Blue Highways: Cookeville, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLeaving Nameless, heading through Tennessee toward the East Coast, we continue on our journey.  I applied for a job in Cookeville once, and it's nice to learn more about it now.  To see where Cookeville lies on our route, click on the thumbnail of the map!

Book Quote

"COOKEVILLE:  Easter morning and cold as the bottom of Dante's Hell.  Winter had returned from somewhere, whistling thin, bluish snowflakes along the ground, bowing the jonquils.  I couldn't warm up.  The night had been full of dreams moving through my sleep like schools of ocean fish that dart this way, turn suddenly another way, never resting.  I hung in the old depths, the currents bending and enfolding me as the sea does fronds of eelgrass."

Blue Highways:  Part 1, Chapter 17

Downtown Cookeville, Tennessee

Cookeville, Tennessee

Cookeville, Tennessee is associated, for me at least, with much the same sentiments as LHM's quote above.  I've never been to Tennessee other than a brief touchdown on Southwest Airlines in Nashville, a 30 minute wait on the plane, and then a takeoff to DC.  But in 2009, I applied for a job at Tennessee Tech in Cookeville, and had a phone interview with a nice young female professor before getting the form "thanks for applying but we've found someone else who fits our needs" letter.

This is not a rant about Tennessee Tech turning down the best possible professor they could have ever gotten, nor is it a rant about my difficulties finding a job in a terrible market for academics.  Rather, this is just a wistful look at what was a difficult year professionally.  LHM speaks to being buffeted by the currents.  I felt the same way.  I applied to 80 jobs that year and got one offer.  During that process, I began to question myself.  Some of the questioning was self-destructive, i.e. "I'm a failure, I'm not worthy of a good job..." etc. etc.  Some of the questioning was healthy, i.e. Do I really want to be an academic?  Do I really want to put myself in a position where I do just as much work as getting a PhD just to keep my job after seven years?

So all these questions were coming fast and furious at me.  I had been in a kind of despair over my prospects.  But for a brief moment, Cookeville was kind of a shining light as long as it offered hope for me.  For an instant, the buffeting of the currents pushing me to and fro ceased as I spoke to the nice young professor, ripe with possibility that I could take an office and teach students in the middle of Tennessee.

LHM seems to be in the same type of place, professionally and personally, and the current that drives him is the ribbon of road that stretches before him.  My professional prospects in Cookeville didn't pan out.  LHM didn't stop in Cookeville, and we'll see how his journey unfolds.  But Cookeville, for a little while you offered me a small professional beacon.  And from what I understand, you're a neat little town in a beautiful area of Tennessee.  Perhaps our paths will cross again someday.

By the way, LHM refers to jonquils in his quote.  I didn't know what they were.  They're pretty flowers, at least judging by their online images.

If you want to know more about Cookeville

City of Cookeville
Cookeville.com
Cookeville Chamber of Commerce
Cookeville Herald-Citizen (newspaper)
The Scoop with Jim Herrin (blog)
Tennessee Tech University
Wikipedia: Cookeville

Next up: Wartburg, Tennessee

Blue Highways: Nameless, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWhat's in a name?  Evidently not much, if your town is Nameless.  But wait, if it's Nameless, does it have a name or not? Perhaps Nameless is a name, or perhaps it could be a state of being.  Now I'm confusing myself.  Follow us as we track William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) on his journey around America.  To see where Nameless lies, click on the map.  Even though it's Nameless, I can guarantee this is the place.

Book Quote

"Nameless, Tennessee, was a town of maybe ninety people if you pushed it, a dozen houses along the road, a couple of barns, same number of churches, a general merchandise store selling Fire Chief gasoline, and a community center with a lighted volleyball court.  Behind the center was an open-roof, rusting metal privy with PAINT ME on the door; in the hollow of a nearby oak lay a full pint of Jack Daniel's Black Label.  From the houses, the odor of coal smoke."

Blue Highways:  Part 1, Chapter 16

Nameless, Tennessee

Why is Nameless Nameless?  LHM gives an account of the reason the town has its name in Blue Highways, quoting from Thurmond Watts and his wife, Virginia:

I stepped in and they both began telling the story, adding a detail here, the other correcting a fact there, both smiling at the foolishness of it all.  It seems the hilltop settlement went for years without a name.  Then one day the Post Office Department told the people if they wanted mail up on the mountain they would have to give the place a name you couple properly address a ltter to.  The community met; there were only a handful, but they commenced debating.  Some wanted patriotic names, some names from nature, one man recommended in all seriousness his own name.  They couldn't agree, and they ran out of names to argue about.  Finally, a fellow tired of the talk; he didn't like the mail he received anyway.  "Forget the durn Post Office," he said.  "This here's a nameless place if I ever seen one, so leave it be."  And that's just what they did.

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 16

Apparently, this is not the only story of Nameless.  According to Wikipedia, another legend is that when the application for the post office was sent in, the name of the community was left blank, and the word "Nameless" was stamped on the returned application.  Wikipedia also reports that a local official wanted the town to be named Morgan after the county's attorney general, but the Post Office demurred, saying that the name was still too freshly connected with a Confederate hero.  The official then said that if the name Morgan couldn't be used, he'd prefer that the community remain nameless.  And now it is.

Place names can evoke lots of feelings, both pro and con.  According to my sister, my hometown in California had a recent debate about placenames.  Seems that some, perhaps new residents of the town, wanted to change the name.  "Fort Bragg" was too confusing to people as it has the same name as a military base in North Carolina.  It also, according to these people, had a bad past in terms of its conduct toward the local native population as it was founded as a reservation.  These people suggested the name "Braggadoon" to evoke a sense of the magical and whimsical associated with the musical Brigadoon about a Scottish village that appears once every 100 years.  Perhaps not coincidentally, a local art and sign shop in town is called "Braggadoon," so it stood to make a lot of business if the name change was effected.  As you can imagine, there was lots of debate on each side.  I'm sitting here now, in my mom's house in Fort Bragg, so obviously the name change didn't happen.  But what was really interesting, especially reading the posts on the local newspaper's web forum, was how passionately people felt.

The interesting thing to me is speculating on whether Nameless, if given the chance today, would be able to get such a name at all.  A post office was established there, but being an unincorporated city, it is doubtful that it would get a post office at all if it applied for one today.  The Postal Service is cutting back, not adding, service.  It now delivers mail six days per week, but is considering cutting back to five.  The price of stamps seems to go up every six months or so as the Postal Service competes with e-mail.  Applications by small communities that want a post office would probably be denied.  So 100 years ago, Nameless could be Nameless.  Today, Nameless would be part of a larger district, and people would address their letters to Cookeville, with a special zip code for people in Nameless.  And therefore, today, many small, aspiring towns would truly be nameless, except in the minds of the locals.  Is that sad?  I'm not sure, because the feelings and thoughts of the residents are what truly matters.  If residents wish to be Nameless or nameless, it's their business.

If you want to know more about Nameless

Cookville Herald-Citizen articles about Nameless
Nameless, Tennessee (Song by The Travelers)
Online excerpt from Blue Highways:  Nameless
TripWow slideshow of Spring City and Nameless by Mary Pardue (including a photo of the Watts Store where William Least Heat-Moon visited)
Wikipedia: Nameless

Next up:  Cookeville, Tennessee

Blue Highways: Livingston, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapOut of Kentucky, into Tennessee.  The road goes ever on, and we're following William Least-Heat Moon on his journey.  Click the map to see where Livingston, Tennessee sits.

Book Quote

"At last the mountains opened, and I came into Livingston, Tennessee, a homely town.  Things were closed but for a highway grocery where I walked the fluorescent aisles more for entertainment than need.  Had I come for lard, I'd have been in the right place: seven brands in five sizes, including one thirty-eight pound drum.

"I drove back to the square and pulled up for the night in front of the Overton County Courthouse.  Adolescents cruised in half-mufflered heaps; a man adjusted a television in the appliance store window; a cat rubbed against my leg; windows went dark one by one.  I think someone even unplugged the red blinker light after I went to bed.  And that's how I spent my evening in Livingston, Tennesee."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

Downtown Livingston, Tennessee
Livingston, Tennessee

If you've grown up in a small town in America, you've grown up in a place where nightfall means silent streets, empty sidewalks, and an eerie feeling as the traffic lights turn over to blinking reds and yellows. My town was no different from Livingston.  At night, everything shut down after a certain time.  The places that did remain open had something of the sinister about them.  The bars that remained open always had characters around and in them that were kind of scary, and I always got a vibe from my mother that they weren't places that you'd want to be in at night.

But that didn't mean that things completely went quiet.  As a high school kid, I knew about activities that happened in town.  If somebody's parents were away, it usually meant a big party at that house.  At times, parents didn't have to be away, because we had the gravel pits on the outskirts of town, or various places in the woods, or even the beaches.  Combine kids, cars, and alcohol, and you had a deadly combination.  A few of my high school classmates died before we graduated because of alcohol and driving.

I kind of liked the quiet of my town.  Night meant real darkness.  At home, about a mile out of town, I could walk outside and look up and see the vastness of the universe and the matter speeding away from each other in the form of stars and galaxies almost like they were at my fingertips, and so clear and bright that you almost thought the ground could be illuminated by them.  Night was quiet too.  Not many cars on the roads to mask the sounds of the nighttime frogs and insects.

Since I left home, I've lived in cities.  In most of them, nighttime is just another time of day with different activities.  In the cities, the streets have activity at all hours.  In cities, you are encouraged to go into bars to socialize with friends and people you hope to meet.  In cities, the sky stays softly illuminated at night, drowning out the stars in a golden halo from the myriads of streetlights and porchlights on the ground.  In cities, the sounds of cars on the streets or freeways gives a constant hum to the night.  You might not hear the frogs and insects unless you are standing in the right spot at the right time.

What's better?  I like the fact that I have so many things at my fingertips in the cities.  Restaurants, taverns, music, people.  In a few days, however, I will make my way to my hometown.  I will once again go to bed and when I turn off my light, I will be enveloped in complete and comforting darkness.  I will hear, instead of the whoosh of freeway travelers, the soft roar of the ocean in the distance.  When I look up at night, I'll again be fooled into thinking that I can touch the stars and galaxies.  And like in Livingston, the red and yellow traffic lights will blink their lonely signals into the night.

If you want to know more about Livingston

City of Livingston
Holly Ridge Winery and Vineyard
Livingston Enterprise(newspaper)
Overton County News (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Livingston

Next up:  Gainesboro, Tennessee

Blue Highways: Ida and Bug, Kentucky

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLeaving southern Kentucky, we are about to go into Tennessee, but not without checking out a little bit of Clinton County first.  Click on the map to locate Ida and Bug.

Book Quote

"At Ida, a sign in front of a church announced the Easter sermon: 'Welcome All God's Children: Thieves, Liars, Gossips, Bigots, Adulterers, Children.'  I felt welcome.  Also in Ida was one of those hitching posts in the form of a crouching livery boy reaching up to take the master's reins; but the face of this iron Negro had been painted white and his eyes Nordic blue.  Ida, on the southern edge of Appalachia, a place (they said) where change comes slowly or not at all, had a church welcoming everyone and a family displaying integrated lawn decorations.

"I lost the light at Bug, Kentucky, and two miles later, at a fork in the road with three rickety taverns in the crotch, I crossed into Tennessee."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

Clinton County, where Bug and Ida are located

Ida, Kentucky and Bug, Kentucky

I really enjoy the picture William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) presents of the lawn jockey in Ida painted white with blue eyes.  It stands in stark contrast to the South that many of us (me included) in the North read and were taught about.  In truth, the South is much more complicated than some of my friends, who argue that we should let the South secede from the Union if they really want to, truly understand.

In 1995, I moved from Milwaukee to San Antonio with my wife.  Texas is on the far west side of what would be considered the old South, though Arizona seems to want to become part of the South as well in the last few years.  I'd grown up in California, then lived in Milwaukee for 8 years.  Milwaukee was about as Northern a city as you could have.  With Germans mainly controlling the power structure, it was a leftist stronghold for years.  While the rest of Wisconsin was giving America Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering about communists, Milwaukee was electing socialist mayors up through the 1960s.  We actually got to know the last socialist mayor of Milwaukee, who by the time we met him was a pretty old guy.

We moved to Texas, and we were convinced we would hate it.  In truth, our first year there, we really did hate it.  Everything seemed to be about Texas.  Not only is Texas part of the South, but it has a HUGE ego about itself.  The Austin Lounge Lizards make fun of Texas' attitude in their Stupid Texas Song:

"By God we're so darn proud to be from Texas - yahoo!
Even of our pride we're proud and we're proud of that pride, too
Our pride about our home state is the proudest pride indeed
And we're proud to be Americans, until we can secede"

Tortilla chips in the shape of Texas, pasta in the shape of Texas.  The Texas flag flown everywhere.  In the first store we went into, the yams had a sign with a yam in a hat with the Texas colors shooting guns in the air.  The Alamo was considered a shrine to Texas liberty - men must remove their hats entering it.  Jim Lehrer, distinguished newsman, told a story about how he was taken to task by the Daughters of the Texas Republic for some statements he had made.  We don't understand how a person born in Texas could say such things about the state, they wrote him.  He wrote back explaining that while he grew up in Texas, he was actually born elsewhere and didn't come to Texas until he was six months old.  Now we understand, they wrote back to him.

Despite all that hubris, we grew to love Texas.  The huge open spaces.  The varied people and landscapes.  The little weird places we discovered, like the art scene in Marfa, way out in the wilds of West Texas, to the Orange Show in Houston.  Sure, you'd find some crazy thing that would make you pause, like the time we rented a room in a Fort Davis B&B and the brochure had hand-written on it "no fornicating."  But seeing the bats fly out from under the Congress Street bridge in Austin, or taking a dip in Barton Springs, or catching Terri Hendrix or the Asylum Street Spankers at old dance halls like Gruene Hall or Cibolo Creek Country Club was fantastic and captivated us.  The music scene was like nowhere else, and introduced us to the Texas singer-songwriter.

While we were there, California passed a proposition denying most services to illegal immigrants.  Arizona recently passed a law allowing police to stop anyone they suspect to be illegal immigrants (in other words, people who look brown).  But in Texas, where the Mexican border is quite fluid and really starts at San Antonio, even under George W. Bush as governor, the state would have never passed such a law because of the ties between Mexico and Texas.  Republicans are now in control of the state but the state is still full of Texas Democrats, who are blunt, pointed and direct.  As I said, it's complicated.

Then we moved to New Orleans.  Again, things were not always as they seemed.  New Orleans is a majority black city in white Louisiana.  New Orleans history had both slaves and free men (and women) of color.  It had Creoles, mixed race people who made their own society to rival the white society, and some of whom owned slaves while others worked to end slavery.  Pre-Katrina New Orleans, when we lived there, was a mix, a gumbo if you will, of all kinds of different people living all kinds of different lives and doing all kinds of different things.  In one city, you could get your South fix by visiting a plantation, or eating at Galatoires or Antoines, or cruise the stately mansions along St. Charles Avenue.  Then you could visit Vaughns, where Kermit Ruffins plays trumpet and serves up red beans and rice, or catch the Mardi Gras Indians on Mardi Gras or St. Joseph's Day.  You might read Nell Nolan in the Times-Picayune as she lists the kings and queens of Mardi Gras and announces the various coming outs of debutantes, all white and beautiful, while outside a second line turns onto your street sending a member of the black community home.  A city where (until recently thanks to Katrina) African Americans dominated the political landscape, while the old white families dominated the economic landscape.  Again, it's complicated.

Now we live in New Mexico, where being Hispanic means that you are not Latino, and vice versa.  Here, being Hispanic means that you are descended from the Spanish conquistadors.  Being Latino means you are not.  Once again, ethnicity and race become very complicated.  An unsuspecting person might offend someone with a Spanish last name if they call them "Mexican."  Just like in the South, you can't take everything for granted and things that you think you know about people and ethnicities can be very different from reality.

There isn't much on the Internet about Ida or Bug, but there is quite a bit on Clinton County, where they are located.  The links I include, therefore, will be for Clinton County.

If you want to know more about Ida, Bug or Clinton County

Albany/Clinton County Chamber of Commerce
Clinton County News (newspaper)
Clinton County website
Political Graveyard: Clinton County
Wikipedia: Clinton County

Next stop: Livingston, Tennessee

Blue Highways: Danville, Kentucky

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapMoving away from the Shakers, and toward the Appalachians we go.  It's amazing how far we've traveled in only 25 pages of the book.  To see where Danville is located, click on the map!

Book Quote

"The highway took me through Danville, where I saw a pillared antebellum mansion with a trailer court on the front lawn.  Route 127 ran down a long valley of pastures and fields edged by low, rocky bluffs and split by a stream the color of muskmelon.  In the distance rose the foothills of the Appalachians, old mountains that once separated the Atlantic from the shallow inland sea now the middle of America.  The licks came out of the hills, the fields got smaller, and there were little sawmills cutting hardwood into pallets, crates, fenceposts.  The houses shrank, and their colors changed from white to pastels to iridescents to no paint at all.  The lawns went from Vertagreen bluegrass to thin fescue to hard-packed dirt glinting with fragments of glass, and the lawn ornaments changed from birdbaths to plastic flamingoes and donkeys to broken-down automobiles with raised hoods like tombstones.  On the porches stood long-legged wringer washers and ruined sofas, and, by the front doors, washtubs hung like coats of arms."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

Danville, Kentucky at dusk

Danville, Kentucky

When I was in my early 20s, a young idealistic volunteer in inner-city Milwaukee who had done two years of service and had no idea what he was going to do for a career, I considered doing a third year of service in Appalachia.  The program that I volunteered for was going to open a volunteer community in Hazard, Kentucky.  Yes, this was the same Hazard, Kentucky that inspired the the TV show The Dukes of Hazzard, and later the movie of the same name.  True fact: in Hazard, Kentucky I was told there was even a Hogg family that inspired the infamous Boss Hogg on the TV show.

I went with a director of the program down to Hazard to scope out the possibilities for a volunteer community there.  I remember driving south, through Cincinnati, Ohio into Covington, Kentucky and then past Lexington and on down Highway 402 through the mountains and into Hazard.  As we got farther from Lexington, the scene fit perfectly with what William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) describes above in his quote.  I remember vividly passing seamlessly from bluegrass and nice dwellings into mountains and poverty, but not all at once.  It sort of snuck up on you until suddenly, you were in it.  The poverty was very apparent: trailer houses and shacks with rusting automobiles or other machinery in the yards.  At the same time, modern convenience also sprung out at me, at least at the dwellings along the roads.  There were satellite dishes on many of the trailer homes, and the newest model pickup trucks parked alongside rusting heaps on the front lawn.  Clearly, like in many of our inner-cities, people picked what to do without and what to do with.  I thought it was selective poverty, in the sense that perhaps foregoing the truck or not having satellite TV might make other things possible for these poorer families, but the truck and satellite TV was too important to pass up.

Though I was drawn to the area, I decided not to continue to volunteer.  But I got to know some of the people who went to volunteer in that newly opened community, and my girlfriend (now my wife) and another friend and I drove down to Hazard to visit them.  What struck me was the disconnect with what people believed and how they acted.  I was pretty lefty in my politics at the time (really, I still am), and most people I met were pretty conservative.  They were active gun enthusiasts and voted Republican.  I was probably treated pretty well by them because I was white, and even my longer hair that I wore at the time fit in with some of the styling and grooming of the people who lived in the hollers.  If I had gotten into political discussions or discussions about social mores, I would have probably disagreed with them 99 percent of the time.  Yet, they were very nice to us.  We stopped at an outdoor flea market where you could buy everything, even guns.  I was invited to come hunting and fishing by a guy I didn't know, who told me that "those Northern girls don't treat you good...you come down here and we'll fix you up with a nice Southern girl who'll cook for you and treat you right."  My girlfriend was somewhat amused...probably because I didn't take the guy up on his offer.  When we were invited to people's houses, even those that were poorer, they never failed to have something for us.  As LHM moves later in the book into Tennessee, he marvels that the people who have the least are usually the ones to invite you to dinner.  That's my experience of Appalachian Kentucky.

This all hits home to me now in another way, because being adopted, I recently learned that my biological mother came from similar roots in West Virginia.  Plain, hardworking, and often exploited people that would still give the shirts off their backs for friends, relatives and even strangers.  In the Appalachians, coal was king and people were often in thrall to the coal companies for work and a livelihood, but the dangerous work and the poverty brought them together.  In a way, I'm proud that I come from such stock.  Certainly with poverty comes pain and suffering, but also a connectedness to community, work and family because they are precious to survival.

What this all has to do with Danville, I'm not sure.  Wikipedia says that Danville is known as the "City of Firsts" because of all the things that first happened there.  First courthouse in Kentucky, first post office west of the Alleghenies, first state supported school for the deaf, first physician to successfully remove an ovarian tumor, oldest college campus west of the Alleghenies.  However, as LHM seems to indicate, Danville and Lexington are gateways to this most rural, most poverty ridden, in some ways most backward part of the country.  We tend to forget these areas because white Americans don't like to see poverty, especially white poverty, so the gateways are usually closed, keeping white poor folks back in the shadows of the mountains and the hollers.  But if you take the paths that the Danvilles and the Lexingtons open to these areas, you may find amidst the poverty shining moments, adventures and deep discovery and meaning.  So visit Danville and think of it as a doorway to the Appalachians.  If it is too rural for you, you can always take in a festival and then go back to the cities.  But if you want to see a unique slice of America, use Danville as a way point to see rural, Appalachian Kentucky.  Perhaps you'll be entranced by its beauty and fascinated by its contradictions, like I was.

If you want to know more about Danville

Danville Advocate-Messenger (newspaper)
Centre College
Festivals in Danville
It's Better in Danville
Wikipedia: Danville

Next up: Ida and Bug, Kentucky