Project Eveningland

3/11/2023 Saturday

Do I have the energy to write this on my zero day, after six days in the Smokies? Yes. Apparently.

Today I ate shitty food, fell asleep half the day in my hotel room, and walked to a local Walmart for a few groceries. Along the way I reflected on how awful it is to cross a big highway with no crosswalks on foot to access food and shopping from a hotel. I saw an old road marker buried in the grass! See picture below. Dad will identify.

I also spent some time thinking about what I often feel when I come off the trail into civilization after a long trek through the mountains: a sort of horror at modern life. (Though, one could hardly call camping with space age fabrics, ultralight metals, pharmaceuticals, processed shelf stable foods, a watch powered by motion [no batteries], and several small supercomputers “old fashioned.”) The hustle and bustle is what’s alienating. It reminds me of a unit in an intro cultural anthropology course about “culture shock 2”—the culture shock that you feel when you return to the cultural context you normally live in (returning from context in which you experienced culture shock 1).

Except that’s not right because Newport (Tennessee) is hardly my habitat. I don’t often appear at, say, the kind of Subway at which you’d expect an old farmer-looking guy to shuffle in and order a sandwich from an extremely “over it” young woman who asks him what kind of cheese he wants and gets a response that is so strange it causes me to burst out laughing just as soon as I could get out of the restaurant.

The clerk (no I will not call her a sandwich artist in the interest of her dignity) says, “What kind of cheese do you want?”

“What?” says the man.

“I said, what kind of cheese do you want?”

“Cheese?! No cheese! Just ham!”

You’d think she had asked if he wanted critical race theory on his sandwich.

On the other hand, on fuller consideration, maybe that could happen in Wellington on a cold winter’s night when Ben and me are too tired from work to cook. The difference would be that we would joke about it with the clerk after. There would be a ton of Jim-Halpert-style eye contact between us and the clerk to the effect of, “can you believe this guy?” But here I mostly can’t do that. Many of the people seem (or just look) desperately tired and a bit broken. Plenty of OK seeming folks too, but the ratio is way different from what I am used to.

Ben and I had another lovely chat with lots of teasing about desserts. He’s “furious” (but we were both laughing) that I left behind a bunch of Mr. Goodbar in our dessert stash. He loathes it but got desperate for chocolate and tried to eat some and spit it out and now he’s mad (but not really) and I’m laughing uncontrollably at the image, which plays like a film in my head. I can see exactly how it looked. He ate it, went “bleccch!” spit it out and then laughed at himself and had a lovely time. He has a way of doing that. He once baked a box cake mix in an 8×8 (too small) pan and created a kitchen disaster and then just became so bowled over at how funny the whole thing was and couldn’t stay frustrated. Important: he then cleans up after!

Ok, time to go get mellow on chemically clean sheets.