Summer 2010 SE - Part Eight - Blood and Birds and Bursting Bombs

Blue lines on the maps are the planned route. Red lines are deviations.

"None of us here got enlightened. None of us here got enlightened. None of us here got enlightened. Not that we knew of. Sorry to say." ~John Giorno

8. Blood and Birds and Bursting Bombs

Right around the Tennessee and Alabama border, but certainly just south of it, the heat and sub-tropical humidity fall back on you like an unwanted wet blanket.

I took 31E south from Mammoth Cave down to Lebanon Tennessee, Cut over to Nashville to check out the big bike shop. Nothing special there; I’ll live with my broken face shield till I get home. Mammoth’s Ranger R. was right about one thing, the rolling hills down through Kentucky and Tennessee along 31 are fascinating. It’s a regular pattern of pronounced hill and valley, hill and valley, up and down like a sine wave. Perhaps they’re formed by ancient rivers wearing away the underground limestone deposits then the roof caves in, but I could be wrong.

Down Alabama 11, across the Wheeler Dam, cut down a local county road 150 to 33 again and south through the William Bankhead National Forest. East on 74 from Double Springs 5 miles to the Corinth Recreation area campsite.

I knew my space was near the boat ramp on Lewis Smith Lake, so I drove down to check it out. A man had fallen getting out of his boat. He was bloody around the elbows and arms and feared he had broken his hip. Indeed he could not stand and he sat there bleeding half in and half out of the water.

He was in his mid 60s and his daughter was the nervous type. I got my first aid kit from the bike, he cleaned up the blood and we called for an ambulance. “Sorry pal, they don’t let me carry morphine.”

I’m the only one in the tenting section of the campground, and it would be very quiet, except the tremendous din made by hundreds of birds far up in the pine trees.

The sounds are short single notes and hundreds of them together is rather like the sound of cicadas, except they aren’t, and while the cicada sound is usually steady, this choir is pulsating rhythmically, then is steady, then a pulse returns. I fall asleep and wake up in the middle of the night and they’re still at it, but the firecrackers have stopped exploding in the distance ~it’s the early morning of July 4th.