rovide by the We got up in Memphis without rain, the first-day since Flagstaff that it wasn’t raining or threatening rain; it is 80° and glorious. We took a walk along the River at a new park with various exercise apparati provided by the Memphis Grizzlies and overlooked by new condos. It got me thinking about the NBA and how they, as a predominantly Black League, work very hard to be part of their local community.  It also got me thinking about man’s changing relationship with Nature. Ten thousand years ago until sometime after the turn of the 19th century, everything outside of the biggest cities was what we now call Nature and it was less something to be enjoyed than overcome. I remember reading that, when the Spanish explorers first saw the Grand Canyon, they wrote that it was an ugly gash in the land, the ugliest place they had ever seen. Even a hundred years ago, a riverfront or harborfront was for docks, not homes. Now the riverfront is for us enjoy, to watch birds, the flowing water, and the ever-changing sky. 

After our walk, we went to the Central Barbecue for Ribs before we hit the road. The first time we had been at Central Barbecue was in the spring of 2008 and it was in a converted gas station and we overlooked the street – in both meanings of the word overlook – while we ate the best barbecue we had ever had. Now barbecue is a bigger deal with barbecue joints everywhere, and Central barbecue has prospered; it now has three locations and a nice covered outside eating place. I’m pleased to say that we still think it is still great. Then it is time to gas up and hit the road. We start on freeways but get off as soon as possible, driving mostly on four-lane back roads called Parkways through small towns where the speed limit drops from 65 to 40. BTW, almost all the pictures taken on the road were taken by Michele.

We are deep in y’all country and honey country, as in “Y’all want honey with those biscuits, Honey?”, and deep in The Bible Belt with large churches – seemingly – every couple hundred feet. A couple of days ago, Richard Taylor asked me to listen to AM radio as we drove, hoping, I think, that I would gain some knowledge, particularly on why these people voted for Trump, that I could pass on. I tried Richard but everything that is not country rock is somebody pitching Jesus. I didn’t hear much fire and brimstone talk, just Feeling down and despondent? Jesus understands, he was a man, too. The countryside is beautiful, in a pastoral way and as we drive through the Smoky Mountains, we pass some great road cuts with the sedimentary layers on full display.  llAfter 326.1 easy miles, we arrive in Chattanooga and have a nice, late dinner at The Flying Squirrel. 

Our plan had been to drive to Bentonville early on Tuesday and visit the Crystal Bridges Museum – the Museum of American Art that was founded by Alice Walton, paid for by hundreds of millions Walmart customers, and designed by Moshe Safdie – but it was closed on Tuesdays. When every day is spent driving to somewhere else, a closed museum throws us off our schedule. We worked around it by going to Crystal Bridges in the morning on Wednesday and early evening – well, not so early, it turned out – then driving to Memphis well into the dark. Memphis was a 346.1-mile drive, much of it in rain, and we arrived beat. 

Crystal Bridges was a revelation, it is a great building, certainly one of the best museums I have ever been to, in a setting that is even better. It is all about American Art  – duh! – displayed chronologically, and it gives the visitor a great overview. The pre-2000 art in the permanent collection did seem slightly second-rate – although there was a stellar Audobon turkey that I fell in love with – and I think that is because by the time Alice Walton started collecting American art, the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art had been collecting American art for 100 years, and the Smithsonian for 120 years, not to mention the Art Institute of Chicago or LACMA or a dozen other museums that had been sucking up all the greatest stuff. They do, however, have gobs of money and great ambition so the temporary shows and the new acquisitions should be terrific. 

There were two shows, or exhibitions if you prefer,  Stuart Davis – which we would have liked to see but didn’t because of time constraints – and Chihuly, who has reached one name status, displayed in the woods. It was raining off and on while we were at Crystal Bridges, with a light and drizzle in between, and we timed our Chihuly viewing between major rains. Walking through the Ozark woods viewing Chihuly in a drizzle was close to magical. 

We had a late lunch in the museum dining room, under a super hanging heart by Jeff Koons and then hit the road. 

  As we got closer to Memphis, the rain got lighter and then we were out of the rain, running on dry roads all the way. 

We crossed the Father of Waters, running unvexed to the sea, to quote President Lincoln, and were in both Memphis and Tennessee. We ended a long day at Beal Street listening to a mediocre cover band playing, among other things, Elvis Presley, The Ozark Mountain Daredevils, and Tom Petty.

We have been driving under cloudy skies or rain since Albuquerque which seems like a long time for us although it has only been a couple of days. When we woke up Tuesday morning, in Tulsa, it was raining Since this drive was short – only 121.5 miles, it turned out – we spend the morning and most of the afternoon in Tulsa in intermitant rain. As an aside, my whole worldview is that it only rains when it is cold and I am shocked every time I walk out of an air-conditioned building into the rain, and it is warmer. End aside. 

It was still raining as we left town. I liked Tulsa a lot. Because it has had several booms and busts, It’s got lots of interesting buildings and it’s fun to walk around the Downtown area and see what seems to be buildings from three eras. The 60s buildings, of which I have always been a fan, come off as pretty blandly out of a human scale, compared to the earlier buildings. 

Once on the road, the rain seemed harder before it let-up..  

A little after when we left Tulsa, we got into the Ozark Mountains and the road cuts became spectacular, but we seemed to be mostly out of them by the time we got to Arkansas. Still, Arkansas was beautiful even if was marred by giant chicken factories, and, driving into Bentonville, much of it seemed like a park.  We ended the day at Doe’s Eat Place, a place we had first run into in Greenville MS, where Michele had a long conversation about Rye whiskeys and Irish whiskeys before choosing a very nice Cornel Taylor Rye.

When we got up to wander around Tulsa, my camera had a dead battery. I had plugged in the charger cable all night but it didn’t charge the phone. It turns out that the phone has to be sitting at a certain angle for the charger to work – I’m worried that I may have tweaked connectors while charging in the car – so I didn’t take any pictures on our wandering through Tulsa. The pictures after the Union Station and before Michele shaking hands, are all Michele’s. 

Amarillo is slightly less than the halfway point between home and the Cousin’s Reunion in Beaufort South Carolina. From home to Amarillo is about 19 hours and 39 minutes according to Google Maps and we have about 20 hours and  12 minutes to go to get to the Reunion (however, both of these times are by the most direct route, a route we are rarely on). When we checked into our hotel in Amarillo, the guy in front of us, an older gentleman with four young disciples, asked if the rooms had a Bible. The young woman at the registration desk said that all the rooms should have Bibles, but, if it didn’t, they had extra Bibles at the main desk. It got me thinking, Wouldn’t a person who is basing a room choice on the availability of Bibles, have one of his own.? Is he with the Bible police checking on the Hotel’s compliance?  This morning, when we checked out at about 11:30, it was drizzling – actually, what I would call a driving drizzle with a fierce Texas plains wind driving the drizzle – and it smelled like a very large feedlot. In a way, that sums up our Amarillo experience which was only a short stop on the road to somewhere else. 

Before leaving Amarillo, we did stop at a small private park north-east of the actual city. The park, Wildcat Bluff, is a square mile sample of untouched grasslands and is the kind of place that would be a County or State Park in California. Driving around Amarillo, which seemed to be mostly Frontage Roads, the land looks uninteresting with civilization sitting uncomfortably on it, but when we out and walked on the land, it was lovely. As an aside, Civilization does not sit easily in Drylands and the drier, the worse it looks; the people are usually on the poor side of the spectrum and there is no place to hide Civilization’s detritus, which I think is one of the reasons many people find the Desert ugly. End aside.    Walking around Wildcat Bluff, the wind was the major experience, but in the car, on Interstate 40, the temperature is a sweet 72° and the landscape, with a shocking number of new windmills, passed by as if we were watching it on TV.     

I am not a big fan of Texas, having been stationed there for a long year and a half, but on the road to Tulsa, while still very much in Texas, we ran into the best rest stop in the known universe. I’m not kidding, it is a stellar rest stop. It even has a tornado shelter. 

Driving east across the Texas panhandle, we pass over rolling hills. They don’t photograph well, but it is very nice driving except that we have no idea what the 75-speed limit means. Will we be jailed if we drive 85? Are we OK driving 79? 

As we drive East, the time in relation to the sun changes, when we entered Texas, we switched to Central Daylight Time which we will live under until we leave Memphis but that is not the whole story. When we got to Amarillo, sunset was at 7:30, in Memphis, it was at 6:42 and, in Tulsa where this is being written, it is at 7:04. Crossing into Oklahoma, the land seems to change almost instantly, part of it is that Oklahoma seems to water their freeways and part of it is that the landscape really does change as we drop down from the Rockies, across the eastern alluvial fan from the Rockies, and down into the greater Mississippi Valley. We stop for gas soon after crossing the border into Oklahoma – so far Texas is the only state we have passed through without getting gas, a fact that tickles both Michele and me as being, somehow, ironic – and we give up on finding any restaurant other than McDonald’s in what seems to be the largest food desert on the continent.  

When we get off the main highway and drive down back roads, Oklahoma starts to feel very different from Texas. As the sun gets low, we go through Gutherie OK – just in time to see them finish tearing down the tents from a Wine and Arts Fair – and finally, into Tulsa in the dark.