Friday, July 20 – Sunday, July 23
Durham to Tuscaloosa
Sorry this took so long to begin. We are now in Wyoming, having been through Alabama, Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Utah (and maybe more) without having cell phone service or internet or TV. It has been great. I will have to get a new version of Photoshop before I can provide pictures, but trust me, except for the Ozarks in Arkansas and Flaming Gorge Utah there has been little beautiful to photograph. We are having a good time, though, and belatedly I will add to the blog. This is the first chapter...Alabama....July 23....
You might wonder about a person who begins their trip on a
Friday morning heading on I-40 west toward Asheville but thankfully we were
ahead of the folks fleeing to the mountains.
The Scenic Byway that bypasses Cherokee and other wonderful tourist
places that decorate the eastern edge of the Great Smoky Mountains was a
godsend and we reached our first night in Murphy, NC safely and uneventfully. This
byway travels the route now referred to as the “Trail of Tears”, along which
the native Cherokees were driven out of their homes in the North Carolina hills
to the barren western territory of Oklahoma.
The navigation challenge for the next day was to artfully
avoid a false turn that might cause us to end up in Atlanta, --which we did --and
we arrived at Lake Lurleen State Park , just outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Lurleen was the name of the wife of the
famous (infamous?) Governor George Wallace of Alabama of civil rights
fame. In spite of that, it is a lovely
wooded park nestled around a small, peaceful lake. No TV, no internet, and surprisingly no cell
phone service. We had to unhook from
Snoopy and drive 8 miles back toward town to call my cousin in Tuscaloosa, and
let them know we had made it successfully to town.
John Mayberry Hisey, the next-to-last Hisey in my Hisey
family tree (He has one son Evan who had only a daughter), is three months my
senior. Growing up our families spent
time together, and John’s father Alan, my Daddy’s older brother, was
responsible for helping Daddy out of scrapes and hard times in Knoxville and
Memphis, Tennessee as he meandered west seeking his fortune (and ultimately
finding my Mother in St. Louis). John
and I are the “youngest” of the cousins, and he and his wife Pam were married
not quite a year before Chick and I. In
1972 both of us couples were “objects of interest” at a Tennessee family
reunion, but Pam was in the spotlight because she was pregnant. All hopes of the Hisey heritage were centered
on her because all the other cousins had only girls.
John and his wife Pam have a historic old home several
blocks from the campus of the University of Alabama (yes, I actually
voluntarily toured the Alabama campus…Uncle Alan was a chemistry professor
there—though educated at the University of Tennessee!) Their historic home has the 12-13 foot ceilings,
the front and back stairs – allowing the “help” to travel out of sight between
their rooms in the basement and the upper floors of the “family”, and the dark,
quite interior rooms required in a real
Southern Home.
It was really fun to
walk through the rooms and see the same Globe Wernicke bookcases from my
Grandfather’s house that I have at home, sitting quietly in John’s home,
too. Look! In the corner is the marble-topped, walnut
lamp table beside an oak rocker from Aunt Katharine’s house that matches the
smaller table I have at home! In each
room is a little piece of my family nestled alongside the family heirlooms from
the Pam’s Paul family.
But what I loved best was the large, high ceilinged porch
around the front and side of the house, nestled under trees so thick it was
dark and cool even with the 105 degree heat baking the sidewalk just beyond the
front yard.
Along the sidewalk, thick
greenery, flowers and bushes, stood three to four feet high blocking the heat
from the pavement from entering the yard.
Heavily leafed branches of the dark green trees hung down to almost meet
the greenery leaving just enough space between to allow gentle breezes to move
from right front to the left back corner of the porch where we sat, under the
slowly moving ceiling fan. A barely
noticeable screening around the porch kept the unwanted visitors away, letting
the family, their two dogs, one cat, and the Palermos enjoy the day, catching
up on family stories, sharing travelogues of ours and their many trips all
around the world.
John was in the Air
Force in Southeast Asia as had been Chick, and they compared and contrasted
their observations from their different perspectives. It was amazing how easy it was to spend time
and be comfortable with a part of the family we have so seldom seen, but it was
fun to see how many interests and viewpoints we had in common – like a family.
After a late dinner, and not a small amount of wine, we
headed back to Snoopy on the lake, glad we had left the air conditioner in
Snoopy going on “high”. The first night
the noise of the AC had been disturbing. Perhaps thanks to the wine, we had no
trouble sleeping this night and being thankful for the “somewhat” cool
interior.
High temperature for the day per the thermometer in Snoopy was 107 degrees!
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| Cousin John Hisey and wife Pam in Tuscaloosa |
