THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260717
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: Bill Ruehlmann
LENGTH: Medium: 83 lines
The traditional American family vacation is one part bliss, one part ordeal and one part Stuckey's. I know, the pecan roll's death, but for a few minutes Buddy and Sis aren't screaming at each other in the back seat. Next stop: Gator World.
Anyway, the secret to a successful family vacation is to make it so miserable that the rest of the year seems terrific. The best of it happens afterward when you show the slides to Doug and Sandy: Here's Harriet just before the shark bit the boat in half.
North Carolina storyteller Donald Davis understands all this. The best yarns are never about happily ever after but what went wrong. Not the highway but the side-turning.
His gregarious homage to the past, See Rock City: A Story Journey through Appalachia (August House, 212 pp., $22.95), seems to incorporate memories common to many of us who grew up enthralled by small stuff in the postwar U.S.A.
Like ``vacations.''
``In those days, before Disney World, before Busch Gardens, before Six Flags Over Anything, the most advertised tourist attraction in the entire Southeast was Rock City, Tennessee, located `high atop Lookout Mountain.' You could `See Seven States! Go through the Fat Man's Squeeze! Feed the pet deer!' and enjoy a host of other temptations by visiting Rock City, where man had improved on the work of the very creator Himself.''
A major part of the marketing portfolio for this resort spot consisted of roadside barn roofs emblazoned with block-letter encouragement to ``SEE ROCK CITY.'' Little Hawk saw it, in the company of Mama, Daddy and scrappy Joe-brother aboard the creaking family Plymouth, at a time when motel marquees put three neon exclamation points after the words ``air conditioning.'' The place was immense.
``Everything in Rock City reminded Mama of where we had all grown up: the deer in the park, the moss on the rocks, the waterfalls.''
It was almost as good as being home.
Next year, they stayed there.
``After all,'' reasons Davis, a native of Ocracoke Island, N.C., ``when you discover that the place you really want to be is at home, why pay to go somewhere else?''
See Rock City is a warm-hearted sequel to Listening for the Crack of Dawn, which first introduced readers to the denizens of 1950s Sulpher Springs, N.C., and won the Anne Izard Storyteller's Choice Award. That's right, ``Sulpher'' is askew. The town got its name from a waterside sign by an unknown traveler, erected to ward off the unwary: SULPHER SPRINGS - DRINK AT YOUR OWN RISK!
Even the misspelling stuck.
Davis' nostalgic narrator grew up listening to Gabriel Heatter, Oxydol's own Ma Perkins and ``our gal'' Sunday. Black Baldwin locomotives still steamed up to the town station. Grilled-cheese sandwiches and ``Co-Colas'' could be consumed at the drug store lunch counter, and Buster Brown saddle oxfords were fitted with the assistance of a fluoroscope that X-rayed the feet.
He lived through the onset of green diesels, FM and Conelrad tests. Red Foley from Renfro Valley. The crazy wild Plott boys wide-open in a flathead Ford.
``Most ordinary precious days.''
See Rock City slips back in time and pace. An entire chapter is devoted to the goings-on at Mrs. Rosemary's kindergarten in the basement of the old Methodist Church. Like her later incarnation, Mr. Rogers, she well understood the only way to stay even with a 5-year-old is not to speed up but slow down:
``The gas heater was covered by a cage made of chicken wire fastened by a metal framework for support. When it got too cold, a condition determined by Mrs. Rosemary's count of how many of us were shaking all at the same time, we would all assemble in front of the heater, get down on our knees on the floor and watch her light the gas. We had no television in those days and we would watch anything.''
Nowadays, we have TV. We have MTV. We have TNT and AMC.
Our attention spans are so accelerated that Americans seem to be suffering from a national case of cradle-to-the-grave Attention Deficit Disorder. Funny thing happened to us on our way to Alzheimer's. We don't even have 15 minutes of fame anymore - we're down to about five nanoseconds.
See Rock City is a welcome throwback to a more deliberate time, when letters on a barn roof reminded us of home instead of an alternative music festival. by CNB