Oxford,Mississippi

I had wanted to drive across southern Tennessee, a piece of country previously visited decades ago on a cross country trip by motorcycle and remembered as exceptionally beautiful and pastoral. Instead the lure of Chattanooga held us too long and we ended up crossing the state in five freeway hours in a hurry to make a dinner date in Memphis with some friends who had driven from California to make a meeting in Indiana. We met in Memphis for dinner and we had a brief encounter in what was for us all an unlikely city. We have known Kim and Joe for twenty years.

After dinner we walked Main Street to Beale where the noise and the crowds were off putting enough, but fortunately Cheyenne saved us as dogs aren't allowed on the famous thoroughfare. That was fine by me as I hadn't driven to the mighty Mississippi only to find myself back among the drunks of Duval Street.  

We didn't find the core of Memphis on this trip, and because Cheyenne's vaccination papers were at home we couldn't leave with a dog day care center, even had we wanted to, while we toured Graceland so that plan was scrapped too and we turned back towards home leaving this city unseen, causing us some vaguely  guilty feelings for failing to figure it all out.

The good news was the roads between Memphis, Tennessee and Oxford Mississippi were quite splendid, curving through lush farmland...

 ...causing me to miss my Bonneville...

 ...and remind me at every curve that I was seeing this world through the windscreen...

...of a cage.

But one mustn't grumble; the company was good and the air conditioning most welcome.

 And eventually we arrived in Oxford, a city built and named to attract the state's university.

 The University of Mississippi was actually located here and though not as august as it's English namesake does boast one alumnus of some note, William Faulkner. Out of curiosity I checked online to discover the University of California system as 120 people affiliated with it who have won Nobel prizes, while the University of California Berkeley campus alone has 51. Ole Miss, has just the one and here is his likeness in bronze:

The familiar British phone boxes are being torn up across the Old Country but here in Oxford Mississippi the enduring symbol was still on line:

 The Lafayette County Courthouse boasted a monument to a Confederate soldier out front and the state flag still incorporates the Confederate Battle Flag, but getting with the modern program has never been Mississippi's preoccupation even as it's  schools languish in last place nationally and its roads are true boneshakers. The architecture is stern classical and lovely.

And while the food may be appalling calorically speaking...

...the taste is delicious. My wife had the catfish, mac and cheese fried okra and jalapeno corn bread...

...while I went for chicken and dumplings, fried eggplant and rice with gravy. All in, with a margarita for my wife and  a coke for me we spent less than thirty bucks with tip and taxes.

 The Ajax diner is a popular spot.

I was amused to notice the servers were attractive young white women while the busboys and cooks were black men.  

Oxford seemed unexceptional, just rather crowded for a small southern town. Parking was at  a premium, and the square was lined with interesting small local stores. I bought myself a book by Jeff Shaara on the Siege of Vicksburg. He is actually a Florida author who teaches at the University of Florida Tallahassee. I like his books a great deal.

 Cans only, but the habit is forming everywhere to recycle in public.

 I was the driving force behind the direction of this road trip as I had long wanted to explore Chattanooga and I also had designs on Oxford, a city of which I had read but never seen. It used to be home to author John  Grisham, and before him the far less readable but far more revered William Faulkner.

He bought a house in the leafy suburbs away from the heart of Oxford, so using our trusty GPS we found our way to what appeared to be the front gate. Along the way we passed modern well to do suburban homes by the dozen, like this, not very well photographed:

The signage for Rowan Oak wasn't obvious at all.

 But we found out there was a reason for that.

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Tennessee Aquarium

My wife the impromptu tour guide decided that we would not have plumbed fully the true attractiveness of little Chattanooga unless we went to see the Tennessee Aquarium, a place of wonder Trip Adviser assured her. I wasn't so sure but in the end after we dithered about for a while we easily found covered parking to keep Miss Cheyenne cool and comfortable in our absence, so in we went, at $25 a ticket.

The structure is impressive when seen from the outside. We took a run across the bridge to see the other side of Chattanooga and while there engaged a young woman in conversation on the subject of her perfectly preserved Bajaj Indian built scooter of which she was inordinately proud, as she should have been.

I did rather wonder what we might find inside this magnificent structure, this is the Bible Belt after all as this tour bus reminded us, had we forgotten. In God We Truss seemed a rather orthopedic stricture to me, but I am far too literal as my wife never ceases to tell me. I think they meant that they were full of trust not of hernia supports. In any event I did rather ask myself if I was going to be subjected to Noah's Ark inside the aquarium.

The plaza in front of the place was an absolute riot of Dali-esque melting sidewalks to nowhere and concrete pavement twisted like pretzels.

Watching families playing with the altered reality while my wife was off buying our tickets started me thinking this might be a very worthwhile visit after all. The exterior promised a very unusual interior.

 Up close one could see the glass pyramids were some sort of biosphere.

 Inside Ranger Rick, some sort of Raccoon character was teaching young minds about the merits of conservation and wilderness and stuff.  It was a rapt audience.

 We had decided to take the river tour as neither of us had ever been to a freshwater aquarium before, but first we had to check out the seahorses. It was clear this was a first rate exhibition hall, no expense spared.

 Clambering upstairs we enjoyed a view across the river. I loved the informal viewing area created very simply out of two glass walls. Too bad there was nowhere to sit, but the absence of places to pause and contemplate was my major gripe about this place. The exhibits deserved more time and some quiet contemplation.

Inside one biosphere was a very popular exhibit. Habitat destruction (home building to you and me) has been wiping out otters in Tennessee and so many other places. They are raising them here for release into the wild. I dare say the youngsters and some of their parents who watched these delightful creatures may be moved to think differently about habitat destruction after seeing them here.

 Or maybe not. We do have a penchant to follow the imperious demands of constant growth and  otters be damned!

The interior of the aquarium was filled with huge tanks of freshwater fish. I sat on one of the all too rare benches and watched for a while mesmerized by the circling fish.

I hope they really do have very short memories as they deserve to be out in the wild rather than restrained in these tanks swimming endlessly in circles.

The worst for me was watching the frantic scrabbling of turtles imprisoned by the invisible plastic walls of their tanks. I hope their captivity isn't in vain and people take the time to learn and be educated, not just amused.

 This cabinet  I loved.

 And this was exceptional also, aquarium employee and musician Matt Downer playing Appalachian blue grass tunes.   Matt Downer also can be found on YouTube if you want to hear his fine playing.

These two photographs illustrated the way private/public partnerships can restore damaged habitat to everyone's benefit:

It was a surprisingly effective and rich experience strolling through the place. There isn't unfortunately much printed material on the exhibits so you do have to spend a bit of time dialing phone numbers with your cell phone to hear recorded descriptions which I found tedious. But there again I am a reader... 

 I can't wait to go back. We might even have the time to check the Ocean Exhibit next time.

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College Protection

 

My wife was at the Florida Keys Community College campus running an errand when she saw this  rather fearsome vehicle on campus.

 

 

It used to be there was a rather mild mannered security dude in the hut at the entrance to the campus who would make his rounds of the campus. My wife used to work on the college grounds and after hours she found reassurance in the guard keeping an eye out for her when she was working late. Not that she ever felt afraid being alone at FKCC at night. Blackwater? Protection? These are the mercenaries one associates with coups d'état in African dictatorships and nefarious behavior in Iraq at the US government's request. In an age when the National Insecurity Agency seems to think that I should believe that storing my e-mails will keep the country "safe" it should come as no surprise that mercenaries show up on a community college campus in the guise of protection.  I wonder what the Founding Fathers (and their wives) were thinking when they agreed to add the Bill of Rights to the documents they thought a free country needed.

City Of Rocks

 It was never my desire nor yet my intention to end up in a rather dark dubious place called "Fairyland" but life has a habit of taking peculiar turns and so it was I shrugged off the negative vibe and stepped into the cave so labeled. There was no other way out so I bravely followed my dog underground into the land of faeries. 

 How my wife managed to get me to a place called City of Rocks where I came face to face with the Old Woman who Lived in a  Shoe tableau seen above, is a story that starts with our recent trip to Chattanooga Tennessee. It took us two days of driving, twelve hours on Saturday and just three hours the following Sunday to arrive in the city which sits at the base of Lookout Mountain. The original plan was to ride the train up the side of the mountain but we missed the turn for the lower station and by the time we reached the top we had the rather surreal experience of watching the riders step out of the train into an upscale suburban neighborhood. There was a State Park up the street and there was a rather hazy view but that was all.  

 We sat in the car for a moment while my wife studied Trip Adviser and announced finally that we had to go to Rock City. I was glad to be doing something so we ignored the traditional state park, a first in my traveling experience and followed the blue GPS line across the top of Lookout Mountain.

It was a lovely sylvan drive, a winding road dipping through suburbia, going apparently nowhere at a leisurely pace. What we did, without much noticing it, was switch from Tennessee to Georgia though it seems eastern Tennessee remains on eastern time unlike the rest of the state which is in the central time zone.

The sign posts were unconventional though clear and like Hansel and Gretel we blindly followed the breadcrumb trail. Rock City? Not  a clue what it was though we were getting an idea how to drive there.

After a fifteen minute meander we arrived at a place that was clearly placed in the 21st century but looked like a roadside attraction from sixty or more years ago. I couldn't wait to see what my wife had scrounged up for our amusement. They assured us our dog was welcome so we parked the car in a vast spacious lot and in we went at a cost I seem to recall of twenty bucks apiece. Cheyenne  was free.

It was an attraction of a similar kind to what one see sat Disney, explicit instructions, a simple map and a fool proof (I think) visitor experience. Rock City presents itself as a unique place and I have to say it is high up on the list of oddities. I looked at the steps and I looked at my portly middle aged Labrador and I wondered...but off she went, like a rocket, frightening a couple of dog phobic visitors into stepping aside. I mumbled my apologies but Cheyenne was intent on getting through it. I came to suspect she might be a bit claustrophobic, a sensibility I would never have attributed to her.

At first I thought the notion of staying IN the trail to be rather ungrammatical but it was borne in on  me that the sign was supposed to be taken literally.

Sometimes we had no choice, on the thirty minute scramble to the end of the magnificent overlook at trail's end.

Other times Cheyenne seemed to be rather too curious about what was going on outside the perfectly manicured trail.

And as usual she found a cooling bath that also served as a refreshment stop for her. A walker who passed us in a wide spot on the trail expressed surprise at seeing our dog. "Do they allow them?" he asked wistfully, mentioning his dog left at home for this trip."Well," I said, "Its pretty much impossible to sneak a  104 pound Labrador anywhere.".

According to the literature a couple of missionaries on a journey to convert the heathen found this place in 1823 and described the jumble of rocks as resembling a city. Hence the name that stuck. 

Since then they've provided a fair bit of work to stone masons to create the very elaborate trail.

 A trail yes, but there are also many natural clefts in the rock:

My wife is no great fan of suspension foot bridges though she's done a few over the years of mad exploration with me.  Grandfather Mountain in North Carolina comes to mind, as do several rather rickety zip lines in Nicaragua and Costa Rica, but I could see no way to get Cheyenne easily across the void in one piece. Fortunately there was a more solid if no less extravagant rock bridge built in a series of impressive arches for the less fleet of foot.

 For some youngsters vertical pathways presented a more interesting challenge.

And here was our reward, a view across they claim seven states, though that claim has been rather tartly refuted on line by the corollary that the claim is "unfounded." Impossible seems more like it, but one doesn't want to be rude. Beyond that disputed claim there wasn't much to see, a collection of rolling woods and a town rather indistinct far below.

It was nevertheless an impressive collection of paths, buttresses, viewing points and overlooks.

 From the platform seen above one could view this human-made waterfall shown here below:

Aside from the need to create human attractions, a preposterous gnome garden and weird structures welded into place in an effort to amuse the masses, the place had its own natural grandeur and it was, I have to say, a shame to see it bent to the needs of crass commerce.

 We wound our way back to the start, a mile long walk they say and there we were almost out yet obliged to go through Fairyland where small children admired, with loud squeals, the assorted tableaux of traditional, to my surprise, children's stories. Here: little red riding hood, set in a  cave off the main trail..

 These oddities are the sort of attractions you have to seek out when on vacation. Its a bit like the worlds largest ball of twine, or Cadillacs planted in the desert. What Nature provides sometimes has to be improved upon. I could imagine coming up here some bright midweek winter's day and exploring the trails and enjoying the views alone and it could be quite the mystical experience. On a 90 degree day shepherding a surprisingly enthusiastic Labrador down the trail was an experience of a different magnitude.

We sat at the Starbucks for a while and refreshed ourselves. Cheyenne had a bowl with us and we watched the world go by. It was a pleasant moment as southern strangers made cheerful conversation and we slipped into the moment, almost without trying. As we gathered ourselves up to leave this monument to Georgia's natural beauty we spotted an electric car plug in station. It reminded me that sophisticated urbane Key West recently rejected the notion of buying electric cars for parking control saying the city lacked the infrastructure to recharge them. Here it is:

Not that complicated surely?  And here it is at Rock City of all places showing us how it's done.

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