The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
still standing, its siding burned brown, windows empty. Here’s a bank vault, slung the length of two football fields. Here’s a shot tower, never used, abandoned after the moratorium in ’92. Tumbleweeds rest on the broken tarmac against the guardhouse. It all looks so ordinary, the orange plastic webbing seen in countless construction zones, the ground bristling with rusty rebar. If you stare at these things, even from this remove, you carry something of them with you. Brilliant blue sky; the dust the photographer breathed, close now as the tongue in your mouth. Turn the knob of your own front door and observe how it smokes in the heat’s first blast. Stand at the kitchen sink and watch the window bow inward and break, the eyelet curtain tumbling out and tearing free. Wake suddenly from your last dream to the fireball’s flash and realize the shock wave is coming, will be here in a single second’s tick.
Click. The guitar case snaps shut. Click. He opens a stiff new pair of glasses. Click. Dog tags rattle in the soldier’s hand. Click. A photographer documents the crash scene. Click. The arm of the record player drops a 45 on the turntable. Click. A soldier stacks cans in the pantry, bottom to rim. What’s still there, in that dark, silent room? A stray jug of water; an empty coffee cup. In a crack in the floor, a safety pin.
All I got here is a bunch of dead man’s clothes to wear.
—The Searchers, 1956
That’ll be the day. When Ethan Edwards says it, it’s cynical; he’s seen it all, and none of it’s good. But in Buddy’s voice, the words change. Baby, I got your heart, he’s saying; you ain’t gonna leave me. It’d kill me if you did, you know that. He’s brave, but vulnerable, too, and maybe that’s his gift, turning bitterness into hope, an alchemy possible only because he’s so young, clean-cut, the favorite son. Will you say goodbye; will I cease to be? Not a chance.
Close your eyes. They’re in the studio in Clovis, in rooms close in summer and drafty in winter; a studio that was formerly a grocery store, smelling of paint and mice. He sits in a corner, threading a fresh string onto the guitar and tightening it, adjusting, tightening again. Meanwhile, Jerry’s working on the drum part. Norman Petty, the producer, says, “That cha-cha isn’t going to work,” and he’s right. He charges not by the hour, but by the song, and they like that; gives you time to get it right. They try different things until they hit on the idea of paradiddles, tacka tacka tacka tacka, a rhythm that rolls like breakers, and when they try a take they have to wait because a passing truck makes the windows rattle. Outside, it’s a hundred dark miles back to Lubbock, and nobody’s in the mood to quit. Grab dinner, come back, and work some more, and later they’ll stretch out on the narrow beds in back and sleep.
Maybe sometime during the night one of those big old thunderstorms rolls up out of the west, and maybe they stand outside the studio and watch it come. Forks of cloud-to-ground lightning silhouette long reefs of cloud, flashing on eighteen-wheelers barreling toward Vegas with a ways yet to go. Arc, crack, boom. Moist wind presses the boys against the wall, the smoke from their cigarettes swirling around their heads and shunting up into the downdraft. Time stops cold in moments like this, everything sharper in the strange light, the ambient electricity strong enough to raise the hair on your arms. Rain on gravel, hot smoke in your throat. When they say, We better go in, you say, Give me a minute. Lean against the still-warm cinderblock and feel the storm coming. If it’s got your number, ain’t nothing you can do. It’s late by now, the night almost gone, but you’re swinging with caffeine and nicotine and a head full of notions. Inside, your friends are waiting, and there’s a seat with your name on it. Soon you’ll walk through that door, an explosion now from close by and closer still, not yet, not yet, now. Does it really happen like that? You bet your life it does.
Rock City and Other Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age
THIS WAY NEXT
—Trailside sign, Rock City
Frieda Carter was an entrepreneur’s wife, and all she wanted was a garden. But it grew. In 1930, she walked through the woods with a string in her hand, letting it trail behind. Across the big flat stone, down a vale and through a narrow cleft, up a hill and out to the edge of the mountain, where the sandstone fell sharply away. Lookout Mountain was Georgia, but the valley was Tennessee, close enough to spit. This is a place where many boundary lines touch.
Do as she did and head down the narrow path through the boulders, winding past hemlocks and bluebells, each plant neatly labeled. Autumn fern, Florida azalea, leatherleaf mahonia, Lenten rose, sourwood, buttonbush. The Enchanted Trail doubles back on itself; you can’t see where you’re going, but you know where you’ve been. The brochure in your hand notes each location of interest.
Which came first, paving the way or planting the specimens? Laying stone for bridges or saying the names? Fat Man’s Squeeze, Needle’s Eye, Tortoise Rock. Who claimed (a stretch) that you could see seven states; who sent money overseas for the fallow deer? These deer, entirely white, bleached as old negatives, recline on granite slabs. Are they statues? people whisper. Not until one of the creatures flicks away an insect with its ear do we move on, spell broken.
Standing here at the lookout, lean against the guardrail and sweep your eyes over the rim of the curving Earth. Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. But these faraway border distinctions must be taken on faith. What you’re sure of are the new subdivisions spreading over the grassy fields below, the pines’ dull green, a barn roof painted SEE ROCK CITY. Closer now: drop a quarter into the slot and fix your eyes to the peepholes. The cold metal hugs the bridge of your nose as you swivel the viewer toward various sights of interest: the nearby waterfall, ice rimming its edges; Stone Face, Missionary Ridge, Lover’s Leap; the freeway.
High atop Lookout Mountain, overlooking Chattanooga, sits Rock City—garden, grotto, moneymaker. It opened in 1932, and if you’ve heard of it you can thank Garnet Carter; he started it, started, too, the marketing campaign that made the place famous, paying to have SEE ROCK CITY painted on barn roofs all over the Southeast. Today, thanks to stricter billboard laws, the barns have become relics. The Rock City gift shop offers birdhouses, coffee mugs, and ball caps shaped like those old barns.
I haven’t been since I was a little girl and am not expecting much. At first, Rock City seems like any other walk through the woods. But see the circles cut in plywood? Look carefully through these round portals at all the dark dreams on display.
The iron handrails sweat cold drops on this chilly day. Next up: Fairyland Caverns, a partially man-made cave lined with dioramas of fairy-tale scenes, lit with ultraviolet light. It’s a strange adjunct to an otherwise conventional rock garden, and the black light is what makes it unusual. To get there, you follow the trail to this entrance, Diamond Corridor.
Step into the shadowy portico and let your eyes adjust. Sparkling minerals cover the walls: crystals of dogtooth quartz, rough blossoms of calcite, glassy chunks of smoky and rose quartz. The gems gleam in the poor light. Coral lines the ceiling, some bleached white, some dyed pink, all of it from somewhere else. Yes, I remember this from my childhood visit—this entrance room, covered in glittering rocks. Back then, I’d always kept one eye on the ground, searching for treasure. During the day I pored over field guides and begged my parents to take me on rockhounding trips; at night, I dreamed of stumbling upon caches of rare specimens. I must have coveted the quartz lining this room, would have been tempted to worry a piece loose, like a tooth, knowing that even the impulse was wrong. I would have longed to sit in this niche for hours, hoarding this sharp beauty.
Not long ago, I uncovered my old rock collection, its specimens packed away in newspaper. There were tiny garnets I had sieved from mud at a North Carolina mine; quartz, still stained from the red clay it had been buried in; fluorite crystals, purple and white, safe in their old pharmacy bottle. Other specimens were glued to cardstock that provided bits of information: galena, heavy