HARRIMAN
though the rate of change at the time i made my first travels was still heroic, there were, and continue to be, relatively small bastions of sad estabs, who, having fled the city early enough, came to control old clusters of family farms, and vacation lands, along with certain governmental and utility installations. what we all knew was that these places and their causes were futile, but dangerous in the short term. they were dangerous for two reasons. the first reason was the simple hostility of these people. nobody likes to be told they are wrong, and certainly not by a class of folks whom the day before you controlled and were served by, and certainly not by all of them at once, and certainly not as they eclipse your authority and strip you of your way of life. so these people had been pushed and were still in some sense of shock. they were the feral cat being spanked with a newspaper for pissing on the rug after being corralled unwillingly into a strange home. they were scabs in their own factories and their cagey ambivalence worried those of us who had cause to come in proximity with their fortifications. the other reason that these people were dangerous was because their existence was a benign trace of their own history. to follow the french revolution analogy, they remained a nominal force in some stratum of society, albeit sequestered to the faubourg saint-germain, and almost completely irrelevant regarding the function of the city, yet still present, and still latently dreaming of their resurgence. never is a waking dream merely an amusement, it becomes an action item, a decision, and loathe was i to pass through their fortifications in east central tennessee.
this morning i am writing in the old 129 truckstop in maryville over a cup of tepid chicory. i am set to move through the oakridge
fortification and into harriman by late afternoon. the fortifications stretch on into north carolina and west to murfreesboro and as i have
a contact in harriman who has word of a burgeoning yet diaphanous community sprouting up in the cornfields of western indiana, i have
determined to pass through the fortifications. from what i have been told, long stretches of the construct are unmanned and many segments
are poorly designed, utilising natural features in place of the built components.
last evening in this establishment i shared a table with 3 stadtsvolk who were all very supportive and all bearing some fragment of
information, whether cartographic or anecdotal, that they insisted would make my passage secure. the fragmentary maps they drew vaguely
corresponded to some old maps i had prepared of the area and i was able to flesh out a route this morning at my campsite that takes into
account the tip re: the unmanned stretch at bacon gap from the young man with the cardigan.
although my election to write this entry before leaving may indicate otherwise, i feel confident that i am well prepared and that i will
encounter nothing more than the aggravation of some already nasty blisters. (note: let out shin strap on left shoe... keep eye out for
webbing).
the information i have assembled about the fortifications themselves indicate that they have always been seen less as a defense and more
of an annoyance. the fact that they fill up the majority of the properties strung together and that both the lands to the north and south
are friendly leads me to believe that it was some last ditch effort to focus resources and hit it off like the old days... men with
megaphones, trucks hauling earth, men with drawings. the fortifications were a symmetrical construct securing nothing more than a linear
terrasse that stretched out like a road linking various hotspots on the strip: sparta, oakridge, strawberry plains, etc. at these points the
parallel strands of earthworks fan out like riverbanks around a slag island to actually brace the town and provide a 'defensible' position.
the key of my approach to the ribbonlike stretches will be to walk parallel to negotiable components such as the glacis and fossé to
scout for safe places to make perpendicular movements over scarps or cuvettes and over or through whatever palisades have been erected. the
main concern i have is that my lateral distance being governed by the tennessee river, i may have difficulty finding enough breaks in the
lines. i suppose i could ford the river but i would feel less vulnerable rolling down a counterscarp at this point.
this will be the first day that my travel has not been relegated to infrastructural thoroughfares so it will be important to keep the
river in sight as a landmark. also it appears that the ridges run in a pretty regular parallel array oriented ne/sw. my things are packed
up, my chicory is down to the roots, and here, i tuck my journal into my belt...
the day i passed through the fortifications went just as i had planned and i am still indebted to the good folks of maryville for their
experience and forethought. i never wrote in my diaries about this episode at the time for fear of what those on 'my side' would believe
about me. it was a hollow concern and was probably more about my vanity as a true force for change than out of any concerns for safety.
i met a man that day who lived on the fortifications, near kingston. he had helped construct them; he was originally from charlotte. he
lived in a house standing at the edge of an especially broad fossé that was essentially an untouched golf course at a country club
overlooking the mouth of the clinch river where it emptied onto the tennessee.
when i slipped down the counterscarp on marney bluff i found myself all at once standing in a completely open stretch of rolling land
surrounded on three sides by the river and on the fourth by the counterscarp itself which i could not possibly get back up. on the far side
of the golf course was the only bridge back across the tennessee. i made way along the foot of the counterscarp skirting the golf course
when suddenly, coming from the direction of the bridge, a man was walking toward me a bit further out in the course. he had a questioning
look, yet his body language was not the least bit hostile, and could be better described as complacent. when he was rather close he turned
and went back around an inlet toward the bank of the river. he had said nothing to me although he could clearly have seen me. as he had not
threatened me, i decided to approach him and called out first so as not to overtake him with surprise. he continued to walk until he came to
a small cemetery behind which stood an equally small house. he stepped onto the front porch and only then did he turn to address me.
«come in, if you will.»
«it has been some time since i have seen a stranger, especially on these lands. it has probably not been since the last time i golfed
this course. it has probably not been since this house was across on the west side of the course. we moved it here so that i could monitor
the bridge. we felt that it was a pertinent security issue. 'we' being those remaining club members who were able to make it here. there
was still a sense of urgency then and we poured a great deal of the resources at hand into securing this ribbon of land. did you ever play
that board game cathedral? there was a strategy of walling off portions of the board that you could build upon later on when the rest of the
land ran out. we did not have anything on either side of this fortification; i guess you could call it wishful thinking, or planning ahead.
have a seat, please. for an instant, that urgency translated to a eugenic desperation to maintain some sense of power, even if over this
little petri-dish of land. so i remained. i remained here because the fortifying was over and i had changed. i knew they were fading and i
knew i had changed. for me it become not the heroic last stand but a chance for me to become, in their eyes, a symbolic outpost. i
volunteered and they knew that i was volunteering because i was not with them any longer. for me it was a chance to relearn who it was that
i was not. in those last days i was planting pallisades at the riverbanks. the aches of physical exertion swept through me and carried a
new kind of self-satisfaction; this was why we were where we were. we were the ones who kept this from the people and sold them a false
sense of satisfaction, of ease, or abstracted spirit. i mean, christ, who the fuck gets any real life experience from burning a candle with
the eiffel tower mechanically reproduced on the votive. we packaged life in such an abstracted form that most of them, shit, even me, forgot
what it was to have an experience that was filtered through our own sensibilities first; the sweat poured into my eyes and they stung. i was
in pain, and i was the history of me, before me, the me that did not give a shit about me, the person that was the potential that i gave up,
that we all give up. it caught fire within me and burned my pathetic hopes to cinders and scorched my ties to those people in oakridge, and
in salina and wherever else they are now, whom i now laughingly stood as the gatekeeper to.»
