Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace Read online

  The ground blurred, a lens out-of-focus.

  How many souls passed there in 10,000 years?

  One of them whispered.

  “Get moving, girl.”

  I WALK ALONE

  Green Day

  My feet pogoed along the pavement of the Natchez Trace, two victims of adrenalin and the craving to launch a novel and make history. After I posted my open-mouthed picture in front of the parkway sign, my phone lit up with words of encouragement from readers around the globe, stalwart people who cheered my writing. I hoped they would bolster me through all 444 miles, because as long as they were there, I couldn’t quit without public humiliation. At the starting line, they didn’t disappoint.

  You’re a badass, Andra!

  Go, Andra! Go!

  You’ve GOT this!

  Praise was always light to my inner moth. I bounded across the road and stuck to the white line on the opposite side, a continuous ribbon of paint that stretched to middle Tennessee. I knelt on the pebbly tarmac and snapped a picture. Perspective merged the line with infinity. I choked on audacity and burning rubber, not caring whether I applied enough sunblock on my fair hands. Before I could push myself to stand, an engine rattled toward me. Hot fumes stung my face and slithered up my nostrils. I rolled sideways onto grass as an extended cab pickup blasted past and disappeared around a bend.

  The driver never braked. I couldn’t tell if he saw me.

  “Sheesh, Andra. Remember, you’re just a five-seven white woman in a hat. Walking. These people aren’t expecting you.” I spoke into early spring air. If I talked to myself and no one heard me, that meant I wasn’t crazy.

  Right?

  I scrolled through my texts again.

  With you all the way, Andra!

  You’re gonna kill this!

  Can’t wait to see you in Tennessee!

  And one from my mother.

  Be careful

  No surprise she chose those words for her only daughter. Always pushing boundaries, stepping over lines.

  I leaned into the railing of a concrete bridge. Cars blitzed underneath me. Each speeding vehicle was a time I jumped too soon. My first, disastrous marriage. My initial choice of career. Even my own entrepreneurial efforts. For me, life had always been about having the guts to jump.

  At forty-four, I needed a place to land. A soft spot. Not a splat of bone and blood on concrete.

  “You’ve already jumped, Andra. For real. No point doing it again.” The back of my head scraped against the guardrail, and I comprehended my first victory.

  Milepost 1.

  Angst forgotten, I skipped to the bend in the road and hoisted my foot along a sliver of browned steel bolted into grass, posts that would mark every mile of my uphill trek to Nashville. As my iPhone recorded the moment, I whispered, “There. Only 443 to go.”

  Anthills volcanoed along the pavement edge, and the shoulder fell into a ditch. “I hope it’ll be okay if I just walk in the road.” I picked up my step and hugged the sloped pavement on the southbound side, confident I would see approaching cars.

  Even though I never saw what was coming in Life.

  Near milepost 2, a white truck stopped. A man’s uniformed arm waved me to his open window. “Great. This is where I’m gonna be told I can’t walk the Trace. Barely two miles in.” I inched toward him, one conversation ringing in my ears.

  Before I left for Mississippi, my husband Michael had just one request. “Call the authorities along the Trace, Andra, and let them know what you’re doing.”

  I dug in along my side of our shared desk and looked into his blue eyes. “Why? One of them’ll just tell me I can’t, and I’ll have to quit before I start.”

  “Just promise me you’ll call the National Park Service before you leave. If you let them know, I’ll be happy.” His left hand fiddled with a pen, but his eyes held my gaze.

  My husband. He straddled an impossible white line. Support my insane dreams? Or protect me? If something happened to me, everyone would blame him.

  I forced my lips to say what he wanted to hear.

  “Okay.”

  But I never made that call.

  As I sidled up to a truck with the logo of the United States Government emblazoned on its door, I cursed myself. Michael was always, always right. Why didn’t I call them? At least put my blasted walk on their radar?

  “What’re you doing?” A peach-fuzzed guy smiled. He couldn’t have been older than twenty-five.

  I relaxed into the cool metal of his door. “Walking to Nashville.”

  “Walking the whole Trace? Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  He shifted his truck into park. The smile slid from his face. “Nobody does that.”

  “I’m doing it.”

  His fingers tapped along the dashboard. After a few beats, he turned to me. “Well, just be careful. Congress cut our patrols to nothing out here. I’m part of a skeleton maintenance crew. I’ll send word up the line, let everybody know what you’re doing.”

  “Thanks.”

  He started to roll up his window before throwing out a last “Good luck!”

  A deadlocked Congress cut funding to non-essential government programs like the National Park Service. When I planned my walk of the Natchez Trace Parkway, I didn’t know I’d face diminished ranger patrols, shuttered points-of-interest and barebones maintenance. I arrived thinking if I got in trouble, I could summon a ranger anywhere along the route. But with next-to-no government employees on the Trace, I was even more isolated.

  As I huffed into my third mile, my feet tingled. I picked up speed into my first easy hill. At the top, I celebrated milepost 3 with a smashed can of Miller High Life, empty trash from someone else’s party.

  The sun blistered the brim of my hat. My cheeks burned after one hour of walking. Three miles. Ten degrees warmer. I shifted my backpack to let air nibble my sweaty shirt. “Making good time.”

  Like making good time negated discomfort.

  When I was growing up, making time was Dad’s catchphrase on long road trips. “Gotta make good time, Linda. Can’t stop for nothing, not even to pee.” I remembered pinching my crotch together to keep from soiling myself while Dad drove past exit after exit. When we got to our final destination, I could barely walk through bladder pain, but I still made it to a real bathroom. Ladies didn’t pee on the ground.

  Familiar heat fired through my loins, my first experience with discomfort on the Natchez Trace.

  I jogged past milepost 4. Another slight incline. A tunnel through trees. To shift my attention from the mounting insistence of my abdomen, I snapped pictures. Of baby wildflowers, infant heads a first homage to spring. Of rocks, strewn across another bridge. Of moss, clinging to the white edge of a road sign.

  Jackson 90.

  Mileposts 5 through 7 blitzed through the blur of photography. I stopped once to sip water, hoping deprivation would help with my urgent bladder. In four miles, I hadn’t seen a single vehicle.

  I shuddered and pressed onward, certain my father would be proud of the time I was making. After all, I was already at milepost 8. Two hours and thirty minutes from the starting line. I squinted up an embankment.

  Elizabeth Female Academy.

  “I can’t believe I’m already here.”

  The first stop on my Natchez Trace book tour, Elizabeth Female Academy boasted the title “First Female College in the United States.” While I wasn’t sure that was true, I knew John James Audubon taught there in 1822. I imagined the Frenchman, lecturing about birds to full-skirted, corseted girls.

  A sidewalk snaked through trees. I hovered there, afraid of ghosts another visit might conjure. Undocumented souls were slathered across the Natchez Trace. Vehicular traffic masked spirits.

  But when it was quiet, when the road was still, I heard them.

  Famous. Obscure.

  I always did.

  When I was a toddler, voices clamored in my head. I imagined my pretend friends into being. Ossie and Palo
lah were the first. Adult features and mannerisms cloaked in tiny bodies.

  About a year later, Steve joined my made-up melange. I modeled him after the boyfriend on the television show Petticoat Junction.

  As I grew, my companions expanded and morphed. They waited in the wings when I played a tough character onstage. As my first marriage imploded, they dried my tears. For most of my life, they were stalwarts who never left me, and they didn’t expect anything in return.

  Until the economy crashed and failure chewed my insides raw.

  “You can tell our stories, you know.” They forced me to name their words and taunted me to make their stories live against the backdrop of a timeless highway.

  Elizabeth Female Academy was a clearing ringed by a broken fence. A lone brick wall cut through its heart. Two windows were eyeballs in a face, with a ragged hearth for a mouth. I stepped over the barrier.

  Into forbidden territory.

  I spread my lunch inside an empty window. As I ran my hands along rough brick, I wondered whether John James Audubon ever stood where I stood, touched what I touched.

  Bladder pain twitched me back to the present. I had to go. Real toilet or not. I shrugged from my backpack and found my toilet paper. Around the corner, blank dirt beckoned me. Nothing grew in a foot-wide ring. The air was pungent with urine. I whipped my pants down and winced through the interminable stream.

  Stiff legs carried me to the highway. At milepost 9, a car charged over the horizon and swerved toward me, a G for Georgia Bulldogs on its front bumper. I rocked foot-to-foot as the window bisected Dad’s jowled face. “We just had the best fried chicken. I mean, it was amazing. Wasn’t it, Alice?”

  “Yep.”

  My stomach threatened to reject my lunch of peanut butter sandwich, almonds and a peanut protein bar. An overload of nuts. I licked salty lips and stretched my heels. “Did you bring me any fried chicken?”

  “Naw, but the guy there, he sang to everybody. I Can’t Help Myself. Remember that song? He even sang it to me!” “Sugar Pie,” Dad’s bass boomed from the crack in the window, “Honey Bunch, you know—”

  My eyes teared as I stomped away from the car. I couldn’t believe I had six more miles to walk, with my senses screaming for juicy fried bird. “I’m going on, Dad.”

  “You don’t want to hear about the fried chicken?”

  Annoyance fired behind my eyes. Dad wouldn’t get to me, not on my first day. “Nope.”

  “At the end, then. I can finish telling you about that fried chicken.”

  I wheeled on him, my finger thrusting inches from his face. “If you mention fried chicken one more time, Dad, I’m gonna choke you with it.”

  Dad thought he could poke my temper with a cattle prod. He always laughed when he got a reaction. “Okay, then. We’re going on now.”

  Fury overcame foot pain. I ignored needles in joints. Hot spots along toes. I blitzed through mileposts 10 and 11, but by milepost 12, I limped. Heat singed along the sides of my feet. I eased down an embankment and sat in a concrete rain gutter. With one hand, I ate a protein bar. A crow cawed behind me, causing me to choke on another peanut. I gathered my things, stunned it was only my first day.

  Beyond milepost 13, men clustered around a trailer parked on the shoulder. My heart gurgled with memories of reactions to my walk. “But what if somebody kidnaps you/rapes you/ties you up in a barn and leaves you for dead after torturing you? What will you do?”

  As I approached, I held my place on the white line. Men with trailers were not rapists. Or kidnappers. Or torturers. They were just men who happened to have a trailer.

  A horse whinnied, followed by a crash. One man struggled with the spooked animal, tied to the end of a lead, while three others coaxed it into the trailer. When I was alongside them, the horse reared. Muscles strained in unison, a gritty, groaning symphony I understood. I hobbled past its chords to milepost 14.

  I put agonized feet aside and focused on the beauty of the Trace: The watercolor canvas of eroded Loess cliffs; the spirit inhabitants of 1,000-year-old Emerald Mound; the variations in the yellow stripe at the highway’s crowned heart. I was lost in description when hoofbeats pounded behind me.

  A runaway horse, nostrils flaring from the exhilaration of a gallop that wouldn’t stop. It clattered toward me. Majestic. Masculine. A living piece of Trace history.

  Was it real? Or part of the haunted scenery?

  When I looked away, Dad’s car idled across from milepost 15. “Did you see that horse?” I called to Alice.

  “What horse?”

  They were gone. The men. The horses. The trailer. All of it.

  Was the Trace toying with me?

  ONE VISION (FRIED CHICKEN)

  Queen

  I took Andra to get some of that heavenly fried chicken. Soon as she was done with her second day of walking, we rushed her on up to Lorman, Mississippi to that Old Country Store. Miles 15 to 30 was so hot, I thought she was gonna fall out before we made it. Place closed at 3pm. She finished at 2:40.

  I told old Alice to punch it, and we squeaked in there at ten minutes to three. Clomped on up them rickety steps and headed straight in. When Andra saw the inside of that place, it was the happiest I’d seen her in two days. She wobbled along the main room with its dusty shelves of junk. One of them women had to help her to the buffet.

  I tell you, though. Andra perked right up when she saw food. She smiled one of them smiles that’s been lighting me up for the whole of her life, and she piled her plate high. Two pieces of fried chicken. Fluffy mashed potatoes. Green beans with ham swimming in ’em. Even took a couple of them barbecue ribs.

  By the time she got to our table, that girl was healed. Her and Alice laughed about some frilly dress hanging in the back corner. Between mouthfuls, Andra said she might just buy it to wear on Mardi Gras.

  “It’s supposed to get cold tomorrow,” I told her. “Winter storm coming through.”

  Andra chewed a double bite of meat. “Don’t tell me that, Dad.”

  “Well, you gotta be prepared.”

  Alice looked from me to Andra. “I guess the dress could be another layer.”

  “Oh, I’ll do it without the dress. Dad’s right. It’s supposed to be highs in the twenties on Mardi Gras.”

  “You gonna walk in that?” I crossed my arms and hoped not, but I knew my daughter.

  She was a bulldog.

  Like me.

  She reached for a big slab of apple pie and vanilla ice cream. “I have to, Dad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said I would.”

  I watched that girl of mine head to the back to pay. That old Mister D took her money and asked about her book. She handed him some cards, and he promised to keep ’em prominent, right next to the register. I hoped he wasn’t getting her hopes up, with her wrecked feet and all.

  Next breath, Mister D was singing.

  I Can’t Help Myself.

  Only he done gone and changed the words. He pointed at me and sang, “You know that man loves you.”

  Andra looked back at me, and her face was all joyful, like she was having the time of her life.

  I’VE BEEN EVERYWHERE

  Johnny Cash

  For two days, I followed Alice through Natchez mansions and ruins, and I stopped to tell strangers my stories while she snapped pictures of I-don’t-know-what-all. I’ll never understand them architects, even though my daughter done gone and married one.

  I try to love him. And everything.

  But when we checked out of Hope Farm and drove to our next stop, I didn’t rightly know what to do. The place was nowhere, really. A main street about three blocks long and nothing else. When Alice and me got there, I took in the Victorian quality of the place. I refinished enough Victorian furniture to know the era when I see it, in spite of not being no architect.

  When that owner-lady took us inside, I couldn’t abide.

  “No stairs. I cain’t do stairs.” I looked at Alice and tried not to be
all pitiful. “You tell ’em.”

  She pushed them glasses up her nose and smiled at me. ‘Cause I’m charming. “I’ll check out the room, Roy. See what’s what.”

  While that proprietor woman led her up them stairs, I poked around the vestibule. My fingers itched to refinish some empire mahogany even as they rubbed against an oak desk. Maybe I missed my calling, outfitting old homes for guests.

  Alice interrupted my dreaming.

  “We can’t share that room, Roy. It’s nice, but the bathroom is open, and……um……”

  I knew she didn’t want to be exposed to the likes of me, peeing in the commode. But I’m charming, remember?

  “That’s all right.” I shifted to that owner-lady. “What else you got? Something where me, Alice and my daughter can triple up?” I crossed my mental fingers and hoped I wouldn’t have to pay for the upgrade.

  Turns out, the owner-lady smiled. “Well. I might be able to get you into this place around the corner. It’s a rental, but we know the owners. People just moved out. There’s a bedroom, and maybe you can sleep on the couch?” She looked me up and down like she doubted my ability to bunk like I was in the Army.

  I could tell her a few things about Army life.

  Germany. 1953. The Black Forest. My feet froze inside fur-lined boots when I went on patrol. I smoked cigarettes to warm my insides, but I never let anyone snap my picture with one lit. They was always behind my ears, no matter what. Regardless of how cold I was, I had an image to preserve.

  For posterity.

  If I ever had posterity.

  Right then, my posterity was wandering up the Natchez Trace, a place I’d barely heard of, all for the love of some book I hadn’t read. I cleared my throat. “Ma’am. You a reader? Maybe I can interest you in this here book.”

  Alice pinched my arm. “Roy. Not now.”

  I set my feet to follow the owner-lady. Because I couldn’t do stairs. Nope. They was too much for me at my age.

  WALK

  Foo Fighters

  Winter storm Titan bowled across Mississippi in the early morning hours of my third day. I left Miss Ethel’s for good and slogged through fifteen miles in sleet, frozen biscuits my only comfort. The cold ransacked my tendons and shredded my joints. I set out from milepost 30 barely able to walk. When I staggered up to milepost 45, tortured tears froze on my cheeks. I trained for two months and believed I was prepared. In three fifteen mile days, the Trace showed me who was master.