"Everything around here's either a hill or a holler." -Anita, Lynchburg, TN

Tennessee.
It’s bright green. Creeks and waterfalls trickle through countless gray rock fissures. Cows graze on 45 degree slopes. Houses either perch on the rounded summits or hide in the valley folds.
Driveways run straight up-- clearly this is an area that doesn't get much snow.
The hills are numerous, steep, and unavoidable. Long ridges push up from the valleys to block the horizon and keep me scanning hopefully for a route around them. Biking in southeastern Tennessee goes something like this: I puff up one incline in my granny gear, railing against fried pie and fried cornbread and efficient TN road planning that does not believe in switchbacks, and I vow to eat only fruits and veggies from here on out. Finally I crest the ridge, coasting just long enough for a glimpse of the next summit, so close yet— down, down I plunge into the holler. And I begin again.

"What's your cause?"
The first question people ask me is, "Where are you biking from?" The second is "Where are you biking to?" About half the curious voice the third question, "Why?"
Most Northerners don't understand why I chose the South, and the majority of Southerners don't understand why I'm on a bike. My "route" meanders and backtracks; it's overall arc shifts on a weekly basis. Some days I think I should turn north and bike home-- point toward a definitive end and just bike. But the point is to be in the South. Growing up in New England, I heard very little about the United States below Washington, DC; my knowledge of the South ended with my high school history lesson on Reconstruction.
Sometimes I have to remind myself to stop and talk, particularly on the days when there are no blazing personalities, just an ensemble of minor characters that pause to chat. So I sit on a Collinwood bench and listen to Durrell recount stories of living on a Florida houseboat and hopping a mail freighter to the Bahamas; learn about regional weather patterns from a country store proprietor wearing a housewife apron and a 40s hairstyle; laugh with Lynette about my accent in the Lawrenceburg Walgreens; discover that Rhessa, the carefully-coiffed auction school director, used to be a whitewater kayaker and that the promise of blueberry pie in Bryson City was the only thing that kept her hiking along the southern half of the Appalachian Trail.
It's the South. Just about everyone here waves hello and tells me to take care and be safe. And pretty soon someone offers up a story.

“Honey, we’re Southern. We’re supposed to be nice. We’re jus’ tryin’ to live up to our reputation.” -Linda, BBQ Caboose, Lynchburg, TN
I turned into Lynchburg’s downtown square and checked my watch. 6:45pm and getting dark. It looked like I wasn’t going to make Tim’s Ford State Park. Where the heck was I going to sleep?
The fast-picking strains of bluegrass tripped out from the far corner of the square. I peered around. “The BBQ Caboose Cafe- Home of the best food you ever ate.” When I saw the city park behind it with RV hook-ups, I rolled my bike to the front door.
“How’s the music sound?” A man with a neatly trimmed white beard was checking the outside sound equipment. I told him I’d biked over because of it. “Well, come on in!”
Old kerosene lanterns hung from the ceilings, red-checked tablecloths and styrofoam plates, Spur of the Moment playing in the corner, folks “buck-dancing” in the other, everyone loving where they were. The 12 dollar dinner special: a full BBQ dinner, fresh-squeezed lemonade, peach cobbler and ice cream, 2 hours of local jokes and pure TN bluegrass, and a personal welcome from the owner to “the lady who biked up here from New Orleans” before he played the spoons against his thigh.
With that introduction, I became a mini-celebrity and folks sat down at my table throughout the evening to ask questions about my trip and offer advice about roads. One man asked if I was going up over Mount Eagle. “Mount Eagle? No, no. I’m going to Mon-tea-gle and then on to Chattanooga.” “Yeah,” he said. “Mount Eagle. Up the mountain through Sewanee and on up to Mount Eagle.” Uh... I looked at my state road map. Monteagle, TN, right after Sewanee.
When Leo sat down, he told me he’d grown up in Nashua, NH. When he heard I was planning to sleep in the park, he shook his head in dismay and told me to come right on up to his house. He and his wife, Anita, had several empty bedrooms and wouldn’t take no for an answer. If he hadn't hosted me, Linda from Huntsville, Alabama wanted to take me home to her house. I left my bike at the cafe, planning to pick it up when I returned for the live bluegrass radio show the next morning, and up the mountain I went, to wash my laundry and sink into the luxury of a bed with pillows. The next morning, Leo left to deliver Murfreesboro's mail, and Anita made me an omelet and biscuits. Anita is about my mother's age. She makes a delicious "sugarbooty" ham, is the proud mother of 3, wears an Easter appliqué vest, decorates with moose and lighthouses, looks after her elderly parents. She also told me that she went backpacking in California once. "I would have really liked your job," she confided, talking about outdoor instructing. "But by your age, I was married with babies." She can't wait to go skydiving for her birthday.

Hallelujah!
"No, this is pretty much it. We're a small community." The cashier in the Monteagle Market, a glorified convenience store, explained that I would not be encountering the music metropolis I was expecting. On a cold, overcast afternoon, Monteagle gave every indication of being just a highway through the woods. Another customer tried to think of some local hikes and natural sights. The next day was Easter, though, and I didn't want to celebrate alone. I biked around, trying to figure out which way to go. I turned into the Post Office to check my maps.
"Hello!" I looked around. The Market customer was walking toward me with an older man. "I was just telling Bishop Millsaps that I had met this girl who had biked up from New Orleans, and--" "And here I am," I smiled. Bishop Millsaps had a scruffy gray beard and round glasses. He punctuated his conversation with enthusiastic outbursts. Saint Patrick, he informed me, had long ago lit fires in honor of Jesus Christ. The authorities demanded he extinguish them, since fires could only be lit for the king. Saint Patrick refused, declaring that he was lighting them for the King of Kings. Millsaps got into his SUV and leaned out the window. If I was headed toward Sewanee, he told me, I should stop by the blue church with the red door. He’d be there lighting the fires. He waved a bundle of fireworks out the window and drove off.
After a 12 mile jaunt to Sewanee with the misguided hope of finding a university town with a bigger cultural life, I returned to Monteagle hoping to catch some fireworks and free camping behind the church.
The festivities were about to begin when I rolled into the Episcopalian parking lot at twilight. Bishop Millsaps was running around. “Where’s my hat?” he looked around for his green fedora. “Martha, where’s my prayer book?” Finally he called together “all who can hear me” and about 10 of us gathered around a small campfire. He reviewed the story of Saint Patrick and read some Bible passages, then headed for the fireworks. The first few swung unnervingly close to nearby parked cars. The next ones made it up into the sky. The Bishop donned a pair of heavy leather gloves and grabbed two Roman candles. A deacon rushed forward to light them. Silhouetted against the street lamp, Bishop Millsaps stretched out his arms and threw back his head. “Christ is risen!” he shouted. Fireworks shot up from each hand and exploded above us. “Hallelujah!”
After the fireworks, the small group of us filed into the darkened sanctuary for a short service, each bearing a lit candle. The scent of Easter lilies hung heavy. “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Martha, Mrs. Millsaps, whispered to me. “No, not quite like this,” I answered. “This is a unique church,” she giggled. “Because the bishop is a pyromaniac.”
“I’ve had a fascinating, interesting life,” Bishop Millsaps told me after the service. I murmured something about how great that was. He looked down at me. “Well, you had to be there.”
“I grew up in a very small town in Mississippi,” he began. “I thought I was black until I was 5.” He continued with the story of how, at age 10, he and his father had come upon a family feud. Dad went to get the sheriff, and young William was left to keep an eye on the couple. The wife had a shotgun trained on her husband and was more than ready to blow him away. “Now, why you wanna do that?” William asked her. “You’re married, you’re supposed to love each other.” By the time his dad got back with the sheriff, William was holding the gun and had decided he should be a preacher. The only question he had for them was, “Can I keep the gun?”

“I’m going to miss you. Don’ know why, but I am.” -Matt, Monteagle, TN
“How does a cold bed sound?” Matt asked me as I watched the fireworks. What? “I just called the lady I live with and she has several upstairs rooms you could sleep in. They’re unheated, but it’s better than out here in the wind.”
Matt is a Vietnam Vet, a VFW member, an amateur IT specialist and an enthusiastic photographer. Every morning he gets up at 5am for coffee with his buddies and then checks on the church “to see if it’s still standing.” He’s been a securities administrator, lawyer, and truck driver, in that order. “I started driving trucks while I figured out what I wanted to do with my life when I grew up,” he says. I ask him what he figured out. “That I should retire.” He laughs a raspy smoker’s chuckle.
Matt’s been a member of A-A for 22 years. “Of course, it took me a while to figure out I had a problem,” he explains. “Problem was, every time I got near alcohol, I’d break out drunk.” Probably in his late 60s, Matt hobbles pretty nimbly, despite his broken foot. He lives with one of his several “adopted” mothers, Mrs. Haley.
Mrs. Haley is 92. She lives in a yellow clapboard house within the Monteagle Sunday School Assembly, a community based upon the Chautauqua model. Her grandmother started bringing her up for the summer lectures when she was two. She says she always wanted to live in the School Assembly. When someone told her in 1958 that the yellow house was going to go up for sale, she called up the owner and bought it that night. She spent everything she had, her aunt’s inheritance money-- $4,000 for the home “with furniture and linens and everything.”
Sitting next to her in church on Easter Sunday, I feel like I could be her visiting granddaughter. She tells me about her life while we wait for the sermon to start.
“My father died in a car accident when I was 10,” she explains, her voice soft. The arthritis in her neck keeps her looking straight ahead. Her hands rest in her lap. “So money was tight.” Even so, she was able to attend the Mississippi Women’s College at a cost of $400 dollars a year, including board. “I was studying art, but my teacher told me I didn’t have enough talent, so I switched to history.” One summer she went to New York City with a college group and heard about a teaching opportunity at a special education school. “I hadn’t even heard of a retarded child before,” she says, but the school was only 60 miles from West Point, where her “husband-to-be” was in school. She took the job, and two weekends a month a fellow teacher drove her down for dates. She’s worked with special needs children her whole life. When she says she lived in Venezuela for her husband’s military assignment, I ask her how it was. “It was heavenly,” she remembers. “The dictator at the time was a military man and the military were treated very well.”
Mrs. Haley doesn’t walk without assistance now, and the only pair of shoes she owns are white diabetic sneakers. Reading the prayers and hymns hurts her eyes so she recites from memory. “I think you were meant to come to us,” she leans over and whispers to me in the pew. “I would’ve had a hard time finding someone to help me to the bathroom.”
Both Matt and Mrs. Haley wanted me to stay. Matt checked the weather and the forecast was rain. “You’re going to lose two days somewhere,” he told me. He offered to drive me down the road to make up for the lost time. But I was antsy to get biking. When I said goodbye to Mrs. Haley, I told her to take care of herself. “Matt does that,” she said. She pressed a papery kiss on my cheek. “I’ll be praying and hoping for sun,” she told me.