Originally published 3/14/17
The weather last week was so beautiful - breezy and sunny and in the 70s everyday - perfect for a walk at lunch with Jackson, or a longer walk in the afternoon by myself. Walking has been a way for me to energize, recharge, think, not think, speak to and listen for God. And Sewanee and the surrounding areas are full of trails and other walking adventures. As part of our slow living here, I'm trying to take advantage of them. As the weather warmed I got excited for Saturday, and planned an excursion for Michael and I to go on an adventurous walk. Remember? Michael calls them death marches. Then we woke up to 30 degrees and a forecast of rain and snow. Isn't that how goes? So Michael, eager to take advantage of an opportunity not to go on a death march, suggested that we go for a ride instead. Yes, riding in the car is equally as vigorous, and will earn me a lunch of fried things at the local tavern. Tired from a week of hard work (for which I am extremely appreciative) and a couple of nights of restless sleep, I acquiesced, embarrassingly easily. Besides, we love a ride around the place where we live. Especially on roads we haven't been on, or to coves we haven't explored. Helps us expand our sense of place, and we're just getting to know this place. iPhones are brilliant for their map app. I love my map app. We have taken many adventures because my phone not only tells us where to go, but where we are on the map. That's the really brilliant part. Thank you, Steve Jobs. Except for when it directs you into the middle of a farm in rural England. Thank you, English people, for being so nice and letting us through. So I got out my iPhone, and, after we dropped Jackson at the boarding house for the weekend, we took off through Winchester. That's the town that has red lights. It has a charming downtown square with a beauty pageant shop called Bells and Beaus that always has spectacularly gaudy dresses in the windows, a cake store that is (fortunately) never open when I'm there, a coffee shop, a Tennessee clothing store (read: fringe and rhinestones) and a movie theater with a neon marquis. It's really cool. But Winchester also has a big lake, Tims Ford lake, that is difficult to see. We've tried to drive around it a couple times, but we haven't found a good vantage point. So we drove through downtown (it's one block, so that doesn't take long) and decided to try to find the lake again. We snaked past one part of it, and crossed it on a bridge. It's about 30 feet down, I'd say, and not a sexy lake. There was a fishing tournament, though, and cold fishermen were patiently casting in the middle of the muddy looking lake. Not sure what they were going to catch, but I bet they didn't have it for dinner. Well, that just took a minute, again, so we proceeded on to the rural Tennessee countryside. We pass by a new development of big brick houses (they must work at the Nissan plant), and drive further out by small country houses perched on the edge of fallow fields, abandoned barns, rusty and broken down farm implements and burnt out mobile homes. Despite the harshness of the human life here, the Tennessee cove is beautiful even in winter, when the fields have sprouted green winter grass while they await spring planting, and the black cows graze fields of denser brown grass. Michael's been studying the cove in his field placement church, Christ Church Alto, which sits at the bottom of the mountain in the midst of these fields. Average Sunday attendance is 10, including me, Isabel and Michael. He's learned that the population has declined in the cove because no one around here really works the land anymore. Modernization requires less manpower, so most land is leased to corporate farms who manage it efficiently and without much help. From the valley you can see - especially in winter - houses that dot the side of the mountain. I always wonder how you get to those houses. So we decided to try to find out. We turned right, down a gravel road. My iPhone said it would get us halfway up the mountain. Until, at the bottom of the incline we run into the first No Trespassing/Private Property sign. There are about 12 mailboxes perched on a wood shelf at the bottom of the drive, and we carefully read the long notice about privacy. We consider for a moment, and decide to honor it. We turn around in the drive of an odd, long, white building with no windows and a red stoop. We decided not to investigate that building, either. At the next turn on my iPhone, we decide to try a gravel road again and are met by the same No Trespassing/Private Property sign at the bottom of the incline. We are just about to turn around, but in the middle of nowhere Tennessee, another car comes up behind us, and it is impossible for us to turn around on this one-lane road, so we press up the mountain. We wind up the poorly paved road through gardens of rocks that have fallen as the mountain has broken apart over the last billion years. The car behind us peels off early, and there are places to turn around, but we are emboldened, and we keep going. About two miles up this tiny, windy road, we come across some cabins: one and two are clearly not inhabited currently, so we begin to pass them to continue, but are faced with another No Trespassing/Private Property sign. We humble ourselves, and agree that we should probably turn around now. We head back down the mountain, disappointed that we didn't get to crest a bluff and find a secret place. There's one more thing we can try. The rumored Venezuelan drug lord's failed attempt at money laundering in an abandoned house in a bankrupt subdivision at the bottom of the mountain. It's a place of local lore and lots of mystery. Sounds cool. Dangerous. Exciting. It's a peach house that sticks out on the side of the mountain, if you know where to look. We come to a big gate that promises extravagance and elegance. One of the two gates was open. Michael was almost giddy, and he actually gunned the car (a little) and said: "We're goin in!" An open gate means "Welcome! Y'all come on in!" doesn't it? A plastic white picket fence lined the paved road, and landscaped pear trees were just beginning to bloom, fighting for space among the natural greenery that was now overtaking the entire landscape, including the road. At the end of the low road there was a beautiful finished house with a sweeping front porch that had groups of cushioned furniture and heating lamps. There was also a man on a tractor working on the side yard. As we turned around at the dead end, we waved, and he did, too. We're Southern. A wave means, hey, just drivin' by today....and a return wave acknowledges, hey, ok! Right? We turned right (again) and headed up the hill to find that unfinished peach eyesore. The road had been paved and marked with a double line, but there were spots where weeds grew completely into one side of road, and we had to drive the other lane around. In places, chunks of pavement were missing entirely, perhaps for planned infrastructure work. Gravel was strewn all over. There were lot markers, and acre sizes, 5.65 acres, 6.37 acres. The lots were full of boulders and scrub trees. It would take quite an architect to design around this landscape. A couple miles up we came to the end of the road and turned right (I'm sensing a theme) onto a gravel drive. We could see the peach house. There it was.
This is the road side, left. The view is on the other side.
The architect who designed this house clearly was not from around here. It was in relatively good shape, with only a few rock holes in one of the windows. We marveled at it, and I thought that was good enough. I took a picture. Michael jumped out of the car.
"I'm gonna go see if I can get in," he said, excited for the exploration. I remained in my seat. Buckled in. You know me, I was sure someone in there was going to kill us.
He climbed onto the front stoop, looked at me, pointed at something and disappeared. Then I saw him in the house through the window. I looked out the side view mirror of the car to see if anyone was coming up behind us. To kill us. Of course. That's me, still thinking.
Then I see Michael on the second floor, through the windows. Still nervous, I check the rear view mirror again. Then I get curious. It must be ok. I unbuckle.
The house is in remarkable shape. No walls, of course, or ceilings or electrical work, but the circular stairs are intact, and the windows are all closed and functioning. It's really cool. We couldn't really tell where the kitchen was supposed to be, or the bathrooms (my two main concerns) and the upstairs was configured a little weird, but it would have been beautiful and modern, if you're into that kind of thing.
The valley side, of course, was almost all windows, which is the important thing.
Michael in a round room that overlooks that valley, right.
And on the second floor, the view. There are two kinds of houses around here. Bluff view, and not. This one had a beautiful bluff view.
So we can say it, we've been to the Venezuelan drug lord's abandoned peach house. (I think someone's made that drug lord part up by now.) There was no vandalism in the house, amazingly, and the structure was in great shape. I think it was built just before the housing crash of 2009, so it's been up there a while. There's surprisingly little about the house, or the subdivision online. It's been in the bank's hands a long time.
The immediate landscape would take some work, but it was a beautiful view of the Alto valley, at left.
So we finish our exploration and we're driving back down the winding, deteriorating road, and we're excited about our find, the exploration, the discovery, the expansion of our understanding of the landscape here, and....the gate is locked. I mean, we are padlocked in this abandoned, bankrupt drug lord's money laundering scheme.
Michael and I look at each other. Eyes as big as saucers. Skin as white as ghosts. Heart rates pumping as if we were walking, and palms beginning to perspire. We laugh, nervously. I clutch my phone.
"What are gonna do?" Michael asks me. What? Why is he asking me? Does he not have a plan for this?
"We're gonna call the police and have them cut those things off and get us outta here," I announced.
"We're gonna have to walk back home," Michael thought out loud. "But how will we drive to church tomorrow?" That's Michael. Always thinking about God
"Oh no," I said, "You're gonna have to turn around and we'll see if that man is still here."
He couldn't have left. He was in the middle of tractoring something. You don't just up and leave those kinds of projects. Worse, on second thought. He locked us in on purpose, and we have to go mea culpa him.
The thing about Michael is that when he gets in trouble, he lapses into confused, humble, daffy old Southern man. I've seen it. Like when he gets pulled over. He acts like he's surprised he's even in a car.
"Why, offica, I had no ideah I was goin even that fa-ust." It's comical.
We drive back down the low road to the house where we can now see that the man was moving boulders with the tractor. Can you fit a rifle on a tractor? Can you push a boulder into a Subaru with a tractor?
Michael pulled all the way up the driveway and rolled down his window. The man scowled and stopped the tractor.
"I'm so sorry, we seemed to have gotten locked in-un," as if he had no idea how we got there. See what I mean?
"Yeah. I put up a private property sign hoping that people would see it and respect it so I left the gate open. But people don't mind it," he gruffed. Oh boy. We did not see that.
"I'm sorrah," Michael pleaded. "Curiousity got the be-ust of me."
Scowling man was not amused by daffy Southern man. He mumble something and Michael understood that to mean he would let us out and not kill us. Michael backed down the driveway, and scowling man drove out in a pickup to the gate.
"He's from Michigan," Michael noted. "No wonder he's irritated." (Sorry, Michigan friends.)
Scowling man opens the gate, and Michael rolls down the window to apologize one more time for finding himself on private property. Scowling man does not care. He does let us pass through though, and did not punish us.
Lord, forgive us our trespasses... That phrase has taken on new meaning for me in the past few days. Michael and I have had long discussions about whether or not we were actually trespassing. We had the opportunity to trespass among known neighborhoods two right turns ago, and declined respectfully. Did we see a No Trespassing sign at this open gate? Neither one of us remembers it. We didn't trespass with malice, or intent to destroy anything, and we didn't (of course). But in the eyes of scowling Michigan man, we did, and that's really all that matters. That's why, in our corporate (that means everybody) confession in the Episcopal church, we also say:
Most merciful God, we confess that we have sinned against thee in thought, word, and deed, by what we have done, and by what we have left undone. I take that last part left undone to mean stuff we didn't mean, or weren't even aware that we did. Like trespassing unknowingly on someone's property, even if to do no harm. Still, in his eyes, we did the wrong thing. So, Mr. Michigan, I am sorry for offending you. And to those others of you whom I have also offended unknowingly, I also am sorry. And, to those of you whom I have overtly offended, I am also sorry. (That blog would likely be very long.)
We can't help it, can we, as humans, but to do the wrong thing sometimes? Advertently, not even inadvertently. As Michael said, our curiosity gets the best of us. Scowling man from Michigan was actually very nice. He let us go and didn't call the police to charge us and fine us, which he was likely within his bounds to do.
He gave us grace, which God also gives us. On Sunday, when we confessed on our knees, then said the Lord's prayer, I considered it differently.
I can only imagine Michael's confession: "Why Law-ud, I had no ida-uh that an open ga-ut mea-unt no trespassin....." And I'm sure God will smile.
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