by Caleb Coy
There are two reasons that the road goes on forever. The first is that roads are always connected. The second is that you will circle around them when you are utterly lost, not merely out of direction but out of the space you move in. And there’s a third reason. The road goes on within you after you’ve left it behind.
Destination: Henderson, Tennessee. Starting point: Salem, Virginia.
The longest journey I have ever taken on my own I’ve taken at least forty-fives times, one way or another. The drive itself lasts seven to nine hours depending on the variables of traffic accidents, road work, weather, the number of stops I take, how willing I am to speed, whether or not I am pulled over for speeding, and whether or not I get lost on the way (this trip, I discover, takes ten to eleven hours if you take a bus full of children and stop at a Cracker Barrel).
The drive is from the suburbs of the Roanoke Valley to a pip-squeak of a hole-in-the-wall town in Tennessee where the only thing worth visiting is a tucked-away private Christian University. It is the effort of an entire day. I have become so familiar with this drive that I no longer need directions, like a friend who’s number I’ve memorized and whose door I have a key to. It has become a comfortable drive, yet every time I take it I feel more and more out of my element. The Avett Brothers in my speaker agree with me how identical the exits are in “I and Love And You.” I am not one to memorize route numbers or measures distances on a map, and so travel remains less pragmatic and more primal, more mythical. I do not recognize a single turn, merge, or exit by number but rather by landmark or alphabetical name. But on paper the journey takes me down I-81 along the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, onto I-40 right out past Knoxville, straight through the long bar of Tennessee, off the ramp onto TN-22 beyond Nachez Trace State Park, onto Cook Street for a few miles, onto 22 A as I snake through a long neighborhood of abbreviated farmland, and onto TN-100 until I hop out in Chester County. I must not map out my journey like this, for then it is nothing more than a finite stretch of pavement with fixed and unchanging routes, all documented and drawn out by the department of transportation responsible for its continual upkeep.
I began taking this journey in a time when even a young traveler would still print out or write down directions. Now we listen to a robo-voice, and occasionally glance at an almost foolproof visual, so now there’s one less avenue of adventure. When my car misses an exit, or takes the wrong exit, I circle around and try again. My mind? Always circling around, taking the ramps on and off through the routes of memory, distraction, supposition.
When I start my car I feel incredibly free. The tank is full, the bags are packed. All the things I need for the next eight hours are contained within the small space and within reach. I am expected nowhere until that time is up, and perhaps even after that. And even if I am alone I have with me a collection of music that would take over a week to listen to in its entirety. If I’m alone, all conversations will be held between myself, my subconscious, my ego, and my God. It’s nearly an hour before I truly leave my Virginia homeland. Soon I’ll depart the rural trucking corridor of I-81 that runs parallel to the ridges, river, and railroad. While I-40 runs from the deserts of the Mohave to the waters of Wilmington, I’ll be running across the stretch between the smokies and the city of Jackson.
exit 84, three crosses, one missing an arm post. spells “tit.”
Thirty minutes out I pass by the first three of many crosses to come in this stretch of the American Bible Belt, which tapers out after the hollers of the Cumberland Gap. Once the Appian way of Rome had been decorated with the crucified bodies of 6,000 slaves. Over 2,000 years later entire roads of a largely Christian country give us the occasional view of crosses empty of any corpse living or dead, urging us to remember one man who reshaped the world. They’re on our Bibles, churches, graves, necklaces, paintings, car decals, shirts, but on the road they are life-sized and seem to even move. Sometimes they are larger, and they loom with open intent. All of them are put up with a more noble purpose than torture and murder, with tens of millions of people passing by them every year.
But especially in an age of open pluralism, the noble intent of crucifix after crucifix after crucifix on the landscape is left up to question. What are the cross-putter-uppers trying to say to highway passengers? Are these emblems each a remembrancer? An invitation? An ironic mark of hope? No longer used as an instrument of humiliating public death and state power, setting up crosses nonetheless urges every onlooker to think of a tortured, dying man. Not so prevalent are empty tombs, sheep, shepherds, fish, or even a Chi Rho. What beckons here, why, and two whom? There are the little conciliation crosses we pass, along with their wilting flowers, for those who died on the road. Here the flowers surround the mark of death, expressing hope in resurrection and peace from grief. It is as if the giant crosses such as this one testify that the highway, fast and overwhelming, has come to kill so much culture. The vegetation around them is oft overtaken by the infrastructure of pavement. The new instruments of state often to wipe out life, and hope clings to the roadside.
marker 71, Blacklick, Rural Retreat, Wythville’s hot air balloon water tower
Infrastructure doesn’t have to oppress the journey it facilitates. There’s a raceway in Wytheville, and I’ve never cared to watch race cars, but I like the water tower. It’s as if a massive hot air balloon got stuck on its way up, permanently up but never moving. They host a yearly balloon festival, and I’d prefer that on any day to the loud races, but all I’ve ever seen is the lone tower. So goes the motto, “Wytheville, there’s only one.” In another hour and a half there will be another hot air balloon water tower that says “Move to Kingsport.” My experience of both towns is only to have seen their similar towers on a drive-by. And this is the story of the interstate system across time, removing what makes a town unique until replications pop up, masking the original behind the identical.
I hear Guy Forsyth’s monologue in “Long Long Time” on how the music used to be about the forever free road, but now that road has accumulated bumper-to-bumper bloated vehicles and repeat franchises overshadowing us. In the monotony of gas station and fast food clones, of exit signs telling of McDonald’s, Exxon, Subway, Love’s, Hardee’s, Marathon, I look for any marker of a village that belongs to itself, even if it’s the two massive water tanks along exit 44, one that says HOT in red letters, the other COLD in blue, like dials to some giant faucet. Passing by Mount Cammerer, I still feel as if I’m yet another stretch of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.
Chilhowie, Big Victory Church Cross
After driving through Bristol, sometime after I pass an impressive log cabin I refer to as the Lincoln Cabin at exit 19, during which time Adam Hood sings “A Million Miles Away” and I sigh that we’ve both spent two hours on the interstate, I pass by another giant cross, roughly identical to the first. This skyward-thrusting hulk of a cross looks like some giant sword stuck in the parking lot of Big Victory Church in Cumberland Gap. It’s not the largest in Tennessee, which stands at forty-five meters in Memphis, but it’s close. Somewhere along the line somebody saw fit to spend thousands of dollars on one of these tall markers, and then build some more.
Our courts rule that a city legally cannot deny the propping up of a religiously-motivated symbol if it is a monument and not a sign. Religious expression, not being a business advertisement, is exempt from advertising laws. But you have got to wonder about the preacher who makes a buck based on the size of his congregation, drawn inevitably from people who have seen the highway cross. The sign is meant to turn your neck towards it and away from other sights. There is only so much visible real estate, and the portions that remain that aren’t solely formed by the hand of God draw our eyes to the designs of people with big plans.
Virginia was one of few states to outlaw billboards for booze when I frequently made my drive over a decade ago, but even now there is a noticeable contrast in advertising before and after the Cumberland Gap. The long stretch of I-40 draws more traffic with more flat land around it than the squiggles of road between my hometown and the end of the Smokies. What’s more, Tennessee is home to Jack Daniels.
Believers in a singular, non-material God can only hope that the physical crosses we create will shield us from the alcohol and porn and consumerism on canvas boards along the journey. It’s as if we’re stretching Jesus tall and wide over the mass calls for full attention sent from every avenue of vice our laws allow. With laws that forbid pictures of liquor within 500 feet of a church, much less a school or a road, you’d think we would not see so many. Furthermore, with such a high population of professed Christians, you’d think we wouldn’t need to advertise our faith. But we only speed by the surface of a culture so saturated with its own history that we’d easily miss how sin and salvation are so intertwined in this land. We post signs on the high road calling attention to our lifestyle, not out of greed, but out of pride. We want people to see what we are when they pass by us. The signs are put up to say “this is what to buy,” but they’re allowed to be put up to say “this is who we are.”
And so at exit 73 I’d see signs to elect Jason Mumpower, followed by a sign that says “Jesus is Lord,” and at exit 3 a sign that says “We Buy Guns.” I now pass by a vector of this confluence of values, in the locus of country tourism that is the cluster of Sevierville, Pigeon Forge, and Gatlinburg. And now, for the first time in all my trips, there is Buc-ee’s, one of several along I-40. This is the Bible belt of the entire country, a confusing country that is, as is often said, one of God, guns, and patriotism, and guzzling gasoline.
Knoxville Ball has no sides
And sometimes we stick a giant gold ball on top of a tower in the middle of downtown and call it “the Lord’s Golf Tee.” Meanwhile, on the other side of the state, an Egyptian-style pyramid that used to host basketball games is now home to a Bass Pro Shop with archery and laser tag. I don’t know what future archeologists will make of a sun ball on a stick or a replica of a structure symbolizing the sun’s downward rays with a fish slapped on the side. Or that furniture outlet with a giant brown squirrel for a mascot. All I know is that, while I drive by hillbilly EPCOT in my fossil fuel-burning engine, Tennessee does not stand out for its use of solar power, or any measure of clean energy, ecological preservation, or sustainability. In the Bible Belt it seems we like to build monuments to what we think we stand for, or used to stand for, or maybe one day will stand for. We like to say we like Jesus and fish and rivers and sunshine and healthcare and forestry, but our habits clash with our vision. We largely have Tennessee to thank for the atomic bomb, auto parts, and processed foods.
Exiting the metropolis, I’m bound to see miles upon miles of solar-powered soybeans, corn, cotton, hay, and tobacco in between the hardwood forests and gas pump towns. On either side of Knoxville there happen to be car dealerships that stand out to me from the road, one that parks cars on its roof and another that has long had a four-wheeler on a fake boulder. Then there’s Cupid’s Outlet Fireworks at exit 357.
Buttermilk Road, exit 360, Twin Smokestacks of the Clinch and Emory Rivers, exit 352
Passing through the last roll of hills and valleys before the flat river land to come, I call this the roughly halfway point, if I were to travel all the way to Memphis. The “two towers” as I call them signify that I’ve made it about halfway across the Tennessee belt, and serves my imagination by comparing my journey to that of some epic fantasy hero. The narrow coal plant towers might as well be nuclear, as the plant was built to support a lab originally built for the Manhattan project.
The year I graduated college, taking my final regular trip across I-40, the Kingston plant accidentally released the largest flood of coal ash in U.S. history, inundating communities and poisoning rivers with over a billion gallons of toxic sludge. Despite the fact that thirty people died directly as a result of the cleanup, as well as countless fish since the day of the spill, and dozens more citizens remain sick from exposure, power company lobbyists have convinced both state and federal authorities that poison isn’t poison if it powers America and pads the pockets of the few at the cost of the many.
Only recently has the Tennessee Valley Authority considered shutting down the plant for good, and if my children attend the same school I did, they may one day drive by towers for natural gas, a slight step in a cleaner direction.
Central to Eastern Time, Crab Orchard, Crossville, Buckeys
Upon cross-examination, another way to interpret the halfway point is crossing through Crossville, about where I see another giant cross and cross into another timezone. There’s the sign for Frozen Head State Park before the slow climb through mid Tennessee, through Cookeville, Gallatin (not gellotin), then Mt. Juliet, where many an adventure I’ve had, including two weddings and a fateful camping trip or two.
Adventures in Nashville
Of which there are many, down in the streets you hardly catch a wink of between the skyscrapers, none of which actually look like Batman. There’s that hookah place we went to, that fancy brick restaurant that used to be a slaughterhouse where we had a banquet, the bookstore my brother and I spent hours at. Somewhere under that bank is the Subway where I ate for twenty minutes with a friend after forty minutes looking to park. And at some point I drove over Jefferson Street, and a minority community cut in half by the hunger for fast travel. I’ve hit the navel of the highest concentration of evangelicals and baptists especially of anywhere around, the veritable Vatican of Protestantism, but business reigns over it, as I can hardly see a steeple or cross amid the towers of commerce.
Before long Nashville and its adventures are gone, and the nowhere towns surround me like there never was a city before. Some of my adventures have been in losing my direction somewhere between here and there, mistrusting or mishearing a direction, committing an exit number to a dyslexic memory, or letting daydreams pull me past the turn. I’ve gotten flack for this, though givers of directions often forget that one misgiven turn makes all turns after it useless. I feel like Modest Mouse with “Interstate 8” on repeat, on a figure-eight strip, directionless and running behind, driving forever yet going nowhere, and did I not just take this exit?
In one instance I pulled off at a gas station to get more gas to spend more time on a road I didn’t know would take me where I wanted. I asked the attendant how to get to somewhere. A local geezer in overalls blurted out, “you can’t get there from here,” and burst into a wheezing, sinister laugh. I remember thinking, of course you can get anywhere from anywhere, if all the roads connect. Was this man just a future version of myself after years of being trapped in a time warp? I’d heard of this time warp phenomenon once. Another elderly man who lived near my destination once asked me at a wedding elsewhere in Tennessee if I’d encountered the same time warp he had on the way to the wedding—in other words, if I’d gotten lost the same way he had.
You can’t get there from here. What does anyone mean by that? The Beatles on the stereo are right, though. The road is long, and it is winding. And it leads to some door. Why else would it be?
I’ve passed an exit here and there for some museum of some birthplace of this or that country legend along the Music Highway, but aside from these and the musical notes on signs, there is no country music in my car unless I tune to it, which is also true of most of the upper continent. One would expect to roll down their windows during this three-hour passage and hear the ghosts of musicians past crooning from the roadside. But no, it’s just a series of markers made thanks to legislators wanting to highlight tourism. Kentucky has a better one, I hear.
After a sign for Beaver Creek Road I pass by the moonshine town of Bucksnort at exit 152 (thirty minutes out is Waverly, home of a girl whose heart I once broke), the Tennessee River (I’m a mountain man), Nathan Bedford State Park (cringe), and Nachez Trace State Park (so much history) before I take exit 108 where the big sign for the Knight’s Inn is. I know to pass by the Cotton Patch Restaurant, the Beaver School, the Little Beaver River, the Big Beaver River, turn right at the Dodge’s Chicken, pass by Caywood (not Gay Wood): Home of the Minutemen, and then across Jacks Creek before I’m back in Henderson, the birthplace of Eddy Arnold and Kings of Leon, but also Freed-Hardeman University, a private Christian college placed in this podunk town branching off the nowhere between Memphis and Nashville, appropriately far enough off Music Road that the school’s a capella tradition can continue without guitars. I used to play the Howard Shore composition “Many Meetings” upon seeing the campus, alluding to FHU as some sort of Rivendell, even though the land is flat and the architecture is less Elvish craftsmanship and more painfully orange brick and a little rural gothic pillaring.
Having driven a monumental portion of the Bible Belt, aka Cotton Belt, aka Stroke Belt, aka Sun Belt, even cutting across half the Music Highway, I get lost in the retreading of old tracks. I’ve travelled across a state of crosses, crops, and commercialization of the fried chicken and pickup truck life, all to move from my comfy home to an equally comfy but more sizable bubble of like-minded peers. I went quite a distance for a scale replica of what I’ve known most of my life, and in that way I was not so different from the countless travelers who never really make a journey except on the speedometer. I’ve changed more in the years since I graduated that place than I did during all those frequent trips.
But every drive allowed for a certain freedom to stew in ways I only had a hint of. Years later, whenever I’m in my car for more than fifteen minutes, my soul departs into some exit I always thought of taking, and the inner map gets another detail drawn in. No matter how many times I crossed the smokies, no matter how many accidental detours I took, I lament that I did not turn aside enough to encounter a thing truly new and different. A Wendy’s was always faster than a local joint, and most towns were only a gas pump.
The starting point is no longer as it was. Neither is the destination. And for such a straight shot from point A to point B, my wandering mind takes great pains to make a labyrinth out of a long road. We want to get lost in new terrain, even when travel is not for travel’s sake, even when the terrain becomes familiar from cutting the same groove again and again.
The road takes on an indelible persona. Travel it frequently and the once lost quality is so familiar that you seek being lost in the road again. It is no longer a metaphor that stretches out beside your life, but has become a map of your self, having swallowed your time whole and forced you through its tracts, an infinite series of off-ramps to anywhere other than the destination you set. Go on, get sidetracked.
There was a time I was so flustered by how lost I was that I stopped for gas and directions, prepaid for twenty dollars, and drove off without filling up, not realizing it until I was near another station. My only consolation? That my error now became a gift for some other traveler, someone else lost and in need of some fuel and a little direction.
Sheila’s rainy day on the Seafront
by Nuala McEvoy
Caleb Coy is a freelance writer with a Masters in English from Virginia Tech. He lives with his family in southwest Virginia. His work has appeared in The Common, Slackjaw, North Dakota Quarterly, Potomac Review, Coachella Review, Hippocampus, and elsewhere
Nuala McEvoy taught herself to paint during the pandemic at the age of fifty, and what was originally intended to be a gentle hobby has since turned into a passion for her. Her work now appears online, in places such as Red Ogre Review, Quibble Lit, Free Flash Fiction, Londemere Lit, Underbelly Press, and Heimat Review. She has work upcoming in The Chestnut Review, Does it Have Pockets, Through Lines, and Ink in Thirds. She has two exhibitions of her work in Münster, Germany, where she currently lives. She was recently interviewed by The Madrid Review about her creative process.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 