We went to the roadhouse for dinner and found what we were to find throughout the trip: there’s amazing food in the most out-of-the-way places. Roper’s kitchen served huge slabs of deep-fried catfish with coleslaw and crispy dark brown hush puppies.
After dinner, Leslie found a new bone to pick with Ethel: the trailer’s gray tank (the one that held waste water) wasn’t much bigger than a dishpan. Washing up the dinner plates had filled it to capacity. Dirty water and greasy soap suds bubbled up the bathroom drain, turning the shower stall into a disgusting wading pool. Fall Hollow lacked sewage hookups, and I didn’t feel like rehitching Ethel, pulling her a hundred yards to the dump station, and then unhitching her all over again. We showered in the campground’s restrooms, located in a frame building atop a knoll. While almost everything about Fall Hollow was lovely, the bathrooms were anything but. Roaches flashed into hiding when the lights flicked on; their dead brothers and sisters littered the floors; moths as big as sparrows clung to the walls, along with insects only an entomologist could have identified.
Leslie overcame her horror, showered, and then, queasiness giving way to fascination, got her camera and took pictures of the lepidopteran who would be her shower companion for the next couple of days: Mothra. When she disrobed later, she was again horrified, discovering that five ticks had hitched a ride on her.
As she plucked ticks, I sat outside for a while, listening to banjo frogs twanging by the creek until the gnats and mosquitoes, which kept my arms flapping like bird wings, drove me inside.
* * *
Breakfast at Fall Hollow was whatever Bill Roper felt like cooking, and his mood that morning was eggs, waffles, and bacon. While he whipped batter behind the counter, we sat drinking coffee with one of his regulars, Arlena Hochstetler, an auburn-haired woman of forty-eight. She was telling us how she and her husband had gone from living in a three-hundred-thousand-dollar Florida house with a swimming pool and a dock on a fishing canal to a camper on a wooded ridge in Tennessee without electricity or running water.
“We’ve got a generator for lights at night,” she said. “Otherwise, we’re completely off the grid. We bathe in the creeks.”
And in the winter, they toted water to the camper and heated it in a big kettle. They’d been living like that for a year. It was the collapse of the housing bubble that set the couple on their journey from the twenty-first century to the nineteenth. The value of their house—it was in North Port, a Sarasota suburb—plummeted to eighty-nine thousand faster than an elevator on a broken cable.
“Things were real good there, but when they hit bottom, they hit real hard,” she said. “We had to get away from it. John was in construction, and his job went kaput, there was just no work there, and our electric bills were getting real high, everything was changing. Nobody knew what was coming, and we didn’t want to depend on them for everything.” I took them to mean the institutions that provide our basic wants and needs: employers and banks, the water company, the power company.
With no hope of selling their Florida place, they rented it, then hit the road. They found seven hundred acres of semiwilderness for sale here in the Tennessee hills, bought sixty-one with their savings, and after clearing the brush moved in with their camper. They weren’t alone. Five other families, all burst-bubble refugees from Florida, had established a settlement up on the ridge, a kind of fundamentalist Christian commune. “They have their own church back in there,” Arlena said. “They have cabins. They want to be in a place where people can’t rob ’em. It’s hard to get where we’re at, in the middle of a forest. Those people decided to do what we did—no electricity, no water—but they came here because they think it’s the end times. We didn’t do it for that reason.”
Whatever the reasons, John and Arlena and their neighbors awaiting the Apocalypse were not like the Joads, forced to pull up stakes, load the jalopy, and seek a new life in the golden orchards of California. They had means and options and changed their lives as much from choice as from necessity.
“It’s my husband’s big dream,” Arlena said, referring to their off-grid homestead. “He’s up there all the time with his Bobcat, messin’ around. He’s happy as long as he’s got diesel for his Cat.”
They had been living the American dream, which has come to mean acquiring ever more stuff. It had failed them. As with the Meyerses back in Key West, the calamity of 2007 had brought the realization that the inner voice that cries I want can never be gratified; the fulfillment of one material desire only breeds desire for more; consumption, in the end, consumes the consumer. And so they’d taken to the woods to pursue Thoreau’s vision of simplicity and self-sufficiency.
I was probably romanticizing when it came to Arlena. A camper without electricity or running water was John’s “big dream,” not hers. She’d had some experience with a stripped-down lifestyle during her first marriage, to a Mennonite farmer in Indiana. “I got used to it, but I didn’t want to go back to it. I don’t like living without air-conditioning when it’s a hundred and three degrees.”
She described herself today as a “Pretendenite” or, better yet, a “Don’twannabe-anite,” and was looking forward to an upcoming move to Virginia, where she’d landed a job and her husband had found work with a company that manufactured conveyor belts.
At breakfast, we were joined by Ken and Patti Neider, her old friends from Florida. They were on vacation, helping the Hochstetlers make improvements, tasks to which Ken brought expertise. Wearing a Hawaiian shirt that looked as if it had been designed by Kandinsky and his dark hair long in back to compensate for its retreat in front, he’d been a contractor in North Port before the crash. Last year, he and his wife caravanned up to Fall Hollow with John and Arlena. They, too, were looking to make a change. Sarasota County had gone from building forty-five hundred homes a year to twenty, Ken said, and his contracting business was on life support.
They stayed in the Ropers’ campground for six weeks. After the Hochstetlers bought their property, Ken lent a hand at brush clearing. But when John said that he was moving his trailer into the wilderness where there would be no showers and no power, Ken replied, “Well, you might as well add ‘No Kenny’ to that list.” He and his wife headed back to Florida to try to revive their fortunes.
“We saw that everyone is struggling everywhere. It’s everywhere, it’s not just regional,” Ken told us.
Arlena nodded. Not long ago, she’d gone to visit family in Elkhart, Indiana, which at one time had been the Detroit of RV manufacturing. She found rust-belt desolation, almost every plant shut down, the gates padlocked, weeds and grass taking over vacant parking lots.
“Lived in Indiana and things went bad,” she said. “Lived in Florida and Florida went bad, and decided to come up here. This place is already bad, so I don’t think I’ll have any problems. The people are great, nicest people you’ll ever meet, but that doesn’t make up for it.”
Optimism is the quintessential American trait, for America has ever been the province of the future, the hope and promise shimmering yonder on the western horizon. Ken was as American as they come, and as if to buff up Arlena’s bleak picture, he exclaimed, “Florida is resilient! Florida is comin’ back, and when it does, nobody’ll want to be the last in line!”
This miracle, he predicted, would happen by the end of the year. Ken had no evidence to support his fair-weather forecast. Indeed, all the evidence pointed to the contrary, but the thing that distinguishes American optimism from other kinds is its faith that tomorrow will be brighter than today, no matter what the facts. It’s a peculiar form of magical thinking, and what makes it peculiar is its power to make the magic happen, to transform illusion into reality. Americans see the world as it is, imagine it as it could be, and make it so. I thought of the pioneers in their westering wagons, convinced for no sensible reason that their lives would be better in Oregon or California, and their children’s lives better still. I thought of my own ancestors, crossing the Atlantic aboard teeming immigran
t ships with the same fantasy in their heads, and in the land Fitzgerald described as “commensurate with man’s capacity for wonder” the fantasy came true. I thought of Ronald Reagan declaring during the last recession, “It’s morning in America.” A realist would have looked at the country then—suffering from double-digit unemployment and double-digit inflation, still embittered by its first lost war, humiliated by the hostage crisis and the disastrous rescue attempt in Iran—and scoffed. Jimmy Carter, the nuclear engineer, had spoken truth when he said that America was gripped by a “profound malaise.” But his successor wasn’t selling truth; he was selling illusion. Americans bought it because that’s what they wanted to believe. If you believe it, it will happen, and lo, it did.
Ken Neider was cut from the same cloth as Reagan. He, too, had once been an entertainer, albeit on a considerably lower rung of the ladder. He was a certified clown, having graduated from clown school in his teens. He made more money in one weekend clown gig than his classmates earned all week at their part-time and summer jobs. After high school, he applied to Ringling Brothers Circus but turned them down when he learned that he would have to take whatever job they offered. “You could sign up as a clown and come out as an elephant shoveler,” he said with a chuckle.
He taught himself to juggle and to ride a unicycle, and did stand-up comedy in Sarasota, but “there was no money in it, so I decided to get serious and went into construction and got my contractor’s license.”
His timing was perfect. Florida was booming. Ken grew up in North Port (that rare creature, a native Floridian!), a town then so small its phone directory consisted of three typewritten pages. When the good times began to roll, eight hundred contractors were building houses and subdivisions in the Sarasota area, and all were prospering.
“We were self-employed in construction for seventeen years, without having to worry. When the crash came, we took two years off, and I did security work.”
From builder of minimansions to security guard. Even that comedown did not discourage him or Patti.
“He got tickets to the Super Bowl for that,” she said, parting the cloud to show its silver lining.
“The New Orleans Saints and the Indianapolis Colts,” Ken elaborated. “I was in charge of the roving camera. When the camera moved, I went ahead and got everyone out of the way—in my clown suit! I scared ’em out of the way!”
He roared with laughter, and so did we. When it died down, he told us that his newest venture was roofing. “We have a situation with roofs in Florida. All those roofs built in the nineteen eighties weren’t to modern specs. Roofing is the coming thing in Florida, and we’re working on becoming roofing contractors. We’re movin’ on up the food chain.”
If that didn’t work out, would he fall back on clowning for a living? Leslie asked, provoking more laughter. He shook his head. It was too undignified for a man his age (forty-seven). “The worst part of it is driving to the show, because you can’t go dressed like this. You have to show up as a clown, and there you are, drivin’ down the street with your big red nose on.”
He turned abruptly and said he would put on a show for us. His juggling balls were in the car. “Brought ’em along in case I ran out of gas money.”
We watched his performance for a few minutes. Ken Neider knew how to keep several balls in the air at once. It didn’t surprise me that he dropped only one.
* * *
Meriwether Lewis has been a hero of mine since boyhood. Sunlight striped the parkway as we drove to the park where his bones lie under a stone block pedestal ten feet high and topped by a broken column to symbolize a life cut short, at thirty-five. Eighty thousand people a year flock to Elvis’s birthplace. Pulling into the empty parking lot, I doubted if even a tiny fraction of that many visit the grave of the man who, with William Clark, accomplished one of the greatest feats of exploration in history. (To test their iconic status, I later googled their names. Elvis Presley yielded 11.5 million results, Meriwether Lewis slightly more than one million.)
We had a look at a replica of Grinder’s Stand, a log cabin on a lawn surrounded by split-rail fences. (“Stand” was the name given to the rough lodges that serviced travelers on the Natchez Trace two centuries ago. Bill Roper described them as “the Holiday Inn Express of their day.”) Grinder’s was where, a marker said, Lewis’s “life of romantic endeavor and lasting achievement came tragically to a close on the night of October 11, 1809.” (In fact, one of the few facts known about Lewis’s death: he died on the morning of October 11.)
The phrase “came tragically to a close” elides the murky circumstances of Lewis’s final hours.
He put up at Grinder’s on the night of October 10, 1809, three years after his epic expedition and six weeks into a journey to Washington, D.C., from St. Louis, where he’d been serving as governor of the vast Upper Louisiana Territory. According to most accounts, he was on his way to the nation’s capital to answer allegations that he’d embezzled government funds.
That evening, Priscilla Grinder, the innkeeper’s wife, observed Lewis behaving irrationally. He paced around, at times raving, at times talking to himself “like he was talking to a lawyer,” she’d told a friend of Lewis’s more than a year later. After she’d gone to bed, she was awakened by gunshots. Looking into Lewis’s room through a chink in the log wall, she saw him bleeding profusely as he crawled across the floor. He cried out for water but, claiming that she was terrified, she did not go to his aid until the next morning. She found Lewis clinging to life, with two bullet wounds, one to his head, the other to his chest. Shortly after sunrise, he died.
When the news reached them, the two men who knew him best, William Clark and Thomas Jefferson, concluded that he’d taken his own life. “I fear O! I fear the weight of his mind has overcome him,” Clark wrote to his brother. Lewis was known to suffer from melancholia, as clinical depression was called in those times. In a letter, Jefferson offered an astute analysis of how the disease led Lewis to do what he did: “During his western expedition the constant exertion which that required of all the faculties of body & mind, suspended these distressing affections; but after his establishment in St. Louis in sedentary occupations they returned upon him with redoubled vigor, and began seriously to alarm his friends. He was in a paroxysm of one of these when his affairs rendered it necessary for him to go to Washington.”
But tales that he’d been murdered started almost immediately, based on discrepancies in Priscilla’s story—she changed it several times—and on a couple of questions. Lewis was armed with two fifty-caliber muzzle-loading pistols. A fifty-caliber ball causes tremendous damage at point-blank range. How could Lewis, having shot himself once, had the strength to fire the second pistol? And, more cogently, how could an ex–army officer and crack marksman bungle his own suicide? The debate continues today, with multiple theories ranging from the plausible to the outlandish.
Some proponents of homicide make a good case, but if we apply the principle of Occam’s razor—among competing hypotheses, the one that’s simplest and makes the fewest assumptions is correct until disproven—suicide seems the more likely to me. I’ve never led an expedition, but as an infantry officer in Vietnam, I’ve known what it’s like to be consumed by a mission requiring “all the faculties of body & mind” and the profound letdown, beset by the trivial demands of ordinary life, that follows such an intense experience.
I pictured Lewis as we hiked a section of the Old Trace, a preserved stretch of the original route. Sage and Sky, delighted to be off lead, quartered out ahead of us. There are few sights I love more than watching them running stretched out through rough country. Yet Lewis haunted me, as I walked the same road he’d ridden two hundred years ago. Tragedy is a word that’s lost its meaning through overuse and misuse. But Lewis was a tragic figure in the classical sense; he’d fallen from a high place, though not because of a fatal flaw in his character. The weight of his mind, in Clark’s phrase, had brought him down.
The Old Trace, no
wider than a jeep trail, snaked along a low, gently sloping ridge, crowded by oak and pine casting deep shadows. The shade was welcome; the day was hot, as usual—ninety-seven. Mosquitoes whined. The weather would have been crisp that October evening in 1809 as Lewis approached Grinder’s Stand. The insects would have been dormant, the trees arrayed in autumn colors. Did he notice their beauty, or was he too preoccupied with the blot on his name? Had his mind already entered the dark house? On those and many other questions, the woods were silent.
13.
We would not have thought the forested Tennessee highlands congenial to the growing of grapes; nor that they would shelter a hippie commune. It was June 4, our twenty-third anniversary, and we were looking for a place to celebrate. Roper suggested the Amber Falls Winery. A winery? Here? “Sure,” he said, and gave us directions as they’re given in the backcountry. Once we’d sorted out the natural and man-made landmarks, we found the winery three miles up a one-lane asphalted trail with more twists than a pretzel. We expected something on the rough-hewn side, and so were surprised to come upon an establishment that would not have embarrassed itself in Sonoma County: ruler-straight vineyard rows, each labeled with its varietal; a winery resembling an upscale lodge, with a broad patio and a gazebo, beneath which customers sipped Amber Falls’s offerings while listening to a jazz ensemble play old standards.
We joined the audience for a while, sampled a crisp chardonnay, the big-city strains of Gershwin tunes transporting us back to our first year together in Manhattan, when we frequented the jazz clubs in the Village and midtown.
The Longest Road Page 8
