10.

Coming down off of Signal Mountain the needle of the alternator gauge in my car began to fall. For a long time it was falling so slowly that I thought my eyes were playing tricks on me. I’d had the car since 1999, and the gauge had never budged before. I asked Jon about it, and he began to study it too. Before long there was no doubt. The needle was listing further and further toward the red.

We were coming into Chattanooga, and Jon called ahead to a friend and got directions to the nearest Advanced Autoparts. I turned off the radio, the cruise-control, anything I could think of. We had just made the exit ramp off the expressway when things started shutting down by themselves. Half a dozen warning lights came on the dashboard, and power steering and power brakes cut out in quick succession. We were still unsure as to the exact location of the Advanced Autoparts, so we pulled into a gas station and foolishly shut the car off. It took a jump start and more detailed instructions before we made it the last few blocks.

I think if anyone ever has car trouble on a road trip they should have an Advanced Autoparts and a Jon Croft handy at all times, because it was the easiest ordeal I have ever participated in. Not only did I learn a lot about my car, but for just over one hundred dollars I got an alternator that is guaranteed for a lifetime (why can’t they just put that kind in the car originally?), and I got to watch a huge moon rise over the Tennessee hills while Jon installed the alternator for me.

We weren’t planning on staying in Tennessee, but by the time everything was done it was dark and Jon’s friend Ryan had taken us to dinner and offered to let us stay at his house. This was slightly awkward for both of us, because Jon’s friend Ryan currently lives with his girlfriend and two children, but Jon and Ryan went back a long way, and we were still a long way from our destination in Georgia, so we agreed.

Once the battery was charged and the car was ready to go, Ryan left and Jon decided to give me a tour of the town. It seems that Chattanooga was another place that was once Jon’s hometown. Actually it wasn’t Chattanooga exactly, but a smaller town that was up on a ridge overlooking the city. I’m not sure how all the towns work around Chattanooga, but my impression by night was that there were a lot of suburbs that sprawled across valleys and the surrounding ridges and were linked by winding strips of pavement and tunnels. I saw Jon’s old house and old school, and then we just kind of drove aimlessly until we were way up on a ridge that overlooked Chattanooga. We got out on a perilously narrow street so Jon could take some pictures, and I noticed some Civil War monuments.

* * *

The hard thing about this story is that I can’t write it like I remember it. I have to write it like an account: we went here and did this and saw this, and then we went here and did this and saw this. But I remember it like images, the whole trip just this collage of snapshots that are part picture and part soundtrack with smells and textures mixed in. A story filled with things like that won’t really work, because there’s got to be something more than road holding it all together. You read about the trip Jon and I took, but I remember the scenes that we moved through, and that night on Missionary Ridge sticks out as one of the sharpest.

We were parked, as I said, on a perilously narrow strip of road, and Jon and I crossed the road and were looking down over the town of Chattanooga. It was warm, which was a nice change. (In the morning, leaving Ryan’s house, we’ll be able to take the t-tops off the car for the first time in the whole trip.) There were lights moving down in the city, and the city itself looked like bright, jagged pieces of glass scattered in the valley, like someone had dropped the whole thing from the sky to watch it shatter between the mountains.

The monuments that lie along the road and lead up further to the very top of the ridge were mute reminders that once upon a time a lot of men ran up the slope we were leaning out over now while a lot of other men stood at the top trying to shoot them. In the darkness it was eerie to find an immense column erected to honor men from Illinois and to remember that less than one hundred and fifty years ago men from where I came from were at war with men from where Jon came from. But the people who live up there see those monuments every day, and it’s probably not strange at all for them to have statues to the victors from a couple states over displayed like this was conquered territory. I guess it was quite a charge, and the Union took the ridge and continued their march to the sea.

9.

My best friend in the whole world decided, after our senior year of high school, that he would go to Trevecca Nazarene University instead of Olivet Nazarene University, and I never really forgave him for it. He was still my best friend though, and he had been bugging me for the past four years to come visit him at Trevecca. I suppose it was only fair; he had come to spend an afternoon with me at Olivet one day on his way home. Now Jon and I were here, and I would be surprised with what I saw and what I learned. It gave us a weird feeling, driving away from campus the next day, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The first feeling I had was weariness, because I felt like the night should be ending soon and it was not. We drove into Nashville and found Trevecca and Derek and somehow there was still stuff to do. We met his girlfriend and his roommate, we toured downtown Nashville in Derek’s Jeep Cherokee, and we saw the curious blend of grit and glitter that was the city, complete with some prostitutes that I didn’t notice until Derek pointed them out to me. We stopped a Coco’s Coffee Shop and stayed just long enough to decide that no one wanted anything. Besides Trevecca, downtown Nashville houses Vanderbilt University, and it was strange brushing shoulders with students from there in the coffee shop. It was certainly a step outside the Olivet bubble. Derek told us that he would on occasion drive into Vanderbilt’s campus and randomly ask girls for directions as a ploy to get a date. Ladies and gentlemen, my best friend Derek.

I went to bed that night on the futon in Derek’s crappy apartment, confident that Olivet was better than Trevecca in every conceivable way. (I was rather smug about the condition of Derek’s apartment. The whole complex was rather dilapidated.) There were birds chirping out the window, and Jon and I couldn’t decide why they kept at it in the middle of the night. I thought it was just because we were down south, that there was some species of bird that stayed up all night; Jon thought it was because we were in the city, that the lights fooled the birds into thinking it was perpetually daylight.

In my notes for that night I recorded that we watched Derek get a haircut (which I don’t remember) and that we went off-roading across the lawns and curbs of the tiny campus (which I do). I also have written down “Luke’s joke” though I have no idea at all what that means. Apparently someone named Luke told a joke that night, and apparently it was funny enough that I recorded it and figured I would remember what it means. I don’t, and if Jon doesn’t either then it will forever remain a mystery.

* * *

The thing about going new places is that sometimes you learn or see things you wish you hadn’t. Sometimes you’ll learn something that will bring into question a decision you made and cast the course of your life into serious doubt, at least for a time.

Jon and I both experienced that curious form of melancholy on our second day at Trevecca. Derek went to class and we wandered the campus, feeling rather on the outside of everything, wondering if this was how visitors to Olivet saw our own school. We were waiting for Jon’s grandmother, who lived in a retirement home on the campus, to get home. Jon wanted to at least stop in and see her before we got on the road again.

As we wandered the campus, Jon reflected on the decisions that had led him to Olivet. Apparently Trevecca had always been his first choice, and something about the tiny campus, the manicured lawns and the stone buildings seemingly dropped in the middle of a less-than-glamorous section of Nashville, made him question his change of heart. He said that he hadn’t wanted Olivet but that God had chosen it for him. I nodded and tried to be supportive and was a bit hurt that he would so easily question the past four years that had been our college experience.

That was before we met Cyrus Poor, the physics professor and head of Trevecca’s science department. I knew there was a derelict observatory on the roof of Trevecca’s science hall, and I wanted to see if there was or had ever been a telescope in it. We stopped by a secretary’s office, explained who we were, and then waited around to meet the professor. It turns out there wasn’t much in the dome other than a Celestron of the same type that we took out for field work at Olivet, but apparently Trevecca has (and had had for the past four years) a physics program in conjunction with Vanderbilt University. It was a five year program that ended with not only a bachelors but a masters in physics. I asked Cyrus why I had heard nothing about this. He explained that the administration wasn’t too keen on supporting the science program. They focused primarily on religion.

I felt sick. More than that, I felt rather angry and betrayed. I didn’t really have anyone to blame; I hadn’t really done any serious homework on Trevecca when I was looking for colleges. Still though, it seemed to me that someone at Olivet, when I explained my goals to them, should have told me about the program at their Nazarene sister school. I don’t know if it would have changed anything, but it was an option I had no idea I had, and it made me depressed.

I tried to shrug it off as we went to visit with Jon’s grandmother, but when we drove out of Nashville we both felt that we were driving under a cloud.

8.

Jon’s grandfather’s farm looked like an old photograph. This is because in Kentucky evening doesn’t just mean things getting darker and darker. As the sun sets behind hills, things also get more and more grainy. I felt that the blue-grey barns on the ridge should have been visible, that there was enough light still to see them, but the quality of sight had deteriorated, and soon the lights on the pickup we rode in with the farmer were cutting through only a smoky dimness. That probably is not how dusk always is in Kentucky. Maybe the clouds had something to do with it.

We had gotten lost in Richmond trying to find the road to Jon’s farm. I-52 seemed to disappear and reappear at will, and Jon still maintains there were two separate roads bearing that number. After a few phone calls to his mother and comparisons of dimming memories, we finally found the correct road.

In Kentucky it seems you pave a road to get to farms. In Michigan the roads are just there, dusty grids out beyond the towns, and you base your farm-placement off that. The road we were on was certainly a Kentucky road, and it seemed to go farther and farther, winding with the only intent of stringing together random modular homes and farmhouses. There didn’t seem to be much sense in it. We finally arrived though, just as everything was starting to look like the old photograph, and Jon grew more excited.

“The old driveway used to cut up through here, between the trees. This paved driveway is new.”

There was a sign announcing this land as “Silverbend Farm”. The road had been through a valley. Turning onto the driveway we climbed up to where a small house sat on a rise.

“That’s where my mom grew up.”

We sat in the driveway for a moment, Jon rather excited but unsure. The plan was simply for him to introduce himself to whoever was home, explain who he was, and ask if we could look around and take pictures. I volunteered to wait in the car. He left and was gone for long enough that I began to get bored. A curtain in a back window of the house lifted for a moment and a face looked out. When Jon came back, he was practically jogging. In the car he held out an unsteady hand, shaking with nervousness.

It turned out that the people in this house were actually just renting it from the man who owned the farm. The woman in the house had called the farmer, and he was on his way over to unlock the gate for us. We sat in the Firebird as the night got dimmer and the light behind the house reached farther. Finally a pickup truck rolled up the road from the opposite direction and climbed the driveway.

Later, when we were back in the car and driving toward Nashville, Jon will tell me that the farmer had been drunk. I’m not too good at picking up on stuff like that. He had seemed to me simply a slow-spoken, friendly man who dimly recalled meeting Jon’s mom and aunts on one occasion. Jon also said that when I had gotten out of the truck to unlock gates in the pasture for the truck to drive through he had made fun of me for being a city-slicker, but if I were a farmer I quite possibly would have made fun of a pair of random guys who wanted to be carted around some fields in the growing dusk and who couldn’t figure out how to work a simple latch.

We piled into the truck with him, two guys in a tiny pickup with some other guy they had never met, driving around because one of the guys has some recollection of the farm that the other guy now owns. It all seemed rather surreal to me. Jon and the farmer pointed to barns on various hills, Jon saying what he remembered and the farmer saying how it had changed. Jon’s grandfather had grown tobacco, but the farmer didn’t do that anymore. Something about government buyouts, and now the money wasn’t there. The land had become grazing space for cattle.

The fields were muddy, and the truck bounced across them and waited for slow-moving cows to get out of the way, sometimes giving them a helpful shove with the bumper. Jon remembered an old farmhouse that had stood in one of the far fields. He said that when he was a kid it had been used to store hay. The farmer had demolished it. “It was dangerous,” he said. “People were always calling me up and asking to look through it with metal detectors and whatnot. I didn’t need a liability.”

I wondered what anyone out here in the hills of Kentucky would be doing wandering around abandoned farmhouses with metal detectors, and I wondered about a farmhouse that had been abandoned when Jon’s grandfather had the farm. I asked Jon, but he couldn’t remember if his grandfather had ever lived there.

Besides the farmhouse, the farm’s new owner had done rather well. The three barns that had been in various states of disrepair and decay when he bought it had been fixed up and were standing sedately in the growing dimness. They were something to see, lumbering like frozen beasts as the hills grew darker around them. I understood what Jon loved about this place, and I sympathized with him when the farmer proudly pointed to all the formerly wooded corners of the property that had been cleared.

“There were trees all up through here,” Jon would say, pointing.

“Yup.” The farmer would grin. “Dozer took care of them.” Then he would point out another area that he had cleared. Jon was distraught, and I wondered what I would do when my grandfather’s property passed into other hands and was changed.

The farmer took us back to the front entrance, and we thanked him for his tour. He shook our hands, got back into his truck, and drove away. It was now completely dark.

Since it was dark and we would see nothing of the country anyway, we allowed ourselves to get on Interstate 75 and follow it down to Road 80. I can’t remember now where Road 80 was or where it led, but it was supposed to get us to Nashville eventually. What I do remember is the incredible emptiness. We would drive for miles without seeing any light or sign of habitation. I think we were traveling through some sort of vast state park, but without getting out a map and checking for sure I would have no idea. I do remember that the exits from the freeway were scarce enough that there was a time when we were actually worried about running out of gas. We finally found an exit at a lonely place called Edmonton. My headache and our weariness added to the unreality of it all. We pumped gas in a thin sleet and walked across a parking lot to a crowded McDonalds. Then it was on, through Bowling Green, in and between a constant fleet of trucks, onto I-65, and finally into Nashville.

7.

In Kentucky I finally felt that I was seeing something new. I think any road trip out of the Midwest is really just a quest for hills, a quest for a land where you can’t see all the way to the horizon. It’s strange, because in Illinois we may have the widest view of anywhere, and yet the places we look for to be ‘beautiful’ always afford us a lesser view of sky and horizon.

We found hills in Kentucky, and I think in my memory they’ll always have a blue hue to them. I’ll remember Kentucky as the roads that lead into Lexington, and I’ll take their windings and the dips and rises along either side, the tiny towns that perch in between these hills, to be representative of the entire state.

For whatever reason the city of Lexington stuck out in my memory like it should be something to drive though. I’m not sure if I thought it had historical significance or it I remember my grandfather saying something about how nice it was. Whatever the reason, we drove through it, and I was rather disappointed. Again though, I can’t say why. I don’t know what I was really looking for. The only thing I remember distinctly is seeing an old building that had been used for a Union hospital in the Civil War. That got Jon and I talking, and neither of us could remember whether Kentucky had been with the North or the South.

Our plan after Lexington was to drive to Richmond, where Jon’s family farm was. He had been telling me about the farm since we realized our route would take us through Kentucky. Jon’s grandfather had owned a tobacco farm. Jon’s mother had been raised there, and Jon had been there when he was a child. When his grandfather died the property was sold, but it was his dream to buy it back one day and turn it into a camp. He called his mom to get directions, and we were going to drive there and ask whoever owned it if we could look around.

Once beyond Lexington we were in the hills once again, sometimes on the ridge with valleys sloping off to either side, sometimes in the valley with a stream keeping pace and cattle watching us disinterestedly. Eventually the hills started getting slightly more rocky, the slopes more steep, and myself more nervous, having noticed a sign a while back that seemed to indicate the lack of a bridge ahead. I asked Jon if he had seen it.

“I saw a sign saying no trucks,” he answered.

“Yeah. Did it say something about a ferry?”

He shrugged. “That would be weird.”

It had been a while since we had passed through the last dot on the map, and I had a vision of the road coming to an end and a rickety boat manned by disreputable backwoods men, men who would extort money from unsuspecting tourists who didn’t want their car at the bottom of a river. I asked Jon if he thought we would have to put my car on a boat, but he didn’t answer.

The road was winding, so when we saw a final sign warning that the road ended in one thousand feet, we couldn’t yet see what was going on. Jon scrutinized the map, and sure enough there was a river intersecting the road we were on. There was also a tiny abbreviation reading ‘FY.’

“I guess that stands for ferry,” he said.

We swept around a curve (hesitantly, because I still had visions of my car in a river), and the road did indeed come to an end. When I tell this story now to our friends I say something like, “We were out in the middle of nowhere, winding through these hills, and all of a sudden at the bottom of this valley the road just ends,” and then I make this emphatic motion with my hand indicating the road ending. That’s exactly how it happened too, and Jon and I just kind of sat there staring.

The river was probably a couple hundred feet across, and a sign told us to stop at a certain distance and wait for the ferryman to signal for us to board. The ferry was not currently on our side but was just pushing off from the opposite shore. To my relief it seems a rather stalwart vessel, and it looked large enough to carry one or two cars easily. In fact, soon it was delivering some sort of minivan to our side, so I supposed it could handle my car.

We were excited, because we knew this would make a good story, and road trips are all about good stories. The ferry got to our side, the gate slammed down, and the vehicle aboard drove out. A man who had jumped out to tie the ferry to a jetty signaled us to drive up into it. Since we’re just stupid kids from the city and were worried we might disrupt the complicated task of getting from one side of the river to the other, once aboard we rolled down our windows and just gawked at the river. When we were about halfway across a ferryman came out of the cabin and told us we could get out and look around.

The ferry was large enough to carry three vehicles, actually, and basically consisted of a little control cabin and a long floating driveway that cars parked on. There were towers with guide wires on either side of the ferry on both sides of the river, so there was no danger of being swept down the stream. It was run by two ferrymen, and when I try to remember them now they end up looking just the same. They were old and friendly with big bushy beards.

We asked them, in more words or less, what the heck was going on.

“There’s been a ferry on this river since 1785,” one or the other explained to Jon and me. “It’s actually in the Constitution that unless it’s not operated for a period of two years, they can never build a bridge here. Too much historical significance. There was an Indian chief who got the rights to run a ferry across this river, which is the Kentucky River, but back then it was pulled on a chain that ran across the river. Back then it was also part of Virginia.” He pointed to the cabin where two flags were flying beside the Stars and Stripes: Virginia and Kentucky. “You’ve got to get congressional permission to fly that one here.”

We reached the other side and one of them tied the boat off. We could probably have stayed and talked to them for hours, and we would have felt good about it too because I bet they don’t get too many people daily that are as incredibly interested in the history and day-to-day operation of a ferry as we were then, but we only talked for a little while before cars came down the road and we had to get out of the way. They did tell us more though, about the number of cars that cross daily (maybe around one hundred) and about the town on the other side of the river (Valley View, dying now, but it used to be bigger than Lexington; they’d float logs down the river for the sawmills). I wish we would have parked the car and ridden back across with them, but we still had a ways to go before Richmond.

“Road trip, eh?” one of the men said when we told him of our plans. “Well, be sure to get in jail. You can’t go on a road trip without getting in trouble at least once. But not here in Kentucky. Wait till you get to Tennessee.”

Besides all that excitement, we almost hit a rooster that was wandering in the street in Valley View. For some reason that was almost as exciting to us as the ferry.

6.

We woke up when Eric left for work, and Jon and I went outside in our pajamas so Eric’s mom could take a picture of us three in front of my car. It was rainy and cold, and though I was ready to leave right then Jon convinced me to come back downstairs so we could get another hour of sleep. We finally did get up though, got ready, and helped ourselves to breakfast.

We said our good-byes and walked out into the rain. Eric’s mom told me that she had read somewhere that the Columbus area gets more rain than anywhere else in the United States beside Oregon. It didn’t bother us that day, because we were getting back on the road and we will be seeing things that we haven’t seen before. Driving out of Columbus the rain can’t touch us. It doesn’t start to look like rainy mornings sometimes do until we are turning around fifteen minutes later, realizing that Jon left his cell phone in Eric’s basement.

That’s an interesting thing to stop and think about really. For a time there on the freeway that we were taking to circle around Columbus and hop on a middle road, we considered driving straight through and writing the phone off as a loss. Eric could drop it in the mail or just bring it back to school when he came. It’s some kind of commentary on our road trip that we both felt it necessary to have our own cell phones. When I asked Jon if he could go on without it, he explained that Annie would be calling it and worried if he didn’t have it.

We drove back to Eric’s house and waited in the driveway. His mother and sister had left to go shopping, and there was no way that we could get back into the house. There was a combination on the garage door, so we sat in my car in the rain and used our remaining cell phone to get in touch with anyone we could think of who might know that combination. Again, it’s something when you stop and think that no matter where we went we had the ability to instantly communicate with anyone in our lives. We weren’t truly cut off, nor would we ever be. We would always be connected with these invisible lines stretching from phone to satellite to phone. It was like the roads, and thinking about it now I wonder if these are the new high roads, traveling without moving, not even seeing the pavement between me and the people I’m far from. Eric finally called us back, gave us the combination, and allowed us to get back on the road.

* * *

There’s not a lot to tell about the roads through southern Ohio. I’m sure if we lived there, if we knew all their turns and every town hunched along their collective back, then there would be things to tell. Now there was only rain. There didn’t seem to be as much brick here as there was coming into Ohio, nor did there seem to be as many hills. Maybe they were there behind the rain. It seemed like we wandered south for a long time, stopping at gas stations and pumping gas in the rain, digging apples and yogurt out of the cooler in the rain. We kept looking for Kentucky, and it didn’t stop raining until we were at the Ohio River.

There was a town along the river on the Ohio side, and it was the first one that we had seen that day that looked like it had much character. It stretched along the river for a while, and we followed them both. Then there was a field and our road twisted up an on-ramp to join another road and make the leap over the river by a rather neat and trim suspension bridge, freshly washed blue by the rain. We stopped beside the field to take a picture of it, but bridges are always hard to capture. I saw the Mackinac Bridge every summer growing up, and no picture ever really came close to explaining it.

This bridge certainly was not the Mackinac, but we were proud of it for some reason, proud of the fact that it was on our road and that it would get us into Kentucky. For whatever reason, that seemed to mark the boundary, at least for me, into unknown territory. Indiana and Ohio bordered Michigan, so they certainly weren’t anything out of the ordinary. Kentucky was a definite step south, an unknown region of hills and blue-colored grass. Our blue suspension bridge was the gateway into all this, and our spirits lifted with the clouds as the rain finally stopped.

We decided that we needed a song as we drove into each new state that would be particularly applicable for that state. We didn’t have one for Indiana. I picked “Carry Me, Ohio” by Mark Kozelek (which Jon didn’t appreciate nearly as much as he should have) for coming into Ohio, and so Jon had to pick Kentucky’s song. He couldn’t think of one terribly specific to Kentucky, so he chose “Road Less Traveled” by George Strait. I liked it enough, as corny as it was, that it could be considered the theme song for our trip.

And it all might come together,
And it all come unraveled
On the road less traveled.

There’s a road, a winding road that never ends.