Metro Pulse/Gamut/Knoxville: Summer 2000

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A departing writer takes one last visit to Knoxville's summer icons

by Greg Siedschlag

There are so many expectations associated with summer that it may only serve to disappoint us. We dream of finally finding that perfect nightspot, Sunday drive, or romance; but we ultimately fall short of those lofty expectations. We may spend the summer pleased—but not content—with these illusions of perfection, but as soon as the leaves begin to fall, we find ourselves plunging back into old routines. It seems that somewhere deep within the recesses of both our subconscious and our city there are pieces of some secret key that, if placed together properly, could unlock some of that hidden vitality and promise.

And so we spend our summers searching.

But where, exactly, do we look? I have lived in Knoxville since the age of four and am leaving in less than three months. My past in this city has been predominated, with some recent exceptions, by an underachievement that cannot be easily rectified in such a short amount of time. But summer is a season tailor-made for such a rectification, so I look for the missing pieces of the key by waking up very early on a Monday morning and spending that entire day trying to reconnect with some forgotten beauty in this utterly familiar city.

Summer in a climate such as Knoxville is best experienced in the morning and the evening. Hopefully there is an indoor, air-conditioned job or home separating the two. In order to best avoid that creeping disappointment, begin waking up with the sunrise by May 15. Summer sunrises are as powerful as a hydrogen bomb and as invigorating as five shots of espresso. Every morning I drive to work down Westland Drive (the portion east of Morrell Road), and between the approximate hours of 7 and 9 a.m. there is a particular heavily-wooded curve where the sun rays explode through the seemingly dominant tree tops. It's a small pleasure, but one that stays with me the rest of the day.

This is my chosen route to breakfast, which I am having at a favorite downtown diner on Union Avenue called Pete's Coffee Shop. If you ever have friends or family visiting who have romantic visions of Knoxville as a quaint Southern city, and you don't want to disappoint them, take them to this little spot on Union. The barbers and dry cleaners stand outside their businesses a good portion of the day to greet and chit-chat with each other and passers-by. The mere sight of it at this hour is like an implied "good morning."

Pete's was probably furnished in the 1950s and the only noticeable additions in the last 50 years are pictures of defining games and players of UT football and photos of some local Little League baseball teams. You're not sure if they keep things this way for aesthetic or budgetary reasons, but you're thankful they do because the rest of the world has inexplicably moved on to more sterile furnishings. I sit down at the lunch counter and order a cup of coffee, French toast, and sausage. I'm used to nothing more than a hurried bowl of Cap'n Crunch in the morning, and if I didn't feel full of vitality before the Westland sunrise, I certainly do now after this warm breakfast.

I leave the diner and this throwback island of our downtown and pull up in the line leading to the booth of the lot I've parked. I pull to the window and the lady begins to talk to me as if we are best friends. After a little endearing digression she looks at my ticket and notices that I went a minute over. "We're supposed to charge a dollar extra for that," she tells me, "but I'll let you have the 30 minute rate. Don't spend it all in one place." If the miracle of miracles ever occurs and our downtown suddenly thrives with activity at all times of the day, and once-abandoned buildings are filled from the bottom floor up with burgeoning enterprise, I hope we still retain these islands of uncommon kind-heartedness like I experienced on Union Avenue that morning.

The sun, that all-important determinant of summer activity, is still at a friendly level in the sky when I make the short drive over to Ijams Nature Center. I arrive at Ijams a little before 10 a.m. There are few cars here and things are very quiet, so I scurry into one of the trails before the crowds can catch up to me. Throughout my mile-long walk there is but a thin cloud cover, a soft breeze, and a temperature of about 72 degrees. Other than a soggy trail from the rains the day before, the conditions are truly ideal.

I stop often along the way to admire the various streams and perspectives on the banks of the Tennessee River. There is one particular spot where the tree cover that dominates the river bank here opens up to a full view of the river, the rolling hills, the horizon, an apparent farm, and that commanding blue sky. Propped against a short fence, I am calmed by the supreme majesty and grandeur of the scenery, and even though I can't see what lies on the other side of the hills a relatively short distance away, this beauty seems to extend forever. Strangely, I think about my imminent farewell and feel not a sense of sorrow for leaving all this behind, but a sense of possibility in seeing what wonderful things lie on the other side of that glorious horizon.

Some hours later I emerge from the woods and I realize it's lunch time, and that the ideal summer lunch is barbecue. Sarge's has just opened a new place off the west end of Cumberland Avenue that I visit with gratitude about once a week when I'm trapped in this den of fast-food overkill.

Barbecue isn't an easy art form to master. While enjoying this sandwich, I think back to how lucky I am at this particular moment, compared with my early Sunday School days as a boy of 9 or 10. Along about August or so, the Boy Scouts of my church, apparently led by vegetarians on a campaign to convert everyone, would begin their annual Barbecue Sale. Mom and Dad, under the naive assumption that they were doing something kind-hearted, brought home four pints of this supposed barbecue for me and my equally unsuspecting little sister to eat. There didn't appear to be as much actual pork meat in the containers as there was crushed bone and tire shreds marinated in muddy vinegar. They still make this stuff at the church, and I consider it a blasphemy to God that such "barbecue" is made in His House.

So good barbecue is not a thing to be taken lightly (nor is bad barbecue), and I'll savor every last bite of it between now and August because there isn't much where I'm going. After this late lunch I head back home under adherence of the Summer Afternoons Indoors Rule. I find myself in the midst of a well-deserved nap when I hear a knock on my door. It's two boys, approximately 12, and the one standing at the door has a plastic mop bucket with a sponge and a bottle of soap in it.

Pointing to my filthy, once white Geo Metro, the boy says that for two dollars, he and his silent friend will wash my car. As I have found out first-hand, good-paying summer work is hard to come by. My goodwill must be extraordinary because these two boys nearly hit the roof when I tell them I'd be glad to let them wash my car. I went back inside, glad that I could offer some would-be lemonade salesmen some spending money and return my car to its original color in the process. They did an inspired job, and I gave them an extra dollar for their troubles.

Summer afternoons and evenings are suburbia's crowning glory. Kids who wouldn't associate too closely or kindly with each other under normal circumstances set out to try and have a good time despite their differences. I go home to my parents' house for dinner and watch out the window as my 12-year-old sister plays with neighbors she really doesn't get along with that well. I think back to when I was her age and remember those summer games of baseball or football when someone would inevitably twist an ankle sliding into someone at second base or get chased into a tree and emerge with a black eye, and everything would seem to end in ruins, only to go back to normal the next day.

After that restful late afternoon I meet up with my friend Sam to go to a concert at a new venue that some friends of ours are opening up in the Old City. It's their opening night, and there is still quite a bit of work left to be done inside, so it is an invitation-only affair. After a blissful day spent mostly in solitude it is good to be in the company of old friends and acquaintances.

But the problem I have at shows put on by my avant-garde peers is that I rarely appreciate—or even understand—what the band is attempting to do "musically" or, more appropriately, "artistically." What would otherwise be a great party is often turned into a headache that lingers well into the next day.

So I can be easily bored when this noise drowns out the conversation. But fortunately Sam and I, friends since our ne'er-do-well days at Bearden High, are old masters of crowd diversion. Go figure: Sam and I both have ID-sized pictures of babies with us, which we affix over the portion of our respective driver's licenses containing our own pictures. We are now Undercover Babies, going through the crowd to arrest people for attempting to sell us crack cocaine. We are indiscriminate as to whom we attempt to apprehend, and after a while we even prefer total strangers. I am always amazed that most people actually seem to think we are funny, or at the very least feel sorry for us.

As I drove home that evening, still laughing at my own outlandish and inexcusable absurdity, I realized that in being an Undercover Baby, I had succeeded in what I had been attempting all day—to create my own vibrant world in the midst of a disappointing one. Though just a tad extreme, being an Undercover Baby was the culmination of my day of simple pleasures. But I don't see any reason why you can't stay within that realm of simplicity for your apex. Consummate experiences don't have to be potentially bothersome to complete strangers.

Certainly, pieces of that elusive key seem to have been uncovered; and although summer will always fall short of perfection in the here and now, years later, perhaps from a locality or a mentality far, far away, it may be looked back upon as a gleaming moment that defined an entire era of a life, and defined a particular place as home.