We had sorted our hike into the Blue Ridge Mountains — we knew where to park, how long it would take, how much water to bring — when the volunteer at Asheville Visitor Center handed over the map she had annotated.
“Now, I’m going to tell you what to do if y’all meet a bear,” she said, looking up at us. Sara and I exchanged doubtful glances. We had set out from Charlottesville, Virginia, the previous morning, and this was the first full day of our adventure. While over the preceding months we had talked about what could possibly go wrong when we abandoned our husbands and various other animals to drive an electric car through the southern states of America, meeting bears hadn’t featured.
“Make yourselves real big, stand still and put your arms in the air . . .” She stretched up to show us, her fingertips wiggling. “. . . And shout ‘Shoo! SHOO’!”
Back in the car, heading up to the Blue Ridge Parkway, we kept a lookout for bears. “You know, I wouldn’t mind seeing one from the car,” Sara said. I nodded. I, too, would have loved to see a bear from the car. But I had promised my family I would make it safely home; that — I’d said it with a knowing laugh — we wouldn’t be driving off the lip of the Grand Canyon.
The Thelma & Louise jibes had been coming from every quarter since we had first talked about our road trip. As they had 30 years ago, when I had done a similar drive — with a different friend, Daisy. Back in 1994, I was in my twenties and unmarried; Clinton was in the White House, gas was 99c a gallon, and we were driving a 1977 gas-guzzling-and-emitting, pistachio-green Lincoln Continental. “A big ol’ boat”, as the locals liked to tell us. Daisy and I had stayed in cheap motels and subsisted on margaritas and square burgers from Wendy’s. We had been a little surprised by the dearth of salad and vegetables available in the deep south — but not unduly perturbed.
Wind forward three decades and Sara and I were mainlining kombucha. Friends from university, we hadn’t seen each other enough in the 25 years since she had married an American and moved to Boston. But enough that, when she had floated the idea of accompanying her across the States — she has daughters at college on both coasts and had taken a year’s sabbatical from work — I had leapt at the chance. My younger child was about to graduate from university; I was between work projects and had spent long periods over the past couple of decades being the parent while my husband worked abroad. And I longed to track back through those honeyed southern states, not to mention through my pre-children life. It felt as if I’d be closing a bracket on an era: the parenting years.
It was a stiff hike up the Blue Ridge Mountains, winding through wild rhododendrons and blueberry bushes on which, we’d been assured, the bears would gorge in a few months. Later that evening, we celebrated our safe return with beer and nachos and a band named Fancy and the Gentlemen playing southern gothy-tonk music in a dive bar in downtown Asheville. Two young women, tattoos stretching between their shorts and cowboy boots, twirled each other around the dance floor. For a fleeting moment, I wished away the past three decades.
One of the goals of our trip was to deliver Sara’s husband’s old car to her son on the west coast — a Tesla we, somewhat unimaginatively, christened Tess. On day three, heading west through the Smoky Mountains towards Tennessee, I battled with her auto-drive function. I was fine swooshing along the fast lane at the speed limit, Fancy on the stereo playing last night’s tunes. But when Tess clicked on her indicator and, of her own accord, started to accelerate to overtake a slouchy truck, I grasped hold of the steering wheel while braking.
Sara laughed. “You’ve got to learn to trust her.” We’d been talking about our children, all six of whom were striking off along their own paths. The parallel was not lost on us.
In Nashville (days four to six), we skirted the mayhem of Broadway’s three-storey honky-tonks and raucous bachelorette parties, and headed instead to the Country Music Hall of Fame for full immersion in Emmy-Lou, Dolly and Johnny. And the next day — after Avery, a young evangelical pastor, had guided us on a Segway tour around the downtown area — Sara went back to the Hall of Fame for more, while I queued to sample Nashville hot chicken at Hattie B’s (where heat levels ranged from mild to Shut the cluck up!!!™). We were working out that, while her tastes (museums and music) were different to mine (food and the American justice system), it was OK to split up for an afternoon. Unlike on family holidays, where we tend to fall in with whatever the loudest — or grumpiest — person wishes to do.
But in Montgomery, Alabama, a five-hour, two-charge drive due south, our interests coalesced. The three Legacy Sites — a museum, memorial and sculpture park — detailed the US’s “history of racial injustice”. The exhibits traced a clear line from slavery through lynching and segregation to mass incarceration. Each site was monumental, in ambition and execution: in the museum, we could pick up handsets and sit down to hear prisoners, in life-sized video, describe the deprivation and degradation of life inside; in the sculpture garden, we were challenged by Kehinde Wiley’s giant rendition of a man lying across a warhorse, Nikes on his feet: slavery, in different forms, endures. The exhibits and artworks were imaginative and shaming; they made sense of America’s past and coloured in its present.
After five hours in the museum, it took a styrofoam tray of Mrs B’s soul food — smoky barbecued ribs, creamed corn, collard greens and a biscuit — to restore our energies sufficiently to head back to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice. The names and stories of 4,400 victims of lynching, etched into 800 hanging coffin-shaped blocks of red weathered steel, will live with me.
We went to bed early that night, in a pretty Airbnb apartment, nestled among pillared mansions in the heart of Montgomery’s Garden District. The next morning, Sunday, we drove past First United Methodist Church, where families — husbands in button-downs, wives in court shoes — were climbing stiffly out of shiny SUVs.
The church we had chosen, New Home Baptist, was only two miles away. Gospel music swelled through the car park as we crept into the back pews. Our attempt at unobtrusiveness failed: one of the ushers, wearing an oversized jacket, diamanté necklace, and white gloves, greeted us. He was followed by the church deacon and his wife, who welcomed us with hugs. The atmosphere was as much party as service: the choir’s voices swelled the room, and towards the finale of Rev Forbes’s theatrical and absorbing sermon, he invited “our visitors from far away” to stand up and introduce themselves. Their warmth and generosity was a humbling counterpoint to the legacy of cruelty and injustice we’d absorbed at the museum.
On Day Nine, in Monroeville, Alabama, I ate a burger from Mel’s Dairy Dream, built on the lot where Harper Lee’s house once stood. Our rented loft was in what had once been Truman Capote’s aunt’s drapery store, and overlooked the old courthouse building, now a museum dedicated to To Kill a Mockingbird. At the Courthouse Cafe that evening, we imagined Atticus Finch greeting the lady at the next-door table, who was wearing a Trump 2024 T-shirt, with southern courtesy.
The next morning, we continued south, to Biloxi, Mississippi, which stretches along the warm, Gulf of Mexico coast. It was a bit of a culture shock, emerging, blinking, from the quiet of Alabama where restaurants served dinner at five, into a neon world of high-rise hotels, casinos and holidaymakers. We found a seafood restaurant overlooking the beach, and toasted the halfway point of our journey with barbecued catfish and cold beer.
At the coast, we turned west, bypassing New Orleans for the Whitney Plantation, where the burgeoning garden, with its giant gardenias, jasmine and old oaks, only sharpened the stories of slavery. Later, after a spicy bowl of boiled crawfish in Breaux Bridge, “the second prettiest small town in Louisiana”, we joined a joyful, multi-hued crowd dancing to Cajun music (plenty of fiddles) at a free music festival in Lafayette.
One of our worries before setting off had been how two women, travelling together in an electric car, would be greeted in the red states. At first, checking into a motel, we would make a point of stressing that we wanted a room with two beds, and talking about our husbands. But after a while we stopped caring. We were never treated with anything other than friendly courtesy — except by a pair of feisty pit bulls outside a seafood market (which also sold alligator) in small-town southern Alabama. We were probably a slightly odd pair — two tall women with funny accents, meandering across America in increasingly creased clothes — but no one seemed to mind.
Texas (days 12-17) was as huge as everyone had warned us it would be. But it wasn’t all oil barons and cowboys — though in Austin I did find the perfect red ankle cowboy boots that I’d been dreaming about for 30 years. That night, Sara’s son, who lives in Austin, took us to Donn’s Depot, a dance hall and piano bar in an old train station, jam-full of locals of every age, creed and dress sense. I wore my red boots and did the Texas two-step with a moustachioed septuagenarian.
On the long drive west, Tess started rattling. I pulled over on the freeway, and Sara slid under her belly to find that her undercarriage was flapping. We crawled sedately into Marfa, the incongruously quirky artist’s town in south-western Texas, where the local store had five shelves of different oat milks — and found a local mechanic, who screwed her back together for $20. At that point, Sara and I, two women who could easily be grandmothers, felt no hurdle was insurmountable.
Our last stop was Joshua Tree, in southern California’s Mojave desert. The trees, named by the Mormons after the Old Testament prophet whose outstretched arms they thought resembled the branches, were more Dr Seuss to me; each had its own personality. We’d treated ourselves to a couple of nights at the Joshua Tree Inn, where our room was next to the one where the country singer Gram Parsons had died after partying on whiskey and morphine. His manager and an undertaker friend, dressed in rhinestones, had taken a hearse to Los Angeles airport to retrieve Parsons’ body, which they spirited back to Joshua Tree and attempted to cremate at Cap Rock, according to Parsons’ wishes.
We got up early and parked at Cap Rock. From there, we set out into the desert. As the sun was climbing, we clambered on to a mound, comprising huge multi-hued rocks. Sara turned to me and mimed wiping tears from her eyes. I looked out towards the infinite horizon, with no other person in sight, and nodded. I was already anticipating the loss of that freedom — and easy friendship.
“We need tattoos,” she said. It seemed like the obvious thing to do.
That night, the last of our trip, we sat at the bar in Pappy + Harriet’s in Pioneertown, California, sharing a huge rack of ribs, fries and slaw. Every now and then one of us would stretch out an ankle to admire the small, two-branched Joshua tree which would, forever, mark our trip and which, I thought, was the perfect opening bracket of a new era.
The next morning, (day 20), we drove north towards San Francisco past a sign to Big Bear mountain. “Would you like to meet a bear now?” Sara asked.
I stretched out my arms as far as Tess allowed. We were ready.
Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life & Art wherever you listen
Read the full article here
