Terror on the Backroads!
It was late spring in the mid-90’s. The world had not yet discovered the convenience of smartphones, nor had the general public made avail of navigation by GPS. There I was, in the woodlands of east-central Alabama, in a shoddy minivan (thanks Avis), Rand-McNally road atlas open on the passenger seat.
Totally lost.
I planned out the rest of that trip very well. I was going to Horseshoe Bend, I was going to Tuskegee, I was going to Chattanooga and Chickamauga and Plains, Georgia and Andersonville and the Ebeneezer Baptist Church. All were wonderful, informative, educational, and even moving. But for some, dumb reason, I phoned in the plan for Little River Canyon, and fell flat on my face.
Well, I didn’t literally fall on my face. What I literally did was drive around various backroads, trying to find the canyon. There was nary a sign to be seen, I just keep flitting around various windy roads, taking random left turns like a blithering jackass. Then, the storms rolled in.
First there were flashes of light, followed by the rumble of distant thunder. Then the sky turned black as night. The wind picked up, the rain fell, then went sideways, and then the flash of the lightning and the crash of the thunder occurred nearly simultaneously. I was in the eye of the maelstrom, in a shitty rented minivan, surrounded by 100’ tall loblolly pines. I was waiting for that one tree to give up its ghost, forcing me to give up mine.
In about 15 minutes, the storm passed and the sky cleared. Heart pounding, I pressed on, and there, on my right, revealed by the sunlight, was the Little River Canyon. It was cool and all, and incredibly photogenic in that moment, but all I wanted to do was go back to my hotel and have a drink.
I haven’t made too many boneheaded mistakes in my visits to over 200 National Park sites, but my short visit to Little River Canyon was one of the dumbest.
I didn’t own a digital camera when I visited the canyon. The photo is from the National Park Service website: https://www.nps.gov/liri/index.htm
America In Context 