Slouching Towards Nashville (1/3)

William Eggleston - Untitled (Gingham Woman, Albers Wall)

 

Ain’t travel grand? Let me unpack. The plan: a group of friends independently squirrel away a few bob, on the regular, over several years. Once a modest fund has been accumulated, start discussing potential destinations and themes etc. Kick off a Google doc. Give the adventure a name. Ask permission from the various ministers of the interior, review calendars and book flights. Then obsess for months about the content of the soundtrack / playlist. Simple in theory eh? The group of friends got whittled down to Marc and I. Original plan was an old-school US road trip: DC to New Orleans. The old road-boat “Ulysses Grant” got as far as Nashville and it was plenty. Big thanks to Siamak for planting the seed for the overall idea. 

 

These posts were built and the adventure was had to the soundtrack of the Ulysses Grant playlist. Listen while you read. It's a banger. 

"Are you a vegetarian, Ira?" someone asks idly. "Yes. Yes, I am." "Tell them, Ira," Joan Baez says. "It's nice." He leans back and looks toward the ceiling. "I was in the Sierra once." He pauses, and Joan Baez smiles approvingly.  "I saw this magnificent tree growing out of bare rock, thrusting itself . . . and I thought all right, tree, if you want to live that much, all right! All right! O.K.! I won't chop you!  I won't eat you! The one thing we all have in common is that we all want to live!" Where The Kissing Never Stops - Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Except for one rainy afternoon in DC, we were absolutely blessed with the weather. Interesting though, in a worrying trend continued from Athens, locals throughout our trip were concerned with the unseasonably warm weather. A guide in the mountains of North Carolina was telling us they’d usually we’d have 2-3 Winter snowfalls by now (early March) and had yet to have even one. It was unseasonably warm in Boone NC, Asheville NC (both high elevation towns) and Nashville TN. A scary trend with scarier outcomes to come no doubt. Someone said "Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get." I guess we were mostly getting weather on this trip. Despite the complexity of the combined itinerary where Marc was traveling from Tokyo to meet me in DC there were no major hitches, few minor glitches, lots of brainfood, foodfood and plenty of memories.

The next couple of posts feature random notes taken on my phone, photos, plus follow up notes written after the trip. My goal as always is merely to capture the chronological. Coherency is an unintended side effect. Turns out, for quick emphasis when taking notes on the phone, the notes contain some ineloquent swearing, so apologies in advance where I've let sleeping ineloquence lie. Any quotes are likely lyrics from songs on the playlist. Have fun tune spotting. 

Eggie Pockets

 

Wednesday (12.8k Steps): Travel. Unravel. 1447 Safe. Big conversations outdoors. “While I’m alive I’ll make tiny changes to Earth” Exhausted on an early morning table top @ Burger King in T2 Dublin Airport.  Greasy, unclean. Infected into my marrow with tiredness. Nina asks what have I got? Why am I alive anyway? Going the distance. Chunky French plaits, sweat pants and perspex spectacles a la mode. The rocking back and forth of early boarding. The Thinkpad is the Snickers work wear for the knowledge worker. Everyone on wheels. Radiohead’s National Anthem all shard and sway. Cliché Cliché. Clenched ends. Neurosis. Exoskeletons in high footfall infrastructure terrify me. An entire infrastructure built on timeslicing. US immigration pre-clearance. “Is that how you pronounce your surname? I’ve been pronouncing that pub's name wrong all along!” Egg pittas and Bombay Mix. Shit (shit!) airline food. It’s OK to be hungry – even in America. Especially in America. DC: Holiday Inn checkin. Located overlooking the Hungarian embassy and within the Embassy belt. Neighbours with Serbian and Kasakh embassies. I guess this city has a second tier embassy belt and our Holiday Inn was smack in the middle of it. Definitely the least salubrious place we stayed, although nowhere near the cheapest. Absolutely the smallest bathroom I’ve ever seen, including Japan – knees knocking door from the dunny. After a couple of days walking the city, my overriding impression is that DC is ditch-dull, a horribly careerist town with mostly ignored, mostly black, social issues. I got an insight into what grinding poverty might be like in the Verizon store I went to for a SIM (best advice ever). Some day, free access to Internet connectivity will be available to all. It's as necessary as oxygen over here. “All of my role models were murdered by the government” – on a hoodie seen in DC. Two (why not?) ragged old flags  flapping on the roof of a building I could see from my bed through the 8th floor hotel window. 

Embattled FBI HQ

I had a strong feeling, seeded no doubt by media we've all been consuming over the past few years but re-enforced early and often on this trip, that America's current state is is a bit raggedy, slightly unraveling, coming undone – and this in the seat of its power. America seems at war with itself and finds itself in a phase of its history where any individual citizen's “freedoms” take precedence over any general good. While other experiences elsewhere gave hope, this feeling persisted for me throughout the trip. 

Speaking of Athens...  and identity. I've never seen a people so desperate for a depth of history that just isn't there. The architecture which dominates Civic and Federal government buildings in DC borrows heavily from Classical architecture, ancient Greek in particular. It also feels like there's an attempt to compensate with scale what the country lacks in history. It's impressive, no doubt, but not wholly convincing. I loved this bendy marble staircase at the National Art Gallery though. 

Books: All small tomes.

Thursday [38k Steps]: Slept in to 6am (11am) despite being wide awake @ 3 for an hour. An amazing cortado at the excellent Aussie Coffee Bar to kickstart my day. This kickstart (with chaser) became a feature of the trip. Ozzie Barista: “Perfection is worth waiting for.” Eggs for Breakfast from the Eggie Rockets diner that doubled as the Holiday Inn hotel restaurant (see photos above and below). Decent, although the eggs may have been either powdered or inflated with a bicycle pump. 

Foyer, National Gallery Of Art, West Building

Not sure when I decided to go the NationalGallery Of Art but it was the best idea I’ve ever had. Art was afoot and it was inspirational. I made my way directly to the Modern Art building. The Philip Guston retrospective was a huge highlight of the entire trip. Probably the best curated exhibit I’ve ever attended. I went from never having heard of him, to spending hours immersed in a huge collection of his life's work. I highly recommend the documentary Philip Guston– A Life Lived  which was shown at the end of the exhibition. There’s also this BBC documentary  (shorter and not as good but still worth a watch.) 

Bombardment - Guston's Guernica

Fantastic inspiration and food for thought at the start of a cross-state trip through modern America, with Charlottesville as our first stop (for reasons mostly unrelated to Confederate symbols.) His life story is fascinating. A Russian Jew (originally from Odessa in modern day Ukraine), emigrated with his family to Montreal very early in the 20^th century to escape the pogroms. This left him at an early age with a lifelong hatred of any form of oppression. He had early brushes with the Ku Klux Klan in LA in the 1920s after he painted his response to the Scottsboro Boys case. He was vocally critical of Fascism in the 20s and 30s and themes of political violence and symbols of hooded figures dominate his work. His paintings… “frequently depicted racism, antisemitism, fascism and American identity, as well as, especially in his later most cartoonish and mocking work, the banality of evil.”

City Limits

Marc arrived into DC around 11pm having taken the metro from the airport to a stop 8 blocks away from the hotel. Good job his luggage had wheels. I vastly over-packed and my luggage had no wheels – a mistake I won't make again. He made some friends as he tried to get a steer towards the hotel without phone signal. One thing I learned from Marc on this trip…. for recommendations, I look to crowd-sourced review data (multiple sites) from the Internet which works well most of the time. Marc takes the old-school, yet somehow novel approach of chasing on the ground information from actual humans. When you get an in person recommendation like that the information is generally far superior and more current e.g. CiCi’s (the Kimpton valet) Midtown Cafe breakfast recommendation in Nashville. 

Asheville

Marc’s sister Cecelia had forwarded a care package to the hotel in DC. It consisted of many, many, many things from Cowboy cookies to rolls of quarters for tolls / parking, from an emergency stars 'n' stripes bandana, to a large consignment of high quality homemade granola, sunscreen, peanut butter, protein bars, butter knives…. The list goes on. Very sweet and very well received. I learned that not only are myself and Marc highly compatible travel companions, we’re very similar. At one point I noticed that we’re both walking down the street in DC with large cameras, the same unbranded and comfortable shoes and clothing, layers of quality outdoor gear and a wooly hat each. We spoke again about never having an argument in all the times and all the different accommodations where we lived together. And so it was on this trip.  Now, were there any patterns of behaviour which got on each other’s nerves? Absolutely there was, but we flowed, we floated. It worked and it’s something special. “Dragged me far enough to know.” 

Smithsonian African American History Museum

  

Friday [22k Steps]: Mam’s birthday. Breakfast at Eggies. Grand. Then a walk in the cold DC air for 45mins to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. I got very little out of the exhibition. It was both curated and presented poorly. Lots of exhibits belching out noise simultaneously from different directions and it jarred me to my bones. Marc was the same. I was disappointed, as in theory at least this museum was why we were here. In retrospect though, DC played a key function: to provide contrast to the warmth and unpredictability of Dixie / the Sunbelt itself. We were exhausted by the time we’d “done” the four floors. Plan was, based on my experience the day before, for Marc to do the Guston exhibition. Well, we walked 10 blocks in the rain to have lunch at the Art museum (for consistency of experience the African American museum's only eating place had an airport-esque cordoned, winding queue for entry which went on for at least 30 mins.) So we noped out of there even though we needed “a cup of tea?” (Marc’s euphemism throughout the trip for a time out / sit down.) My plan was to head off to the Smithsonian Museum of American Art for the afternoon. So many high quality museums in this town. We had lunch and both of us are still exhausted and it’s raining and howling cold outside. I mentioned going back to the hotel for a kip. I’d slept extremely poorly so I was both exhausted from the morning’s activities and I’d had no sleep. He said he might do the same and even suggested a cheeky taxi which we jumped into immediately outside the museum lest we change our minds. Ended up reading booooks Crow, Didion on a dull DC afternoon and getting a snooze in before dinner. Perfect. Dinner was a pre-booked, pricy kip with no physical menus. We were seated in an ante-room off the main room – no idea what purpose that served. We were told to scan a QR code for the menu. My data mining allergy kicked in so I asked for a physical menu and was given an iPad. The food menu was a link to their website. The drinks menu contained on an app in the iPad. Turns out the linked food menu was not the menu for that evening so we had to choose twice. Can’t even remember what I had. A white bean soup, some artichokes, some other stuff, definitely some wine. “We have a different stomach for Dessert” - waitress in Asheville. Later we discovered the “Take Me Home Country Roads” song is about West Virginia and our road trip assiduously avoided that state completely. Mountain Mama indeed. 

History Vs Banality

Almost Heaven (Just Like Heaven), West Virginia (Jr.)/ Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River / Life is old there, older than the trees / Younger than the mountains, growing like a breeze

Lesser Spotted Red Yellow Cab

Saturday [12.5k Steps] The taxi we took to the car hire place for 9am to properly commence the roadtrip was a red Yellow cab. The receptionist at the Holiday Inn desk who checked us out and ordered our cab (“No Uber?”) had the most kind and beautiful soul. She became completely distracted by a cute puppy being led through the lobby. And why wouldn’t she when the alternative is an endless stream of soul-crushing admin. Crazy amazing Eritrean eyes. May the bottom rungs of the hospitality industry ladder be kind to her. 

The Compact Traveler (featuring wheels!)

The Avis staff only allowed one customer per teller into the office. This with a howling gale blowing outside on our luggage… and Marc :) I struggle with transitions on the best of days so this was a frustrating start. Renting a car these days is usually a multi-person endeavor - so much swapping of documents to complete the validations. Same circus with a group beside us. The only goal seemed to be keeping the counter area as quiet and uncluttered as possible for the staff.  We got some bogan, obnoxious white Toyota Sienna instead of the bastion of German engineering (Passat) which I’d booked. We also had to deal with a dysfunctional external navigation device which caused us no end of trouble through the trip. The car worked OK (can i haz wheels?) and got us to where we needed to go, but the "take it or leave it" attitude of the staff and the poor logistics which got them to the point where they were offering us a pick up truck for a 1000 mile trip was a poor customer experience. Anyways - most importantly, we figured the tunes out. Apple Play refused to work so we hard-patched my new, red, Plan B phone into the Sienna's mainframe with a fiery red USB cable and we were in fucking business. The shittest set of speakers I’ve come across in a long time. They had the dynamic range of a spring doorstop. Everything about this car was sub-par with hidden annoyances which we'd discover at inopportune times. But we couldn’t complain because we had TUNES! Ulysses Grant playlist played hard for the entire trip and it was good. 215 songs was perfect 😊 Marc was introduced to Big Star. The Replacements taught me that you can’t go far without Big Star. Advice to keep in mind for all road trips.

Fugazi - In On The Kill Taker

As we’d settled in to the decision to skip the Washington Monument due to time constraints, Last Chance For A Slow dance from Fugazi’s In on the Kill-taker featuring the self same monument (albeit blurred) on its cover came on the playlist. I'm a big believer in signs. Under normal circumstances I would have heeded the sign. But in this instance we needed to keep moving. Agreed we’d take day on / day off driving and the driver would deal with whatever came including fill ups flat tires etc. With assistance of course. That's kinda how it ended up being until right towards the end. So, DC into Virginia. Marc had suggested a visit to Monticello. We hit Monticello for one-ish and booked straight onto a tour. 

Monticello

(Notes plundered, supplemented and re-edited from Wikipedia) Located outside Charlottesville, Virginia, Monticello was the primary slave labor plantation of Founding Father Thomas Jefferson (3rd president of the US). He began designing Monticello in 1769 after inheriting land from his father at age 26. As the eldest son, it was expected that he would inherit his father’s entire estate. Instead, Jefferson was given his choice of building site and adjacent fields and the task of dividing up the remaining land between the other sons. Jefferson designed the main house himself and he reworked the design through his presidency. 

Outbuilding at Monticello

Situated on the summit of an 850 ft (260 m)-high peak in the Southwest Mountains, the name Monticello means "little mountain" in Italian. Jefferson used a combination of free workers, indentured servants and slaves to build (and then re-build) the home. The working plantation was originally 5000 acres and used the labour of slaves for tobacco growing. 

SO much PHOTO!

 The house (including grounds) is a National Historic Landmark and is the only private home in the US to be designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.The US nickel features Monticello on its reverse side. Monticello is also depicted on the reverse of the 1953 $2 bill. At Jefferson's direction, he was buried on the grounds, in an area now designated as the Monticello Cemetery. Jefferson's gravestone features an epitaph he wrote himself and interestingly makes no reference to his Presidency. Culinary factoid of dubious provenance: Monticello is also known as the birthplace of macaroni and cheese in the United States....! It’s more likely that it was merely made popular there. Jefferson's slave and cook James Hemings brother of Sally Hemings, Jefferson’s mistress, perfected the dish and made it similar to the way it served today. 

Our guided tour was fun, informative and interesting. As much of a polymath as the guy was I get the impression that TJ may have been painful to be around. The idea of a piece of land and a dream home built from the ground up and only from ideas tugged at the heart strings a little given our own disappointments but this should be treated purely as an inspiration. 

 

Vegetable Garden At Monticello Álainn

 

Virginia into North Carolina.....After a cup of tea at Monticello, we hit the road later than we’d planned for the 4.5 hour drive to Boone. The sunset-lit drive to Boone, North Carolina was our first taste of the wilds of Appalachia and the Blue Stack Mountains and it was intoxicating. It was also our first of many sunset drives to "the next place." The route was sprinkled with farming communities nestled deep in the hills, fully isolated, fully self-contained, the independence of the pioneers and frontiersmen still woven deep into their fabric. Marc was fascinated by these remote communities and by their viability challenges coming as he now does from the Great Metropolis. He made the excellent observation that the vast majority of the homes we passed at twilight were unlit and appeared empty. I made the half joking comment that they were all at mass. I may have been half right. First In Flight – Wright Brothers were from Ohio and designed and built the "first flight" plane there. Maiden flight took off from North Carolina – hence the “First In Flight” on the majority of NC license plates. The argument continues, but Marc’s choice of Blackalicious First In Flight for the playlist was great synchronicity. I heart synchronicity.

 

 

Wheels, making traveling everywhere easier

 

Checked in to our spacious hotel in Boone and straight to the Red Onion for dinner, Marc as diligent co-pilot having rang ahead from the road to say we’d be late and to hold our place in what turned out to be an empty restaurant. Ah me. My bowel soon found out why it was empty (the restaurant that is.) I stupidly chose sea fish in a hopelessly inland mountain town. The fish exhibited symptoms of very recent temperature trauma (frozen to microwaved in 6 minutes) and the myriad of highly processed flavourings it was reheated in (think Chinese 5 spice) fucked me up 5 times. Big zero for Red Onion, Boone. It was in Boone after the reality of driving the distances we’d itinerised that the decision was made to skip Memphis – and that was a good decision. I reckon Memphis almost needs its own trip and I loved TN and NC so a revisit is definitely on the list. Anyways, I sat at the laptop and re-routed us, calling the hotel in Nashville to extend by one night. No Bueno as they wanted a 50% premium on the same room for 1 night extra. So extended in Asheville by one night where we managed to get the room for 20% LESS for the second night. 

 

Towns we met on the road during the first day on the road: Troutville, Rutherwood, Crumpler, Shatley Springs, Mouth Of Wilson, Troutdale, Sugar Grove, Christiansburg, Buchanan, Mechanicsville, Jolivue, Ladd, Yancey Mills.