This trip just got either a lot shorter or a lot hungrier.
I had prepared for this moment for days, by going to the ATM machine bit by bit: my account does not let me draw more than five hundred dollars out on any day, and I don’t have a credit card, so for large expenditures like this I have to pay cash and draw the account out over a few days. I counted out the money and arrived with it in hand.
When I got there I met the young gentleman I had first spoke with. “Hey, you ever get to the Red River Gorge while you were here?”
“No. Didn’t really have wheels.” Okay not entirely true but I was not above an appropriately timed guilt trip. “But I want to go – you know, several other people mentioned it while I was here. That’s a good sign.”
Troy came out. “Ah thank we’re ready to get you back on the rowud Jawun,” he said. “Where’d you say you were bikin’ to?”
“The whole Mississippi River.”
“Mayin. How lawung’s that gunna tayik?”
“I’m giving it two months.”
“Wail, good luck.”
“I brought you a gift,” I said. “Here’s some maple syrup. I bottled it myself – tapped the trees and ran lines too.”
He seemed genuinely pleased. “Mah oh mah. That’s a grayit gift.”
“If you want to do it Kentucky style, you heat some up in a saucepan, and put some bourbon in it. Boil off the alcohol – otherwise it will have a sharp taste from the alcohol – and put it on vanilla ice cream. Bourbon maple syrup on ice cream is pretty much the best thing ever.”
“Mayin! Sounds good. So what’d you do while you was hayir?”
“Saw Ashland today, that was nice. Saw the university, went to Port Royal too to check out the Wendell Berry stuff. Really the only thing I didn’t get to do was go to Keeneland for the horse racing.”
“Nex tahm, nex tahm. That will be nahn-fifty-seven and fifty two sants.” I started counting out the money and he said, “Jes gimme nahn-forty.” I think the maple syrup had just paid for itself. He walked me out to my truck too, both of us gimping a bit.
“Wail Jawun nex tahm you’re hayir way’ll go to Cane-land together.”
“I think that’d be fun. Seems like horses are a big thing around here.”
“Hayl with the horses, way’ll go look at the gur-urls!”
I threw my bike into the bed of the truck and hopped in. The clutch was a little resistant at first. But I pulled out and headed to Catherine’s. But the gear shifts were not good. “Damn,” I said. “Damn damn DAMN.”
Optimism or obstinacy, we're going.
I thought it might recover miraculously with a bit more use. I got back to Catherine’s and I grumbled, but still packed up all my stuff and threw it in. We got in the truck and started it, but the gears ground terribly as I tried to get into reverse. It then balked at getting into first. We drove to the first light and then I turned it right back around and went back to the transmission place.
I think the maple syrup had been very useful here. When I showed up, Troy was clearly angry. “What sames to be the problem?” I told him it was not fixed. He went off in what I would describe as a businessful mood. He wanted this thing done.
We, on the other hand, sat in the office and made ourselves a standing reproach to their workmanship. I paged through the Hot Rod magazines, looking for pictures of girls, but apparently these were serious hot rod magazines, for men who only cared about machines. Some of the ads in the back were interesting, though.
“Would you believe this there are not one not two but three ads back here for penis enlargement. I guess it really is true that men who drive cars like this are making up for their small penises.”
Catherine busted out Boggle, which amazingly enough she had in her purse. We played Latin boggle: you shake a container of letter-sided dice into a 4×4 square, and try to spell as many Latin words with the upturned letters as possible. I have no idea what the mechanics thought of this one. Pretty girls generally want you to do something more exciting with them than play Latin Boggle, I imagine. But she had taken it out, so it was her fault. I beat her four times in a row.
Walking the beautiful outskirts of Lexington.
We went for a brief walk along the trafficky, ugly road, then came back and just sat there. We talked with each other. We talked with Troy. We talked with other people who came in and waited. It got to be pretty close to five o’clock. It was clear to everyone that I wanted out. I was going mad. And Troy made the decision to release the vehicle again. Apparently they hadn’t been doing much with it anyway: they were “lettin’ it blade.” He instructed me that maybe when we got to our destination, we could remove the cap on the transmission fluid container, and it could continue to bleed overnight. I agreed to do so. And we blasted out of there.
It was clear that it really wasn’t any better, but I had run out of patience. I just needed to go. I wasn’t sure what would happen here. I could throw it into gear, sometimes by using all my might. But I doubted Catherine would be able to when it came time to hand the vehicle over. It was behaving exactly as it had been when I made the determination I couldn’t go to the mountains with it. I really wasn’t sure what was going to happen. It certainly didn’t seem smart to drive it right into the Smoky Mountains if we couldn’t rely on it. But impatience and desire will overmaster judgement in the end. I slammed it into gear when I needed to, and eventually we made it to the highway, and once I got it into fifth gear and didn’t need the clutch we zipped along just fine. Three hours later we were off the highway and coming into Sevierville (pronounced “severe”). Here it became clear that we weren’t going to be setting up our tents in the park – still an hour away – that night. It was probably time to look for a room. So we drove into downtown Sevierville and pulled up in front of a restaurant.
It looked nice, too, but we were informed it was closing now, basically – eight p.m. When I asked if there was any other place nearby to eat – I didn’t want to put the car into gear again without accomplishing the purpose on account which I had taken it out of gear, the waiter said, “In Sevierville? Ha sorry no I don’t think so. You see what type of a place it is. I mean, what kind of place has restaurants closing at eight o’clock?”
Which I thought was a good question. So we hit the streets and walked. Downtown everything was empty and dark and closed. Springsteen had it wrong: the darkness was at the center of town. At the edges, though, it was all neon and light. We walked down the nearest block of exurbia. A Waffle House sign was in the distance. Catherine had never been to a Waffle House. “I’ve always wanted to go,” she said.
“Well, I think tonight you get your wish.”
I take suburbia to be the term to describe when people live on the outskirts of town and use their cars to get into the centers. This was something different – the center was completely dead. Even if you lived in the center you would have to go someplace else to find supplies or gas or food. It was exurbia, and it had quite blighted Sevierville. Lexington had a bad case of it, but Sevierville – otherwise a very pretty town with a backdrop of gorgeous mountains – was quite on death’s door, and this the malignant tumor. What was peripheral had grown uncontrollably, and threatened to choke off the life at the heart.
At the Waffle House I asked around for a cheap place to spend the night. I got several answers, but somehow I liked the person who said “the Mountain Aire Inn” best. We walked back to the car in the American night, smelling the living air coming up from the river as we crossed it, drove to the Mountain Aire Inn, and stopped for the night. I asked about a car mechanic in town. The woman at the counter said the owner’s husband was a good mechanic, maybe he’d look at the truck. And the husband’s brother ran a repair shop. “He’s very honest, too.” I would find that out the next day.
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