There is a police car blocking the entrance to Overton Park.
Normally in these pages, I would be telling you about my latest excursion to a fun and fascinating destination. I was planning trips to Louisville for the Kentucky Derby and the Great Smoky Mountains before COVID-19 took non-essential travel off the table. Once the depth of the pandemic became apparent, the Memphis staff discussed what would be best for our readers, who were either stuck at home or forced to risk their health as essential workers on the biological front lines. A long hike in the woods, we decided, would be a refreshing few hours away from the cold glow of the smartphone screen. But on the day I opened my browser to find a suitable state park to tromp through, I found instead that Governor Bill Lee had ordered them closed. The world was shrinking.
So, on a beautiful spring day, I decided to do what generations of Memphis writers before me had done: Seek inspiration in the Old Forest. I laced up my hiking boots and set off into the wilds of Midtown. The streets were eerily quiet, but not zombie-apocalypse deserted. The air was clearer than usual; the deep blue above me reminded me of the days after 9/11, when the airport roar subsided, and no contrails divided the sky. I was wearing goggle-like sunglasses and a cloth mask my wife, Laura Jean, made from an old, gray t-shirt.
I’ve lived in Midtown for 30 years and have always thought of Overton Park as my backyard. It never occurred to me that it might not be accessible until I turned a corner and found my way blocked by a man in blue. Everything that has happened — all the cancellations, the closures, the job losses, and above all the wave of sickness and death that won’t crest — hit me anew. I came for a simple escape, and there was none.
One of the Brooks Museum’s stone lions looks across a nearly empty Overton Park.
The cop in his car sees me staring. Normally, confronting a member of the Memphis Police Department with your features concealed by a mask, sunglasses, and hat can lead to bad outcomes. But these are not normal times. “Can I go for a walk?” I ask him, pointing to the distant tree line.
“Sure,” he says.
I’m relieved. “I thought the park was closed!”
“No cars,” he says. “But you can walk.”
I ramble over the deserted golf course, and it feels wonderfully transgressive. As I top the hill to the east of Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Greensward stretches before me. There are a few people here, mostly indestructible young folks. A gaggle of girls sits on an island of blankets, gathered around a board game, soaking up the sun. How many days have I spent here, reading under a tree, strolling next to Rainbow Lake, or sharing a picnic lunch on the rolling lawn?
The metal barriers which have marked the front lines of the fierce battle between the Memphis Zoo’s parking needs and Midtowners for whom this park is sacred ground are stacked in silver piles. I make it a point to breach the line and reclaim the green space for my pedestrian needs. The Rainbow Lake fountains are shut down, and the normally hopping playground is closed. I walk past the dog park and through the arches, and the Old Forest closes in around me.
Why do we travel? It seems wanderlust has been hardwired into human beings from the beginning. We spread out of Africa and conquered the world; then, in the twentieth century, went looking for new planets to visit. Back in the oldest days, we were expanding tribal territory and finding accommodations for an increasing population. But now we go just to go, to see new sights, to eat new foods, to find out what it’s like over the next hill.
In Arizona, the author emerges from Air Force One at the Pima Air and Space Museum.
For generations of Americans, satisfying that wanderlust has meant hopping in a car and hitting the road. As a young man obsessed with the Beats, I wanted to emulate Jack Kerouac and see the country as a wanderer, going where the spirit led me. The first time I got an opportunity to try was the summer before my senior year at Rhodes College. Joel, my best friend since kindergarten, had been in a motorcycle accident in the spring of 1992 and had spent the summer laid up on his mother’s couch with a broken leg. Now he was ambulatory again, and had a fat insurance settlement check from the drunk driver who hit him.
We set out south in my Mazda 626 to get some beach time. I brought along my Pentax camera and a couple of rolls of 35mm film. We had some comically huge cigars and took pictures of ourselves puffing on the disgusting stogies in stupid situations across the Southeast. At the statue of Vulcan in Birmingham, Alabama, I dropped trou to get a bare-butt shot to match the god’s heroic haunches.
In St. Augustine, Florida, Joel took a lawn chair into the surf and grinned as the waves broke over him. We gawked at the beautiful women in Miami and utterly failed to pick up any of them. On the tiny island of Shark Key, we stopped to have a beer at a little beachside bar and rented a couple of jet-skis. It was a quiet day, so the owner joined us and took us on an unforgettable tour of tiny inlets and hidden beaches. The next morning, we woke up on a beach in Key West and, somewhat belatedly, got an expensive hotel room to stay one night before turning back. It was there I discovered that I had loaded the film in my camera incorrectly, and all the funny images of the trip were irretrievably gone.
Two years later, I set out on a much more ambitious trip. LK and I were close friends who had bonded in the Rhodes writing program. We saved our pennies, bought a tent, quit our jobs, and set out West for a monthlong road trip. With very little money (I recall having $480 in my bank account) we skipped from park to park and crashed on the occasional couch.
In New Mexico, we made a point of going to Roswell’s International UFO Museum and Resource Center, which, despite the highfalutin’ name was a grade-A roadside tourist trap with chintzy dioramas of crashed flying saucers. In Arizona, we looked out over the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, but both of us agreed we were more impressed with the majestic Zion National Park. We conned our way into a University of Arizona faculty building in an attempt to track down one of our favorite living poets, Norman Dubie. We found his office deserted. At the aircraft boneyard that is now the Pima Air and Space Museum, LK snapped my picture emerging from the Air Force One where Lyndon Johnson had taken the oath of office in November 1963.
As we passed through Las Vegas, we decided to scrape up the change in the car and play some slots, just so we could say we gambled in Sin City. We parked in a 30-minute space at the Luxor (as a Memphian, I’m always attracted to pyramids) and set out with $1.50 each. With a few pulls of the lever, we somehow won enough money to buy gas to get us to Laguna Beach, then north along the Pacific Coast Highway all the way to San Francisco. We stopped in Santa Cruz to ride the roller coaster on the boardwalk that had been featured in the vampire movie The Lost Boys. We camped among the redwoods in Sequoia National Park and in the ash fields of Mount Saint Helens. We slept under the stars in Montana, visited our second Grand Canyon of the trip in Yellowstone (yes, they have one there, too), and communed with prairie dogs at Devil’s Tower, where we hoped to get picked up by the mothership from Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Then, broke, filthy, and completely sick of each other, we drove for 24 straight hours back to Memphis.
Discarded concrete urns rest in a hidden clearing deep in Overton Park.
Memphis keeps the Old Forest intact to remind us of what this land looked like before the buildings rose and the streets sprawled. Even though you’re only a few hundred yards from Poplar Avenue, you can still feel like you’re lost in the woods — especially when the city is quarantine quiet. I wander with no goal but movement through trees that don’t note my passing. I pull my mask down from my nose. It’s good to just smell the oxygen.
The Beat poets talked about using travel to find yourself. But when I tried, I don’t think it worked that way. I’ve seen much beauty, and satisfied my itch for novelty. But I couldn’t run from my doubts, my anxieties, myself. I only took my baggage sightseeing.
Deep in the Old Forest, there is a clearing where broken, man-sized urns are scattered like the litter from a giant’s wine party. At first, I am surprised by the sight, but then I remember being here before, in what seemed like another lifetime.
Under the rustling green canopy, I remember a moment when I was an undergrad. LK and I were at a reading with our poetry teacher, Richard Lyons. If I’m an above-average wordsmith, it’s Professor Lyons’ doing. As we were lamenting the lack of poetic job opportunities, he said, “Maybe you should try travel writing. You can do description, and I’ve always thought a poet would be good at it.”
Some trips you take by yourself, but the best trips are shared experiences. In the summer of 1999, I took one of the most consequential trips of my life with my then-girlfriend, Laura Jean Hocking. We both had a little time off work around the July 4 holiday, so we drove down to Navarre Beach and got a cheap room in the Holidome, a massive Holiday Inn property dating from the early 1970s that was, at the time, the only thing on a deserted stretch of coast. I brought along my first-ever purchase from Amazon, a thick trade paperback copy of The Lord of the Rings, and read it under a beach umbrella. We made sandwiches from a cooler we kept in the room and flew kites in the surf.
Our relationship had been stormy up until that point, and it would be so again. But on that beach, in that crumbling hotel with a great indoor pool, we discovered that we traveled well. We brought along a jam box for the beach, and the big hit of the trip was Stevie Wonder’s 1976 masterpiece Songs in the Key of Life. Laura Jean and I have traveled many miles together since then — she often accompanies me as photographer on trips for this magazine. But we will always remember heading home along Highway 98 as the beach faded into the distance with “Love’s In Need of Love Today” bubbling from the car stereo.
The Holidome was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina and never rebuilt. Now, formerly sleepy Navarre Beach is as built up with resorts and condos as the rest of the Emerald Coast.
The author drives through Las Vegas.
By 2000, Joel had moved to Durango, Colorado. I visited him that summer. We hadn’t seen each other in years and had a lot of catching up to do. One day, while he was working as a chef, I took a solo day trip to Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. I wish I had known the UNESCO World Heritage Site lies at the end of 20 miles of washboard desert road before I set out in my rented Chevy Cavalier. After swerving through two dry stream beds to get there, I marveled at the maze of preserved pueblos, some of which are more than a thousand years old. Once, this was one of the largest cities in North America, with a trading network that stretched from the Pacific Northwest to Panama. It lay in obscurity for hundreds of years, just far enough off the beaten path near the Four Corners to be safely ignored.
I had anticipated a national park with all the amenities, but Chaco Canyon wasn’t set up to attract tourists. Only water was available at the tiny welcome center, and so my lunch was a pack of airline peanuts. To this day, I ask for extra snacks on a plane, and stow them in my backpack for later emergencies.
As I walked down a cliffside path to check out millennia-old petroglyphs, I saw storm clouds approaching from the West. Remembering the dry stream beds, I realized I needed to get out of there before a flash flood stranded me. I raced down the barely-there desert road and just made pavement before the storm hit. Only I could get rained out in the desert.
A couple of days later, Joel and I went on another one of the car-camping adventures we called “Amok in America.” This time, I made sure to load the camera properly. We drove through Monument Valley, the iconic landscape director John Ford loved to put in Westerns like The Searchers. The poor little Cavalier struggled up a switchback cliff until we found one of the most spectacular overlooks in America. We wandered through the monoliths of Bryce Canyon, then headed to Moab, Utah.
Arches National Park is the place where animator Chuck Jones set the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons. It’s an otherworldly landscape of delicate, suspended sandstone formations. We arrived at the park and got the last available camping site in Devil’s Garden around noon on July 2nd. Feeling indestructible after days of high desert hiking, we loaded up all the water bottles we had and hit the 12.6-kilometer Primitive Trail just as the blazing desert sun passed its zenith. The hike was one of the most amazing experiences of my life, and it damn near killed me. As we were scrambling over rocks and under Landscape Arch and the Double O, our water ran out quickly. The sunscreen we kept applying didn’t seem to work at all. By the time we got back to the car, my stomach was cramping — a sign of serious dehydration. As the AC took hold, I put the camera on the dashboard and took the first selfie of my life. I wanted to remember how I felt in that moment.
We still go Amok in America from time to time. Joel, my other bestie from home Chip, and I periodically go on hiking trips to catch up — most recently last year, when we did a weekend in Savage Gulf, Tennessee. I also caught up with LK, who now lives in the Czech Republic, last year. We hadn’t spoken in the decades since our epic trip but quickly fell back into our friendship. Laura Jean and I bought a house together in 2003 and married in 2007. She remains my favorite traveling companion.
Why do we travel? For adventure, to see things we’ve never seen, to challenge ourselves, to experience life more deeply. To know ourselves, our friends, and our home, better than before.
I emerge from the Old Forest, blinking in the sunlight. My mask is still around my neck, but an approaching jogger reminds me to put it back into place. As I walk past the Greensward, I turn to take a last look. Maybe I would see myself, under a tree, reading a book of poetry.
