Tag: adventure

  • En Plein Air: Tommy’s Story

    En Plein Air: Tommy’s Story

    On Atma’s maiden voyage, I parked the van in Santa Margarita, California to survey rock piles upon which artists had scratched, scrawled, and painted pictographs en plein air over 4,000 years ago1Way before the 19th century, when the French took a notion to escape the studio and paint en plein air; I parked the van in southern New Mexico on a lot next to Carlsbad Caverns, found the gaping opening that spiraled down in sweeping circles to the cold pit of an enormous cave. It had stalagmites, it had stalactites, its walls wept with a milk white substance like the glaze on Krispy Kreme doughnuts. It had elevators to haul people back up to the top. It had bats. It was a cave’s cave. And it was undeniably cavernous. The long twisting descent made it was easy to imagine Dante’s journey through the fiery rings of the Inferno. All the Caverns lacked was a Virgil and tortured souls2Where was Dick Cheney, when you needed him?.

    A Painted Rock at the National Monument in Santa Margarita

    I parked the van in Arizona among Saguaro3A Youtube guide to pronouncing this word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThfqfKu790I cacti and the arid splendor of the Sonoran Desert.

    Saguaro Cacti in the Sonoran Desert

    I parked the van outside of Austin, Texas on a side-trip to the Longhorn Cavern State Park before turning toward my final destination in Houston. As I approached the park, I noticed a turn-out to a scenic view and vowed to check it out on the return.

    The entrance to the cave itself was shrine-like and spectacular, a nature-made atrium of boulders weathered smooth over an impossibly vast period of time. I shrank from the chance to explore the cave on the excuse that I would come back and bring a friend. Or maybe I just knew, though I was in Texas, there was no way this cave was going to match up with Carlsbad Caverns.

    I drove back to the turn-out that promised a scenic view. The best spot to access the view was in the fat center of an elliptical loop at the end of a short drive, past a stand of brush and trees. It was desolate with an air of abandonment and neglect, a place where you could shoot holes in a can setting on a stump and no one would care. On the return side of the loop was a car pulled completely off the road into rough grass. I thought whoever came along with that car was up to no good. The view stretched out over a valley to distant hills with an easy, self-satisfied bucolic splendor. Hill country.

    I fiddled around getting Atma parked off of the road so the sliding door on the passenger side would open up over the vista. As I circled around the van to get to a steel garbage can and its chained lid, a disembodied voice rose out from the vicinity of that car. It was a man’s voice, and he was saying that he couldn’t move and needed help.

    I decided immediately that there was a fifty percent chance that this guy really needed help and the other fifty percent was that this was a setup and the guy or a few of his buddies lurking nearby were armed with guns. Still, it seemed like bad form to refuse a person help when he asked for it so plainly. I decided to circle around his car so I would come up on him from behind and get a look inside on my approach.

    “I’ve got a bad back and I need my paints from the back seat,” he said, flicking his head in that direction. It was a four door. He sat with his legs flung out from the driver’s seat. I was going to have to open the door behind him to fetch him his paints. I felt uneasy still. I wasn’t yet sure what I might find.

    Tommy, the painter, in car

    “I’m Tommy. I come up here every day. I drove all the way out here from Myrtle Beach, Florida to be with my husband. He’s the only man I trust. It’s a long way to go in a condition like this. See that tree over there. I come up here every day to paint that tree. I talk to that tree. And you know what? The tree talks back. I know I’m crazy. Don’t let me scare you because I’m crazy. I’m a painter. I paint signs and sometimes take along a helper to carry my supplies.”

    Tommy’s Tree

    I seized on the idea that Tommy painted signs, maybe houses too, to fund his artistic study of this tree. I didn’t know exactly what kind of painter Tommy thought himself just that he came out to paint this one particular tree. It wasn’t a mighty oak or a redwood. Its trunk splayed out at its base into three separate trunks, each as big as a big man’s thigh. It stood in among a stand of others. Its tripartite trunk must have caught Tommy’s eye. Whatever the reason, it was the tree that spoke to Tommy.

    Then he showed me his current rendition of it, stretched in a frame on a long, skinny canvas. It was a lot like a Van Gogh with the shape of the tree described in vertical lines made luminescent and wavy by a mysterious internal source of electricity.

    Next he got me to pull out a photo album from the passenger footwell in the back of his car. It was his portfolio and contained plastic-sleeved photographs of paintings and murals which beatified everyday people and gave most of them angel wings apparently to enjoy the Southwestern grace of a non-denominational Spanish mission and hover about its stony well.

    “One time a man come up to me outside a little place I had where I kept my supplies and hit me over the head with a pipe,” he said. 

    “That’s the reason I’m all bent up like this. He destroyed the nerves. It’s why I can barely walk. It took a lot of surgeries to put me back together. And you know what? I knew that man. It was a fellow who used to come help me out. A long time after I got out of the hospital, I remembered his face and knew who he was.”

    “Did you confront your attacker?” I asked him. I felt like I already knew Tommy well enough to guess the answer.

    “Yes, I did. I asked him why he did it. And you know what he told me? He said he needed $500 to pay a gambling debt. And I said, ’man, you should have told me. You know, I would have given you that $500. You didn’t have to do that. He said he was sorry.”

    I marveled at Tommy for having no hint of resentment in his story, neither in the words he chose or the timbre of his voice, even though the guy who attacked him had left him unconscious and crippled for life. Tommy could still walk but just barely. It was vital but also a courageous feat for him to stand-up from time-to-time so he could walk a few paces to keep from getting stiff.

    Then, I asked him if he had forgiven the man who had crippled him. I felt like I knew the answer to that too.

    “Yes, I did,” he said.

    For Tommy, I think it is fair to say that, wherever he is now, life’s been good. Out of sheer force of a kind spirit, life’s been good. And if life’s been good for Tommy, I reckon the chances are life’s been pretty good for us too4An earlier version of this story appeared in Ode to the Adventure Prone.

    Footnotes

    • 1
      Way before the 19th century, when the French took a notion to escape the studio and paint en plein air
    • 2
      Where was Dick Cheney, when you needed him?
    • 3
      A Youtube guide to pronouncing this word: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThfqfKu790I
    • 4
      An earlier version of this story appeared in Ode to the Adventure Prone

  • Half-naked Man on Campus

    Campus security detail confronts author while sunbathing on the quad of a Christian university campus in Texas.

    Maureen Muldoon texted me a few days before a Voicebox planned evening of storytelling, asking me if I could fill in for a scratched performer. The theme song for the month, appropriately was “September” by Earth, Wind, and Fire. I said yes before knowing what I might possibly contribute. I thought Maureen might bite on a story about sunbathing since one could make a tenuous connection between the end of summer and the end of sunbathing. Lo and behold, she agreed!

  • How to Fulfill a Boyhood Dream in Cumberland Gap, TN

    Routinely in the sixties and early seventies my parents would load me up with my kid brother in a borrowed station wagon and buzz down from Chicago to Asheville, NC as fast as centrifugal force and the likelihood of sliding sideways over the edge of a mountainous road would allow.

    Dad always drove and he always seemed to be in a hurry, my guess, now with the benefit of hindsight, is that vacation didn’t quite begin for him until he had dumped his offspring off with his parents-in-law so that he might slake his thirst for alone time with his young and pretty bride.

    He was not a hover parent. Hover parents had not yet been invented. Nor for that matter was there such a phrase as free-range parents though that expression retroactively comes much closer to describing our parents’ parenting style. Nor were they overconcerned with the quality of the quality time we might be having with the grandparents in their absence.

    I don’t recall mom and dad dallying long enough to take the grandparents out to supper. They didn’t linger, not even briefly to pause on the front porch. It was magnanimous of them really to slow down and stop the car long enough for us to step out onto the curb with our belongings.

    Canonical Stuckey’s Billboard

    The trip down in consequence was a blur. Dad didn’t believe in stopping anywhere. Certainly not at Stuckey’s to get one of their pecan logs made famous to my brother and me by their billboards which popped up every fifty feet or so along the side of the road for the whole trip south.

    A Brick of Black Cat Firecrackers

    He didn’t believe in stopping at trading posts either where one could purchase a leather jacket with fringe just like the one Tonto wore, sparklers, black cat firecrackers, cherry bombs and M-80s, in case you had an urge to see if they were as potent as your cousins had bragged about and you really could blow up a porcelain toilet. We didn’t stop for arrowheads, rubber tomahawks, bow and arrows, postcards of virgin Indian maidens, beads, moccasins, bears in cages, any of that cool stuff.

    These roadside attractions were “tourist traps” according to our father. We always passed by the Gap and only heard of a mythical location where three states converged to a point. Even as young children, we understood that a point was a mathematical concept, an abstraction more than a location, but we wanted to see it anyway.

    So, the myth of the three states converging to a point survived those many trips down south. Survived my childhood, survived my grandparents.

    As an adult, while on my own pilgrimages to Western North Carolina, I sometimes took a side excursion to Cumberland Gap just because I could, to enjoy the cozy nestled-in feel of the place, a tiny hollow snug with the mountains with a population that dares not exceed 500 persons and a tiny white clapboard chapel which for decades has wed elopers darting in from neighboring states.

    This year I was zooming past on my return from the 2021 edition of the Wildacres Writer’s retreat, it was a fabulous and productive time (if you’re a writer you need to check it out), when my eye caught a sign for the Gap, I gave a whimsical flick of the wheel and steered my van in the indicated direction. Only I forgot that it begins with the apprehension that you are traversing the parking lot of a coin-operated laundromat before the road starts looking like a proper road with a lane in each direction for traffic.

    Once the road starts looking like a road, it is a charming little descent into town. I had a sandwich at a pub before driving to a trailhead, remembering that while I had been to that spot before I had no recollection of hiking the trails. The only way to remedy that was to hike up one and settle it for all time.

    Cap Creek Coffeehouse

    I left the lot briefly to tank up on coffee at the Gap Creek Coffeehouse, two blocks into town before returning, parking again, and starting my ascent.

    If you travel the U.S. a lot on roads, you will pass by dozens and dozens of small towns with “historical” downtowns and districts. You will rapidly conclude that we, as a nation, are historically addled. I wonder how Europeans might take it if they ever toured the states by motorcar. Three burgs into it and they would be convulsing with laughter if not peeing in their pants.

    It would be ironic enough for a person coming from Paris or Prague, imagine instead a resident of Athens who can look out a window to see soaring above the fence in his backyard, the Parthenon. Yet, despite the relative youth of our nation, we have our sites that can inspire awe. (If you have any doubts, plan your next trip to the civil-war battlefield of Antietam in Maryland.

    A historic marker with a AAA rating

    On the trail, I quickly came to a sign explaining that Daniel Boone and some others had pioneered the gap as a passageway that broke through the Appalachian Mountain range permitting settlers to reach deeper into the interior of a vast, untamed wilderness in search of a new life. Their feet tread where might feet tread. They brought their families, the more privileged of them might have a horse to share. They came over in the gap in the winter DELIBERATELY so they could be ready to plant at the first sign of spring. You quickly formed the idea that these people were desperate in a way we’ve lost a knack for grasping, who must have had stories of hardship like the people who brave the Rio Grande and at great risk come over the border from Mexico.

     When it staked the all-too-familiar “historical” claim, I was all in. The legend had already convinced me that I was on hallowed ground.

    I turned to the fork that put me on the trail to the three-states peak, which immediately took me past the ruins of an early iron foundry that looked more like a grain than a steel mill. The remaining structure could have been part of a Mayan ruin.

    The trail turned sharply up hill. A signed promised me it was 1.2 miles to the peak. Peak makes me think of a bald surface with a crown of snow around it like the head of a monk. It also makes me think that there was a bit of a climb in store.

    I greeted a young couple coming down the path toward me with the question, “was it worth it?” only aiming to tease out a little encouragement, an old, usually reliable trick. The girl assured me it was a challenge and gave me a winded look to back it up. This put her guy friend in a quandary. How could he encourage me but not encourage me at the same time? What if I had a heart attack half-way to the top—in part due to his dubious advice—that would saddle his conscience for the rest of his breathing days? I could see the gears turning inside of his skull. Then, he said if I was in good hiking shape it shouldn’t be too much of a struggle.

    It made me wonder, did I look that old and fragile? And then I thought that I had just come from a few moderately strenuous hikes in North Carolina, a pair of them along the length of the Deer Lick Trail, all uphill up until the turning point, a scenic overlook by the side of the Blue Ridge Parkway, with friends Art, Tucker, and Jane, and that people tended to underrate me anyway. I left them feeling freshly emboldened.

    The next couple was more encouraging but left me with the ominous warning, “when you see a bench along the side of the trail, use it.”

    It took me what seemed like a long time to reach the bench and when I did, I didn’t feel like stopping. I pressed on with the immediate effect of wondering what level of bone headedness caused me to ignore well-meaning advice and pass up on a chance to collect myself.

    For most of the climb, I enjoyed the foreboding rumble of thunder from distant mountains. Now somewhere past the half-way mark, it started to drizzle. The trees on the side of the mountain mostly protected me from the rain even as it picked up tempo. Instead of moisture, doubt started to seep in. I had visions of breaking out into the clearing of the mountain peak in time to get skewered by a bolt of lightning.

    Triumph!

    I pressed on. My interior monologue of braggadocio alone would not permit me to slink down the mountain now. The rain picked up, turned into a downpour. I didn’t exactly see the point of running out to expose myself. I could see light from a break in the trees ahead indicating I might be coming toward the peak. Then I saw a gazebo roof! What was a gazebo doing way up here? I broke for it. If need be, I could weather the storm under cover. Then, I realized the gazebo crowned the peak. I had made it.

    Looking down at my feet, there was a marker put there by the United States Geographical Service marking the exact spot where the three states came together, a casual affirmation of a boyhood fantasy. Woohoo! Sometimes dumb luck is the cleverest thing going.

    U.S. Coast & Geodetic Survey Triangulation Station, the (formerly) mythical point where Kentucky, Virginia, and Tennessee converge