It’s just something I cannot get out of my head.

 

This summer I encountered something unbelievably meaningless, something so completely useless that it will undoubtedly stick with me until my final days, when I inevitably cash in my chips and hope that god pays out with a one way ticket going straight up.

 

I was in the foothills West of the Appalachians, somewhere in Tennessee between Tellico and Tallassee. No, not Tallahassee: Tallassee, Tennessee. I was on highway 411, or it may have been 129 or hell maybe even highway 11 for all I care. The exact road really doesn’t matter. Just know that it was one of those big old roads that shoots straight through the oak and hickory with little care for the rivers and hills that exist between its two ends, because damn it a straight line on a map looks a whole lot better than one that makes sense to build. These roads are usually big ol’ things, where it feels like they just went and cut a 100 yard wide stretch of trees between two towns out from those woods and ordered someone else to fill the rest in with pavement and then paint some lines on it. We’re talking four lanes total, two lanes running either way with a patch of mud in the middle big enough to fit two or three more if someone would have just told them that’s what the government contract ordered. Even better, on the outer edge of either of these two-laners is a paved shoulder big enough to fit a third car, which I was damn lucky enough to see someone actually use, if only just so they could skip a 20 minute traffic jam by driving right around the entire backup.

 

This story’s not about that driver though, that bald thirty something behind the wheel of his bronze Ford Taurus with a mind so brilliant that he managed to out-think everyone in that line. There’s really nothing more American than someone like that. Well, except for the real subjects of our story. The two individuals who used that shoulder, that consequence of the government having more money and space than sense, to simply set up camp right on the side of the road. Where the Taurus used the washboard pavement to live life in the fast lane, these two used the same patch of asphalt, maybe just 20 miles down the road, to have a little pit stop.

 

Maybe a pit stop’s not even the right word. I could say it was more of a picnic spot. Hell, maybe if I stayed around for long enough they would’ve turned the same smooth patch between two Texas sized rumble strips into their own little motel. Here they were, two rednecks, and really that ought to be a term of endearment around those parts. It’s certainly a whole lot better than the endless supply of Whisky Tango running around on the side roads in their trucks jacked up on meter high tires who desperately want you to think they just got out of the mud despite the fact that the paint above the tires is cleaner than the mirror in a hospital bathroom. Well, back to the two model rednecks. These two were probably somewhere in their mid fifties, you never really can tell with people around there since nobody ever really looks their age, but age really isn’t too important to our story anyhow. What is important is that they had simply parked their much humbler, not so lifted, Ford Super Duty F-250 on the shoulder of my side of the two laner and set themselves up a little brunch.

​

Maybe the first thing going through your head, as someone with the tendencies of a blog reader, is that they were sat in their truck eating on the side of the road real quick like so they could rejoin the road and get to their spot on the lake before it got too hot. Well, if that’s what you had running through your head then you couldn’t be more wrong. I was driving, grandmother riding shotgun and napping away, with two cousins in the back - eyes pasted to their phones, and to this day nobody else in the car believed me after I told them what I’d seen. Maybe someday a Tennessee resident could corroborate my little story.

 

Well here they were, on the side of the road, each in their own lawn chair with its legs adjusted so they’d sit flat in the grooves of the the woo-woo boards, facing the oncoming traffic behind the dropped tailgate of the truck, just watching the clouds move across the sky and the traffic come and go. I had that sneaking feeling that when I got close enough I’d be able to read some sort of Trumpian paraphernalia on stickers in their back window, but to this day I can do no more than assume their political affiliations due to the fact that in front of the rear window of the truck, on the edge of the tailgate, they had a grill cooking away - casting a plume of smoke that wafted up so that maybe some other Rocky Toppers down the road had a few extra clouds to look at on the shoulder of the road themselves.

 

This wasn’t just some Easy-Bake Oven or George Foreman grill sitting on that tailgate either, it was a real Jimmy Young or maybe even a Rumble in the Jungle Ali on the back of that truck. If they’d have given me the pleasure of seeing them open it up as I drove by I swear it would’ve been a double or maybe even a triple racker under the hood. There was even enough smoke in the air that about 10 seconds after the whole sight was confined to my trio of rearview mirrors, the smell of some cooking marinated pork had drifted its way through the car vents and into the cabin, sort of like an actually good version of the same sensation you get when you drive past a skunk on the road - knowing his best wishes are on their way to your nostrils and there’s nothing but time until they finally kiss you.

 

So there they were, just sitting in their chairs, grill smoking away, two gallons of what ought to have been sweet tea in their Team Gulp sized cups, having what seemed to be a pleasant chat about football or fishing or who knows what, just right there on the shoulder of the road. So what if every twenty seconds you need to stop talking as a car whirrs by at 70 miles an hour, probably makes for a good time to take another sip of your tea or bite of your porkchop anyways. 

​

Well, just why in the hell is this worth remembering, and even more why is it worth writing for a little architecture page like this? Again - you must be a blog reader, because that’s a damn good question. I think the real reason I can’t get it out of my head is that these were two people who saw themselves as owners of that little patch of infrastructure in a way that I can only dream of one day doing myself. So, in a word: jealousy.

 

Today we live in a world modeled off the idea of those Roman Centuriations that split up the Italian countryside many centuries ago. Those local matrices of roads had their own public benefit, but through the lenses of Jefferson and the countless surveyors who came after him that’s all been lost to time - and maybe those dumb enough to care about history. In a way, this highway, whatever the hell number it was, acted like a Decumanis with its own linear presence running through the Tennessee hills, creating a little centuriation of its own. And here were two people, who at first seemed like they were the only ones dumb enough, but really they were the only ones brave enough, to really treat it like a piece of infrastructure they could take modern ownership of. Sure - in a legal or safety based discussion they look like real pieces of work, maybe some would even put ‘em in the category with the jacked up Whisky Tango crowd, but they’re just the opposite to me. The more I think about it, what they did really just makes sense.

 

Someday I want to be like them.

​

- C

​

11/20/2022