Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace
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Table of Contents
NOT WITHOUT MY FATHER:
BOOKS BY ANDRA WATKINS
NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE MEMOIR
DEDICATION
MAP OF THE NATCHEZ TRACE
Road to Nowhere
Hit the Road Jack
King of the Road
Walk This Way
I Walk Alone
One Vision (Fried Chicken)
I’ve Been Everywhere
Walk
When the Saints Go Marching In
Roam If You Want To
Walk Right Back
Walk Like a Man
I Drove All Night
Rednecks White Socks and Blue Ribbon Beer
You’ll Never Walk Alone
Holiday Road
Have Love Will Travel
Fields of Gold
Walking on Broken Glass
Walk On By
I Can Tell That We Are Gonna Be Friends
Walk Like an Egyptian
Green Onions
Walkin’ After Midnight
A Million Miles Away
Every Day Is a Winding Road
Walking on Sunshine
I’m Walkin’
Cross Road Blues
One Step Up
Follow You, Follow Me
I Walk the Line
The Golden Age
Walking to You
walk on the wild side
Fast Car
Walk and Don’t Look Back
Go Walking Down There
Personal Jesus
Love Walks In
Learning to Fly
I Would Walk 500 Miles
EPILOGUE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
SUPPORT THE TRACE
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
TO LIVE FOREVER:
HARD TO DIE
I AM NUMBER 13
THE THREE R’S OF 21ST CENTURY READING
NOT WITHOUT MY FATHER:
ONE WOMAN’S 444-MILE WALK
OF THE NATCHEZ TRACE
ANDRA WATKINS
WORD HERMIT PRESS LLC
COPYRIGHT © 2015 BY ANDRA WATKINS
No part of this book/ebook may be reproduced in any format.
Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace is a memoir. It chronicles the author’s actual experiences with real places and people. Some identities and locations are disguised or combined. The author’s father’s narration is a product of the author’s imagination.
ISBN-13: 978-0-9908593-0-7
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG NUMBER APPLIED FOR
BOOKS BY ANDRA WATKINS
Non-fiction
Not Without My Father: One Woman’s 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace
(January 2015)
Photography
Natchez Trace: Tracks in Time
(January 2015)
Fiction
To Live Forever: An Afterlife Journey of Meriwether Lewis
(March 2014)
Hard To Die
(coming Spring 2015)
Your True Love Lives
(coming Summer 2015)
I Am Number 13
(coming Fall 2015)
NOTE ON THE STRUCTURE OF THE MEMOIR
This is a memoir.
And it isn’t.
My narration is my voice. My experience. My truth.
My father’s narration (in italics) is comprised of his stories. Some as he tells them. Others as I imagine them.
The chapter titles are a playlist of road music and walking songs. If you spend 34 days walking 444 miles, you need a soundtrack to keep you company.
DEDICATION
For my father
Roy Lee Watkins, Junior
And in memory of Jeffrey Lee Nelson
March 10, 1957 - July 10, 2014
A father taken from his family too soon
MAP OF THE NATCHEZ TRACE
ROAD TO NOWHERE
Talking Heads
The journey is a long slog with an unpredictable number of mileposts. One can make the trip alone, but why not share it?
As I traversed familiar mile markers and pulled up in front of my father’s house, I could predict where I’d find him.
In his recliner, his belly a shelf for a vat of popcorn. At eighty, he whiled away days feeding his face and shouting at the television. Whenever his throne was vacant, I eschewed all temptation to occupy it.
Because I imagined how many times he farted into the velvet upholstery.
Sometimes while naked.
I could hear the television when I stepped from the car. “Why am I doing this again?” I whispered as I slipped through the back door.
“Andra!” There he was, sprawled in his recliner. A jagged scar played peek-a-boo through his open pajama top. “What’re you doing here?”
I opened my mouth and clamped it shut. Once I uttered my request, I couldn’t take it back.
I needed a wingman while I walked the 444-mile Natchez Trace from Natchez, Mississippi to Nashville, Tennessee. I planned to launch my debut novel and become the first living person to walk the 10,000-year-old road as our ancestors did. Nobody could convince me that an unathletic woman and her mid-life paunch were incapable of walking more than a half-marathon every day for a month.
Even though my aversion to exercise was as spectacular as my father’s.
I wanted my walk to redeem my novel’s hero, American explorer Meriwether Lewis, one-half of the Lewis and Clark duo. He died of two gunshot wounds on the Natchez Trace, seventy miles south of Nashville.
He was only thirty-five.
Was it suicide? Or murder? His death is one of America’s great unsolved mysteries.
To walk a forgotten highway for five weeks, I needed a wingman who could shuttle me to my first daily milepost and pick me up fifteen miles later. Someone who wasn’t busy. Someone available. Maybe this person even craved an adventure.
I scrolled through a list of prospects. My husband Michael couldn’t be absent from work for five weeks, especially since his job paid for my predilection to write. My friends all had children. Husbands. Gainful employment. I discarded people for an hour, my list a scribbled mess that highlighted one harrowing name.
Dad.
My father wasn’t doing anything. He was available to go on a five-week jaunt through Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee.
His stomach pooled over his thighs and his triple-chin jiggled as he leaned into his response. “Go on a five-week trip? Just you and me? I don’t want to do that, Andra.”
“Why not?” I shouted even louder to penetrate his VA-issued, circa-1980 hearing aids.
“Well.” He chewed a handful of popcorn. “Because…….I got furniture to refinish.”
“It’ll be here when you get back.”
Dad dug his fingernails into the arms of his chair. “I cain’t be away from my Sunday school class for that long.”
“God won’t care if you miss church to spend time with your only daughter, Dad.”
“Well, uh…….I……..Linda might need me here.”
Mom preened into the room with his bowl of ice cream. I never understood why she didn’t just hand him the carton. She placed the spoon between his fingers and smiled. “I don’t need you here, Roy.” Her flawless makeup matched her leotard. “I’m going to the gym. Be home in four hours.”
She flounced out the door, leaving me with my jiggly arms and red hair I forgot to brush.
I sighed and turned back to Dad. “Why don’t you want to do this, Dad? I mean, you haven’t
been anywhere since your appendix ruptured two years ago. You’re just sitting here in this recliner, waiting to die.”
Dad picked at his ice cream and avoided my gaze. “Spending five weeks with you don’t sound like much fun, Andra.”
Dad and I shouted down my teens, harangued through my twenties and seethed away my thirties. For most of my life, our every interaction disintegrated into hurtful words and pregnant silences. Yet, I was willing to cast our history aside and endure his company for more than a month, while he rejected me?
Wrong answer, Old Man.
I gnawed my tongue to regroup. Dad was my last hope to take readers into my book’s world. To help my scribblings make me somebody. In a universe of words with little meaning and even less point, I believed I created something valuable, a story that could make a difference, a tale that would leave readers fundamentally altered and pining for the next installment.
All writers are convinced whatever they write qualifies, be it dreck or brilliance. Our words are sperm and egg on the page. Merge them together, and one can hold a physical chunk of the writer. It’s a shame a book can’t arrive covered in blood and filth from the birth canal, screaming and howling to breathe.
But to get anyone to care about a story, the writer must make it about the reader.
My breathing even, I flashed my most fetching smile.
“All right, Dad. Look at it this way. We’ll be riding near hundreds of tiny towns with lots of strangers who’ve never heard your stories. Think of all the junk shops and dive diners where you can enchant people. Don’t they deserve to meet you before you’re gone?”
Dad’s eyes took on a dreamy tinge. His yarns were Southern gothic legends, tales he rolled out for every stranger he encountered. I imagined myself spending the entire trip with a view of his broad back, regaling everyone but me. He must’ve conjured the same scene. “I’ll do it, Andra. If the Lord lets me live ’til March, I’ll go with you.”
Dad would be my wingman on the Natchez Trace. Visions of literary stardom floated in front of my faraway eyes. Because my secret dream was The New York Times headline:
- Debut Novelist Walks Her Way to Blockbuster Best Seller! -
I basked in the mirage of that proclamation, in the glory of staggering to my Nashville finish line with crowds of people. News crews. Fans waving my book and clamoring for an autograph.
My swelling imagination burst when Dad heaved himself from the chair, scratched his crotch and farted. “Yeah, Andra. This is gonna be real fun.”
What had I done? Besides self-scratching and legendary gas, his sleep apnea machine didn’t stifle his explosive snoring.
And the bathroom. I would have to share a bathroom with my father, whose hulking belly obscured all ability to aim. A sodden fact that seeped into my legs when I locked myself in Dad’s bathroom and plopped down on the toilet.
I didn’t want to spend five weeks with my father.
As I winced through a sink bath, I studied my face in the mirror. The beginnings of forehead wrinkles and crows feet. A hint of Dad’s bulldog jowl. I stuck my tongue out at my green-eyed self. “Welcome to Hell, you idiot.”
HIT THE ROAD JACK
Ray Charles
Dad moseyed through the faded grandeur of the Plantation Suite at Hope Farm, a bed and breakfast in Natchez, Mississippi. Our first stop on my 444-mile Natchez Trace Parkway saga. Dad planted himself between two canopied beds. “That the TV?” It was the size of an iPad, perched on a desk. He fumbled with his suspenders and rocked back and forth on the Persian rug, eyeing chairs he knew wouldn’t hold his weight. “How’m I gonna watch that?”
I left him cradling his sleep apnea machine and followed my friend Alice into Mississippi dusk. “What am I doing here?” I whispered.
“You’re gonna be the first person to walk the Natchez Trace as the pioneers did.” Alice slammed the trunk of Dad’s tan Mercury Grand Marquis and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose. My dearest friend was the ballast that would protect me from the onslaught of my father’s outsized personality.
Alice had been part of my life for more than a decade. In my early thirties, my friends were all married, including Alice. I was the only pathetic single person I knew. While everyone talked about the possibility of babies, percolating babies and actual, birthed-and-breathing babies, I chewed my lip and wondered if I’d ever meet a functional man and contemplate babies.
Or maybe I wasn’t functional.
I sat alone in my house, ate alone at my table, showered alone in my bathroom, and slept alone in my bed; yet, I didn’t want to be alone.
I endured lunches and dinners, drinks and parties, listening to everyone compare notes on the next phase of life, a milestone I couldn’t achieve. They wove their stories on blue-lined notebook paper, while I clung to holes in the margin. I came away from these interactions, my insides shrunken and my life an afterthought. I thought nobody cared about me.
Except Alice.
Even though she was pregnant herself, she tried to steer group conversations to non-gestational topics. “What books are you reading?” She asked. Or, “Tell me about your last trip.” One time, she interrupted someone mid-ultrasound photo essay. “We’ve been talking about pregnancy for almost an hour. Can we spend the last few minutes of lunch on something else?”
If friends are a reflection of who we want to be, I wanted to be more like Alice.
While I wove from thing to thing to thing in a vain effort to find myself, she became partner in an architecture firm and mothered a daughter I considered a niece. She was primary caregiver to her disabled brother and supreme supporter of her husband. I cultivated a friendship with her, because I wanted to be her. I never understood how she did everything, but I thought if I got to know her better, some of her juju would dribble onto me.
A decade on, she was a seminal figure in my life.
Alice and I decided Dad as wingman would be the equivalent of what writers call an unreliable narrator. He might intend to drop me off and pick me up each day, but given the wealth of strangers between miles one and fifteen, he couldn’t be depended upon to be there for me.
Alice agreed to babysit my father and schlep me around for the first week of my Natchez Trace walk. The rest would be just Dad and me.
I didn’t want to think about that.
Not yet.
I shoved the looming time with my father over my shoulder in a moonlit parking lot. If I thought about what was coming, I’d quit before I took one step.
Alice heaved grocery bags up narrow stairs. “I think that’s everything you’ll need for a long walk.”
“Maybe.” I held the screen door and followed her into our suite. A jumble of athletic gear awaited me. Compression tights. Hiking shoes. Energy bars. CamelBak water bladder. Gadgets and creams designed for the extreme athlete.
An athlete? Who was I kidding? In high school, I couldn’t run a mile, score a goal or hit a ball. Why did I think I could walk more than a half-marathon every day for a month at forty-four?
I spread a map across the quilted bedspread. A long rectangle stretched from one side of the bed to the other.
The Natchez Trace.
Almost 450 miles of highway ringed by farms and swampland, its sides were eroded canyons in some places. Ghostly buffalo herds competed with the earliest Native American spirits, Spanish conquistadors, French missionaries and warring armies along a paved federal parkway. I imagined their voices, and I honored them in my novel. Ten thousand years of history.
The Trace was a tunnel through Time.
From March 1 to April 3, 2014, I planned to walk the highway as our ancestors did. Fifteen miles a day. One rest day a week. For thirty-four days.
On the eve of my start, I perused a daunting list of things to do: Stock up on snacks for my daily food kit; buy enough bottled water; organize supplies for easy access as we moved; fall asleep early to be rested. I flitted between piles of stuff, wondering how I would winnow it into one compact pack. I r
ead Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, about her trek up the Pacific Crest Trail. I didn’t want to carry unnecessary things.
Food, a water-filled CamelBak, Gatorade, a first-aid kit, extra socks, flashlight, toilet paper, waterproof pants, a spare battery pack for my iPhone, cards announcing my novel, notes from readers, a Parkway map, a voodoo doll and mace. Items of necessity. Charms for good luck. One weapon. Two if the voodoo doll counted.
Everything I needed.
I flattened a roll of toilet paper and shoved it into a ziplock bag. “Dad, can you help me go through this list? Check off things as I call them out? Dad?”
Even though Dad wore hearing aids, I had to shout if I wanted him to hear me. He said they didn’t pick up children and women with higher voices, but I caught him turning them off around me. I barreled into the other room and found Dad standing in front of a precarious bureau, his sleep apnea machine balanced on a ledge. An electrical cord dangled from one hand. “Dad! Help me here?”
“I cain’t find a place to plug this thing up.” His filmy eyes scanned walls papered with yellowed clippings of Dwight Eisenhower and Barry Goldwater. “This all seems like yesterday……”
I groped along the walls and felt an outlet behind the bed. “You can plug it right here.” I picked up the end of the cord and scooted under the bed. When I stuck the prongs in the socket, I held my breath. “No telling whether the wiring in this place is up to code, right Dad?” Silence. “Oh well, maybe he can’t hear me under here.” Layers of history peeled back with me as I heaved myself to stand. Coughing, I knocked dust from my knees in the empty room. “Dad?”
I opened the bathroom door, expecting to find Dad spraying everything but the toilet, but it was vacant. Foiled, I darted into the other room. “Where’s Dad?”
Alice reclined on one of two mountainous canopy beds, blonde hair splayed on the pillow. Her eyes drooped behind glasses perched on her heart-shaped face, and her voice ran thick like syrup. “He went over to talk to Miss Ethel.”
“Again? Jesus God, it’s after nine o’clock.”
She punched her pillow and settled onto her side. “I guess she’s the only stranger he can find to talk to at this time of night, Andra.”
Miss Ethel was the doyenne of Hope Farm, a spunky wisp of a woman in her seventies. When I checked in earlier that afternoon, she met me at the front door and blinked through thick glasses. “Surely you’re not gonna walk all the way to Nashville, Ondra?”