As a travel entertainment I’m reading Stephan Ambrose’s biography of Meriwether Lewis and Ambrose’s account of the expedition that explored the west along the Missouri River and across the Rockies to the Pacific. This exploration was at the behest of Thomas Jefferson who had just made the Louisiana Purchase and about doubled the size of the country.

Lewis and Jefferson were both Virginians and the agricultural practices of plantations and slaves required more and more new land. We live sometimes uncomfortably with the results. When Lewis set out for the west there were three passes through the Appalachians and yet more than a million people had already crossed looking for economic opportunity.

If you turn on the “no freeways” filter on your GPS and cross from the North Carolina Piedmont into eastern Tennessee around Johnson City your van will get a workout and when you get to the other side your arms will feel like you’ve gone 10 rounds with Mohammed Ali from so much steering. Some of the switchbacks in the road were so acute and long that I must have run right over the road I just traveled.

On the North Carolina side, my old friend Cynthia told me that half of the trees in Mitchell County had been knocked down by Hurricane Helene. As a drawer of trees, by looking at a hillside I could well believe it. The horizontal lines of fallen dead wood were as numerous as the vertical lines of live standing trees. Road patches showed where entire hillside roads had been replaced. And many were still closed awaiting repair or rebuilding.

Shortly after crossing into Tennessee I saw a sign directing me to a waterfall and I turned to follow it. The road led me down to a small town on a small river and out along that river on a small road. The river had cut a steep-sided little valley with only the occasional small plot of ground suitable for a house. There were a few houses on these, but mostly there were RVs parked next to ruined homes that clearly were damaged by the storm that happened two years earlier. It was a pretty little valley, but clearly you didn’t want to be living there in a flood.

 I got stopped by a flag man because they were making repairs to the road ahead. I could see it wasn’t going to be a quick exchange of alternating traffic because what they were doing was much more involved, interesting, and scary than normal travel stoppages. They seemed to be rebuilding the valley wall underneath the old roadbed in order to replace the riverside lane that had gone missing. There were dump trucks and an excavator perched so far out over the edge of the precipice that to look at it gave me the willies. But I couldn’t stop from watching.

I thought about all the roads we’ve built in this country. It’s an engineering marvel. In Virginia I had just visited my mother for her 99th birthday. None of the roads I’ve ridden on since I’ve left home were in existence when my mother was born. In a lifetime we’ve covered the country with roads and cars. 

Have you ever built a road? Or just walked through a thick wooded area to get to a favorite fishing spot? A bridge?  Even a little bridge over a stream on a golf course? The most basic woods road or driveway is a piece of work. 

 In the Ozarks one day I drove north through the endless winding snakes up one mountainside and then down the next only to wind back up and down again all day long. The next day I removed the no freeways filter. I almost flew down the interstate in the opposite direction where they had built bridges over all the valleys that I had wound up and down the day before.  They even dug a tunnel through the top of the highest mountain so you could fly down the state of Arkansas in your car from mountain top to mountain top at 70 mph looking down into the haze of the valleys below. 

  So after this long reverie about roads while waiting for the flagman I got the wave and continued on to the waterfall, which turned out to be a little gem. There was a sign warning me not to jump off the falls because it might kill me, but no guard rails or fences. Dolly must have read it, because she had the good sense not to get too close.

The road led only to the few scattered homes along the river and to the waterfall so we had to retrace our trip past the construction. I realized on the way out, with more appreciation, that three of the bridges on the river road were brand new. 

Near the end of my travels through Tennessee, I drove on the Natchez Trace Parkway. The Natchez Trace is one of America’s oldest roads. Who knows how long native Americans were using it before it became one of the early primary roads on the frontier?

I parked the van and we spent the night at the Meriwether Lewis monument. It marks his grave. He died here in a cabin at a farmstead called Grinders Stand — of blood loss from two mysterious gunshot wounds while returning to Washington to report on how things were in the west. Even though I know now how the book ends I’m going to keep reading. It’s that good.

The monument is a single broken column signifying unrealized potential. Having a little sense of his accomplishments it seemed odd and awesome to be standing there completely alone at his grave. Dolly disrespectfully marked the spot; she hasn’t read the book yet.