The sun is still bravely trying to brighten my day as I drive out of Natchez, but rain is forecast, and the skies are darkening. And I have no GPS, only an old map of the Southeastern States Robert gave me. I have studied the map and have an idea of a route I could take to reach Tennessee. From the map, it looks like the most direct route might be a road outlined in green called the “Natchez Trace“. The scenic route, no less! I will try and find that, but I’m never completely sure of where I am without Google Maps. If only I had internet! But at least as far as my phone is concerned, I am in a foreign country with no mobile program including roaming. I am left at the mercy of an old, outdated roadmap and the sun, which threatens to leave me at any moment.

Outside Natchez now, the road is lonely, with few cars on the highway. I turn on the radio and decide to listen to a country-western station to get an idea of the life I imagine Southerners to live. Then I switch to right-wing talk radio, then some Christian station, then NPR. Surely with all these choices, I will get some idea of how people in Mississippi live and think. I feel a little nervous, driving along the highway. Will I really find my way into Tennessee? Will all go well? But my curiosity is stronger than my fear, and I am intrigued by the hilly scenery, the little villages, the farms, and the wooded pretty countryside – and the many churches I keep passing. Most of them are Methodist or Baptist.

In my tummy I feel a mixture of fear and pleasure at finally being completely on my own, free to explore as I will, but afraid that I might get lost, or somehow end up in a car accident. It’s been wonderful visiting family and friends, but I’ve had very little time to myself. Now here I am, on my own! But unsure of how to get to where I want to go in the country I grew up in. My thoughts range between inner commentaries about what I hear on the radio, little snatches of fear about whether I will arrive at my brother’s and how many mistakes I will make getting there, and enjoying exploring a region I have never visited.

My thoughts are focused almost entirely in the present. The only thoughts about the future are about whether it will rain, and whether I will arrive at my brother’s house today or tomorrow, at the latest, with no accidents or problems with the car. There are no thoughts about how my life will look in a year from now, let alone in a month. At this moment I have no clue that life for everyone I know, as well as for myself, will become much more frightening in a year from now than my present little tugs of apprehension. I have no inkling that it is a luxury to even be driving across a part of America. The talk on the radio is about blackfacing, racism, and whether or not a wall will be built to keep the illegal immigrants away from the Southern border to Mexico. I cannot imagine that tiny, microscopic invaders will build a much stronger, far more effective barrier to migrants than any wall. Depending on whether I’m listening to a conservative radio station or liberal, the speaker is either proclaiming Trump to be truthful or a liar.  I can’t imagine that in one year there will only be one news item across the entire world. I can’t imagine that everyone in the entire world who doesn’t live in America will be denied access into this country, including wealthy Europeans.

I drive along a country road, US Route 84, which will take me, hopefully, to a freeway, Interstate 55, and onto the Natchez Trace in Jackson. Just at the intersection of Route 84 and 55, near a town my map and the road signs promise to be Brookhaven, I finally spot a place where I can probably eat. By now, mid-afternoon, I am truly hungry. Here is a big Chevron station with a large cafeteria inside. Everything there looks delicious! Pork and red beans, potato casserole, peach cobbler. I haven’t had any Southern fried chicken during my time in the South, and I see this being served. It looks so good! And others around me, many of them black, are eating this crispy chicken. I order some legs and fries and a diet Coke. They give me some cornbread along with the chicken. There are free local newspapers available. I take one and read between mouthfuls of delicious chicken. I find an article written by someone who confesses to having belonged to a sorority during her time as a student in a college in Mississippi. She couldn’t remember what happened while she was going to college, so she went through old yearbooks. There, she discovered that she had witnessed blackfacing during her college years, thinking nothing of it at the time. By now she is ashamed of what went on during her youth, as well as her own indifference. Blackfacing, for any readers unfamiliar with the term, is the act of painting one’s face black to imitate the appearance of a black person. It was apparently a big joke in years past for white people to attend parties dressed in blackface. Thankfully, by now it is considered to be racist, insulting behavior. I am really happy to discover that people in the South, which I am coming to like more and more, want to be rid of racist attitudes.

It never crosses my mind that I am eating in the presence of strangers, that our bodies occasionally brush one another as we reach for ketchup or stand in line to pay. Focused on blackface, racism and getting into Tennessee, I cannot imagine that in a year’s time this cafeteria may be closed down, or that no cars will be lined up to buy gas, or that the employees here may well be at the unemployment office, filing for unemployment insurance or fighting to stay alive, or dead. I have no thoughts about whether many of these people of color around me may be either unemployed and unable to afford a meal of fried chicken at the local restaurant, or may even be dead, because good medical care is not there for those in America who can’t afford it. Those at the bottom of the heap, and those include black people, are the ones who will die first from this invasion of microscopic intruders, only because they can’t afford good medical care.

I fill up with gasoline, holding my bare hands to the pump, not imagining that there could be any other way of filling the gas tank, and swipe my credit card over the pump to pay, bare-handed. No one here is wearing a face mask or seems to be obsessed with hygiene. Surgical masks are not part of American life. No one has ever heard of home-made masks.

I climb back into the car and prepare for a long drive. By about five pm I’m encountering a bit more traffic from Vicksburg. How far am I from Tennessee? I need to find the Natchez Trace! Hopefully driving along there, I’ll soon be in Tennessee. Finally, I see a sign instructing me how to join the Natchez Trace. I turn off Interstate 55, onto the Natchez Trace. It is indeed green and beautiful. I am driving along a beautiful lake surrounded by pine trees. It is really getting late, but the speed limit is only 50 miles per hour, and this is only a two-lane highway! This is like driving to my grandparents’ house as a child, before there were any freeways and it took three hours to drive 120 miles! At this rate I will never reach Tennessee! But at least there is plenty of time to read the signs along this beautiful lake. I am driving along the Ross Barnett Reservoir.

There are no towns, no restaurants, not even any hotels as far as I can see. Only beautiful parkway. This was a mistake. How to get off this road? If only I had decided to pay for a toll road! But I thought the Natchez Trace would be my most direct route. Yes – if it were only a freeway.

Later I discover that this truly beautiful stretch of road was originally a footpath used by Native Americans for hunting. The parkway was built during the 1930s during the Depression by the Civilian Conservation Corps. I am unaware that I am driving along a national monument of sorts, and also that in one year’s time our country may be experiencing a depression more severe than the Great Depression of the 1930s. I don’t consider the fact that in a year’s time more people will be applying for unemployment than in the 1930s and that even more businesses may go under than during that period.

I see road signs announcing a town coming up – Williamsville. Hopefully I can get off this Trace there and rejoin Interstate 55. This proves to be possible. One hour later, by now around 6 pm, I am back on the 55, heading north. Now and then my windshield wipers swipe off a few sprinkles. A road sign tells me I am about 152 miles from Memphis, Tennessee. Well, here I can drive faster, since I’m on the freeway. Maybe I can reach Memphis, or somewhere near Memphis and stay the night there. I should be able to make it by about 8 pm, I figure.

But then it begins to rain in earnest. Rain as heavy as an ocean crashing onto the windshield. Sometimes the showers are so heavy I have to stop the car and wait for the rain to lessen in intensity. At one of these stops I phone my brother. I apologize, saying I had wildly underestimated the time it would take to reach him. I will have to find a motel somewhere to sleep in.

The next morning the rain has stopped, for now, and before nine I am back on the 55. My roadmap has shown me that in Memphis I can branch onto the Interstate 40 and drive along there until I reach Knoxville, my destination. I drive along the 55, and before I know it, I see that I must be in Tennessee because most of the license plates now are from Tennessee.

Wow, are these roads in Tennessee treacherous! Huge potholes as big as cars, at least six inches deep, keep slowing me down. Don’t they improve the highways in this State? I later read that in 2018, the city of Nashville had 9,179 potholes, compared with over 5,000 in 2017. In 2019, today, there are more than in 2018. 2019 has seen the heaviest precipitation in Tennessee on record. By 11 am, it is raining heavily again, increasing the record margin. As I drive along, the radio blaring to keep me awake and alert as much as anything else, I hear talk of highway closures. One of them is my interstate! Then I see flashing lights warning the same, with a detour sign. I am going to have to take a detour into Knoxville. How will I ever find my way to my brother on a detour without a map? On and on I drive, anxiety mounting by the minute. There is flooding on the highways. I slosh along. The water is too deep to see the potholes. Traffic is very slow, visibility poor. Sometime in the afternoon, on my detour highway, I see a little snack bar and filling station. I stop there and buy a sandwich, diet Coke and a big package of M & Ms. Hopefully, this will keep me until I reach Knoxville.

Finally, at around 5 pm, I reach the Knoxville city limits. Visibility is poor, but I think I see my exit, and leave the freeway, hoping to find the car rental agency, which is almost certainly closed by now. I can only hope that there will still be someone working in the office. There is such major flooding along this road, portions of it are closed off and I cannot find the car rental agency. Besides, there is some big road construction project. I drive into a mostly deserted strip mall, and find a bar that is open. I ask about the car rental office. The man instructs me where to go. I arrive there, and find it closed, just as I feared. Not a soul in sight. But there is a sign saying that rental cars are to be delivered at the Knoxville airport. Yikes! Where is the Knoxville airport? It is not on my map! I phone my brother for the third time today, and he tells me how to get to the airport, and says he will be there to meet me. Hurray! I have almost made it to the end of a harrowing journey. I am unaware that the entire world will be experiencing something that goes much deeper and stretches much wider than what I have just been through. When I am relieved to almost be out of danger, I do not realize that many will die or lose loved ones from something that kills more people in one month than car accidents do in one year.

I arrive at the car rental at 6 pm, and there are my brother Jason and Ron, one of his sons. I throw myself into Jason’s arms in relief. The car didn’t break down, there was no accident, I am in Knoxville. We are all alive and well. Jason’s wife Lucy has cooked us a delicious, comforting lasagna dinner. We sit at the table, a happy family reunited. I am relieved to find both well. Each of them has been battling cancer and Lucy will have to go to the hospital next week for another round of immunotherapy. We are all unaware that another disease even deadlier, even swifter to kill than cancer, will be threatening us all in one year from now. I do not know that I will later savor these memories as perhaps the last time I was able to see my brother and his entire family because a disease disrupted all travel plans.

We are also unaware that in a year’s time we citizens of the world will value our families and friends much more than we have ever before. We will treasure phone calls, Skype and other video conferences, savoring little tidbits of each conversation. We don’t know then that much of the world will begin to linger over the little things, learning to be grateful for sunny weather and Skype or Zoom conversations. We don’t realize that in a year’s time strangers will greet strangers with a smile, wishing them a good day and good health. We don’t yet know that an afternoon bike ride along the river close to home can be just as beautiful, just as meaningful, just as full of discovery, as a drive along the Natchez Trace.