Not Without My Father: One Woman's 444-Mile Walk of the Natchez Trace (22 page)

I hummed with bliss. With accomplishment. Yet, I was a failure, though I didn’t know it. I wanted to finish my walk with the headline

- Debut Novelist Walks Her Way to Best Seller -

I would complete my last day with five hundred books sold. Slightly more than one book per mile.

And I didn’t care. My mental sky was lit with five weeks of memories, time with my parents nobody could erase. Gifted minutes. Millions of seconds to match my million steps. My hours built days that bloomed into five weeks, seasoned with lessons in joy. I was determined not to stand over my parents’ caskets and whisper, “I wish we’d done………….”

Life is about what happens between all the things we wish we’d done. And when we do those things, Life fills holes and lights the flame of wishes. Life makes wishes live.

LEARNING TO FLY

Tom Petty

“Last bit’s gonna be hilly, Andra.” Dad yelled from his window while Mom snapped a photo of me walking away from milepost 435. My last day walking the Natchez Trace.

“Nine miles to go. I’ll see you at the end.”

Mom slipped my iPhone into my hand. “We’ll stay with you today, Andra. You know, in case you need us.”

I swallowed the burn in my throat and turned before she could see my face. “Okay.”

Air bulged with the promise of rain. I wove along the highway, one eye on the purple bruise spreading across the sky. My phone jangled through a thunderclap.

“Andra Watkins.”

“Can I speak to Andre Watson?”

Sigh. “Speaking.”

A male voice continued. “This is News Channel 4 in Nashville. We’re coming out to interview you, but we can’t get there until 1. Can you make the walk last that long in this weather?”

I pulled the phone from my ear and checked the time. Eleven o’clock in the morning. Two hours to walk nine miles.

I laughed. “Yep. I can’t wait to meet you.”

“We’ll just find you if the weather holds. Don’t worry about being somewhere specific. If you see us, you see us.”

I ended the call and squealed. I was going be on Nashville TV.

Maybe?

Adrenaline flooded my insides, a nerve-and-nausea cocktail I battled whenever I stood in the wings, awaiting my entrance in a play.

Before I took a step, the phone mewed again.

“Andra Watkins.”

A female voice chirped in my ear. “Hi, this is Alex from
The Tennessean
? I want to be there when you wrap up today. When’ll that be?”

“Two,” I blurted before I did mental calculations. Frantic, I added up time and hoped everything came out right.

Call waiting beeped through our goodbye.

“Hello?”

“Andra. It’s Michael.” My husband was on his way into Nashville to pick up supplies for an event at Parnassus Books. My first official appearance as a published author.

“Hey, Dear. So much is happening. I’ve got a TV station coming out and—”

“Well, you might want to shake up your schedule.”

“Why?”

“Because, when I drove through the gate at the end of the Trace, the last milepost was 442.”

“What? How can that be?” I dragged out my rumpled Trace map and read the words, ‘The northern terminus, milepost 444, is near Nashville, TN.’ Was the Parkway map a lie? “Everything says it’s 444 miles.”

“I know. I scoured my map, too, and I drove it, just to make sure. Even stopped and asked somebody.”

“And?”

“Four forty-two is the end.”

Rain blotched my face. The atmosphere was a giant water balloon, and Trace spirits hovered, ready to throw it my way. “So, I’ve got to make six more miles last three hours?”

“Just finish whenever, Andra. Timing doesn’t matter.”

“It does, though. There’s the TV at one. Newspaper at two.” My voice trilled upward, a crescendo of panic. After five weeks without a set schedule, two appointments threatened to undo me. A raindrop landed on my nose, and I watched it, cross-eyed. It skittered down the front of my green jacket and disappeared.

A little girl with blonde curls knocked inside my head. I spent more than a year with her, writing her story. She started in a courtroom with a bead of sweat running down her nose. I would end my tale with a snout full of rain. I wiped my face and laughed.

“What’s funny?”

“Oh, nothing. I wanted this day to last. I guess now I’ve got an excuse to take my time.”

“What about the weather?”

“Dear, I can walk through anything.”

An hour later, I walked up to the bridge near milepost 438. I stood on the edge and looked down. Grass and highway spun together, a gaping infinity. I wasn’t sure I could cross it. The guardrail didn’t reach my waist as I took a few tentative steps onto its southern end. Sky and trees and asphalt collided with vertigo. I wound up on my stomach. A cold expansion joint zippered across pavement. My knuckles scraped against cardboard, and when I closed my hands around a box, I focused on its lettering—
Fix A Flat
—to lift me to unsteady feet.

“You saved a bike. Maybe you saved my life.” I threw the box on the ground and took a picture. Before I looked down again, I snapped several more. The gentle angle of the roadbed. Toothy metal. A lone figure on the other side.

My mother. I kept my eyes on her, a worthy competitor to the glory of Birdsong Hollow. Because, sometimes, being in the moment meant not looking down.

I wobbled away from the northern end of the bridge and caught Dad in exquisite form. His last sale on the Trace. A motorcyclist. A pull-off. A person and a parking lot were all he needed to pounce.

He wagged my book in the man’s face. “She wrote this book here. See?”

I walked over and offered my hand. “Hi. I’m Andra. Are you riding the whole Trace alone?”

“Aw. I couldn’t compete with your walking it. Your dad here’s been filling me in. But no. I’m just out for a joy ride.”

“Tell me about your bike.”

I listened to his stories about riding. About Vietnam. About living.

“I’ll take one of your books.” He unzipped a black satchel and made room.

Maybe I could sell books, too.

As I high-fived Dad, I realized we were a team. He moved in for the pitch, and I closed the sale. How would my writing career ever survive without my father?

I pottered into the road, my home for more than a month, my thoughts consumed with images of Dad. His triple-chinned laughter. The cadence of his voice. His habit of turning off his hearing aids.

I waved to the TV van and breezed through my interview. When they told me to walk along the highway while they filmed me, my body did what it needed to do. I left them to navigate my final downhill, my twisting approach into Nashville, but I wanted to dig my heels into pavement and stop Time. I vowed to live pain and wonder again if my parents did it with me. I started my trek dreading every second with them. When did our relationship agony morph into ecstasy?

“Ma’am. You okay?” A man sat in a white SUV, his mouth obscured by a handlebar mustache. I took in the logo on the side of his ride. A federal ranger. The first one I’d encountered since Jackson, Mississippi, three-fourths of the Natchez Trace Parkway.

“I’m great. Been walking the Trace. This is my last day.”

“You come all the way from Natchez?” He leaned through the window and ran his fingers over the United States Government emblem.

“Yeah. I started March 1.” I held my breath and waited. Rangers south of Jackson greeted me with doubt. One even regaled me with the story of a couple who tried a through hike, only to be washed out at milepost 90. His tone dripped with, “And they were more fit than you.”

The first federal employee to admit I might succeed was a surveyor at milepost 222. It was radio silence from there.

He pounded his door. “We been talking about you for weeks! The maintenance crews have been cut back and all that—budget nonsense, you understand—but they’ve been doing extra runs without pay just for you. ‘Gotta check on our girl!’ Every day, they’ve been following your trek on their own time.”

“Really?” I thought about the trash collectors I came upon at pull-offs, the foresters I encountered as they removed fallen trees and debris. The trucks that honked as they rattled past. When I talked to them, they said they were doing their jobs as well as they could with no funding, trying to preserve a forgotten place. I blinked back tears with the realization that underpaid, unappreciated people gave their own time and resources to make sure I was safe. To pave the way for me to finish. I swallowed. “Everybody’s been following me?”

“Yep. I’m so glad I got to meet you. And you’re finishing today.”

Still shell-shocked, I nodded. “In about a mile. Yes.”

“Well. Good luck to you. We’re all rooting for you, wherever you go from here.”

His taillights faded into rain, and I whispered, “Wherever I go from here.”

I walked over a short bridge. Along a wooden fence. To milepost 442. The official end of the Natchez Trace Parkway.

But I found a new beginning.

I WOULD WALK 500 MILES

The Proclaimers

What did I expect to feel as I walked through a wooden gate and hoisted my foot onto milepost 442, the end of the Natchez Trace? I knew I’d see Michael and my parents. Even the reporter from
The Tennessean
.

But I didn’t realize my friend Cindy Duryea would drive twelve hours from South Carolina, didn’t know she stopped in Aiken to pick up her eighty-nine-year-old mother. I never knew she called her Nashville-based daughter Katy from the car to say, “I just picked Mom up. Now, we’re on our way to get you and meet Andra, and won’t that be something?”

I experienced my walk’s greatest gift at the finish line. Hugging Cindy and knowing my journey inspired someone else’s adventure. She knew she didn’t need five weeks. She took twenty-four hours and did something spontaneous with people she loved.

I smiled for the camera and wondered what would happen if more people copied Cindy? For a few hours. A couple of days. Maybe even a week. Memories could be stamped on any unexpected outing with people who mattered.

It’s only too late to make memories when it’s too late.

As everyone gathered around me, I couldn’t feel anything. For the first time in five weeks, nothing hurt. My body was numb.

But my mind buzzed with the trip’s revelations about Mom. About Dad. About myself. My heart overflowed with joy. I nodded to ghosts who detoured from the traditional Trace route and stood by my side.

Because the last seven miles of the Natchez Trace Parkway were a new road. Around Nashville the Old Trace was consumed by development years ago. When I nodded to the boatmen, I knew they came because they wanted to be there.

After almost an hour of celebrating, people peeled away, and I was left with Michael, Mom and Dad.

“I’d like to go to that big stone sign a couple of miles back and take some pictures.”

I wasn’t ready to say goodbye to the Natchez Trace.

We piled into two vehicles and drove through misting rain. When I looked into the trees, I was transported to points on the Trace’s 10,000 year timeline. I focused on hardwood and leaves and slivers of sky, and for a few seconds, if I closed my eyes, I traveled through Time.

For 442 miles, I tried to honor the countless men who walked the Natchez Trace, alone or in packs, to build the frontier states of the USA. I listened to the voices of Native Americans who were displaced. “See what we did?” They whispered from ancient mounds and buried places. Quebecois French mingled with conquistador Spanish on the wings of thousands of migrating birds. I heard sounds I didn’t recognize, rhythms I never expected. And, at the end, I only had one plea.

I hoped the Trace seared us into its soul. When people traveled it in a thousand years, maybe a few of them would hear my parents and me. In fallen leaves and birdsong. In the echo of their own footsteps. In a field of daffodils winking in the breeze.

I stood next to the Natchez Trace Parkway sign, flanked by my parents. When I smiled into the camera, with one arm around each of them, I made one final addendum.

I wanted to recall every molecule of our adventure. The sound of my father’s laugh. How my mother said my name. Through tears, I hugged my parents and branded them into the corridors of my brain.

Because when someone remembers us, we live forever.

EPILOGUE

MAKE A MEMORY

Bon Jovi

Who matters to you? Maybe you’re like me, with aging parents who are still somewhat healthy. Or perhaps this story finds you near Life’s end, with adult children and grandchildren.

We can all name people we take for granted, because everybody’s swamped. Overwhelmed. Harried. We mean to make memories with people who matter, but often, we put it off for someday. And someday morphs into never, as Life’s unpredictability claims the people we love.

I wrote
Not Without My Father
to inspire others to make a memory. Now. Today. To grab someone and turn “I wish I had” into “I’m glad I did.”

If you enjoyed this story, the best tribute you can pay lies in making a memory of your own. You don’t have to spend five weeks. Take an hour. Or an afternoon. A day or several.

Make a Memory is a MOVEMENT.

Help start it by making your own memory.

• Post a picture or video online.
  
• Include your name, where you live, and who you’re inviting to make a memory.
  
• Show the memory you want to make with a photo, a map, a gif or a video. Be creative. Make everyone who sees it want to Make this Memory with you.
  
• Tag the person you’re inviting to Make a Memory so they can respond.
  
• Hashtag your post with #NWMFMakeaMemory.
  

We’ll collect your Make a Memory submissions and showcase them on andrawatkins.com.

This isn’t a contest to impress everyone with your grand travel aspirations or lofty goals. It’s a sincere plea to spend time with someone who matters, to be able to say “I’m glad I did.” If you need ideas, go to andrawatkins.com/makeamemory.

Your Make a Memory entry could change your life.

But your participation will help make enough memories to change the world.