wood head-and-foot boards with the knotty spindles. It was caked with white paint, but underneath was solid walnut. Being a wood man, I could tell when I scratched it a little. I bought it for five dollars and took it home to refinish myself.

Linda hated it on sight. “Roy Watkins, I am not sleeping on that piece of trash.”

“Just you wait, Linda. I’ll make this thing the best bed you ever seen.”

I bought a bunch of refinishing supplies and got to it. Took me almost a week working nights to strip all that white paint off. I repaired a couple of them broke spindles and varnished it. When I was done, I set it up in our bedroom.

It was the prettiest thing in our house. Even Linda had to agree. When Andra came along, we gave that bed to her. She’s still got it, set up in her and Michael’s place. Sleeps better than any bed I ever had.

Every piece of junk’s got a beautiful soul. It just takes the right person to coax it out.

WALKING ON SUNSHINE

Katrina and the Waves

Morning sun streaked the pavement as Michael and I ambled along the north-to-south side of the Natchez Trace Parkway. Milepost 301. The start of my forty-fifth birthday. Mississippi Hill Country gave way to pre-Alabama waterways and plains. Michael’s visit was a birthday surprise he planned before I started walking.

He always believed I would finish, though I still wavered. Wherever he caught me with a cell signal, Michael used FaceTime to encourage, to console, and to tell me how much he loved me. He never questioned my choice to walk 444 miles alone. Never voiced his fears. Never complained about five weeks apart. I gripped his palm and willed myself to be the strength he saw in me.

To mirror his strength.

I pulled Michael to a stop and snapped a picture of a discarded toothbrush. People doing seventy in cars didn’t notice trash. It couldn’t compete with the storied scenery. But on foot, I saw it everywhere, neglected bits of humanity tossed along a forgotten roadway.

Much like Meriwether Lewis. He returned from his conquest of the West, more famous than Katy Perry or Lady Gaga. Desired for his company. Celebrated.

Until he died of two gunshot wounds on Tennessee’s Natchez Trace.

On the eve of his thirty-second birthday, he penned an expedition journal entry:

This day I completed my thirty-first year, and conceived that I had in all human probability now existed about half the period which I am to remain in this Sublunary world. I reflected that I had as yet done but little, very little indeed, to further the hapiness of the human race, or to advance the information of the succeeding generation. I viewed with regret the many hours I have spent in indolence, and now soarly feel the want of that information which those hours would have given me had they been judiciously expended. But since they are past and cannot be recalled, I dash from me the gloomy thought and resolved in future, to redouble my exertions and at least indeavour to promote those two primary objects of human existance, by giving them the aid of that portion of talents which nature and fortune have bestoed on me; or in future, to live for mankind, as I have heretofore lived for myself.

While some historians called the paragraph a foreshadowing of his supposed suicide, I interpreted it as the personal challenge of an ambitious man who wanted to be remembered for his contributions to mankind. How many times had I admonished myself to try harder, to give more, to do better? Did wanting to grow as a human being and chiding myself when I didn’t make me suicidal?

As much as he hoped to be remembered, his reticence for self-exposure and his murky death make him hard to know. And I always went for men who were hard to know, though I never understood why.

On my birthday, I wasn’t thinking about the famous explorer. Meriwether Lewis was days ahead of me, buried under a broken shaft of granite near Hohenwald, Tennessee. I only considered the next fifteen miles. It was easier to skip along behind my husband and admire his butt in hiking pants.

“Do you know how good you look in those—” I froze near milepost 309.

Michael whirled on me. “What is it?”

Silver glittered at my feet. I stooped to retrieve a thin disc, lodged between white line and grass.

William Clark’s immortal words shouted through Time.

Ocean in view! O! The Joy!

“A Lewis and Clark nickel. It was tails up. Right here.” I pointed to the inch of pavement. Clark’s joy flooded my heart as I held it aloft and squealed, “It’s a birthday present. From Meriwether Lewis to me.”

“No way.” Michael took the chewed-up nickel and inspected its rough edges, its tire-worn surfaces.

I flipped the coin to block fantastical explanations.

Because it would just be crazy.

Meriwether Lewis’s haunting of my life was mythic in our household. When I woke my husband one night, claiming to have heard a man in our bedroom chanting, “You have the complete story,” Michael didn’t question my sanity. He tolerated my tears for a man long dead, my talks with a ghost I couldn’t love, my stalking of a spirit I’d never contain.

My husband understood me. He knew my soul.