Sticks of Fire: a Tampa blog

Well, well, the Bible Belt weekend was pretty intense. Nashville is not the main draw to the area at all, though. The awesomest part of the whole trip was Kentucky, without a doubt. Nashville was OK. Rural Tennessee was very cool, but Kentucky was amazing.

The flight into Nashville was cheap, under $200, and the hotel, the Wyndham Union Station was fabulous. The building used to be a train station, and Wyndham renovated it to match its original look as much as possible. Original wooden timetables have been restored by artists who painted over the little numbers in the same font and crinkle-crackled pages from schedule books are framed throughout the lobby.

Everything in sight is marble, and the bed was so fluffy and cozy, I couldn’t help but kick like a crazy bike-rider once I got under the covers, giggling and smashing my face in the pillows, which had whole goose feathers sticking out from cotton weave. The kitchen also serves, daily, at three o’clock, some delicious kind of treat. One day it was chocolate marshmallow cookies. Another day it was chocolate chip cannolis. Very wonderful, all of it, and the connolis totally made up for the part where bottled water was four bucks a pop.

The main downtown area of Nashville was within five blocks of the Union Station, and that was a big part of why I picked it, but it actually turns out that downtown Nashville can be summed pretty quickly. Imagine five different venues in a row, only they’re all Mastry’s on Central Avenue in the ‘Burg. That’s Nashville’s bar scene - smoky, dingy and crowded with stumbling drunks in kinda dirty clothes.

The only joint that redeemed the place was Tootsies…

The only joint that redeemed the place was Tootsies, which I hear is sort of a legendary hotspot. I really dig country music in the way that I really dig Irish music - I grew up with it and the Catholic in me loves a sad story. The skippity tra-la-las in rhythm mean people normally considered leadfooted in today’s milieu of crappy, beatjacking hiphop can bob their head and, well, it’s hard not to feel OK about your life when you hear the baleful moaning of some poor singer who’s just lost his bucket of moonshine to a brute with a bigger truck.

Tootsies got right on this with rip-roaring country drinking songs. Within minutes of the band starting up, middle-aged guys with enormous beer bellies were two-stepping and hollering and women with way too much perfume and cakey makeup were throwing their hands in the air. They were pretty spectacular and a serious challenge to anyone who says white folks can’t dance.

Basically, though, I can go to bars anywhere in the world, so I wanted to see some of the rural loveliness I had been dreaming about all month. I went north into a little speck-a-leck no-town called White House and walked around some fields, crunching snow and sorta staring at everything, blinking in the glare of crusting ice. I’ve never seen just fields like that, where nobody’s doing something with the land - no houses, stores, bus stops, train stations, restaurants, apartment buildings, nothing, no “Future Home of Nations Bank” or “Whitney and Walker - Only 3 Units Left!” signs, just land, carrying light plow marks and kinda gently rolling up and down, but mostly flat. I’ve seen, like, apple orchards and pumpkin patches and suburbs and mountains, but never untouched, I don’t even know what you call it, just plain, regular country or something. It was breathtaking, I have to admit.

Then, of course, I realized I was totally on private property, because there were houses in the distance, and I must look fairly ridiculous to any land-loving Tennesseans who might happen upon me in a fur coat and crystal-studded sunglasses and pink knee-high boots, staring at absolutely nothing like it was coolest thing in the world, so I went and had some lunch at a place called Stop 30 and it was delicious.

I’m pretty sure my chicken was killed especially for me, and there was a table of cowboys next to my table and we were very interested in each other. I was especially interested by this snippet that I overheard from one of them on his cell phone.

He was teasing some girl and he said, “Now if you keep talkin’ like that to me, I’m gonna take that picture from last week and cut you right out of it and glue in a picture of Pam Anderson from a magazine!” All that big, strict, tough guy stuff! Real pictures that you can cut! “Pam” Anderson, the only fantasy girl around and she only lives in magazines! Gluing things together! Fantastic! I had to smash my face into my jacket so that my grinning didn’t give away my eavesdropping.

The old lady who ran the place tried to get me to try cracklins, too, but I just couldn’t do it. Cracklins is the skin ripped off a pig’s shoulder and then deep fried in lard! Aaaahhhhh! I was game, but the more I thought about it, I just couldn’t and she thought that was pretty funny. She was really sweet.

I went into Kentucky next and that was so, so cool. I walked through the woods and over hills and crunched around in more snow and threw snowballs at trees and spotted all types of animal tracks! I saw a family of deer and they weren’t afraid of me at all! The mom deer even started to approach me a little bit when a leaf that must have looked like a snack blew by.

I walked along a really high crest over the Green River, which really is very bright green from acid rain washing over limestone, and that made me a little nervous, because it was a really, really long way down, but I was fine. I saw all types of frozen waterfalls and icicles, too. I didn’t even mind that I ripped my coat with all the strenuous activity.

Next I took a cave tour where we climbed down a vertical shaft and every time the ranger said vertical shaft I had to suppress a smile, because, I’m sorry, but what does that sound like? There was a little bit too much talking on the cave tour for my tastes, but I sat patiently through it and we went through different paths and stuff and some other people were on, like, a crazy spelunkers adventure involving hats with lights that I wish I had known about beforehand, but, honestly, even just two hours of skittering and turning through narrow passages and slippery cave rocks was intense enough.
When I got back to Nashville, I went to Legend’s Corner, which is just a big, silly tourist trap. The walls are covered with record sleeves, but just for, like, anybody. One sleeve featured Waylon Jennings looking like he had just crawled out of a cave himself. The album was titled, “I’ve Always Been Crazy,” which, like, OK, I guess so, but then there was also an album called “Spiderman and Friends,” with, like, cartoons on it and stuff and, well, that was kinda dumb, but whatever.

The saving grace of Legend’s Corner was the short-jawed cowboy in the corner (a lot of short jaws in that area of the country, I noticed, but I didn’t want to ask about the general ethnic makeup, since that sounded a little racist in my head, even though we all know certain places attract certain groups, like the way The Dirty Jerz is a ton of Italians and Colombians, and ain’t that America or something). He practically made me cry with his poor, melancholy songs about girls who treated him bad and how he couldn’t get a handle on his drinking. I was entirely mesmerized by him and I think it must have been pretty obvious, because he kept nodding at me and when he finished his songs, he would smile at me, which made me wonder if all the sad, sad songs were an act, but then once he started again, I sure fell for it again.

All in all, it was an eye-opener of a weekend, and maybe you should go, too. Oh yeah, and the plane crew let me up in the cockpit, too! Cool, right?

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