Honeymoon Day 32-?: Crystal Balls and Rearview Mirrors

My yin and I arrived in Boone on a Saturday afternoon. The final five hours of driving felt almost surreal, probably because of my desire to stretch them out until they formed an invisible asymptote, forever separating our journey from its ultimate destination. This yearning could probably be read as a metaphor for the grander, more primitive urge to circumvent or forestall death, but none of these things were on my mind that day.

my day planner, 2010-2011

Instead I was intoxicated by the distinctive redolence of the Appalachian mountains, which still smell like home no matter how long I've been gone. I caught the first whiff when we exited the highway in Elizabethton, a sleepy little town whose character is defined as much by "The Lost State of Franklin" as it is "The Great State of Tennessee."

West of Elizabethton are modestly larger burgs like Johnson City and Kinsport, and to the east lay even less populated municipalities like Hampton and Butler, towns so small that they were sacrificed to the construction of Watauga Dam, which first brought electricity to this area almost seventy years ago.

image appropriated from here

No pictures were taken of any of these places, though, not even of the sign between Trade and Zionville that reads "Welcome to North Carolina." For some reason, going home doesn't entice the eye in the same way as visiting far-away places.

I suppose the root of this can be found in the difference between the familiar and the exotic. Home brings with it a specific feeling, a sense of knowing that cannot be neatly captured by the image. We sense it, we smell it, we hear it in the sound of lawnmowers as much as in the wind.

Whitman Sleep Tonight

There is no sleep so sublime
as Whitman, under a tree
in Brooklyn, I dream
of my grandfather

fresh cut grass,
two cycle engine oil
and nostalgia.
Childhood

spent on the front porch,
chewing on sprigs of birch
pine needles in the fall.
The redolence of spring

mingling autumnal decay

the smell of impotence,
the taste eternal.

The exotic, however, demands attention from the eye. It asks to be seen, it poses, it teases and waits. We find ourselves struggling to tell loved ones what the image fails to communicate. The cliché insists that each picture is worth a thousand words, but the image also demands another thousand in explanation and context. This is what my yin and I discovered when we showed the photographs from our trip to my grandparents and mother.

But, for the time being, this is beside the point.

The point is that my yin and I have decided to extend our honeymoon indefinitely, and if the current estimates hold, it should last until sometime in the year 2089 (78 more years!) Although this estimate of my longevity was provided under some duress, I'm still view it as a reasonably reasonable forecast.

This means that the month we spent on the road is but a tiny fraction of the trips that await us, and if the vital statistics from this adventure are any indication of what lay ahead, then we have much to look forward to:

Honeymoon Vital Statistics

Duration: 32 days
Number of states: 20
Number of National Parks: 13
Total mileage: 9,555
Miles driven by my yin: <.5
Number of photographs: >4,500

What these numbers cannot relate is how much we learned about ourselves and each other over the course of our honeymoon. We encountered bears (without getting eaten), less than ideal accommodations (without getting flea-bitten), and spent more than 200 hours in the car together (without driving each another completely crazy).

even more in love than we were on Day 1

This bodes well...