I’m a bona fide lover of nature but this year I’ve been working six days a week all summer and there hardly seems time enough to get out and do what I want to do. (I work outside which is the only reason I can tolerate a six day work week). So yesterday after a couple of rousing, beer sodden days celebrating the United States’ 232nd birthday I woke up with an agenda to get out and get away…into the country. I took a fishing pole, a journal I rarely ever open up but keep on hand in case it’s needed, and a book called The Character of Meriwether Lewis by Clay S. Jenkinson. I knew where I was headed at least for the first part of my day.
Nashville is the northern terminus of the famed Natchez Trace. The Trace was once a wilderness road called the Devil’s Backbone due to the surly riverboatmen and bandits who passed along its deep woods shrouded length between Nashville and Natchez, Mississippi. Walk a few stretches of the original Trace and you’ll find it is not a cheery place. These woods are deep in the more remote locations and tangled with vines and a thick canopy over most of the route. Along with the ruffians traveling the trace were Andrew Jackson and his fiancé Rachel who was still unwittingly married to another man. Later some of Jackson’s army of mostly Tennesseans going down to defeat the Creek Indians and the British would pass this way. But the most tragic character to ever make his way along the Natchez Trace was Meriwether Lewis - naturalist, writer, ambassador to Indian nations, leader of the Corps of Discovery, personal secretary to Thomas Jefferson, and governor of the Louisiana Territory. At the age of thirty-five he died by his own hand at a little inn called Grinder’s Stand, the first white holding travelers came to after leaving the Chickasaw nation. Grinder’s Stand is about twelve miles outside the present day Swiss settlement of Hohenwald, Tennessee and not too far from Grinder’s Switch, the hometown of country comedian and wonderful lady Minnie Pear (Sarah Cannon).
Lewis must have made a striking impression on the inn keeper at Grinder’s Stand. She wouldn’t allow him or his servant into the house. Instead he readily agreed to stay outside as had been his custom. Since the end of his journey with the Corps of Discovery he had not slept in a bed, instead preferring to lay down on bear skins and blankets. This from a man who a few years earlier had made a fuss over the frumpish cut of his officer’s coat he had ordered and who made fun of the pedestrian palates of his fellow countrymen, his own palate having been refined at the French influenced table of Thomas Jefferson. Ironically the only disagreement Lewis would have during the three years he spent exploring the Louisiana Purchase with William Clark would be over Clark’s lack of enthusiasm for dog meat which Lewis had grown to enjoy eating.
In 1809, three years after returning from his famous journey, Meriwether Lewis was a famous man, a good looking man, and a scientifically if not classically educated man. But he couldn’t get a woman to marry him (he asked several), he couldn’t manage his debts, and he couldn’t lead men outside of the martial style at which he excelled. Men with a choice in what to do didn’t generally do what Meriwether Lewis wanted or needed done. Where his mentor Thomas Jefferson turned to frenetic activity to ease his mind Lewis turned to whiskey. Most people agree he was an alcoholic…on top of suffering from “melancholia”, depression in our current vernacular.
So in hindsight it isn’t surprising to us that Meriwether Lewis would take his own life at a remote frontier outpost in the middle of the night on 11 October 1809. And it wasn’t too surprising to the young nation either. A newspaper account from Nashville read, “In the death of Governor Lewis, the public behold the wreck of one of the noblest men.” Jenkinson summarizes Lewis perfectly in Character:
“Some men don’t belong in the wilderness…some don’t belong in civilization. And a few, having spent time in both, find they no longer have a home in either world.”
So my trip was to stand at the grave of the great explorer. I feel a kinship to Lewis that is unmistakably rooted in my often melancholy view of the world. Like Lewis I see the greatness at my fingertips but can’t quite grasp it. All my efforts usually fall a little flat and short of their mark. I accomplish just enough to be frustrated. I think that is a lot of what Lewis felt. I want to write something of merit. He knew he had to rewrite his journals into a scientific and political manuscript. In letters Jefferson inquired, occasionally with some irritation evident, as to whether or not Lewis had begun the project. As far as we know Lewis never wrote a word of the book that would describe his exploration of the Louisiana Purchase.
I sat at Lewis’ grave for a few minutes then walked back to my truck to, well, explore. I walked around in Little Swan Creek, catching a crayfish. A father and his kids were catching crayfish in little nets. While we were stopped and talked for a minute a water snake came slithering right up between us, quite fast. The kids were wild with excitement, sort of. Snakes are so common along the Buffalo River and its tributaries that there is no need to get too excited about them.
Afterwards I drove into Hohenwald to buy $3.98/gallon gas and eat a most un-Meriwether Lewis lunch at McDonald’s (number 3 value meal…large size). Then I headed back to the Trace and north, stopping at the Gordon House and Gordon Ferry stop west of Columbia. I’ve always liked this stop on the Trace. It was here that I found an arrowhead in good condition while walking along a trail back in 1997. I walked down a rocky little creek for two thirds of a mile to where it emptied into my beloved Duck River (by some accounts it is the most biodiverse river in North America.)
Although comfortable in the wilderness Lewis felt a certain sense of awe as well. Writing of a solo jaunt in Montana during the expedition Lewis writes:
“I then continued my rout homeward …the succession of curious adventures wore the impression on my mind of inchantment; at sometimes for a moment I thought it might be a dream…”
In this passage Lewis eventually realizes he is not dreaming when his feet are stuck by prickly pear cactus. Throughout the journey Lewis described nature and animals in very human terms. He wrote that mule deers were “drearie” and of birds, which he loved, he wrote that they bring “gayety and cheerfulness”.
In my much smaller journey up the dark creek I encountered birds of a different feather. About the time the putrid smell of rotting flesh hit my nose I heard the whump whump of heavy wings and caught the glimpse of two very large turkey vultures jumping from the ground into a nearby sycamore. Spotting a couple of feathers on the ground and led by the unpleasant odor I walked by where they had been and found their meal of dead possum. I kept walking.
After trudging through some heavy sediment at the mouth of the creek I walked onto a rock strewn point and waded out into the river. Where the creek water had been refreshingly cold on my sandaled feet the river water was like bathwater…predictable for July. I fished a little minnow lure with a silver belly and an olive back. I cast and cast in the late afternoon sun which was beginning to cast a beautiful light over the whole scene. I fished the channel and I fished the eddies. There I caught perhaps the world’s smallest bluegill, so small that I wondered why it had even chased my minnow. Wading into the leeward side of the channel I cast some more then spotted a stick looking up at me from about three feet away. It was another water snake. As soon as I moved again it stuck its head back down into whatever lair it had there among the water weeds and mussel shells. I cast a few more times and decided to call it a day. No, I wasn’t done in by the snake. My dog and I have swam with cottonmouths on this river. Snakes aren’t a problem. Not catching any good fish is.
I walked back up the creek, once again hearing the whump whump of three buzzards taking to the trees. If birds were larger (and these buzzards are big) we would have issues with them. They are prehistoric dinosaur brained creatures that would surly look at our puny pipedal bodies like we look at chicken on a stick. Coming out of the creekbed I looked at the late afternoon glow on the red brick of the old Gordon house and thought about how happy travelers would have been to see it 190 years ago. They were only a day’s ride from Nashville. They may not have traveled to the farthest, unknown shores of the Pacific Ocean but, on this journey at least, they had come farther than Meriwether Lewis, who sleeps by the side of the road just a few miles back.
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