June 6, 2008

Traveling

by Terry Taylor, Creative Guide

Fred and I are driving through the South. We flew through it earlier.

AirTran to Atlanta, a Hertz stop and we’re on our way. We hit a few new business fishing holes and stopped in Chattanooga, TN. Going to Chattanooga with Fred is like going to Boston with a Kennedy. Fred is a local celebrity in the river bend city growing in shadow of Lookout Mountain.

We leave at 8 am and drive towards Huntsville, Alabama. I know Alabama like the contents of my memory. But this is the Arctic Circle of Alabama compared to my stomping grounds down in the Wiregrass southern flatlands. North Alabama is far from Andalusia.

We slide down the side of Lookout Mountain going south, passing a business named Atomic Fireworks. A few miles later is a nuclear power plant with classic cooling towers.

No “Gomer Simpson” jokes, please.

Actually, there are dozens of massive fireworks establishments at the edge of north Alabama. For some odd reason, that nuclear power plant nestled over there on the left with the fireworks stands as big as Wal-Marts seems like a bad idea. We keep driving, following the Hertz “Never Lost” GPS.

A funeral home on the right looks like Buford Scissorhands did the landscaping. A highway sign informs us that we are driving on the Trail Of Tears Corridor. Up ahead, I mist up a little as I see four jackasses under a billboard that reads “Your Future Starts Here.” I hope irony and reality are not linked between the asses and the words above them.

Farther down the beautiful road, flanked by rolling mountains, smoking industrial plants hug a revival tent with a sign that reads “Holy Ghost Meeting.” I comment to Fred that while I have seen much evidence of God in my time on this orb, I have been to a few of those “Holy Ghost” conflagrations in my life and have never seen a ghost, Holy or otherwise.

We pass a two-acre field packed with baby strollers and child car seats. Odd is hardly adequate to describe the scene. There must be a thousand of them lined up as if waiting for children to show up and have a seat. Not far away, a Christmas tree juts out of a rock cliff, fully decorated. Fred looks at me with an expression I have seen many times from people who are not from Alabama.

“Don’t ask,” I say.

He doesn’t.

A few more miles brings a pizza place advertising “Large Ham Pizza” and I wonder if they have a sausage and biscuit pizza, because I could go for one right about now.

I notice a metal building sitting alone in a little valley. On the front is a firm statement: SCREW PRODUCTS.

I concur. So do nine buzzards circling four skinny goats in a patch of scabby grass. I predict three goats by sundown and nine satisfied vultures.

We have passed at least 300 churches and one Moontown Liquor store. The devil is out-numbered, clearly, but holding on.

Upon arrival in Huntsville, the rockets of NASA push against the azure sky and we become subtly aware of a seriously scientific building boom that seems the opposite of what we read in the papers around the country. This is a place where you want to sell a house.

We later learn that Huntsville has more PhDs per capita than any place in America. Thank you Werner Von Braun.

We finish our meetings and fly into a sky brushed with peach and coral with silver clouds smearing the horizon. Peacock blue pushes the sun down into the west, maybe into Mississippi. Opal lakes, appearing like melted metal, poured into the shapes of Sanskrit, dot the darkening earth as I watch the Atlantic South ease by at 500 mph below.

At just the right moment, out the plane’s oval window, the sun lasers the earth like a welding arch and it is officially dark. An atmospheric soup of powder gray smokes the evening and speckled pattern of streetlights, cul de sacs, and baseball fields fill the darkening land.

We descend and put our tray tables and seatbacks in their upright positions. Little 18-wheelers suckle warehouses below like puppies as we descend into Richmond.

I will soon be home; or having just visited Alabama, maybe I was at home earlier in the day. Maybe we carry home inside us no matter where we go?

Maybe we are home wherever we are.

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