A few days ago LC and I left our sweet Jamie-dog at home and spent a short while "up on the mountain" briefly exploring a couple of small towns and then driving down the back side of the mountain headed towards McMinnville.
I took many pictures of beautiful rolling hills, increasingly green grass and fields, and endless farm land that I will post another day.
One of the stops we made was in the small town of Altamont (incorporated 1848).
With a population of little more than 1000 people who are spread out throughout many "hollers" and winding back country roads hidden among the trees, even that 1000 people seems hard to believe.
There is really not much of a town in the usual sense of the word.
There is a town hall, a couple of nurseries, a couple of cafes and restaurants and country stores, a sheriffs department, not too much else.
Neither Altamont nor the close-by community of Beersheba Springs (nor the couple of other very small towns in the vicinity) have a lot of businesses-as-usual, and I have to imagine that most things that most people buy they buy in the larger towns of Tracy City and Monteagle if they do not want to come down from the mountain.
All of these communities are part of Grundy County.
And Grundy County has a very tough reputation.
Grundy Countians have the deserved reputation of being close-knit and closed and no-nonsense mountain people. Suspicious of strangers and outsiders. Preferring to be left alone to live their lives in peace.
Because there are so many places to hide, crime (particularly drug production and use and all the rest) is widespread, but unfortunately that is the case in many many rural communities in Tennessee.
It is a bit of a wild and woolly section of Tennessee and both LC and I love it there.
And it is beautiful.
Very beautiful.
Altamont and then Beersheba Springs are both located close to Stone Door and the extensive trail system and waterfall system located in adjacent surrounding natural areas.
Part 1 of our recent trip to Stone Door:
After grabbing a quick and basic lunch from the small restaurant section of an Altamont convenience store LC and I drove only five minutes down the two lane highway before pulling onto the side of the road, climbing out of the truck and walking up to and through the main town park.
Walking through the entrance of the park, that was completely surrounded by a low stone wall my Mountain Boy went in one direction and I walked in another direction, both curious to see what we had found...............
As I approached the bandstand I turned back to look in the direction we had come, wanting to take another look at the church that we had parked beside.
It was abandoned, beginning to get a little run down from neglect, but was made of stone and really beautiful.
I stood regarding it for a few minutes, wondering why such a lovely building was not in use...............
A light cannon resting on one side of the park.
After walking around this piece which was hugely interesting I found my gaze continually gravitating towards the stone fence.
There were three entrances to the park, each one containing decorative concrete pillars, and the stone wall was not flat.
Instead it was completely covered with rocks standing upright every foot along the way.
Interesting. Certainly unique....................
The town was very quiet.
As I walked slowly through the park taking in bandstands and war memorials and pumps and as I looked outside the square at the small empty buildings that used to be storefronts but were now abandoned, I was acutely aware of the silence.
No wind. No people. No traffic. No planes. No birds.
Just silence..............
An unexpectedly large number of military vehicles parked outside the Sheriffs Department.............
As of the writing of this blog I have had 41,995 visits to this site.
I don't know if that is a lot of blog visits in two years and two months or not, but in the past few months I have suddenly become keenly aware of the fact that I should have put "labels" on the blog when I started it so that folks could find things a little easier.
But I did not know about such things until just recently.
When I first started this blog just before leaving Tennessee in January 2010, and just before moving to Juneau, I knew nothing about blogging.
Actually I knew nothing about digital cameras and taking pictures and downloading and......
I initially started the blog so that I could stay in touch with family.
So that my Mountain Boy and my oldest son in Tennessee and my youngest son in Iraq could see where I was and what I was doing and know that I was OK.
And while I was in Juneau I was so damn busy and so damn stressed and so damn overburdened and so damn tired that I never picked up on labels and how useful they could be when folks were looking for specific information.
This whole blog has definitely been a process.
Much as the past two years have been a process.
Has it really only been two years??
It feels so much longer..................
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