NORTH BOUNDARY – DÉJÀ VU

Judy was up and out the door to make the rounds at Curves by 8:30. Me, well, I was up by 9, or so, and heating up the oven and starting the coffee to drip. I popped 3 biscuits in the oven, and hit the bathroom, and by the time I was out, the biscuits and coffee were done.

When Judy got home she made her wonderful southern “white” thick gravy, while I scrambled 3 eggs and fried 2 pieces of “light” beef baloney!

After my second cup, I took a shower and shaved, and we were out the door to the community center where we both voted an early ballot, marking our selections by shading in a rectangular box with a number 2 pencil.

We then zipped about 12 miles up the road toward Oak Ridge, passed K-25, where I used to work, and on to the west entrance to the North Boundary Greenway. Yes, I’ve written about it before, but we love to walk there.

It’s a beautiful, usually isolated, easy walk of about a mile and a half out to the 4^th bridge, the largest one on the walk that crosses Popular Creek. We love the slight rolling hills that make you begin to sweat, but there are also long flat stretches that wind their way through the DOE property. The three mile round trip is just about all we really care to do.

It was another beautiful, dry, fall day, with the temperature just below 70, a light breeze, and lots of colorful leaves rustling all around us. It has been so dry here this summer and fall that you are really pressed to find brilliant colors this year. However, there are subtle red, yellow, orange, and still lots of green leaves around, but there is a lot of brown mixed in too.

Ron bicycled the route just a few days earlier and had told me about a new beaver dam just off on the right side of the second bridge you cross after leaving the highway.

There it was – such a masterpiece of construction too! It amazes me how they instinctively know just how to perfectly build a dam, seeming to know how much of an area the backwater will cover. Their lodge must have been further up stream, because we could not see it from the bridge, but you can bet it was up there somewhere, with a safe little family unit proudly surveying their domain.

Judy posed proudly with her new “hiking stick” that Steve, her sister Terri’s husband, made for her. It’s a strong hickory stick, tapered to an epoxy tip at the bottom. Steve cut groves into the top for grip, and inset an emerald stone, her birthstone, into the very top. Down the top forward side he carved “Lucy Dragon”. Lucy is the moniker she was awarded after leaving her purse in a public restroom in Key West! Luckily, some honest person turned it in to the police and she got everything back before the cruise ship sailed. We were truly blessed…again!

Steve has been on a mission of making hiking sticks for all the Dragons, and I think he only has one more to deliver. He has 19 acres of fine Tennessee forest, so he doesn’t have to look too far from his workbench for the raw materials.

I encourage you to get out and vote, and to take a nice long walk down some country gravel road before winter comes. They’ll both do you good!

There are other shots on my Flickr page!

THE NORTH BOUNDARY GREENWAY

Ms. Mushy and I took another little 3-mile stroll along a portion of the North Boundary Greenway today as we often do. The weather in East Tennessee was once again beautiful and in the 70’s, a wave of high pressure leading a change coming by the weekend.

This area was once part of the Gallaher-Stone Plantation, way back before the Government took it from the Wheat Community farmers in 1942 to build a bomb to end some little World War. Remnants of stone steps, house corner stones, and flower gardens can be found along the Greenway. Often a buck, following a couple of does will peep out of the pine thickets along the way and watch you as you approach, then dart across the road, white “flagged” tail waving goodbye.

You can also find well-groomed old family cemeteries that the Government still maintains. These cemeteries have very old headstones ornately marked with names and dates, while slave graves are noted only by a single large stone indicating which end the head was laid – no name, no date, just a stone to proclaim the hard work they provided their owners.

Today we walked a bicycle path into an old rock quarry area where limestone was once blasted out to build roads, concrete pads, footers, and compressor stands for the huge K-25 Plant near Oak Ridge, Tennessee. The plant is being torn down today by Bechtel Jacobs Company, a subcontractor to the Department of Energy, and buried nearby. The K-25 site, along with Y-12 and X-10, was once a bustling worksite with over 12,000 men and women (my dad included) working on the world’s greatest secret – so secret they didn’t even know what they were building. Only General Groves and a select few knew the full mission.

At some point, workmen hit an underground stream and the quarry flooded, probably covering equipment that couldn’t be removed in time. The water today is beautiful, reflecting the blue sky above and the green cedar trees that line the quarry’s edge. Only a few scraps of iron and a pile of concrete fence footers remain to bare witness to the work that went on there.

Since most people never get back in this area, I thought you might like to see a couple of pictures. I hope they brighten your day as they did ours.

HE MADE THE SIGN OF THE CROSS

My mom’s mother and father divorced back in the late forties, which was all but unheard of then. My grandfather left my grandmother in northern Alabama, with my mom and her 7 siblings who all lived on my great-grandfathers cotton farm and went to Oak Ridge, Tennessee to seek work. Oak Ridge during the war years was a change of live for many farm families in the southeast. They went from working the farm and doing familiar tasks to doing jobs that were completely new to them and completely new to the world as well.

Oak Ridge was a sort of boomtown then, and it, like the areas around Los Alamos, NM and Hanford, WA, provided a “gold rush” of new jobs to poor people trying to eek out a meager living during a war and not that long after the depression.

Granddad applied for work at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) and at the time they were only hiring craft people and he was asked if he could do carpenter work. He said “Sure, I can do that,” all the time knowing he was not a qualified carpenter. Granddad was told to come back the next day to qualify for the craft position.

He borrowed a book from a guy he met in the barracks where he was living and stayed up all night learning how to square a building. Luckily for him, he was given that exact exam the next day. He retired 25 years later as a respected “carpenter” having learned his skill as he went.

I respected his drive, resourcefulness, and determination. Years later, while also working at the K-25 Gaseous Diffusion Plant. I applied for a “planner and estimator” position that worked with the rigger and pipe fitter crafts. I did not have to do either type of work, but I did have to issue move instructions for hoisting and lifting using the rigger codes, and order materials for pipe fitters. I knew most of the rigging work already, but knew nothing about running pipe. I got wind from a friend who interviewed the day prior to me that there was a “qualification” test during the interviews.

I stayed up all night and memorized “travel and run” formulas and things like that. I aced the exam the next day and my future boss complimented me in front of a group of co-workers. A lady who was very jealous commented that I should have done well because “my friend” had given me all the answers!

I was shocked and the perspective boss took it that I cheated on the exam. In reality, I only knew there was a test and studied. However, I did not get the position, BUT I had successfully emulated my granddad – he would have been proud.

We often visited granddad in his little apartment in the WWII barracks where his carpenter skills provided him with extra storage space, seating, and a hidden “hotplate” in the side of a cabinet he had made. The men were not allowed to cook in their rooms, but he hid this secret for the full time he lived there.

Granddad visited us on many occasions, since we only lived 20 miles away. It was then I began to notice that he made strange noises when he ate. He loved food, smacked proudly, and breathed deeply through his mouth as he ate everything on his plate. He held his knife and fork strangely too, at least to me. He would hold his fork in his left hand, tines down, and his knife in his right the entire time he was eating. Mom had started trying to get me to eat while holding the fork, tines up, in my right hand, switch with the knife when I cut food, put the knife down, and change hands with the fork to complete the bite, but I often ate like him when he visited.

When granddad was finished eating, he laid the knife perpendicular across the plate and then laid the fork across the knife. “Why do you do that granddad?” I asked one day.

“It’s the Cross son. I do that to let others know about Jesus. I don’t have to say a word, be lost for words, or anything just put the knife and fork that way and they know what you mean.” He seemed very please that I had noticed and that he got to tell me the details. He was a proud Primitive Baptist and always attended church by himself.

I would watch him all evening, looking at his snow-white hair and the little red blood vessels at the top of the skin on his cheeks, and to him telling stories of hunting on the Catoosa Wildlife Preserve. The one I always will remember is about a deer, or a bear (he never was sure) that scratched itself against the side of his truck camper in the middle of the night. It was actually a scary story to me at the time.

Often he spent the night with us and I always watched the clock carefully. Something else he did strangely to me was snore! I would always go to bed earlier than normal so I could be asleep before granddad dosed off.

For years I watched his ritual of eating and “crossing” the plate and secretly wished I had come up with that idea myself. What a simple little thing that can say so much, I thought. I often “cross” my own plate now when I am eating out, but no one has yet ask me why I do it. Maybe it is not strange enough to move most waiters and waitresses to ask, but maybe someday, or one of my grandchildren will ask me why. Then I will get to tell them the story of the other man that made the sign of the cross. That will be like witnessing about two good men in one!