Saturday I dodged the rain and went to Beaman Park in between cloudbursts. It's seriously beautiful up there in the northwest corner of Davidson County, and it's particularly weird to think of it as still being Metro Nashville, which it is. You get the bad with the good: right outside the park entrance there's a trailer on cinder blocks in the creek bottom with (I'm not exaggerating) ten pit bulls, each permanently chained to a different doghouse, each placed just far enough from the other ones that they can't interact. They just sit there like fearsome quiet sentries, guarding their little shingled homemade huts.
It was a 2.1 mile hike - the Henry Hollow loop - and not hard at all, even though there is some significant vertical terrain. I admit that before, I could never really figure out why they called a hollow a hollow, but it's plain as day to me now. You really do see it when you're there - a steep hillside with a wide swooping curve, as if it had been hollowed out with trowel. I didn't see other people at all, which was fine because once again, alone in the woods, I had that "this would be a good place for a murder" feeling.
The next day, Sunday - THE LORD'S DAY - I went again to do the same hike with my hiking friend Carol, who also just helped Sister Meg and me refinance our house so she is directly responsible for my giant bathtub full of twenty-dollar bills. We are trying to hike every week and when Chicago Meg gets back from Gulf Shores, I think we're going to enlist her as well in what I am now calling the Saturday Morning Hiking, Bowling, Brunching and Cribbage Club. We will do ONE of those things every Saturday morning. But! That's putting the cart before the horse! And no you can't be in the club! It's by invitation only. ANYWAY! Carol was as taken with Beaman Park as I am. Next week, we're going to go do the same hike again, with another loop added on for a total of 6 miles. I think it might be cool to do this hike every week because we can monitor spring. There's supposed to be a goodly number of yellow lady's slipper out there and that I would like to see.
After our hike/gossip, we went to the new Red Robin, even though I am pretty anti-chain restaurant but I really wanted a hamburger, where I had a pot roast sandwich, which is not a hamburger at all, I KNOW, but at least I didn't have a chicken sandwich like Carol did, which I am convinced she only ordered because there was a picture of it on the menu and that way she didn't have to read all the other five-thousand descriptions of items they had. In addition to the pot roast sandwich experience, a large red plastic chicken menaced me from across the room - just look! HIS EYES ARE STARING RIGHT AT ME!. Though Carol pointed out sometime later that it was probably not a chicken at all but instead a red robin since we were at, you know, RED ROBIN and suddenly that made a lot more sense. Though in a way no sense at all; there's still no explanation about why this giant red robin was threatening me, though I admit robins seem less instantly terrifying than chickens do. Then we went to World Market (my third time in four days!) because she hadn't been there yet and then wa-la, that was the end of this meeting of the Saturday Morning Hiking, Bowling, Brunching and Cribbage Club. Except this time it met on a Sunday. Hmmm. I think I have some things to work out about this club still.
The last two days of the Alabama vacation were as great as the first two. I spent a couple of more hours on Wednesday on the Pine Beach Trail, yet another part of the Bon Secour Wildlife Refuge. This was a four-mile out and back and it went through a lot of different kinds of landscape. 
Maritime forest, scrubby something or other, a lagoon sort of thing and then some dunes...until ta-da, the gulf. It was a good hike but I got a little bit sunburned. 
Thursday I packed up the car and then I took Madeline out on the beach and she did her usual thing when I let her off the leash where she sort of runs around deaf and nuts and the fuh-reaks out when she can't find me. Then we piled into Loretta and took the Ft. Morgan ferry across the mouth of Mobile Bay to Dauphin Island. Now don't try and get all fancy and pronounce Dauphin in the French manner; pronounce it in the bottle-nosed manner, like "dolphin" without the L. Anyway, this bay is where David Farragut (another famous D.G., by the way, as his middle name was Glasgow) yiyapped about not firing until you see the whites of their eyes. Which I could totally see, as Madeline's eyes nearly popped out of her head when the ferry engine started. She calmed down eventually but one thing I noticed was that of the 18 cars on the ferry, at least eight of them had dogs. That seemed high. Anyway, you could see lots of oil platforms from the ferry, both in the bay and in the Gulf. I wonder if you can visit them? Or is it all super-secret?
So anyway, I hopped onto I-65 and made my way to Splinter Hill Bog Preserve, which is another area heavy on pitcher plants. None were in bloom but you could see all the dried up ones and that must be something else in the summertime. It was one of those trails where they post little informational things along the way and on one of them it said something like "there are eight million venomous snakes in this one square acre" which frankly is something they should say at the BEGINNING of the trail if you ask me, BUT THEY DIDN'T ASK ME so then Madeline and I turned around to get the hell out of there and that's when we saw another little sign that said WATCH OUT FOR ALABAMA BLACK BEARS and suddenly this Splinter Hill Bog trail was PISSING ME OFF. Then I remembered Chicago Meg telling me a story about how when she was in the Peace Corps (Togo!) one of the things they taught her was how to kill a snake with a rock. She said if you see a snake in Africa, don't bother with your ethics; just kill the damned thing. With a rock. So I picked up a rock for protection. I figured the mechanics of it were pretty straightforward. She didn't give me any advice on taking out a bear; I guess they didn't teach her that in Togo. 
Oh, Alabama! You crazy barefoot inbred mistress of my heart! From the depths of my Croc-flopped soul I look at thee! My BFF Chicago Meg is on her 2nd Annual Escape From Winter working vacation in Gulf Shores for a few weeks and I took it upon myself to skeedaddle eight hours down I-65 and visit her and avail myself of a free place to stay at the beach for a few days. So far it's been insanely beautiful: near 70 every day and sunny, except for a dramatic thunderstorm last night. BUT ANYWAY! Enough about the weather. Do I LOOK like WILLARD SCOTT? But a happy Smuckers birthday to my centenarian readers nonetheless.
I loaded up Madeline and drove down on Sunday, with brief stops in both the cosmopolis of Elkton, TN (where Madeline was menaced by a giant thirty-foot-tall knife-wielding, chef-hat-wearing chicken. What is a chicken that tall looking for to eat? And also? Chickens do NOT HAVE opposable thumbs! How do they hold a knife or fork? It was a very confusing stop and I haven't even gotten to the part about the joint next door, The Boobie Bungalow. I have no idea what they do there. Perhaps it is a wildlife group dedicated to the preservation of a certain species?) and also Greeneville, AL, where absolutely nothing of interest has ever happened, other than me driving through. Oh, maybe a tornado or a civil rights march or WHATEVER but other than that, NOTHING. Especially if you judge it by the gift shops. NOTHING. So then I got off 65 and made a beeline to the Coleman Camping Factory Outlet, where I picked up two hiking poles (because that's what makes me a SERIOUS HIKER. How much shit I carry when I do it) and a red steel-belted camping cooler. I'm stopping there again on my way back. Then I got to Gulf Shores, hung a right and drove all the way out the Ft. Morgan Peninsula, as far as I could go without falling into the Gulf of Mexico. The name of the house is Dolphy Dunes. I have no idea what a Dolphy is.
But TODAY! Oh, TODAY! Fantastic. We got up early and drove back a few miles to meet our tour guide for a nature walk in the Bon Secour WIldlife Refuge. Her name was Jan and she was a lovely older lady with a Wisconsin accent. She pointed out reindeer moss and dewberry and dollar weed and several hollies and someotherthingamajigs and I couldn't hold it all in but she was very knowledgable but she didn't like it when BFF Chicago Meg said something about a muscadine grape leaf that seemed different than the other grape leaves she had pointed out. Jan turned on her heel and stomped off into the alligator/armadillo/cottonmouth-infested maritime forest. I laughed at that, "maritime forest." It sounded so fancy! It just means "woods by the beach." But it was super-pretty.
Then we had breakfast at a weird place that had 9/11 newspaper clippings all over the place ("I'll have two ham biscuits with a side of tragedy! And a small orange juice!") and then we delivered our friend Jenna to the Pensacola airport - after I spent sixty-two dollars on inexplicable things at Souvenir City and the Purple Octopus. Don't ask. But if you need a sand dollar that has been airbrushed with the phrase "Liquor Up Front; Poker In The Rear," please call me. I have a surprise for you! 
I took off early on Monday and drove 15 miles west of town to Cheatham county, where there's sort of a patchwork, shabby state park called Harpeth River State Park. I shouldn't say shabby, really, but it is made up of little unconnected pieces and parts of land along the Harpeth River. Well, they're connected if you're in a canoe, which I was not, but otherwise, you have to drive to each little one. I decided to go to the Narrows of the Harpeth part. The Harpeth river is a winding, hairpin-ny river and at one point it doubles back and gets to within 200 feet of itself. Sometime back in the olden days, some guy (Montgomery Bell, whose name is on everything here in town) had his slaves chip a tunnel through the 200 feet, thus diverting a good portion of the river, so that the water would turn a wheel to make I dunno, moonshine or flour or something. Wool. Who knows; the signage was all faded. ANYWAY. All the mill stuff is gone and all you get now is a waterfall shooting out of a cliff face. I've canoed down this part of the Harpeth before and sometimes the water is so low you can walk through the tunnel...but not at this time of the year. They actively discourage it, though and to be honest, if you try it it does feel like you might die at any minute. And the slave part gave me the willies. It's like that part in Tom Sawyer where the go in the cave and oh, someone's there with a torch. Injun Joe? I can't remember; it's all fuzzy. But that's what it feels like. Spooky.
After visiting that part, I doubled back and hiked up the ridge above the Narrows. You get a nice view of the surrounding farmland and whatsthatcalled? Floodplain. My knee did okay hiking up. When you get to the top, there's a verrry narrow part you can walk on, like five feet wide. One mis-step and you would fall a long way and die. I didn't do that. There were children up there and they were running around like crazy, which sort of boggled my mind because really, there was nothing to prevent them from tumbling down the cliff. It was insanely windy up there.
Then I got in the car and drove to another little piece of the park, Newsom's Mill. It sits on the edge of the Harpeth next to a now-broken dam. There was signage that said Nashvillians used to take the train from Union Station downtown out to the dam on summer days and have a swim and a picnic. Which was the LAST time a Nashvillian didn't drive his SUV somewhere, I'm just saying. They also found a skeleton in the original dam when they were replacing it with the concrete one which is now the busted one. The whole thing felt very Blair Witchy or maybe like a place you would have gone to a secret rave back in the early 90s and I couldn't wait to get the hell out of there.
On Saturday, I went to Radnor Lake, just south of Nashville. Radnor Lake used to be a "State Natural Area," which I guess is the state's way of saying "nice try, but you're no State Park, honey!" but now I guess it's finally a state park, if a puny one. It's pretty (see pic, which I stole off the web), but I have had issues with it in the past. For starters, it's right smack in the middle of a bunch of upscale residential areas and a few years ago, the people who run it - which I think is an uneasy mix of government and some hippie vegetarian volunteer types - began charging you admission if you drove to Radnor Lake, but it was free if you walked or biked....which of course meant that only the rich white folks who live around it ever went, because YOU CAN'T GET THERE unless you drive! It's a long way away! So Radnor Lake was sort of like a really big Gramercy Park, a private place for the rich. I boycotted and since then they've rescinded that policy. I'm SURE it was because of my boycott, about which I told no one and in fact never really knew I was doing.
