Just because it`s possible to clamp ourselves to steering wheels and accelerators and drive 70 miles an hour from coast to coast without seeing anything except the rear ends of 18-wheelers, that doesn`t mean we have to do it.
Only God and perhaps the management of Cracker Barrel restaurants know how many of us do our white-knuckle runs each spring between the Midwest and Florida. We pack our shorts and our sandals and get into the oddest assortment of vehicles since camping went to microwave ovens and cable TV, and then we bore down the road as if we were being pursued by hungry polar bears.
Now, I ask you, is that any way to traverse the colonies?
It is not, and so on our most recent trek southward, my wife, Betty, and I took the pedal off the metal and were rewarded with a traveling experience almost as rich as the one in 1962 when we hauled five kids to the World`s Fair in Seattle-after which we both would have gone into therapy if we could have afforded it.
Despite driving a full-sized van and pulling a 19-foot travel trailer some 3,500 miles over Interstate Highways 65, 24 and 75 to and from the Ft. Meyers, Fla., area-an undertaking that in itself may hint of mental instability-there was no need for therapy after our recent trip.
There was, instead, a sense of amazement at how a few stops had enriched not only our travel, but also our appreciation for history.
We drove south far enough that a late winter storm sweeping across the country was cold mist instead of snow, before making our first foray off the interstate.
Then we left I-65 at Elizabethtown, Ky., and followed Kentucky Highway 61 a dozen miles to Hodgenville and the birthplace of Abraham Lincoln. By coincidence, it was Feb. 12, and in the dampness that hung over the red-clay country it was hard to believe that only 183 years had passed since that day when Nancy Lincoln gave birth in that most famous of log cabins.
The reconstructed cabin on display takes on a shrine-like quality, an impression enhanced by the broad concrete steps that lead to the pillared marble-and-granite building that houses the log cabin.
And then, there it is, its crooked logs chinked with clay and its shadowy interior inviting the imagination to soar back across the decades.
The primitive structure is neither dwarfed nor denigrated by its polished stone enclosure, and to stand before it in the privacy of your thoughts is to feel the soft, ephemeral embrace of history.
The reverie is ended by the arrival of a group of Bowling Green 1st graders who shuffle in to stare at the log cabin and to listen to their teachers.
History lives! If we hadn`t gotten off the interstate we would have missed your party, Abe. Unthinkable. Happy birthday, and, while even 127 years after Robert E. Lee`s surrender, we still haven`t got it all straightened out, we`re working on it.
The Lincoln birthplace is a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service, and it is a first-class operation, down to the birthday cake served by site superintendent Carolyn Link.
So it was in a party mood that the trip south was resumed. And it was in something of a party spirit that the next stop was the Museum of Beverage Containers and Advertising in Goodlettsville, Tenn. What we have here is the can collection of Tom Bates gone orbital.
”It just happened. I started collecting cans as a kid and it ended up being this,” Bates said, sweeping his arm around at the towering shelves crammed with cans and bottles.
”This” is a big building just a mile or so off I-65, and directions to it are not all that easy to get because not everyone in Goodlettsville is aware that ”the world`s largest collection of soda and beer cans” is listed as a tourist attraction in some publications.
If you are in to cans and bottles or Coke or Pepsi memorabilia or antique advertising, Bates has something for you and you can find his place by driving east off I-65 at exit 98.
Bates will tell you that the prospects of retiring on the sale of your can collection are not good. ”Most cans from about 1970 to the present are not worth much,” he said. ”Only 50 cents to $1.”
And Billy beer cans, though sometimes they are advertised for sale for hundreds of dollars, are worth only a couple of dollars on the collector market, even if they are full of beer, Bates said.
Of course there are a couple of cans that were filled in Chicago many years ago-one by the Manhattan Brewing Co., another that held Rosalie beer-that are worth big bucks. Unfortunately, only one of each is known to exist and they each sold at auction for $6,000.
You don`t learn those kinds of exciting facts by sticking tight to the interstate. And it is a short detour from laughter to tears when you poke your nose off the main thoroughfare. On a morning of warm mist, we left I-75 near Calhoun, Ga., and drove Georgia Highway 225 the short distance to the New Echota Historical Site, where the infamous Trail of Tears had its beginning.
”I`ll never forget the sadness of that morning,” a soldier wrote of the day in 1838 when he and his companions forced the Cherokees to abandon their homes and property and begin the agonizing winter trek to Oklahoma, during which as many as 4,000 of them perished from exposure, malnutrition and disease. (Part of that trail runs through southern Illinois.)
It was at New Echota, Ga., that the Cherokees established a representative government, a judicial system, commercial enterprises and farms, and an alphabet and printing system that produced the first Indian-language newspaper.
New Echota was designated the capital of the Cherokee nation that took in parts of Georgia, Tennessee and Alabama; thousands of Indians began to live in peace in a manner they thought would make them an acceptable part of the burgeoning white culture.
Then gold was discovered in northern Georgia and all the tranquility, treaties and human rights for the Indians went the way of smoke signals.
When the Cherokees didn`t move off their farms and out of their prosperous little town at the request of the U.S. government, the Army was sent in to move them. The tragic circumstances that followed are brought to life as one strolls the grass-covered remains of the town. One envisions walking from Georgia to Oklahoma in the winter without food or shelter, with a sick baby on your arm and with your feet bare and bleeding.
The New Echota site is operated by the Georgia Department of Natural Resources and came into existence in 1950 when a group of Calhoun citizens raised money to buy the 200 acres which had reverted to farm land. An annual Cherokee homecoming is held at New Echota; this year`s is Sept. 19.
The long, straight miles of interstate will diffuse those thoughts of the Cherokees eventually, but not even the shiny elegance of Atlanta and the balmy weather of the area around Macon can erase them, or prepare you for the next stop and its equally poignant message.
It is late afternoon and a sprinkle of rain chases us just south of Macon and we take exit 46 off I-75 and follow Georgia Highway 49, which is called Peach Parkway and the POW Memorial trail. It is a pretty drive past orchards and farms and through small towns where camellias and azaleas are blossoming and daffodils sprout in unlikely places.
After 60 miles or so, there is Andersonville, the infamous Civil War cemetery and prison site. Across the road and up a small hill is the town itself, where the thousands of Union prisoners spilled off the railroad cars and were marched into the stockade of death and horror.
This place, even more than some of the well-known battlefields, may give a visitor the best sense of the wrenching that this country endured during the Civil War. The rows of modest grave markers, over the mass graves that were filled at a rate of 100 or 200 each day, are somber indicators along the route to the prison site where reconstruction work is in progress to mark the corners of the former wooden stockade.
Looking across the peaceful valley with its trickling little creek, it is impossible to believe that it was all here such a short time ago: the stench that drifted for miles, the maggot-infested wounds, the men preying on their dying friends to try to survive, naked corpses in the open sewers, hollow-eyed soldiers ready to die to escape the agony of starvation.
It began as a 16 1/2-acre enclosure and was later enlarged by another 10 acres, park ranger Allen Weatherspoon said. At its peak it had 45,000 prisoners, with some 13,000 of them dying during its 14 months of operation in 1864 and 1865.
The horrors of Civil War prison camps were, of course, not exclusive to the Confederate cause. The final score for all prisons was 30,208 deaths among 211,400 Union soldiers captured, and 25,976 deaths among 462,000 prisoners in Confederate prisons, the largest of which were Camp Douglas and Rock Island prisons in Illinois.
But the atrocious conditions at Andersonville were apparently the worst and were thought to be partly the fault of the prison commandant, Capt. Henry Wirz who was later tried and hanged as a war criminal.
A monument to Wirz was later erected by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and stands in the village of Andersonville.
Weatherspoon helped us check the prison files (available to all visitors) to determine that two Union soldiers named Stokes had been ”exchanged” from Andersonville, and it was interesting to imagine that they had boarded the train here and left the revulsion of this place behind to return home.
Andersonville is also a National Historic site and its purpose has been expanded to become a war museum for the prisoners of all wars, Weatherspoon said, adding that it is also an active National Cemetery, with two or three burials each week.
Fifteen miles down the road, we detoured for a brief night time stop at Plains to find that everything except one service station and a souvenir store was closed. This was probably a good thing because in our state of personally connecting with history we might have overstocked at Cousin Hugh Carter`s antiques store, or barged in on Jimmy for some trout-fishing gossip.
We interrupted our travels then for a couple of weeks with the alligators and birds and beaches of Sanibel Island, Fla., the kind of respite that is guaranteed to defrost a Northern brain.
The first stop on the way back was Cross Creek, the rural Florida community where Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings set most of her writing, including
”The Yearling,” the book that established her reputation.
We were there-only a few miles off I-75 just south of Gainesville-on a warm, humid day when all of Rawling`s characters seemed to be loafing just out of sight in the shadows of the overgrown orange grove and the palmetto.
Rawling`s typewriter sat on a table nearby with a supply of copy paper and some pencils, and there was, of course, a vase of flowers because Rawlings insisted on flowers even before the necessities, according to her biographers. She also insisted on good food-much of it she cooked herself-and drinks to entertain the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, Margaret Mitchell and Dylan Thomas.
Except for the hard-surface road out in front, the house and its surroundings must all be pretty much the way it was when those delightful paragraphs were crafted about the people who lived so close to the earth in the flat Florida land that is only a short step up from the swamps of creation.
For anyone who has enjoyed those paragraphs, a quiet walk around the premises has a magic feel to it.
”We cannot live without the earth or apart from it,” Rawlings has written, ”and something is shriveled in a man`s heart when he turns away from it and concerns himself only with the affairs of men.”
With that exit line, we left the sprawling old house beneath the moss-draped trees and headed on up the road to visit the Okefenokee Swamp, definitely not a place of ”the affairs of men.”
It is a 60-mile drive off the interstate from Valdosta, Ga., on U.S. Highway 84 to Waycross and then south a few more miles on U.S. Highway 1 and Georgia Highway 177 to the north end of the Okefenokee. And there, at a visitors` center on Cowhouse Island, you can stroll among the alligators-one of them, Oscar, is more than 14 feet long-and you can walk the trails and boardwalks to get some sense of nature`s awesome capacity for getting along so well without man, and recovering from the wounds that he sometimes inflicts.
You can even get an intimate look at some relatives of ”The Yearling” in an enclosure behind the nature center. A better experience, however, is to ride a boat or canoe over the tea-colored water into some of the 600 square miles of wilderness.
”There`s a `gator,” guide Joe Hall said as he guided the boat around a bend where a 10-foot reptile took the sun on a patch of grass.
”They don`t bother you if you don`t bother them,” Hall said, pausing to replenish his load of chewing tobacco.
Hall stopped the boat frequently to talk about some of the plants, among them the meat-eating pitcher plant and the ”never wet,” which sheds water. At one point he stepped out of the boat and onto the floating carpet of matted vegetation.
” `Okefenokee` is an Indian word meaning `land of the trembling earth,`
” Hall said, jumping up and down to illustrate his point.
It was fitting that our visit to the Okefenokee occurred on the day of Georgia`s presidential primary election and we could note in the visitors`
center the campaign of long-time swamp resident Pogo who ran for president with the slogan: ”In 1988 it is wise to run and maybe scream a little.”
Pogo`s wisdom seemed to apply to the current political scene, and we left the tranquility of the swamp and headed across the radically altered and domesticated continent.
There was another scheduled stop-in Murfreesboro, Tenn., which had been touted in a tourist guide as the ”antique center of the South.” It is not. Many other towns, Goodlettsville and Nashville for example, have more antiques dealers.
But in one of the two antiques malls in Murfreesboro, J.W. Duncan said that the Stones River battle was one of the bloodiest of the Civil War-”They say the blood ran for days.” It took place nearby, Duncan said, and the town has a pre-Civil War courthouse, and holds annual Uncle Dave Macon Days when banjo and fiddle players gather from all over and . . .
It goes on and on like that the minute you get off the interstate-one fascinating site or circumstance after another. It is a terrible thing what those race courses have done to us. It is time to get off the super highways and take back the country.
And if that sounds like a political slogan in this election year, rest assured that it is only urging that you vote for yourself. Or as Pogo might say, ”We are passing up life, and it is ours.”
