2005/04 Deep South trip - Cumberland Gap |
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Morristown turned out to be just about the right size to have a library (for Internet access), laundromat, banks, grocery, and liquor store. The grocery sold beer but not wine, so we got directions to the liquor store but couldn’t find it and gave up on the wine. This would prove to be a mistake! By the time we’d done all that it was mid-afternoon and into the eighties, and we settled for a short trip north to camp at the Cumberland Gap historic park.
The park surrounds the Cumberland Gap, the narrow trail that provides a way over the Appalachian 
Mountains from Tennessee into what is now Kentucky. This is the trail that made the guide Daniel Boone famous back in the 1770s. It was also sung about by Lonnie Donnegan back in those dreadful days of skiffle with its paper combs and tea-chest basses. Today, Tennessee and Kentucky are connected by two long two-lane tunnels that run under the historic trail. Up above the tunnels there are the remains of Civil War forts. Each side in the war thought they had an impregnable position, but it was easy to cut off supplies, so one side would get control and they’d get starved out and the other side would move in. For a while!
We drove up to the Pinnacles for the view and a short walk around the fort’s earthworks. There were vultures here too, but these were black vultures, a bit smaller than the turkey vultures we’d become used to. Mostly the locals don’t call them vultures; they prefer “buzzards”. Three states come together at this point. We went back from Kentucky into Tennessee through the tunnel, and then a mile into Virginia to the campground.
Wednesday April 6th
We had spent the evening finishing the printing of the copies of part one of this journal, so on Wednesday we went looking for a post office on the road across Kentucky. We found one in Pineville, a tiny town squeezed between the highway and the mountains. While I was there I asked if there was a liquor store in town. “We’re a dry town, mister.” I didn’t bother asking where the nearest wet town was as they clearly were a’fearing for my soul already. Later we got a “liquor map” for Kentucky which shows that almost all the counties in southern Kentucky are dry, just a couple are wet, and a couple more are “moist” with a few towns that are allowed to sell liquor. Our supplies were running low.