"Let's go to Hendersonville, or Columbia" Matt suggested, perusing a list of the strange little cities that circle Nashville.
"No," I said."Let's go to Alabama."
Alabama is less then a 2 hour drive south of Nashville. Matt and I had traveled through The Heart of Dixie only once before, on our great Southern roadtrip of 2007. Matt remembered driving through the cities. I mostly remembered the creepy rest stops, and having this song stuck in my head for hours and hours:
We decided to chart a bee line south for Huntsville, Alabama with a few stops for flea markets and whatever else we came across. For the uninitiated, Huntsville is mostly known for two things.
1) As "Rocket City" it is the largest hub of NASA activity in the country. Here, shuttles and rockets are designed and manufactured and astronauts are trained. It is estimated that 1 in 3 people in Huntsville is an engineer.
2) The location of the "bed intruder" news story, and consequent viral autotune video.
I packed a variety of snacks, Matt wrote down the directions, and we were off.
Our first stop was the state welcome center, and its attendant rocket.
Next we aimed for the Huntsville Flea Market. On our way there we got sucked into the vortex of the Hard Times Thrift Shop. We made a u-turn on whatever route we were driving and checked it out.
The Hard Times Thrift Shop was a combination of everything awesome and terrible about off-brand thrift stores. Architecturally it was phenomenal. The whole thing was housed in a collection of ramshackle buildings mended and expanded with whatever oddball materials were accessible. The main building used to be a roadhouse bar, and there were little hints of it still in the corners and rafters. This building was surrounded by a half-dozen one-room wooden shacks, each housing a different seller.
The goods however, were overpriced, boring or offensive. Pretty colored liqueur glasses for $15 a pop. Ceramic angels. A table full of mammy dolls that were clearly made in the 90's or later. A young couple tried to sell us a kitten, and a woman gave us the stink eye when I tried to take a picture of a creepy ventriloquist dummy. We beat a hasty retreat, happy to have seen the place, and satisfied enough to move on.
A little further down the road we found the Huntsville Flea Market proper. It was a very traditional flea market (swords, wigs, vinyl belts, incense, knock-off oriental carpets) and there was nothing much on interest there. We followed the long halls as they connected to other long halls, until we were so deep into the complex I suspected we had reached Moria. After checking out the old Zoltar machine we hit the road again.
Huntsville itself was a rainy ghost town. We had arrived on a Sunday afternoon and everything was shut down. We walked around downtown, looking in shop windows and imagining what this place was like / is like, when filled with people. Overhead the clouds grew threatening and thunder rumbled, echoing between the bank and the court house.
We found the home that Tallulah Bankhead was born in. A three-story stone building of apartments and houses still very much in use, it retained a turn of century charm that seems so rare these days.
On our way back to Nashville we cut through a part of Alabama that had been devastated by tornadoes just a week or two before. I gave Matt the camera and asked him to take a few shots as we careened by. I was eager to have a chance to see the destructive force of the tornadoes in detail, but I didn't want to stop and subject the locals to disaster tourism as they slowly moved debris and struggled to reclaim what was left of their homes.
People always remark on the odd selectivity of tornadoes, how they destroy one house but spare its neighbor, or demolish a kitchen but leave a glass vase sitting on the counter. That level of haphazard catastrophe was present here, where jumbles of wood and brick laid 20 yards from a garden of tomato plants, still upright in their cages. Nature has a blind eye, but a very precise hand. The sun began to dip as we discussed fate and chance on the drive home.
And that, my friends, was our trip to Huntsville, Alabama.
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