Q: Where in the continental United States can you drive for more than 400 miles or nine hours across most of two states without passing a 7-Eleven or Walmart or any other business, without seeing a billboard or any other commercial sign, without any evidence that you are living in 2011 except the car you are in and those you pass?
A: The Natchez Trace. Running from Nashville, Tenn., to Natchez, Miss., this scenic highway is a 444-mile museum. Except for about a minute near Jackson, Miss., when you pass over Interstate 55, you might as well be in the 1930s, when the road was built. And except for the facts that the road is paved and land tilled, you might as well be in the 1820s, when the Trace was hiked by flatboat pilots headed north, or 1812, when Andrew Jackson marched his troops down it to New Orleans, or 1500 when the Choctaws and Chickasaws traded and hunted along it.
Today the Trace rolls across woodlands and grasslands past farms, remnants of the original trail, waterfalls, Native American burial mounds and two Civil War battlefields. It does so at a leisurely, two-laned pace (50 mph speed limit) without any trucks or much traffic, following the contour of the land through morning mists and evening sunsets along a path blazed in prehistory by animals migrating from the salt licks of Tennessee to grazing lands of the Mississippi Valley. It is a long, narrow historical theme park in the way Williamsburg or Dearborn Village are: on the very spot and painstakingly accurate in some ways while being sanitized and made presentable in others.
No comments:
Post a Comment