Memory Place

It was a whithered, sinewy, very old tree, unusual because it stood naked and defiant long after most trees would have toppled, no more than forty feet high but a good two feet across, trunk and branches intact. A tremendous cedar, I wondered? But what caught my eye were the axe marks about two feet up. I was a hundred yards above the Guild Trail on the very northern nose of Lookout Mountain. Probably two dozen people a day passed nearby on the trail, but virtually no human beings ever come up the steep slope I was on. Who had started to cut down this tree, then thought better of it? How long ago?

This is the conundrum of Lookout Mountain: nearly every inch of soil has been walked upon and often manipulated by men going back over centuries, and discerning the work of neighborhood kids from civil war soldiers is not easy for the casual observer. A half mile from this very spot, archaeologists had argued whether a collection of walls and "rifle pits" were made by the Confederacy or prehistoric Indians (the last word seems to be the Confederacy).

Brady and I had parked at the rear of the upper Ruby Falls lot and started our walk at the Eagles Nest, the old quarry that had been turned from an eyesore into one of the centerpieces of Adolph Och's vision of the Hanging Gardens of Lookout only to fall back into ghostly neglect in modern times. The two concrete eagles, created by Spefano Giuliano in 1931, still stand on the upper corners of the quarry walls (although one of them is completely headless and the other is not much better off); stairs still lead up from Scenic Highway. We poked around what used to be a pool with a fountain in the center of the quarry, examined an old stone wall that probably once held back the soil for the variety of exotic plants that were brought in.



Just to the north were the ruins of a pedestal that once held a bust of Shakespeare, the first (and last, from what I can tell) of a series of statues intended to inspire visitors to this place. There is no pedestal there now, only a careless jumble of rocks. The bard departed this place long ago.

Winding up through the woods we climbed over the Hardy Trail (once of the bed of a railroad up the mountain) and into the woods on the other side. A hundred feet from the trail we found the Old Federal (aka Andrew Jackson) Road, which dates back to 1805 and may have been the first wagon trail through the Cherokee nation. In those days the Tennessee river forced travelers up onto the side of Lookout to get past Moccasin Bend on a relatively flat bench of land between bluffs and rocky slopes above and below. Two hundred years later that once major thoroughfare is just a faint impression through the woods, forgotten and reclaimed by nature. We followed the old path around the nose, over a cleared powerline, and down to the point that it crossed the old railroad bed heading steeply down the mountain.

Not long after pondering the axed tree, I saw what I thought was at least a dozen white-tail deer. It turned out to be just five, but that was enough for me. I had seen deer on the more isolated western slopes but never this far north.

We walked back on the Federal Road until it dumped us back into the Ruby Falls parking lot just a few feet from the truck.