your friends are waiting, and there’s a seat with your name on it. Soon you’ll walk through that door, an explosion now from close by and closer still, not yet, not yet, now. Does it really happen like that? You bet your life it does.
Rock City and Other Fairy Tales of the Atomic Age
THIS WAY NEXT
—Trailside sign, Rock City
Frieda Carter was an entrepreneur’s wife, and all she wanted was a garden. But it grew. In 1930, she walked through the woods with a string in her hand, letting it trail behind. Across the big flat stone, down a vale and through a narrow cleft, up a hill and out to the edge of the mountain, where the sandstone fell sharply away. Lookout Mountain was Georgia, but the valley was Tennessee, close enough to spit. This is a place where many boundary lines touch.
Do as she did and head down the narrow path through the boulders, winding past hemlocks and bluebells, each plant neatly labeled. Autumn fern, Florida azalea, leatherleaf mahonia, Lenten rose, sourwood, buttonbush. The Enchanted Trail doubles back on itself; you can’t see where you’re going, but you know where you’ve been. The brochure in your hand notes each location of interest.
Which came first, paving the way or planting the specimens? Laying stone for bridges or saying the names? Fat Man’s Squeeze, Needle’s Eye, Tortoise Rock. Who claimed (a stretch) that you could see seven states; who sent money overseas for the fallow deer? These deer, entirely white, bleached as old negatives, recline on granite slabs. Are they statues? people whisper. Not until one of the creatures flicks away an insect with its ear do we move on, spell broken.
Standing here at the lookout, lean against the guardrail and sweep your eyes over the rim of the curving Earth. Alabama, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. But these faraway border distinctions must be taken on faith. What you’re sure of are the new subdivisions spreading over the grassy fields below, the pines’ dull green, a barn roof painted SEE ROCK CITY. Closer now: drop a quarter into the slot and fix your eyes to the peepholes. The cold metal hugs the bridge of your nose as you swivel the viewer toward various sights of interest: the nearby waterfall, ice rimming its edges; Stone Face, Missionary Ridge, Lover’s Leap; the freeway.
High atop Lookout Mountain, overlooking Chattanooga, sits Rock City—garden, grotto, moneymaker. It opened in 1932, and if you’ve heard of it you can thank Garnet Carter; he started it, started, too, the marketing campaign that made the place famous, paying to have SEE ROCK CITY painted on barn roofs all over the Southeast. Today, thanks to stricter billboard laws, the barns have become relics. The Rock City gift shop offers birdhouses, coffee mugs, and ball caps shaped like those old barns.
I haven’t been since I was a little girl and am not expecting much. At first, Rock City seems like any other walk through the woods. But see the circles cut in plywood? Look carefully through these round portals at all the dark dreams on display.
The iron handrails sweat cold drops on this chilly day. Next up: Fairyland Caverns, a partially man-made cave lined with dioramas of fairy-tale scenes, lit with ultraviolet light. It’s a strange adjunct to an otherwise conventional rock garden, and the black light is what makes it unusual. To get there, you follow the trail to this entrance, Diamond Corridor.
Step into the shadowy portico and let your eyes adjust. Sparkling minerals cover the walls: crystals of dogtooth quartz, rough blossoms of calcite, glassy chunks of smoky and rose quartz. The gems gleam in the poor light. Coral lines the ceiling, some bleached white, some dyed pink, all of it from somewhere else. Yes, I remember this from my childhood visit—this entrance room, covered in glittering rocks. Back then, I’d always kept one eye on the ground, searching for treasure. During the day I pored over field guides and begged my parents to take me on rockhounding trips; at night, I dreamed of stumbling upon caches of rare specimens. I must have coveted the quartz lining this room, would have been tempted to worry a piece loose, like a tooth, knowing that even the impulse was wrong. I would have longed to sit in this niche for hours, hoarding this sharp beauty.
Not long ago, I uncovered my old rock collection, its specimens packed away in newspaper. There were tiny garnets I had sieved from mud at a North Carolina mine; quartz, still stained from the red clay it had been buried in; fluorite crystals, purple and white, safe in their old pharmacy bottle. Other specimens were glued to cardstock that provided bits of information: galena, heavy for its size and shiny, used in the manufacture of batteries; spotty bauxite, from which aluminum is made. There was the lavender muscovite from Canada, and the yellow knob of sulfur, still smelling as sour as it ever had. Best of all, there was a polished slab of agate, small as a baby’s fist, whose every wrinkle and stripe I remembered immediately. The band of rich red with a stutter of white floating above! It looked like the horizon of a desert landscape I hoped even then to someday see.
I loved the world, believed its every inch paved with treasure, but knew it could be ripped away at any moment. Death was real; the preaching we heard every Sunday underscored that. A farm accident instantly killed my grandfather. A girl my own age, eight or nine, lost her mother one Friday night when her mother’s car was forced off a bridge. You’re no different, the preachers said, and I had to admit their logic. They’d start in on the scary parts of the Bible: Ezekiel, Daniel, Revelation, the moon turning red on that great and fearsome day. The Battle of Armageddon could start at any moment, the preachers would say, even now, while we’re sitting here in this big beautiful sanctuary, and are you right with God? Well, who could be? There will be a blast of wind, the rivers will turn to blood, the preachers said. Matthew 24:29, The stars shall fall from heaven, and the powers of the heavens shall be shaken. What a relief when we could all file out of the barn-like church, shaking the preacher’s hand on the way into the bright sun, past the blooming crepe myrtles and the old crabapple tree. How could we go out for fried chicken after that? How could I lie on the living-room floor and read the funnies or look at the paper’s pictures of boring debutantes? I asked my parents about the end of the world, and they said, Try not to worry about it too much. Sometimes, after that, when my mind wandered during the sermons, I let it go—down the path my own feet had made through the pines; later, to dresses, always red, that would fit only me. I gazed at the fake stones set in the little rings I loved to wear, saw the lights of the sanctuary reflected in them, and let my eyes go out of focus, staring at my earthbound vision.
TO ESCAPE TEMPORARY BLINDNESS
BURY YOUR FACE IN YOUR ARMS
—Survival Under Atomic Attack,
Office of Civil Defence; 1950
Fairyland Caverns is a grotto, of course, and a grotto is a place with a long history. The ancient Greeks worshipped caves, the water flowing through them, and the nymphs associated with that water. The first grottoes were naturally occurring caves, but in time people dug caves out of rock, expanded existing caves, and heightened the effect of water sources by installing pipes that spurted liquid on the unwary. The practice of building grottoes was revived in Italy during the Renaissance, when wonderful things such as water organs—pipe organs played by falling water—were invented. Artists embellished cave walls with bas-relief; they arranged shells, mineral specimens, and chips of glass in swirling mosaics. If there were no natural stalagmites, they made their own, dripping cement into elaborate towers. If there were no nearby beachcombing sites, they imported shells from the West Indies. Those with enough money created spaces where the natural world was represented in abundance. They entered, perhaps, through the carven mouth of an ogre, his forehead inscribed
