photograph by lily bear traverse
Anna, Cameron, and Noah.
Once the stuff of middle-class Americana, this summer, road trips are a luxury and a privilege. Inflation, wage stagnation, gas prices, the climate — take your pick. It’s objectively harder for folks to get by now than it was when I was a kid, and I’m not that old. But I’m old enough to know that concerns that seemed abstract to me when I was younger (“the economy,” whatever that was) are very real.
I’m writing to you from the second stop of our journey: Washington, D.C. We paused for the first night outside of Knoxville, where one branch of my husband’s family — his father, stepmother, half-sister, and half-sister’s family — lives. When was the last time you drove across Tennessee? I’ve traversed our state dozens of times, but I’m never not mildly startled by how long it takes, heading east, to get across it. All the more so considering that, from our home in Midtown, we can reach either Arkansas or Mississippi inside 20 minutes.
There’s something to be said for journeys to new lands, full of surprise and unfamiliarity. But I also believe in the power of retracing one’s steps. We’re re-introduced to past versions of ourselves along the way, and maybe we learn more about who we’re becoming in the process.
The drive across Tennessee also reminds me how little allegiance I feel to the state as a whole. I’m a Memphian through-and-through, but a Tennessean? Technically, yes, my license plate and driver’s license say so. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling far more spiritually connected to our neighbors in the Mississippi Delta than to, say, Cookeville or Johnson City.
We’re in D.C. for a few days. Cameron’s attending a legal-writing conference, while I work in the dining room of our Chevy Chase Airbnb, and my stepson, Noah, and mother-in-law, Nan, kick around the city where Noah was born 14 years ago. When we leave D.C., we’ll continue north until we reach upstate New York. There, we’ll spend a few days at an idyllic Adirondack lake called Big Moose where my dad’s family has vacationed for several generations. It’s a glorious area full of cool lakes rolled with morning fog, lush green mountains dotted with waterfalls, loons, and not actually many moose (a few hundred, by recent estimates, which is more than there were when I was a kid).
I met my great-grandparents at Big Moose when I was a baby, not that I remember that occasion. In later years, my parents and I canoed the lake; we climbed mountain peaks; we crunched salt-and-vinegar chips while reading novels on the dock; we built fires in the cabin at night, even in the summer, when temperatures dipped into the 40s. This will be my first trip to the lake without either parent. Dad and I trekked north a few times after Mom died, but now they’re both gone, leaving me to tend the family memories and forge new ones, too.
There’s something to be said for journeys to new lands, full of surprise and unfamiliarity. But I also believe in the power of retracing one’s steps. We’re re-introduced to past versions of ourselves along the way, and maybe we learn more about who we’re becoming in the process. Here’s the rest stop where, when I was 9, we assembled sandwiches while swarmed by flies. Here’s the exit where we saw a rainbow. Here’s Bristol, on the Tennessee-Virginia border, which reliably provoked my mother to sing a few bars of “The Bristol Stomp” (never mind that the song’s about Bristol, England). Repetition, with difference.
Repetition, with difference: that could be the theme of this year’s City Guide, In recent years, we delivered annual guides adjusted for their moments: 2020 focused on the ways local organizations, businesses, and individuals had reinvented their operations to stay safe during the unvaccinated first year of Covid. In 2021, we talked about Memphis opening up again, but so much was still uncertain (as it always is, if we’re honest). This year’s August issue is the closest in a long while to what we might call a traditional City Guide. You won’t read much about pandemic adjustments — that’s just the water we all swim in, nowadays. You will be updated about all manner of Memphis arts, music (the blues!), people, business, food, nightlife, and more.
So much has changed over the past few years. But in those changes, maybe we see more clearly what Memphis is, has been, and can be. Sort of like the feeling of driving I-40 for the umpteenth time.
