Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 11
I DROVE THROUGH a landscape of gumdrop hills, rolling roads, neat farms. The sky was
full of those big fluffy clouds you always see in nautical paintings, and the towns had curi-
ous and interesting names: Snowflake, Fancy Gap, Horse Pasture, Meadows of Dan, Char-
ity. Virginia went on and on. It never seemed to end. The state is nearly 400 miles across,
but the twisting road must have added at least l00 miles to that. In any case, every time I
looked at the map I seemed to have moved a remarkably tiny distance. From time to time I
would pass a sign that said HISTORICAL MARKER AHEAD, but I didn't stop. There are
thousands of historical markers all over America and they are always dull. I know this for a
fact because my father stopped at every one of them. He would pull the car up to them and
read them aloud to us, even when we asked him not to. They would say something like:
SINGING TREES SACRED BURIAL SITE
Forcenturiesthisland,knownastheValleyoftheSingingTrees,wasasacredburialsitefor
the Blackbutt Indians. In recognition of this the US Government gave the land to the tribe
in perpetuity in 1880. However, in 1882 oil was discovered beneath the singing trees and,
after a series of skirmishes in which 27,413 Blackbutts perished, the tribe was relocated to a
reservation at Cyanide Springs, New Mexico.
What am I saying? They were never as good as that. Usually they would commemorate
something palpably obscure and uninteresting-the site of the first Bible college in western
Tennessee,
the birthplace of the inventor of the moist towelette, the home of the author of the Kansas
state song. You knew before you got there that they were going to be boring because if they
hadbeenevenremotelyinterestingsomebodywouldhavesetupahamburgerstandandsold
souvenirs. But Dad thrived on them and would never fail to be impressed. After reading
them to us he would say in an admiring tone, “Well, I'll be darned,” and then without fail
would pull back onto the highway into the path of an oncoming truck, which would honk
furiously and shed part of its load as it swerved past. “Yes, that was really very interesting,”
he would add reflectively, unaware that he had just about killed us all.
I was heading for the Booker T. Washington National Monument, a restored plantation
near Roanoke where Booker T. Washington grew up. He was a remarkable man. A freed
slave, he taught himself to read and write, secured an education and eventually founded the
Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, the first college in America for blacks. Then, as if that were
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