This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (11 page)

It's possible to sail from Nashville to South America? You can do that?

“Take the Tims Ford River,” the son-in-law says. “When you get to the Mississippi, go left.”

Karl and I have done very well in our Winnebago so far, I will admit it. We discuss the possibilities of our getting along for six years on a boat. He is heartened. He thinks we would do fine. We go to the pancake breakfast at a cluster of tables next to the office. Across the driveway, a child in a bright orange bikini leaps into an aboveground pool over and over again. The pancakes are two for $1.05. We sit down with Rodney and Ronda, who are on their way to the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally from Minnesota. Ronda is wearing a bra made out of chamois cloth and leather cord. She is wearing black leather chaps with long fringe down the sides. She is young and tan and lean with an abundance of curly gold hair. Rodney, who is very much in love with her, looks painfully average in his khakis and polo shirt.

“Are you bikers?” Rodney asks us.

“Of course they're not bikers,” Ronda tells him. “Look at their hair. Their hair is too nice.”

I think she means that I look like a member of the Winnebago set. I am neither windblown and bug-splattered like the bikers, nor rumpled and tanned like the campers. My shirt and nails are clean. Suddenly I feel I represent things I do not mean to represent: wholesomeness, family values, docility.

They want to know if we're going to the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, and we, who have no plans and no bikes, say yes.

“Rock and roll,” Ronda says, showing her pretty teeth, her pretty everything. “I'll give you a ride.”

And so Karl gets on the back of Ronda's Harley. He puts his hands behind him and she reaches back and pulls one of his arms around her narrow, naked waist, right above the chaps. “Hang on!” she cries, and so he does, he must. Out of the Winnebago and onto a Harley, Karl roars away with Ronda and I watch him go. And I feel something, something that is like jealousy and loss and pride at his bravery. They weave away from us down the narrow road towards the mountains in all that gorgeous light. Karl and Ronda. Gone.

Rodney shakes his head. “She's really something,” he says wistfully.

“She's your girlfriend?” I ask, knowing that she isn't his girlfriend, not in a million years.

“She's my neighbor,” he tells me, his eyes still on that point on the horizon where the person he loves and the person I love were last seen. “She lets me come to Sturgis with her. It's a long way to come alone.”

Ronda, he tells me, is a receptionist in a dental office.

Rodney and I finish our pancakes and pick up the paper plates, and right about the time I think they are never coming back, they come back. Karl's smile is enormous and when he gets off the bike he pats Ronda's shoulder and comes straight to me. “She's going to take you now!” he says. His joy vibrates in the heat of the day. I am sitting on the picnic bench, paralyzed by the offer. Karl is the one who jumps on the bike. I am the one who stays behind and finishes pancakes. “Go!” he says.

“She just went out,” I say, sounding lame even to myself.

Ronda revs her engine and makes a great sweeping motion with her tan arm, and I go to her and get on the back of her bike and put my arms around her waist. “Hang on!” she calls to me, and then we're gone.

How you ride says everything about how you see the world. In the Winnebago we see the world from inside our house. We watch it as it rolls sedately past our living room window. But on the back of Ronda's bike, leaning deeply from side to side, I am the jutting purple mountains. I am the asphalt and the birds in the sky. I remember everything about the twenty minutes I spent in the blown-back cloud of Ronda's hair. People are more than willing to die on motorcycles because for that moment in the Badlands of South Dakota they are truly and deeply alive.

“That man loves you!” Ronda screams back at me.

“So he says!” I scream to her.

By the time we return to the Badlands Interior Campground, the RV herd has cleared out. Picnic tables sit empty on grassy slots between strips of gravel and sand. Connection poles for water and electricity stick out of the ground like speakers at a drive-in. Where there should be a movie screen, there is nothing but mountains and sky.

We say goodbye to Rodney and Ronda, and say that maybe we'll see each other at Sturgis, though we never do. We go to the motorcycle rally in our Winnebago, parking as far away as possible and walking in. One motorcycle in a national park at dawn is a beautiful thing. Two hundred thousand motorcycles with their concomitant two hundred thousand motorcycle guys is something else entirely. Within ten minutes my romantic ideas about bikes have disintegrated and once again the motorcoach and the promise of the open road call my name.

O
ur Winnebago is the warm nest, the mother ship, and when we return from a hike or a run through some small town, I am glad to see that great whalelike mass parked on the roadside. We become adept at hookups and feel like geniuses. We empty black-water tanks in the driving rain. We sleep in a beautiful tree-shaded KOA in Sheridan. We sleep in a crummy campground in Cody (“Closest to the Rodeo!”). But wherever we pull down the shades and stick the popcorn bag in the microwave, it is the exact same place. Getting out of the rodeo at eleven p.m., I am glad not to have to find a motel or pitch a tent. I am glad not to eat a bad dinner or unpack my suitcase or try to start a fire.

Finally we reach Yellowstone, which is to Winnebagos what upstream is for salmon. All have come and all are welcome—the modest conversion van is parked between the luxe models with tricked-out interiors worthy of a mafia wife. We are all brothers beneath these towering pines. A number of people have mounted a map of the United States and Canada on their vehicle's side, with a colored insert for every state and province they've visited. Under various awnings there is indoor-outdoor carpeting, potted plants and wind chimes, patio furniture, and, on a folding chair, a large stuffed bear holding an American flag. In the morning the air fills with the smell of eggs and sausage. It's like a neighborhood in an imaginary version of the 1950s, with a virtuous respectability so kitschy, so obvious, one longs to mock it, except I can't anymore. I am trying to remember how to pull my awning down.

On a cruise-boat tour of Yellowstone Lake I meet Pat, a retiree in her mid-sixties who has been traveling in her thirty-seven-foot Winnebago for eight years. Her husband died last January, and she's driven alone ever since. When I ask where her home is, she tells me she doesn't have one. “My children live in southern California,” she says. On this day Yellowstone Lake is a postcard, with sculpted clouds and diving ospreys. I ask Pat if she comes here a lot, but she says no, it's been years. When her husband's health was declining, he couldn't take much elevation. Now that she's alone, she's seeing the mountains. Life is short, she tells me. She plans to go from a motor home to a nursing home.

K
arl and I drive along the Madison River on our last night in Yellowstone and see people swimming. We pull into a parking lot and put on suits and walk down to the water. We wade into the cold and swim and let the current carry us around until we're tired and hungry. Then we go back to the Minnie and take showers. I make a fairly decent dinner in our play-house kitchen and we wash the plates and put them away and drive on.

I believe the Winnebago has set me free. It has made me swim in cold rivers and eat pancakes with strangers and turn down obscure roads with no worry about where I have to be or when. I believe it has set many people free, old people and people with children who go off and see what this country has to offer because of their motor homes. Maybe they don't hike, maybe they don't shoot the rapids or explore the wilderness, but they are out there. Who am I to say how others should spend their vacations?

I believe this is the Fourth Great RV Truth: People who don't like them have never been in one.

I feel like I went out to report on the evils of crack and have come back with a butane torch and a pipe. I went undercover to expose a cult and have returned in saffron robes with my head shaved. I have fallen in love with my recreational vehicle.

And I have fallen in love with Karl, which I can see now was the point of the story. The vast open spaces of America, as experienced through the twenty-nine confining feet of motor home, have restored us, though we both feel worried when we drive back to Billings and turn the Minnie in. We walk over to the sales lot, full of ideas. We could drive home, or drive in the direction of home and see where we end up. There is a beautiful thirty-foot Airstream Classic on the lot, and for a minute we think an Airstream would be just the thing to keep us like this forever. But at some point before we pull out a credit card we come to our senses. We know we have to make this work without a motor home, which, after all, is nothing but love's powerful crutch. I know what would happen if we bought that Airstream, what our friends would say. We would never be welcome to park in front of their homes. We would be drummed out of polite society. We would be refugees on the road. We wouldn't mind.

(
Outside
, June 1998)

Tennessee

I
'VE BEEN TOLD
that the secret to making money, big
money, is to find the place on the edge of town where the real estate stops
being priced by the square foot and begins to be priced by the acre. The idea is
then to buy as many of those acres as possible and wait for town to creep
towards you so that you will be there, ready and waiting, when those acres are
converted down into square feet.

Having lived in Nashville for most of my life, I
have seen this theory put into cash-making practice time and again. Acres that
once were home to lazy cows and nibbling deer are now the physical underpinnings
of sprawling shopping malls and housing developments and golf courses—thickets
of blackberries mown under to make way for irrigated expanses of manicured
greens. The cows and the wildlife, not unlike the urban poor, were forced from
their neighborhoods and herded off to distant pastures.

Nashville is not a city that can take any pride in
its urban planning. Lovely old homes are knocked down, appalling condominiums
spring up in their stead, traffic multiplies geometrically, mom-and-pop
operations issue a mouselike cry trying to hold back the big-box chains, and
then are devoured by those chains in a single bite.

But for every way this city has changed for the
worse, there is some other way it has changed for the better. When I was a
little girl, the Klan marched down at the square on Music Row on Sunday
afternoons. Men in white sheets and white hoods waved at your car with one hand
while they held back enormous German shepherds with the other. My sister and I
pushed down the buttons of our door locks and sank low in the backseat. Those
men are gone now, or at least they aren't out walking the streets in full
regalia. If growth and modernization means getting rid of the Klan while bad
condos spread like lichen over tree trunks, well then, let's hear it for
modernity.

There was a time when Nashville cared more for
genealogy than character. (In some very limited circles this may still be the
case.) If your family hadn't been in the state long enough to remember what
Lincoln had done to it, then you might be politely tolerated but you would never
truly be accepted. I knew this, having moved here just before I turned six. We
were Californians, and we may as well have been Martians. But then there was a
shift—too many people moved here in the last two decades to keep up with who was
from where. Somewhere in all the confusion I became a local.

If the changes that Nashville has seen just in my
lifetime could all be put together and then averaged out, I would contend that
this place is more the same than it could ever be different; because while
Memphis has changed and Nashville has changed and Knoxville has changed, the
state of Tennessee has not changed. To understand this you have to go back to
that place where real estate prices out by the acre. Plenty of people made a
killing on those deals, but don't be fooled: many, many more are still holding
on to their land. And yes, the cities do push out, but down here the cities are
islands surrounded by an ocean of country, and the country pushes back hard.
There is a powerful root system that reaches far beneath those mall parking
lots, and the minute we stop hacking away at it, the plants come back. This
sounds metaphorical. It isn't. For all its briskly evolving cities, Tennessee is
first and foremost a trough of rich soil sitting beneath hot, humid weather. Its
role on earth is less to be the home of country music and the meat-and-three,
and more to be a showcase of rampant plant life.

Between the ages of eight and twelve, I lived with
my family on a farm in Ashland City outside of Nashville. We called it a
gentleman's farm, which meant that the only thing we did to the land was look at
it. The daringly modern house my stepfather had built was as substantial as a
sheet of folded notebook paper. Whenever it rained the dirt in the basement
turned to mud and poured beneath the laundry room door. Mushrooms the size of
salad plates popped up overnight—entire mushroom cities—in the shag carpet of my
sister's bedroom. All the doors had been stained outside the summer the house
was being built and were covered in petrified insects. The shallow swimming pool
was so burdened by frogs that even if we had done nothing but haul them from the
water with the skimmer net night and day we couldn't have saved them all. We
kept a couple of horses that could be ridden only if they could be caught, and a
very large pig that fell into the same category. (There is a picture of my
sister sitting atop that pig, her knees together, riding side-saddle without the
saddle.) There were banty chickens named after members of Nixon's cabinet; the
dogs had an uncanny knack of eating them just as their namesakes fell before the
Watergate committee. Alongside the well-fed dogs there was an endless parade of
cats, rabbits, hamsters, and canaries, but the most abundant form of life was
the flora that sprang from our untended ground: all manner of trees—eastern
redbud and tulip poplar, frothy seas of white dogwoods, all types of maples, red
oak and white oak, black locust, red cedar, enormous black walnuts. In early
fall those walnut trees began to drop their smelly green-hulled nuts the size of
baseballs, and we tripped on them and squashed them with the car. Once a year in
a fit of boredom or optimism we would forget everything we knew about black
walnuts and scrape off the filthy husks and dry the nuts on the front porch,
thinking we would eat them, but they were impossible to get into, yielding a
tiny bit of meat for an enormous amount of work. Before we ever got enough
together to make a quart of ice cream, the squirrels would come and carry our
burden away.

My childhood was spent with the dogs, hacking my
way into the thick undergrowth of woods with the single parental admonishment
that I should watch out for snakes. I didn't much worry about snakes. We had
thirty-seven acres—so much room, so much leaf and bark and trunk and bloom—that
it seemed impossible that any snake and I would arrive in the same place at the
same time. This was the seventies, and I ran a terrarium supply business—digging
up moss and selling it to a flower shop in town. The land was my office, my
factory, and beneath the shade of endless leaves, spade and shoe box in hand, I
would go to work.

In Nashville we have a Tiffany's now, a J. Crew,
countless Starbucks. But drive out to Ashland City sometime. Go down River Road
to what used to be Tanglewood Farm and I can promise you that not one thing has
changed, except that maybe by now the house has rotted away, and the roots under
all those trees have dug themselves down another twenty feet or so. Every year
the country grows thicker. Every year it inches closer to town.

Tennessee, with its subtropical summers and mild
winters, has a perfect climate for almost any sort of plant. The non-natives
thrive alongside the natives. The kudzu vine arrived from Japan in the late
1800s as part of a poorly thought-out plan to help slow soil erosion. It has
since spread an impenetrable web over the South, draping fields, billboards,
barns, and forests. If left unchecked—not that anyone has had much luck keeping
it in check—it would take out the interstate system. Kudzu exploded, but then
Tennessee excels in the explosive growth of plant life. “Think of those plants
in the California deserts,” a botanist friend said to me, and I picture the
succulents and flowering cacti that thinly dot the vast stretches of sand.
“Those are the plants that can't compete.”

Tennessee's plants are so competitive that every
day is a slugfest: a deciduous tree blocks the light to a shrub, a tendril
reaches from beneath the shrub to pull down the tree, insects bore into bark,
birds fill out the branches, worms as blind as Homer chew through the soil,
crunching the fallen leaves into a thick layer of duff that coats the forest
floor. Among the hale and hearty, one of the uncontested kings in the Volunteer
State is poison ivy. It sweeps over everything and we leave it alone. We're
supposed to leave it alone. The counselors at Camp Sycamore Hills for Girls, not
fifteen miles from the farm where we lived, made the point so clearly we could
not possibly claim to have misunderstood. “This is poison ivy,” they said,
during a long, hot hike at the start of my second week of camp. They pointed to
what seemed to be an entire field. “
Leaves of three, let it
be.
Do not go near it.”

Lee Ann Hunter and I talked it over that night in
our tent with all the balanced consideration of eleven-year-olds. We had heard
about the plant but had never seen it in action. We felt certain we could ride
those three leaves out of our miserable tents and back into our own beds. The
next night after dinner we took a detour through the forest, back to the very
field we had been warned against. Like virgins to a volcano, we threw ourselves
in. We rolled in it. We picked it. We rubbed it in our hair and stuffed it in
our shirts and ground it into our eyes. Reader, we ate it. What was so bad about
camp? It was boring? We didn't like the food? Some other girl got the better
bunk? I don't remember that part of the story. All I know is that we turned to a
plant as Juliet had turned to a plant before us: to transport ourselves out of a
difficult situation and into a happier one. Like Juliet, we miscalculated the
details. I can't say the hospital was a better place to spend the summer, but we
were out of Sycamore.

Plant life, like all life, is the subject of
constant revision: one tree is hit by lightning, another is upended in a storm.
I remember our Dutch elm succumbing to the blight that wiped out its kind and it
seemed like the vacancy it left behind was filled in a matter of minutes. Even
if this endless expanse of green is composed of different constituents over
time, the land still pumps out plants faster than anyone can count them. The
plants, I believe, have shaped this state more than people ever have. When the
success of a crop determines where people will live, then who's making the
choice as to where we settle? The hundreds of little towns that lie between the
cities have hardly changed at all in the years I've been driving through them.
If a silver oak grew up in the space that the Dutch elm left behind, then maybe
a tanning salon took the place of a beauty shop, or a hamburger joint became a
pizza shack, but as in the forest, these changes are negligible. For the most
part people are poor. The last truly revolutionary thing to come into their
homes was electricity.

On one particularly scorching summer afternoon,
coming home from a trip to Memphis, I decided to leave the interstate and take
the two-lane highway down to Shiloh to see the famous Civil War battlefield. The
insects joined together in such a high-pitched screed I could hear it over the
air-conditioning and through the rolled-up windows of my car. The bugs and the
plants and I were alone on that highway. I didn't pass another car for ten
miles, and then for twenty. The millions of leaves on either side of the road
were so dense and bright I could almost feel them growing. And then I saw a man
standing in the middle of the road waving his arms in crosses above his head. He
looked like he was trying to land a plane. I stopped my car. It must have been
110 degrees on the blacktop. Not to stop for him would have been to kill
him.

There was a woman on the side of the road, leaning
against their car. The man and the woman were in their seventies. When I rolled
down my window the man held an artificial voice box against his throat.
“Ran-out-of-gas,” the machine said. I told them to get in quick before they
melted; I would drive them to the station and bring them back.

But the woman didn't want to go. They both got car
sick and neither one of them could ride in the back. My car was small. “I'll
stay here,” she said. “I'll be fine. There's plenty of shade.”

So I drove the man fifteen miles to the gas station
while he told me the unbearably sad story of his life in the flat monotone of
electric speech. Cancer of the larynx. Once he was sick, his wife left him and
took the kids. He got laid off from the factory. He had to go back to the
country where he'd grown up, see if he could farm some on the land his father
had owned. Hard times. This new wife was nice, though, that was a plus. At the
end of every couple of sentences he'd thank me, and I had to tell him to stop.
He told me I could drop him off at the station and he would hitch a ride back,
but we didn't see another car the whole way there.

“I can take you back,” I said. “I'm just out
driving around. I don't have anyplace I have to be.” It sounded suspicious, but
it was the truth.

I waited with him at the station even though he
kept trying to shoo me off. He thought there was going to be a car heading back
in his direction but no one came; after a while there was no choice but to
relent. He said he would take the ride only if I let him pay me. We argued
politely about this. I reminded him that were the roles reversed—and they could
be reversed—he would never take money from me. Reluctantly, he raised the voice
box to his throat and agreed with that. I drove him back to where his new wife
was waiting. Just as it was over and we had said our goodbyes, he leaned back in
through the open window of my car and put five dollars on the passenger seat,
then turned quickly away. It broke my heart in a way that was all out of
proportion to the greater sadnesses of life.

It was lonely out there on the road after he was
gone, lonely when I pulled into Shiloh an hour before the park closed. More than
ten thousand men from the Union and Confederate armies had died here in April of
1862. It took very little imagination to see this place the way it would have
been that spring, dogwoods and cherry trees and apple trees all blooming in the
mighty undergrowth, the energy it would have taken the men to fight their way
through the trees in order to come to some sort of opening where they surely
would be shot. The Union dead are buried on a hill with a view to the Tennessee
River. It is a lovely spot, with a cool breeze coming off the water. There is a
small white marker on every grave. Outside the gates of the cemetery is a copy
of the Gettysburg Address on a metal plaque. The Confederates are buried in a
mass grave that lies at the bottom of the hill, but they at least are all
together, and they are home. I did not pass another soul in the park save the
ranger at the gate. He asked me to leave when it was dark.