A Walk in the Woods

enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was
in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they
were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days,
sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a
new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton--not far from where Katz and I now
sat, as it happened--was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state
prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating
Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly
humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don't realize
is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn't overturned in
Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving
conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended
from apes as overtaken by them.
Suddenly--I can't altogether explain it, but suddenly--I had a powerful urge not to be
this far south any longer. I turned to Katz.
"Why don't we go to Virginia?"
"What?"
Somebody in a shelter a couple of days before had told us how delightful--how
gorgeously amenable to hiking--the mountains of the Virginia Blue Ridge were. Once you
got up into them, he had assured us, it was nearly all level walking, with sumptuous views
over the broad valley of the Shenandoah River. People routinely knocked off twenty-five
miles a day up there. From the vantage of a dank, dripping Smokies shelter, this had
sounded like Xanadu, and the idea had stuck. I explained my thinking to Katz.
He sat forward intently. "Are you saying we leave out all the trail between here and
Virginia? Not walk it? Skip it?" He seemed to want to make sure he understood this
exactly.
I nodded.
"Well, shit yes."
So when the cabdriver pulled up a minute later and got out to look us over, I explained
to him, hesitantly and a bit haplessly--for I had really not thought this through--that we
didn't want to go Ernestville at all now, but to Virginia.
"Virginia?" he said, as if I had asked him if there was anywhere local we could get a
dose of syphilis. He was a little guy, short but built like iron, and at least seventy years
old, but real bright, smarter than me and Katz put together, and he grasped the notion of
the enterprise before I had halfway explained it.
"Well, then you want to go to Knoxville and rent a car and drive up to Roanoke. That's
what you want to do."
I nodded. "How do we get to Knoxville?"
"How's a cab sound to you?" he barked at me as if I were three-quarters stupid. I think
he might have been a bit hard of hearing, or else he just liked shouting at people.
"Probably cost you about fifty bucks," he said speculatively.
Katz and I looked at each other. "Yeah, OK," I said, and we got in.
And so, just like that, we found ourselves heading for Roanoke and the sweet green
hills of old Virginny.