Roadkill

I was on my way to work this morning, when I saw you lying in the road. Stretched across the yellow lines, you lay there exposed to the weather that has so thoroughly beleaguered Georgia and Tennessee. But instead of paws or a furry countenance sticking up vulnerably into the air, frozen by rigor mortis, pages fluttered lifelessly. No lifeblood dried stickily on the tarmac, but words and occasionally sentences spilled out into the road. I speculated - were you chased onto treacherous Ochs Highway by some literary critic who runs with the coyotes of Lookout Mountain? The hunt is over, at least for you.

Now the dark silhouettes of students circling in the sky herald your disembowelment. One lands, and greedily snaps up a few quotes out of context to be taken back to its young paper, to whom they will be fed without correct citation.

The Other Lookout Mountain

There are a number of posts that could follow that title, most of them dealing with some kind of socioeconomic issue, examining class differences. This not about that; rather, it's something much more trivial. I'm sure you've had the experience where you dream about alternate versions of familiar places, and that's what I mean by "other" Lookout Mountain.

So, in my version, which comes back every now and then, I'm driving south on the mountain (or sometimes inexplicably flying - those are the best). And while Lookout Mountain is a long mountain, stretching from Tennessee south through Georgia into Alabama, this dream-version is huge. I come across huge canyons with sheer cliffs, stretching down to wide rivers, dwarfing anything in Cloudland or Little River Canyon. The mountain keeps going, becoming a high Southwestern scrubland with Utah-like rock formations. Sometimes, when it's an aerial view, it'll be under a full moon that illuminates immense waterfalls that lead off the mountain through a kind of pine wilderness. I think it's in this area (much higher than the 2000 ft real elevation) that there's this secluded lake between a number of peaks.

The real Lookout Mountain is pretty cool, for sure, but man, I wish I could find this version.