Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Riverside Ramble

Mamie was invited to be interviewed in Chattanooga by Marcia Kling of Newschannel9 for a mid-day television program geared to the over-fifty crowd. The topic was to be Mamie’s life in Coker Creek and the Autumn Gold Festival, organized for forty years by Mamie’s son, Frank. When Mamie’s back went out, I lined up Frank’s cousin’s wife, Wanda, as an alternate. When Frank died, we were down to the wire on Marcia finalizing her program, and Wanda felt that she just couldn’t go through with the interview. The Ruritans asked me to represent them on Marcia’s show. Talk about life (and death) happening while we’re making other plans...

I hated to miss the opportunity to publicize Frank’s pet project. So, being the “wing it” queen, and quite a show-off, of course I agreed. I costumed myself in my denim skirt and fall festival vest, put on my cowboy boots, and headed to Chattanooga.

One of the most beautiful drives in North America has to be the drive between Coker Creek and Chattanooga. After passing through the tunnel of greens on Tennessee Highway 68, and along the Hiwassee River, Federal Highway 64 takes you past the Ocoee River rapids and through a ribbon of rock on one side and the river on the other. There are hairpin turns all along the route, making the drive into quite an adventure. I did pass a car that had run off the road. No one was hurt, but it was a sobering reminder that it’s very difficult to concentrate on driving when surrounded by such bodacious beauty.

I was reminded of my brother Gregory’s joy in driving our mountain roads, realizing that our automobiles have more of a tendency to stay on the road than run off the edge because we “bank” our highways in the United States. He says that this is not the case in Austria, where he lives. It must be very impressive for Greg to have pointed it out to us.

If you ever want to understand the song “America the Beautiful”, you really have to visit America’s protected natural environments. Here, in the Cherokee National Forest, you have miles and miles of God’s Country with acres of wildflowers clinging to cliffs of slate gray sedimentary rock. The rivers along the way vary from still, rocky mudflats along the lower Hiwassee to class five rapids at the site of the 1996 whitewater events on the Ocoee River.

Richard and I have been very fortunate to have seen many parts of our fabulously beautiful country – many of our travels being when I had the post-Hurricane Katrina fantasy of spending the rest of our rootless lives in an RV. We’ve experienced the “Spacious Skies” of Montana, and “Amber Waves of Grain” in Southern Illinios. I’ll never forget the first time I spied the “Purple-Mountained Majesty” of the Rockies as a six-year-old looking out a train window enroute to my Uncle Edgar’s house in Colorado. Several years later, upon hearing “America the Beautiful” for the first time, it gave me chills to realize that I had seen, first-hand the “purple-mountained majesties” of the song.

Not to belabor the love songs to America theme, but Richard and I spent time in California and I’ve been to the New York Islands. We are still hoping to see the redwood forests, and have loved life in the gulfstream waters. We really believe that “this land is made for you and me” and are so grateful that our country’s leaders have protected so much of it for our recreation, appreciation, and awe.

We’d be hard-pressed to pick a favorite place. But living in a holler, in the mountains of Southeastern Tennessee, at the edge of the Cherokee National Forest, is like being rocked in the bosom of Mother Earth.