Friday, September 25, 1998

Text and captions by Jesse Fox Mayshark, Adrienne Martini,
and Joe Tarr

Photographs by David Andrews, Aaron Jay, and Ed Richardson

Knox County is a big place, bigger than most of us think about most of the time. It's not until you drive from Carter to Concord—or Seymour to Halls, or Karns to Holston Hills—and realize you're still in the same place that the size and diversity of it hits home. In any given day, pretty much anything you can imagine is going on somewhere in and around Knoxville. A lot of it is mundane, some of it is extraordinary, and all of it says something about the people who live here.

The "Day in the Life" photo essay has become a convention of sorts, even a cliché—it's been done on national and international levels, with varying results. What would it be like, we wondered, to try it in Knoxville? What would we look for? What would we find? The answers may not be surprising individually—people making donuts or milking cows or cheering high school football teams are not in themselves unexpected events. But taken together—and taken within hours and miles of each other—they are a reminder that we live in a place filled with activity, that there are fascinating things going on around us all the time whether we notice them or not. What follows is not comprehensive geographically, culturally, or thematically, nor is it intended to be. It's just a collection of sideways glances at life in our backyard.

5:30 p.m.
Dick Bales and Patty Watkins aren't just weekend waterfarers. The longtime members of the Vol Navy spend six to eight months a year living on their 65-foot cruiser, most of it moored at a "dockominium" at Fort Loudon Dam. But during football season, they're apt to tie up off of Neyland Drive for weeks at a time, inviting friends on board to wine and dine. They came upriver for Boomsday and planned to stay right through the Houston game on Sept. 26. They'll be back in a few weeks for the close of the season. The boat's name: It's a Hoot.

7:45 p.m.
Knox County is no agricultural hotbed, but just down the road from the Food Lion plaza on Asheville Highway, you'll find Rick Fawver doing what his daddy and his granddaddy have done since 1910—raising milk cows. The smell and the muck of farming surround the milk shed and any one of several dogs may bark and sniff at your toe as you approach, but inside it's all business. Bud Lane, shown here, leads the complacent cows to and from the shed where they are hooked up to the tentacles of modern dairy farming, which do the work once required of hands. Outside, the sun burns off the fog, but Fawver and Lane have been up for hours as they finish up the first of two milkings for their 200 cows.