The Pleasant Ridge Adventure
The trip to Tennessee this past weekend was supposed to be mostly related to my role as the daughter of aging parents. They were going to fly to Nashville as would my husband and I, then we would rent a car and I would drive them to a family reunion and around to visit my dad’s relatives. After our Friday morning visit to my aunt and then some lunch, we discussed what to do with the rest of our day. We decided to “ride up to Pleasant Ridge” where my aunt said there was a cemetery with the graves of some of my dad’s ancestors. What followed was the most remarkable series of events.
After many miles of narrow, winding roads up and down ridges and into and back out of “hollers,” we had several new friends, found family we did not know we had, found the graves of ancestors going as far back as one born in 1699, found just how much things can change, and found how some things change not at all. We heard so many stories of how things were when my dad was growing up in “the holler” as one of the fifteen children of a farmer. We drove down roads that have been flattened and straightened considerably in the seventy-five years since my dad drove them as a teenager and young man. We learned that the Cannon County, Tennessee community is still interconnected and interrelated, nearly to the level it was nearly a hundred years ago.
I may have mentioned it here before, but I am a “military brat.” I grew up living on or very near Air Force bases amidst other Air Force families. Even though we would visit both sides of the family, people who were deeply rooted in their communities, I really never thought about how different we were. As I got older, I started to realize how growing up in a rootless and transient environment can have both positive and negative results. I think roots must be some basic human need, because I have always, at some level, wanted to belong somewhere. As a kid, I chose to claim Tennessee as my place of origin, although I never lived there except the four years I spent at the University of Tennessee.
As I have thought about this past Friday, I have realized a few unrelated things. First, people in rural Tennessee stay rooted at a higher rate than people in rural Texas do. I am not saying either way is right; it is just interesting. Second, some people live their life then fade into oblivion, while some are remembered long, long after their deaths. I have been wondering what makes the difference. Third, the more we “progress,” the farther we get away from our basic humanity — as in air conditioning, technology, and commerce have taken us away from the land and away from each other. In contrast, technology did help us find the ancestors’ graves and, in the process, connected us back to living people.
One final thought…Listen to the stories, write things down, record people’s voices. Life moves very fast and opportunities must be grabbed.