Wednesday, February 17, 2016

American gods.


"There was a sense of continuity on this island that scared him, and that he found desperately reassuring." - Neil Gaiman


I arrive at Lookout Mountain in Georgia while standing in Nashville, Tennessee. Even at 11:05am, the line for Hattie B's is out the door and into 40 degree January air. My eyes are fixed down into the mass-market paperback, my fingerprints overcast from the ink leeching off the pages of Shadow's story. He tied up, bleeding out in a tree as his wife and the dying'off American Gods arrived at Rock City and its seven'state vista atop the mountain for the novel's climax.

500 thumbed pages earlier, a "Caveat, and Warning for Travelers" cautioned that the settings in the story to come were real. Forgotten tourist traps, abandoned flags of optimism pierced into the Twentieth Century America ground just off the arteries of our interstate highways. Rock City the latest in a line that followed Wisconsin's House on the Rock, and Cairo, Illinois, and the lonely Kansas plaque stamped in the geographical center of the nation. To be looked for and found at the reader-turned-traveler's peril. As for what Lookout Mountain truly looked liked, in the moment I left it to imagination, to Neil Gaiman's description rather than the certainty of Google Images. My fingers were now too concentrated on the hot chicken and my plastic cup of beer.

After my lunch of Hattie B's it was into the heart of Nashville, parking my rental car off Lower Broadway and the honky'tonks still hung-over at noon on a Thursday. I turned the corner and headed toward the dormant light bulbs lined up, poised to belt out CASH the moment the darkness took over for the sun. There's far too much in Nashville to squeeze in to a 3 day bachelor party weekend, so I visited the Johnny Cash Museum on my own, on my day'early exploration of the city. Half artifacts, half interactivity, the not-quite-three-year old museum has everything a die-hard fan would want, and enough of Cash's work alive via technology to hook generations of new ones as well. The relics snaked the walkways and spanned decades. His guitar from the "Hurt" video, Folsom Prison inmate issue metal cups from his iconic concert there, his Air Force dog tags, a hand'improvised and crayon'colored Cash family coat of arms. But the item that struck me breathless is back at the start, in the very first case. 

Back in high school in Arkansas, Johnny Cash didn't even have a first name yet. The Air Force wouldn't force him to elongate his initial into a full word for another few months, so he was still simply J R. During his senior year, J R, the boy who would grow up to be "The Wanderer," who'd "been everywhere, man" went on his first real trip ever, to see a little of America before he signed up to serve her in the Korean War. It was on that Senior Trip with his classmates that he went to Nashville for the first time, the class taking a meandering, scenic way there. The museum has the lone postcard he sent his parents from his journey, scrawled simply "Having a good time," and a photograph of a pensive J R next to his two smiling friends from atop the same rock'cragged viewpoint as the one in the drawing on the postcard's front. A lookout with a seven'state vista. 

I never heard of Rock City or Lookout Mountain until about an hour earlier. Despite starting the book after me, my best friend made it to the pages of Lookout two weeks before I managed to. The novel came out a decade before this museum ever opened its doors, so I don't know when Neil Gaiman made it there and decided to put it in his work. According to the postmark, J R Cash made it to Lookout Mountain on May 4, 1950 and chose there to send the briefest of missives home from, that would, sixty-five years later, make it into a display case of a museum bearing his name. Preserving his legacy.

The timing is just about impossible. The random choice to start that book instead of dozens of others a month earlier. Four weeks worth of countless variables in reading patterns, 2 or 3 pages chipped away on each subway ride to work, that all had to go just right for me to hit page 485 and its obscure destination, with its forgotten charm just in time to see that lone postcard. Something mailed 4 months after Eisenhower was inaugurated, when my mother was not yet 2.

Some people will tell you that everything happens for a reason. Usually while you're under the weight of tragedy. When things are going well, coincidences are a wink from your Guardian Angel. Others will credit fate, or destiny, for even the slightest of life's alignments clicking softly into place. And they could be right, and even if not I'm happy they've found a life philosophy that works for them. For me, I don't believe in Jesus or in angels watching over me, or in anything as intricately planned and preconceived as destiny. The overlapping lives and experiences I see, and cherish, and am grateful to find myself a part of, a participant in, aren't held together by fate, but rhythms. The pattern of time is a melody, accompanied with simple words that everyone can relate to, but that carry in them the collected experiences of our centuries. A chorus that repeats and strengthens. Your confidence growing in each renewed familiarity. Life and shared memories, even those separated by decades, or by layers of narrative, are the lyrics of an American folk song. Cash's American recordings. They're simply random moments, no less gorgeous or poignant to the one experiencing them if they don't point to some greater being or design. For me, it's beautiful enough to let Johnny Cash yet again tell me a little more about the world we shared.