1.
Mishka is Ukrainian for “little bear.” Even before she was born, my wife, Julie, contracted with Northern Lakes Labradors, an animal breeder in Bowersville, Georgia, for the purchase of a puppy then in utero. Eight weeks after Mishka was born, we traveled to Bowersville to pick up the dog.
2.
In late October 2023, our dog, Frieda, died. Frieda was a wonderful and loyal dog. The breeders who sold Frieda to us, moved their operations from Minnesota to Georgia. By lineage, Frieda was Mishka’s “great-aunt,” if such categories apply to dogs. Because of this connection, Julie bought Mishka before she was born and, then, followed her progress by watching short videos showing the tiny puppy trotting with her nose to the ground on the sod of a southern lawn.
3.
April 8, 2024, the day on which we were to pick up the dog in rural Georgia (about 85 miles to the Northeast of Atlanta) was also the day of a great celestial spectacle, a total eclipse of the sun. The so-called “Zone of Totality” swept in a swath of darkness as if applied by a paint brush north by northeast, passing through the Hill Country of south central Texas, Fort Worth, and, then, southern Illinois up through Indianapolis, Cleveland, across the Great Lakes, darkening the waters with the moon’s shadow cast between 108 and 128 miles wide, crossing through Vermont and Maine and, then, passing over the Maritime Provinces of eastern Canada. This phenomenon attracted, it was reported, between six and eight million people, crowds swarming into the projected penumbra. The eclipse’s transit of North America began in Torreon, Mexico about 1:00 pm, the zone of totality departing from Maine about an hour and ten minutes later.
4.
According to my Maps application on my phone, the drive to Bowersville required 17 hours, but, of course, travel time was longer – at least twenty hours coming and twenty hours going. We left Austin on Saturday morning, April 6, 2024, before dawn. As we drove though northern Iowa, mighty turbines batted at the sky and the red rays of the rising sun, light mingling with wind over the empty fields. Drought was ruining the land and roadside grass was withered and grey and the ponds for the livestock were low, showing white, cadaverous lips of gravel and clay.
5.
Forty miles northwest of St. Louis, the deciduous trees are stark without leaves. Winter has still crucified these woods. But, at St. Louis, all the hardwood trees are fully fledged with leaves and seem about to lunge into the sky and fly across the land.
6.
There was no traffic on the roads until we reached the freeways passing through St. Louis. From that point all the way to Bowersville, Georgia, the Interstates were crowded with vehicles. Heavy trucks crowded the cars and SUVs. The trucks are required to strictly observe speed limits, therefore, reliably traveling at 65 miles per hour or 70 depending upon the State. But everyone else speeds and, therefore, the floods of cars and vans and pickups swept by the slower moving semis, creating perilous eddies and vortices as they passed. It was frustrating and demanding driving: either you found yourself pinned behind the huge, blind piston of truck-trailer or merged right or left to pass, pressed on by the other vehicles urging you down the highway. And, so, for hours and hours.
7.
Two bridges in St. Louis swallow up traffic and spit it out across the rivers. One bridge crosses the Missouri; the other spans the Mississippi a mile or so upstream from the great silver Gateway arch. On the trestles above the bridge deck, digital letters spelled out this message to vehicles crossing the big river from Missouri to Illinois: EXPECT HEAVY TRAFFIC AND LONG DELAYS ON MONDAY, APRIL 8 BECAUSE OF ECLIPSE.
8,
About five minutes east of the bridge from St. Louis to East St. Louis, the interstate bisects a peculiar neighborhood. Tiny, squat-looking houses line narrow streets extending along diagonals to the freeway. The houses have an archaic aspect. They date to a time before lawns and, possibly, preceding sidewalks. The houses are so closely spaced that their side eaves seem to touch. On one side of the freeway, the homes are wood with closet-sized porches and decaying shingles and, although the day was bright, some sort of shadow seemed to have eclipsed them, a taint from the past, as it were, that hung heavy as the scent of magnolias or dying flowers over the neighborhoods. The perspectives on the neighborhood were blurred. The freeway cut through, a ruthless zone of speed and concrete. To the north side of the interstate, some of the homes were brick, little kilns lining diminutive lanes. Several small soot-darkened masonry churches pitched little mosque-shaped domes into the sky.
9.
These wooden and brick houses, shack-sized and nestling together among a fog of ancient trees, reminded me of something but I couldn’t quite bring the recollection into focus. Currier and Ives? But more grim and impoverished.
10.
We stopped at Mount Vernon, Illinois to spend the night at a Drury Inn. A big twilight-colored bus with Nebraska plates was parked in the lot and rows of luggage were awaiting distribution to the rooms assigned to the tour’s passengers. Retired men and women wearing lanyards filled the lobby. Presumably, they were being bussed to some place with clear skies predicted for Monday so as to admire the eclipse.
11.
After we checked into the Drury Inn, I went outside for a walk. A vacant lot was nearby, beyond an access lane that led to some businesses on the frontage road – a Steak and Shake and a new deli. The vacant lot was yellow with dry grass and adjoined a cemetery. Most cemeteries have a fence around them, but this tract of nondescript old graves stood open on all sides, unbounded, the dead, I suppose, spilling out of the acreage dedicated to them and encroaching on the nearby lane, a churchyard, and some morose-looking brick apartments. I strolled among the stones, looking at dates on the weathered, limestone slabs. Someone had cut back the nearby wood-lot to reveal a single corpse-sized stone reposing among the chopped up saplings and tree-trunks, a flat slab lettered: MOTHER.
12.
It’s imprudent for the dead to be unfenced. Their kingdom should be kept apart from where the living abide. Someone should put up a barricade between the worlds.
13.
Before dawn: early morning. A factory beside the Interstate. A sign flashes a jocular, riddling message: What is put on a table but never eaten?
14.
The next day, we drove to Chattanooga, Tennessee. The entire way is wooded, with ranks of pines and hardwood trees sealing off the horizons. Then, there are mountains, running in long east-west ridges that gradually curve like parentheses to wall off the valleys. For hundreds of miles, there are no rest stops. But, then, where the freeway labors up over the Cumberland Ridge, a route complicated by huge trucks hauling overwide burdens, there is a hilltop rest stop, walled with semis and ten miles later, down in the gorge, another stop.
15.
The rest stop in the deep valley overlooks an expanse of water where the Tennessee River is impounded into something called Nickajack Lake. The landscape is exorbitantly beautiful with bays and inlets and shining expanses of crystal blue water cradled between lofty, densely forested bluffs. The vistas remind me of the Adirondack Mountains. The travelers stopped at the toilets and information kiosk next to the lake are baffled, even a bit dazed, by all the glory on display.
16.
Locomotives and iron rails evolved into ubiquity over the course of forty years. This advance in technology reminds me of cell-phones. No one used these devices a few decades ago, but, now, they are everywhere, an indispensable tool that was unimaginable except in science fiction when I was in college. America’s first railroad, the Baltimore and Ohio began operation in 1827. By the time of the Civil War, trains were vital to transportation and, to a large extent, control of the railroads was tantamount to control over enemy territory. Chattanooga was a rail hub, radiating train lines across the South and, so, the town became a strategic objective for the federal Army of the Cumberland in the theater of war between Vicksburg and Atlanta.
17.
Chattanooga lies near a tight meander in the Tennessee River, the Moccasin Bend, a point of land directly beneath Lookout Mountain. The site is dramatic, the river’s channel brushing against the thousand-foot ridge that rises vertically to sheer palisades defending the mountain top. Across the valley, other mountains wild with hanging forests guard the town. After the battle of Chickamauga in September 1863, defeated Union forces withdrew twelve miles northward to the town, fortifying the place against the siege mounted by the Confederate armies. Rebel units scaled Lookout Mountain and dragged cannons to the edge of its stony cliffs overlooking Moccasin Bend and the railroad town. The scene was set for the Battle of Lookout Mountain, sometimes called “the Battle above the Clouds,” fought on a wet, misty day in mid-November.
18.
The west-bound traffic out of Chattanooga is eclipse-heavy, an endless procession of SUVs and passenger cars punctuated by heavy trucks caught in the vehicular melee. But we are going the opposite direction, coming down from the forests of the Cumberland plateau to the edge of the high mountains overlooking Chattanooga. An exit off the Interstate runs to a road that lifts us above apartment buildings and some desolate strip malls, ascending the side of the mountain. Halfway up the peak, men in florescent vests signal us into a parking lot below a masonry turret, sleek and a little like an air-traffic control tower, rising over the hillside shaft opening into Ruby Falls. The Falls are a famous tourist attraction in this part of the world, a jet of water falling a hundred feet through multi-colored lights in the black heart of the mountain. There is no natural access to the vertical limestone oubliette into which the water pours. For a hundred-thousand years, the stream throbbed like an artery in the dark belly of the mountain, water siphoned out through channels pouring into the river at the foot of the ridge. A show-cave with an entrance high on the hillside featured an underground stream and the owners of the cavern followed the water downward, blasting open passages to reach the hidden falls.
19.
I’m not on the mountain to see the Falls, however impressive they might be, and, so, after some misdirection, parking my car briefly on the terraces under the tower-entrances, I figure out that I’m at the tourist attraction and not the battlefield. So we drive higher up the steep slope, switchbacking upward among forests drowned in green, suffocating kudzu. Mansions line the lane atop the summit and the road ends at more parking lots beside a castle keep and neat lawns protected by stolid, heavy-looking cannons. A sidewalk cuts across a small grassy field perched over the abyss and there is an obelisk erected by the State of New York to its sons, some of whom died in the fighting here. The day is green and blue with enormous vistas over the deep valley, the shaggy hills enclosing the town, and the grid of roads, like crossed fingers between buildings with white roofs – here the aerial perspective makes Chattanooga into a map of itself.
20.
A small museum explains the battle. The southern forces atop the mountain were defeated by the terrain that they had selected for defense. The hillsides were too steep to allow cannon fire at attacking troops scaling the cliffs directly under the mountain top. Dense forests clinging to the mountain’s flanks afforded protection to the attacking forces as well. As the Union troops assaulted the peak, the Confederate defenders didn’t have clear fields of fire on the skirmish lines, more or less, directly below. Furthermore, the attacking Federal forces exploited clouds that shroud the slopes of the peak. Union troops reached the base of the palisades fifty feet below the summit by night fall. In the dark, the Confederate defenders fled from their entrenched positions, abandoning cannons on the edge of the cliffs. At dawn, the Blue-coats shivering on the cold heights found the summit abandoned and, so, raised their battle flags as the sun peaked over the top of Missionary Ridge to the east across the watery valley.
21.
The castle building on the highest point of the ridge was once the entrance into Lookout Mountain caverns, the natural entrance to the labyrinth of limestone passages honeycombing the mountain. The National Park Service occupies a visitor center next to the heavy, rusticated walls of the castle tower. In the museum, a big mural (it’s thirty feet long) shows lines of troops advancing into swaths of greyish cloud running horizontally across the grey and brown heights of the mountain. In the foreground, General Hooker on a white horse greets another commander, turning away from his skirmish lines vanishing into the courses of fog. A jumble of ironmongery, bullets and shells and stirrups, occupies a display case.
22.
When the Union troops were ordered to assault the Confederate snipers and artillery on the mountain top, some of them exclaimed with disbelief: “Do you expect us to fly up there?” One young man wrote in a letter that, before the assault, the chaplain asked the soldiers to leave any small tokens or messages that they would want him to deliver to their next-of-kin or sweethearts were they to die in the battle. One young man, David Monat, enlisted in the 29th Pennsylvania Regiment, Geary’s Division, XII Corps handed some coins to his friend, Jack MacLaughlin and said: “Jack, I’ve got about 3 or 4 dollars. If I go, look out for them and, if you get a chance, take a drink and say ‘Here’s to a good fellow’.”
23.
Missionary Ridge is a lower range of hills to the east of the Chattanooga Valley. An engagement was fought on the steep bare slopes of that ridge (the trees had been cut for building materials) after the successful attack on Lookout Mountain. Minnesota troops led that attack and there is a dramatic painting of the assault adorning a wall in the lobby to the Governor’s office at the Minnesota State Capitol. I have known that picture, a pyramidal composition of blue-coated soldiers leaning into shot and shell, since I was a small boy. In Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, one of the poem’s ghostly interlocutors, Knowlt Hoheimer tells us that he was “the first fruit of... Missionary Ridge”, shot through the heart in the assault. The dead man says that he ran away to join the army when accused of stealing hogs and that it would have been a “thousand times” better to have been locked in the county jail than to lie under the wings of a marble angel beneath a pedestal chiseled with the words Pro Patria – “what do (those words) mean anyhow?” Missionary Ridge no longer exists. The hillside has been eroded by development, tracts of houses and light industrial buildings and the place where the Minnesota boys made their valiant attack and where Knowlt Hoheimer fell no longer can be seen.
24.
I repeat: What is put on a table but never eaten? For the answer to this riddle, see the third section in 32.
25.
From the hotel room, a little after sunset, a deep pink glow outlines the black, indistinct mass of Lookout Mountain. Our room is in a place called East Ridge, four-hundred yards from the Georgia border. (We are possibly on the side of what was once called Missionary Ridge.) The sky darkens to lavender above some long pennants of cloud dipped in gold. An indistinct range of hills kneels on the horizon – this is either a bank of clouds or more mountains to the northeast.
26.
It’s two-hundred miles total: southeast to Atlanta, then, looping in a catenary bend to the northeast ato an unincorporated place, Bowersville where the Labrador puppy is waiting for us. The whole route is dense with traffic, mostly bumper to bumper, particularly in the suburbs of Atlanta. We pass some crashes, congestion on the road clearing beneath soaring concrete causeways jammed with cars. Forests block the landscape – you can’t see the suburbs or towns from which all this traffic is ceaselessly gushing.
27.
Northern Lakes Labradors raises dogs on 20 acres located about six-and-a-half miles east of the Interstate. We arrive early. An email message from my office instructs me to call my tax preparer. State and Federal taxes are due in seven days. The terrain is unimpressive, a few low hills above swampy depressions, tiny farms surrounded by embattled-looking stands of pine and fir bedded in rust-brown fallen needles. The roads are all named after heroines or places in novels by Sir Walter Scott. Dirt roads ramble haphazardly through thickets, rutted clay as red as blood. Near the dog breeding place, several roads collide at sharp acute angles – nothing is square or right-angled out here in this country; the old pikes and lanes are knit together eccentrically. A dusty truck laden with chickens crushed together in open wire boxes navigates a turn and, for a moment, it seems like the crazy heaps of cages will come crashing down onto the hot, scarred asphalt. The chickens already look mangled, clots of white paper towel or soiled chrysanthemums stacked on the back of the truck. It’s a half-mile to our turn; at the next intersection, a Dollar Store occupies a roadside trough across from a
COOP gas station with its door framed by Christmas tree lights. At the junction, where a narrow lane leads to Northern Lakes, a big church stands above empty parking lots: Intersection Baptist Church are the words inscribed above a portico upheld by white columns of the kind you might imagine on an ante-bellum manor house. A pole barn next to the church houses the Intersection Family Center. A quarter-acre of graves, mostly pillars and pale dwarf obelisks stands in the shadow of the church with its steeple cocked astride the ridge-line like a jaunty little hat. This cemetery is also unfenced so that the dead can come and go as they like. A concrete block pavilion set back from the country road marks a township park, although the planners of this place seem to have omitted picnic tables and any other amenities from the small tract of unmown grass lawn. The sign says that there is a ballfield here, but that’s also been omitted or, if once built, now abandoned. Trees in a chaotic patch encroach on the open plot. I find some playground equipment made of sagging plastic next to a swing set, but it’s unclear to me whether these fixtures are part of the public park or on the land of a neighbor who has parked his pickup trucks and lawn-mowing tractor (with a golf cart for visiting nearby folks) in an open shed, an envelope of sun-faded fiber glass. An improbably heavy, winged creature, some sort of cross between a huge carrion fly and a bumblebee, hovers uncertainly over the turf next to a water-pump. The winged beast buzzes as it bobs up and down in the warm air. Storm clouds, perhaps threatening thunder and lightning, tower over the patchwork of small farms, crumpled barns, red lanes, and shacks to the east. Five-hundred miles to the west of this park, on the prairies of Indiana, the shadow of the moon eclipses the sun and people assembled by the thousands along freeways and atop green knolls and crowding parking lots at Walmarts and near churches and warehouses cheer, first, for the sun’s obliteration and, then, for the diamond beads bursting forth from around the edge of the sun that has been put out like an inconvenient eye, and, then, the crowds cheer again for the corona, it’s rays that make the landscape tremulous like the bottom of the sea where columns of water flicker and shift and, then, at last, the people cheer one more time and clap their hands and praise the sky upon the sun’s return, the light suddenly turned on like a lamp in the heavens so that corners and edges are visible again on the shapes of things. But, of course, none of this is visible where I am talking to the tax preparer, watching the big black tumor of the bee or fly or whatever it is hovering like a tiny hot air balloon over the dew-damp sod, some cattle lounging near a seep of water among the trees, and a mellow warm light suffusing this landscape that is everywhere small, understated, split into tiny parcels of green woods and green shadow and pale yellow fields moist under the sun and, then, I can hear dogs barking and a woodpecker tapping in the green fog of underbrush between the trees. It’s time to pick up the puppy. Julie is sending messages on her cell-phone. A small, twelve-sided corral, only hip high, encloses some astro-turf – is this an enclosure for children or pets or...? The panel hinged to offer entry to the artificial grass within the twelve-sided corral has fallen down and lies atop the astro-turf. Birds are singing. Unassuming fences crisscross the fields. In the hollows, agricultural confinement buildings stand among thistles, fans like huge screw-heads penetrating their walls. Perhaps, the light is mellowed by the half-shadow of the moon blocking the sun. But the sky feels vague, ill-defined with haze, and hot.
28,
We drove back to Chattanooga. The heavens are exhausted by the sky-show and, now, clouds are bubbling up from the earth, rising to the zenith.
29.
The next day, driving from Chattanooga to Mount Vernon, traffic oncoming beyond the median is backed-up for miles. It’s eclipse pilgrims returning from the zone of totality.
30.
You expect to see some trace on the land where the sun was eaten away by shadow. Something should be engraved in the land, a monument of some sort to an experience that people on the radio say was “spiritual”, astonishing, a testimony to how small we are in the universe and, yet, evidence for something like the fellowship of man, all our warring communities joined together in awe and wonder. Probably, this is rank idealism. Nothing marked the transit of the mighty shadow across the terrain. Not even the idea of the eclipse was palpable on the landscape.
31.
At Mount Vernon, the dead in their unfenced cemetery seem somehow unhoused. Maybe, they are wandering the fast food joints, the hobby lobby, the Krogers’ grocery store. The puppy in the hotel room bites my hands and arms a hundred times, bites my toes fifty times, would gnaw on my genitals if this were allowed.
32.
Crossing into St. Louis, five minutes from the Mississippi, I glimpse the strange neighborhood of tiny houses through which the freeway bores like a mineshaft. It’s before a lightless dawn. The sky is now overcast and ran is pouring out of the darkness and the little shacks shimmer under faint street lamps. The structures are flimsy, wet, like enclosures stacked up from cards extracted from a deck, so frail that the falling rain might undermine them or that they might collapse from a gust of wind.
33.
I’m thinking about Stephen Foster and, perhaps, Scott Joplin, whose home I visited ten years ago on a visit to St. Louis, a genteel place (as I recall) with a piano in the parlor and cozy-looking calico drapes. Now, I recognize the shape and disposition of the ancient, battered and tiny houses: they are slave cabins, utilitarian dwellings built post-bellum but, nonetheless, homes for the poor accustomed to living with little or nothing, people so poor that they didn’t even own themselves.
35.
The sun comes up over a bad accident in the west suburbs of St. Louis. The traffic bends to a single lane and nothing moves for a while under the wet skies except for an occasional car jumping out of line to seek out a nearby off-ramp. Ambulances and fire-trucks are lined up next to the side of the road and lights are flashing and there are sprays of broken glass on the concrete, broken fragments of fender and hood, but the vehicles are gone and the injured people hauled to local hospitals. The crash leaves traces and some highway patrolman are deploying yellow and orange tape-measures against the somber, stained surface of the interstate. Why didn’t the car wreck between moon and sun leave a mark?
36.
An hour after dawn: empty roadways stretching out to the horizon – it’s smooth sailing from rain squall to rain squall on the road back to Austin.
April 12, 2023
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