Highlander, Sewanee, Fiery Gizzard

 

The Last Annual Vol State 500k Road Race is held in July of every year. The runners reach the top edge of the Cumberland Plateau at Monteagle, Tennessee, 272 miles into the journey. By then they are so exhausted and sleep-deprived they barely notice the passing scenery, trudging along like cinematic zombies. It was originally for them that I wrote this story, in 2019, to help them realize the uniqueness of some features they never saw in the race.

While ultrarunning brought the impetus and inspiration, I came to realize that the story appealed to general interest and was concerned very little with journey running. Here it is:

Once you drag your despairing bones three miles up the side of the Cumberland Plateau and over its edge, you'll find yourself standing in Monteagle, Tennessee, Mile 272, a desultory mountain town of some 1,500 souls, most of them white. Take a left toward Tracy City. The sights you see around you will likely not suggest what I'm about to tell you happened here.

This was the location of the Highlander Folk School, a school that taught social justice leaders. It helped train miners and other workers in Appalachia to organize. In the 1950s it became involved in desegregation and civil rights. Rosa Parks, Ralph Abernathy, M. L. King, Jr and John Lewis all trained here.

The hymn "We Shall Overcome" was born here, here in this unlikely place. Helped along by folk singer Pete Seeger, who published the song, it became the very anthem or the civil rights struggle and one of the most recognized songs you can name.

Then Highlander was accused of being a communist school. Couldn't you have guessed that? In 1961 the State of Tennessee evoked its charter and seized its property and real estate. (Today a broad Street named Rosa Parks Boulevard barrels out of North Nashville straight to the State Capital, where the charter was revoked, and I run it every year in the R 'n' R Nashville Marathon.) Once closed, Highlander moved to Knoxville and re-opened in 1961. It moved to its present location in New Market, Tennessee, 25 miles east of Knoxville, in 1971.

On March 29 of this year, 2019, a fire destroyed the executive office building and decades of archives. Nine other buildings on the 200-acre campus were undamaged. A “white power” symbol was found spray-painted in the parking lot.

Anyway, go left at Monteagle. If you make a mistake and go right, you'll find another surprise just six miles later when you stumble onto the University of the South, a distinguished liberal arts school, frequently called Sewanee, after its hometown. The school owns 13,000 acres, officially called "The Domain." Only 1,000 acres are developed. The rest is still wilderness, dotted with natural stone arches and miles of stark sandstone bluffs topped by ledges which afford sweeping views of the pastoral lands below, very much like The Rock toward which Vol State runners head. I'm lucky to have hiked around The Domain.

The Sewanee Review, a distinguished quarterly literary magazine, is published by the University. It began in 1892 and is said to be the oldest publication of its kind in the country. If you are a young Assistant Professor of English working toward tenure your essay in the Sewanee Review would be like bringing a batting average of .319.

A list of contributors reads like a Who's Who of American letters: Flannery O'Conner, William Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, Cormac McCarthy, and so on. Tennessee Williams left his literary rights to the University, which must be a financial help.

Along with poet Allen Tate, novelist Andrew Lytle was the editor of Sewanee Review. He died in Monteagle in 1995.

You don't want to die in Monteagle. So, head left toward Tracy City. And find another surprise -- a stream called Fiery Gizzard Creek -- apparently named by David Crockett when he burned his mouth on a hot turkey gizzard. I expect the name omits some other choice adjectives he may've blurted out.

The trailhead to the Fiery Gizzard Trail is at Tracy City. The trail follows the creek part way down an amazing gorge of unique geologically structures: standing rocks, house-sized boulders, waterfalls, and so on. The trail is part of South Cumberland State Park. The park headquarters are on the left as you trudge toward Tracy City. You can find water and restrooms there.

Backpacking magazine, which I used to read, called the trail one of the top 25 hikes in the country. I took that walk solo a few years ago. I'd like to go back while I'm still young enough (young enough!).

Highlander, Sewanee, Fiery Gizzard, why didn't I include more topics like these in the book Bench of Despair? Maybe I should have. But I didn't want to bog down the narrative with description and history and navel gazing. From the beginning, I wanted it to be a page-turner, driven by the actual action that occurred. Posted here, boring exposition is free, all free.

It Is Forever Yesterday

On the day after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15, 2013, Anita and Lynn Burnett walked up to visit with my daughter Jill and me. Their hotel and ours were both in the secured area soldiers had established immediately after the blast. That area encompassed several blocks downtown, enclosing office buildings, restaurants, hotels, and Prudential Center, a high-rise shopping center.

Overnight, my vision, degraded to incapacity by the marathon’s rigors, had returned to normal. Meanwhile, Lynn had become a celebrity. A Nashville TV station, realizing a local Tennessee runner had finished barely before the blast, called him up and interviewed him on-air. Following that, his Facebook page filled with friend requests.

We decided to take a walk outside the secured area and went through a checkpoint just outside the hotel that was manned by soldiers carrying M-16s. The soldiers requested proof in the form of room keys that we were duly lodged in the hotel. We didn't have a room key. Jill and I had just checked out because we were heading back to Tennessee later in the day. We had stored our luggage there to pick up later, and I had the hotel receipt for it. Soldiers inspected the paper and let us pass. It likely didn't hurt that Lynn and I, two guys standing there skinny as runners, were wearing our Boston Marathon jackets.

We walked along in the Back Bay neighborhood, an area of neatly kept row houses and brownstones. It was like a Sunday morning, quiet, peaceful, and idyllic. But you could see barriers across the streets leading downtown where the bombing had happened the day before.

We drifted along. The walk was good and what Lynn and I needed to help our legs recover. Suddenly a young woman came out of a house. She'd seen our jackets. She walked up to Lynn and me and handed each of us a long-stemmed red rose.

"I want to thank you for coming to Boston to run the marathon," she said.

Despite what you may've heard about the gruff temperament of Bostonians, the woman's act was in total keeping with the kindness extended to me by Boston citizens over the years during my trips there.
We walked on, Lynn and I clutching our roses, touched by the woman's kind gesture. After a while, we came to a side street barricade manned by two soldiers. I walked up to the barricade and reached my rose across it to one of the soldiers, saying,

"A woman gave me this rose and thanked me for coming and running the marathon. I want to give it to you now to thank you for your service."

The young soldier accepted the rose with a smile. Following my lead, Lynn gave his rose to the second soldier. We walked on, leaving the two soldiers standing behind the barrier holding their roses and their rifles.

I don't know; memory can be inaccurate. It is a patchwork of images, sounds, and scenes, of things said and not said. It is plastic and can be molded by later events and the passage of time.

Nonetheless, the enduring image I hold onto is that of the two soldiers standing there clutching their roses and cradling their rifles. We four walked on and passed out of that scene and out of that story, and came back to our lives in Tennessee.

The families ripped and torn apart by the cruel violence of the bomb that day can never walk out of that scene and out of that story. For them, it is forever yesterday.

Fateful Return

Iconic feature of the race, a Hatch Show Print

It turned out to be a fateful day, one filled with dark omens, unexpected karma, and a ghost walking the hardwood.

Omen. I started an hour and a half before sunrise and headed west down I-40 toward Nashville, aiming to run the Richland Creek 5-miler. It was Saturday, April 4, 2015. The trip represented a return to racing in Nashville for me. It had been 17 months since I’d competed there. It was a return in another way, too. I’d run only in a limited way most of that time while dealing with a medical ailment called Grave's Disease. The 5-miler would be my third race in two months on my gradual return to the race circuit.

So, I headed down I-40, a drive that takes an hour and a half. And I had familiar company. The full moon hung heavy in the west. I drove toward it. It seemed a friendly presence. Soon, I noticed something unusual about it, a chunk of the moon had vanished on the left side, like a bite out of a cookie. In such cases, primitive peoples believed a monster was eating the moon. It caused them great worry. 

I have no such superstitions. I recognized a lunar eclipse was taking place. While the moon was setting in front of me and the sun was trying to rise behind me, the earth was in the way, casting its shadow on my lunar friend. Odd thing was, I’d heard nothing about the eclipse on social media, newspaper, radio or TV. I wondered how many of the motorists around me knew what was happening right in front of them. 

I exited the Interstate and checked an app called Google Sky Map on my smart phone. It correctly showed the moon hovering over the western horizon, but made no mention of the eclipse -- that I could find anyway. It was like a secret eclipse. As I drove on the waxing darkness spread across the globe. My last glimpse of it came as I entered Nashville. Only a sliver of the orb remained. Then I lost it in the city skyline.

Karma. The race was located at Cohn School, once a high school, now used as an adult school. I’d passed by the building many times, when I lived in Nashville 50 years earlier. But I’d never been in the building or even on the grounds before. Even so, the building holds a bit of family history, history made personal.

Although old, the building remains comfortable, pleasant, and in good repair. I asked the gentleman manning the info desk when it was built.

“Oh, I don’t know, sometime in the 1800s,” he says, not too precisely.

Registration was set up in the hallway on the main floor, pre-registered pickup at one end, same-day registration at the other end. I was the first runner to arrive, and I waited while they prepare the registration table. 

As it happened, bib number 314 came up for the first person in line, which was me. Because of that, I got the particular number that could've had meaning for absolutely no one there that day but me: The number 314 equals one hundred Pi, or 100xPi. The number exactly matched the oval bumper sticker on the back of my car, which contained the sole number 314. The number is the length in miles of the Vol State 500K road race, which I’d completed in the summer of 2013. 

“One hundred Pi” became an inside joke for that multi-day ultra. The stress of that very esoteric adventure is likely what caused the Grave's Disease that has made my recovery necessary in the first place. Or maybe not. The doctors don't know, neither do I. Some things in life must remain a mystery. I took the unlikely bib outside and held it beside the sticker on my car while a young woman made a photograph for me.

Circle Closed. Inside the building I headed away from the registration crowd, south down a long, wide and deserted hallway, looking for the men’s restroom. I came to double doors, the entrance to the gym. They were locked. I retreated a few steps to a second set of double doors, pulled on one and it opened. I walked into the deserted gym, my steps ringing in echo on the hardwood. 

I walked out to center court and stood there taking it in, turning to look at the goals, the score board, and the collapsing bleachers pushed back against the side wall. 

The young man who would become my father ran this hardwood, playing center position for Cohn High School. Standing there, I realized that would’ve happened some 80 years earlier, around 1935. His history here entered family lore, in a story you seem to have always known without thinking it was in any way remarkable or particularly interesting. It was always just there, part of family history.

He was kicked out of school. He got into a dispute with a teacher and threatened to throw that person out the window. He was gifted in intelligence and athletic ability, both. But he was also an unruly hothead. That ended his formal education. 

There is a bit of him in me. No escaping that, I reckon. Up until his death a couple decades ago he was the family patriarch. His sisters are gone, and I am the oldest of my siblings. Which makes me a sort of family patriarch now. Thus, my visit to Cohn, in some sense, closed a circle, a circle whose orbit has taken over 80 years. And it closed solely incidental to an athletic event that I’d come to contest, not basketball but a foot race, a race that was about to start outside the building. I had to go warm up.

Another Circle. The race course was appealing. It headed south through an older residential area of white frame houses and into a park containing ball fields, tennis courts, open spaces and groves of trees. The main thing it did was cross Richland Creek. After which, we run parallel to the creek on its west side. That took us just past the cul-de-sac of Knob Road, where just a shot away stood the brick duplex my young family occupied 50 years earlier. Another circle closed.

We crossed the creek again, back to the east side before turning north for the return to Cohn School. It was at that crossing where I spotted a big lazy pool in the creek below, a pool where you’d imagine fish live. The young man who would become my father whose name was Glen, probably imagined it too. .because he was arrested for seining fish from a creek -- most likely this creek, I must believe, since it was near where he and his parents lived then. Another circle closed.

More Karma. Race over and back at Cohn School, how did it turn out? The state record for 74-year-old man was 39:57. My finish time was 38:14, hence I’d set a pending state record. I was the oldest runner listed in the results, and my time placed me in position 57 among 307 listed finishers. It was not the best I felt  I could do, but it was the best I could do that day.. And it was encouraging. I hoped to improve in the weeks ahead as I continued my recovery.

Standing there among the runners, I looked up at the building, its three-stories height. And I wondered which window the teacher had feared. I wanted to have one more look. So I went inside and found the gym again. I walked out to center court and stood on the stripe. It was quiet. The scoreboard hung on the wall behind the north hoop; the U.S. flag draped the wall below it. In 1935 when Glen Smith ran this court, the flag held only 48 stars. I looked at the floor and at the goal. I raised my phone and snapped a picture, then walked away.

I Don't Want a Pickle

Heads up, folks! Crazed codger coming atcha atop 600 pounds of raw power and pure speed, spurring a motor singing its trademark song through pipes that burble like a giant symphony hall organ. Watch out, now!

The Codgerhood Fairy left this prize sitting in my garage a few days ago. She thought I'd been a good boy. She knew what she was doing. I think she's trying to kill me.

No, I bought it myself, seeking no advice, asking no one's opinion except my own. Cause, what could anyone say to someone who is 78 years old?

"Yeah, man, go ahead. Buy a Sportster. That's just what you need!"

Yeah, that's what they totally gonna say. Not likely, Bud. You got to make your own decision.

Imagine my wife's surprise when I left for Lebanon, Tennessee on one Thursday morning and came back owning a Harley. She didn't know me when I messed with motorcycles and airplanes.

It ought to bring a good price at my estate sale. "Shit, man, look! A 1200 Sportster! Didn’t expect that."

A decision of many factors. But the biggest one is a belief I hold that we must wean ourselves of gasoline by say year 2040. Gas should be extinct by then, and I will be, too. So, why should something that will happen then determine what I do now?

This: motor sports perpetuate our love of machines and help continue our dependence on gasoline. And there I was considering buying a sport machine. I was caught in a contradiction. Well, I did read that it gets a pretty good mileage, 50 miles per gallon. Some redemption there maybe. Small redemption. Not enough for Bob Marley to work with.

Finally, I decided I have to live in the world where I find myself. Harley doesn't make an electric motorcycle. They better learn how. Instead they make a deep-throated mumbler that sounds like no other motorcycle, a sound that legions of loyal fans love specifically for that unique percussive sound.
          Two other factors I had to consider: my fading eyesight and dwindling years. I've curbed nighttime driving of my car because of vision defects. As my ophthalmologist warned, "You've lost one eye and half the other. You can't mess around with this." I understand that and yet I still drive, safely I think, at least in daylight. My vision is no worst sitting on the bike. Stakes are higher in case of an accident on the bike, true. Noted. And my dwindling years? Well, I am getting on in years, also true.
          Both these two factors failed as an argument against the bike. What they did was this: added urgency. Urgency. If this is an experience you want, man, you'd better get on with it!

So, I bought the Harley, against my deeply held environmental beliefs. I bought the bike. Does that make me a hypocrite? Maybe. Very well then, I accept Whitman: I contain multitudes.

I also accept Arlo Guthrie:

"I don't want a pickle

I just want to ride on my motor-cicle.

And I don't want to die

I just want to ride on my motor-cy-cle”

Which leads to another thought: Don’t die. You stop growing, you die. You stop learning, you die. Seek adventure. For a codger, buying a muscle bike is growing, is learning, is adventure. See me ride my motor-sicle!

Watch out, now!

#HarleyDavidson

#Sportster

#IDontWantAPickle

#RedemptionSong

Goobers

Six miles into a run in a rural county where dogs run wild and people do, too, I was hiking up a long hill while I ate a pack of M&Ms. In the first four miles it had rained hard and steady. I was still soggy and waterlogged.

            I finished the snack and was rolling up the empty pack to stuff in my shorts pocket. Just then a beat up old pickup rolled up from behind and stopped. A kindly old gent with a beard like a white broom looked over.

            “You need a lift?”

            “No, thanks, I’m training.”

            It was as if I’d said the most ordinary thing you could possibly hear on this country road. Without another word, the man reached across the seat and lifted up a two-pound plastic jar of honey-roasted peanuts still about half full.

            “Hold your hand,” he said.

            He filled my hand and was still pouring. Peanuts were falling on the road.

            “Hold your other hand,” he said.

            I cupped my hands together and he poured out a giant pile of peanut, until peanuts were sliding down the slope and falling on the pavement.

            “That’ll help you,” he said, and began to rumble away.

            “Thank you, I love peanuts,” I shouted as he pulled away.

            I stood on the wet pavement cradling the pile of peanuts. Trees overhead were dripping. The truck passed out of hearing.

What to do with the peanuts? Child of the Great Depression, I hate to waste food.  I’d planned my snacks to simulate the race I was training for, and stuffed the snacks in the pockets of my shorts. I’d brought two packs of M&Ms, a pack of peanut M&Ms and a Pay Day bar. I’d just finished the first pack of M&Ms.

I’d accepted the peanuts from the man. That was the right thing to do. It is a kindness to accept help when people offer. It gives them pleasure and satisfaction.

The clock was running and I stood in indecision. Finally I leaned my face down to the pile and began chomping peanuts, like a pig eating corn in a trough. More peanuts fell to the pavement. Birds will follow me after this, I thought. Eventually I ate enough to free up one hand, but I still held a handful of honey-roasted peanuts.

What now? I noticed the empty M&M pack folded between my fingers. I’d never gotten around to stowing it. It’d be like stuffing toothpaste back into the tube. I decided to try, and started funneling peanuts into the wet pack. The side seams were beginning to come unglued. More peanuts fell to the pavement. Eventually I ended up with a lemon-sized lump of peanuts bound more or less by paper, and I stuffed the lump into an empty pocket.

The lump stayed there until I finished my 24-mile run. Then it became my recovery snack. I dug it out and ate those last peanuts as I walked back up to the house. A few more fell on the ground.

Homecoming

            

            We’d just finished running the race known as Run For Your Mama 5K, a race in honor of Mother’s Day which fell on the next day. I was talking with a man from another town, a stranger to me, an older runner near my age. He told me that he was a high school baseball coach. We talked and laughed easily, as runners at a race always do. Suddenly he turned serious, recalling another time, another place.

His face twisted as he relived the moment, telling me how he'd come home from Vietnam, how he reunited with his mom. I averted my gaze for decency. It took his entire athlete's strength to choke back the catch in his throat.

It had been a long journey. Toward the end, he hitchhiked and finally walked the last stretch, arriving at his mom's home on a cold morning just as she was sitting in the car warming it up to go to work. She didn't know he was anywhere about.

"I dropped...I just dropped... the bag...and went running. I knocked...I knocked on the window." His hand made the knocking motion.

She looked up and recognized him. He described the surprise and joy. The memory was too powerful. His throat caught, his face drew.

"I opened the door... There was the seat belt..."

But they got it finally unlatched.

The telling didn't have to be eloquent. The tears, the joy, the happiness—you could see it all in his face, the memory there.

We stood on the grass, two old men reflecting, remembering. He was every mother’s son and his mom was every son’s mother.

Cummins Falls Marathon Welcomes Return of Local Ace

Josh Hite runs alone in first place at the Baxter Street Fair 5K, September 2011, a race he went on to win.

Cookeville half-marathon runner Jan Lowe enjoys the rural scenery along Blackburn Fork. Photo by Monte Lowe.

Cookeville resident Josh Hite didn’t have time to run a marathon.

Even though running marathons was his hobby, back in 2013 when the annual Cummins Falls Marathon was inaugurated, he was busy. Busy teaching English at Vol State Community College, working on a PhD degree at Middle Tennessee State University and even teaching karate after school at his business, Karate for Kids.

So he was busier than most people. But at the last minute he did decide to run that first Cummins Falls Marathon. Good thing too. He ended up being the overall winner of that race. Since then, Josh has returned to Cummins State Park each year to run one of the four races offered in that event – marathon, half-marathon, 10K and 5K.

The Sixth Annual Cummins Falls Marathon will kick off next Saturday, February 24, at the State Park, and once again Josh will toe the line.

Prior to the start, The Tennessee Tech Golden Girls dance team and mascot Awesome Eagle will be on hand to entertain and brighten the mood. The Golden Girls finished third and Awesome Eagle earned first in recent national collegiate competition.

The Cummins event typically attracts over 300 runners. Some 40 percent of runners are from Tennessee. Around two dozen states and a few foreign countries are usually represented.

Winning the first Cummins marathon was just another entry in Josh’s list of running accomplishments. He was not known as a shabby runner. The year 2009 is instructive. He ran 4,000 miles that year. That many miles comes to an average of nearly 80 miles per week. He ran 22 marathons and won five of them outright, appearing on the podium (top three) in 14 of them. The previous year he had already qualified to run in the prestigious Boston Marathon. The following year he would create Cookeville’s first marathon, the Blister in the Sun Marathon—and win it.

Josh’s professional achievements have kept pace with his running milestones. He expects to finish his PhD degree this year. Recently he was named Director of English and Humanities at Hagerstown Community College in Hagerstown, Maryland. When he can, he returns to his Cookeville home, where his wife Martha and two sons, Andrew and Jude, ages 13 and 8, respectively, still reside.  

Saturday Josh runs the Cummins Falls Marathon. The Marathon and the Half Marathon start at 8:00 a.m. The 5K and 10K start at 9:00 a.m. On-line registration is available at ultrasignup.com. In-person registration and packet pickup are at 2-7 p.m. at TownePlace Suites and also at the State Park on Saturday morning up until 30 minutes before the race starts.

Runners stream down Sliger Hill two miles from the start line during the 2016 Cummins Falls Marathon. Photo by Bob Melgar.

Athletes who choose the Cummins Falls Half Marathon run across Blackburn Fork State Scenic River on a temporary pontoon bridge made from plywood placed atop kayaks anchored in the stream, a unique feature of that course.

Josh Hite finds balance in Rock Creek during the Chattanooga Mountains Stage Races in 2010, where runners complete a trail marathon each day for three consecutive days.