Dispatches From the Other

Living all my life here in East Tennessee, I have been an uneasy native of what we now call a “Red State,” dominated by a fierce and uncompromising mistrust of government’s power to alleviate economic suffering or limit business in any way. Taxes are seen as inherently evil, instead of being the price of civilization, as Oliver Wendell Holmes called them.

In alternate years, the Conference on Southern Literature gathers from the corners of the encrimsoned South other lonely strangers in a strange land. Call them liberals, progressives or persons of social conscience, they speak up with the assurance that stones will not rain upon them, excoriations will be absent and they are among friends.

One of the writers to be inducted into the Fellowship of Southern Writers this past weekend was Will Campbell, whose journey of thought, faith and activism has been chronicled by himself and others. Escorted across the stage to the lectern by Jill McCorkle, his aging body belied by the clear strong voice and sharp perceptions he addressed to the audience.

I knew that Campbell had been a unique figure in the tangled struggles of the South during the years of civil rights activism. I did not know that he had participated also in a sort of Underground Railroad escorting young men to Canada to escape participation in the Vietnam War. He told of driving carloads of such men to havens across the border, speaking to them of the problems they would face, not least being the irreversible separation from all they knew as home. For southerners, especially – Campbell is a Mississippian and many of the refugees were also – such separation was wrenching, however conscience made it necessary.

Campbell spoke of one such young man, sadness in every line of his face, who picked up a guitar and began to sing his own song expressing this loss. Will Campbell, across forty years and still in command of his memory began to quote the lyrics there on the stage of the Tivoli, faultlessly, and the words were some I knew quite well, and so knew the name of the young man. The song was “Mississippi, You’re on My Mind,” by Jesse Winchester. I have some of that now no longer young man’s recordings, including that one:

I think I see a wagon rutted road
With the weeds growing tall between the tracks
And along one side runs a rusty barbed wire fence
And beyond that sits an old tar paper shack

That is the first stanza. Will Campbell rolled out almost all the rest of the song.

I was in the South still, and it was home, indeed.

Upscaling Pine Breeze

It will be interesting to see the local fallout from the real estate bubble implosion, and the attendant economy meltdown. I am especially interested in the effects on North Chattanooga, where I live. For fifteen years or more, real estate in this area has been escalating in demand and therefore price. Small bungalows have been gentrified and sold for amazing prices. Unbuildable sites now have houses and condos perched on their unsuitable terrain.

I have watched a recent development with special interest.

Old Pine Breeze

On a ridge top where first a tuberculosis sanitarium, then a child development treatment facility were located, the old buildings were razed some years ago. This year, a gated community christened “Hill Pointe” gradually rose on the spot where TB patients died and were cremated, where troubled adolescents served involuntary terms of confinement and counseling. I looked up one house now for sale, for a mere $598,000. The houses and town homes are thickly clustered,

New Gate

with minimal yards and lots of luxury touches to jack up the prices. The vanished wards and dormitories named after local families are only memories. Or more, perhaps.

Pine Breeze Sanitarium, later Pine Breeze Center,  figured in a novel, Four and Twenty Blackbirds, written by former Chattanoogan Cherie Priest, published in 2005. Priest had explored the old buildings shortly before they were demolished, and experienced a truly spooky manifestation, which she incorporated into her book. Even apart from the local interest, a good book.

So, perhaps the new homeowners perched high on Stringer’s ridge will find some unadvertised amenities in the stillness of nights spent where so many troubled spirits lived and sometimes died.

“They’re here,” a little girl said in a movie once. They may still be, on Hill Pointe.

The Lemming Effect

Today is the first day in two years that the Market Street Bridge in Chattanooga, also known as the Chief John Ross Bridge, has been open in two years. As I posted earlier, a total renovation of the concrete skin of the bridge, as well as some other maintenance work, has been brought in under the contract deadline by a month.

An overdeveloped sense of triumph over this event has been seized on by civic boosters, spawning  a multitude of bread and circuses events today. Driving towards the area north of the river I saw gridlock on the streets close to the bridge, and altered course accordingly. Troops of families dressed in the motley of garments typical of a summer outing in public spaces were filing down the sidewalks towards the park which serves as northern terminus for the Chief John Ross Bridge. I understand from the radio that all sorts of concessions and activities were available for the diversion of the multitude, including “face and pet painting.” I don’t even want to know what that entails.

One of the events that might have been of some interest was the staging of boat races by large long boats powered by crews of 18 or so, paddling rather than sculling. Called “dragon boat” races, presumably to borrow the associations of viking ships. Yesterday evening, practice for the dragon boats ended in barely averted tragedy, when one of the boats was swept against and nearly under a work barge still in position. All the crew made it safely to shore, although a couple of them were pulled under the barge, to surface downstream. Volunteer boaters of all sorts participated in the rescue of all those who found themselves in the water. The official county rescue boat showed up in time to tow the dragon boat to shore.

There apparently was no further drama today, and this late afternoon my beloved and I encountered some of the crew for one of the teams (not the capsized one) at the Tremont Street Tavern, celebrating medals they had won. I don’t know if they finished first, but they were in high spirits. The logo on the back of their crew shirts said “The Drinking Crew with a Rowing Problem.” I believe the name of their team was something like, “The Tipsy Boats.”

I like them. I bet they would never paint their pets.

A Bridge Made New

For the past almost two years, one of the main bridges across the Tennessee River at Chattanooga has been under extensive renovation, amounting to a complete re-concreting of the surfaces of the main structure. Below is a picture of the drawbridge portion of the John Ross Bridge, a bascule bridge, taken today during final test of the mechanism before the August 4, 2007 re-opening. The work was completed almost six weeks sooner than the contract estimate by the prime contractor, Mountain States Construction, LLC. Kudos to them. Nice to know public projects can be brought in ahead of time.

A detail below of the bridge shows the control booth and a banner announcing the re-opening. The ironwork of the drawbridge had been renovated a few years ago, with all the old paint stripped down to bare metal and re-painted. With the concrete refurbishing now almost complete, the bridge should be good for another 80 or 90 years.

The kick-off of the re-opening will be the crossing of the bridge by an electric shuttle bus, inaugurating an extension of the free downtown shuttle service to North Chattanooga, where feverish development has resulted in increased commercial and residential activity. Shops and condos, spreading over the north bank of the river like profitable locusts. Also resulting in parking meters popping up for the first time on that side of the river.

Traffic should move more smoothly with the bridge opening, just in time for a looming new construction project on one of the other cross-river arteries. TDOT plans to widen HWY 27 just north of another bridge, the Olgiati, also closing permanently an off-ramp that is too close to the bridge’s main exit. Progress. Dig we must. And so on.

I love progress. Sort of.

No More Porches

I attended this past weekend a biennial event in Chattanooga, TN, the Conference on Southern Literature. Writers of fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction who are from the South, or write with something of a southern flavor, gather and give readings of their writing, participate in panel discussions and sign copies of their work for those who attend. A frequent subject over the twenty-six years the conference has existed is the definition of “Southern Literature.” As a life-long southerner (being born in Washington, DC makes “native southerner” a problematic descriptor for me) I have given this subject considerable thought. Even between conferences.