Time Traveling On The Natchez Trace

Ida Santana, MD
Sep 8, 2018 · 3 min read

I drove yesterday from Nashville down the Natchez Trace Parkway to Hampshire to visit a friend Marina Marlota Darling who’s a screenwriter with two small children. My mother is a midwife and delivered both her babies. She and her husband had sold their 300 acre farm last year in Hampshire that adjoins the Natchez Trace and moved to LA. But it didn’t feel like home so they bought their Farm back just days before it was scheduled to be completely logged of all the hundreds of years old trees.

I went to Hampshire School 4th through 12th grade. And driving back was like a holy pilgrimage. We used to have hay rides in 8th grade at my friend Terra’s grandfather’s farm just down the road from Marina.

I got off the Trace early on Highway 7, drove through crazy little back roads through Water Town and Shady Grove. I was listening to Doc Watson’s Blue Grass song Shady Grove driving through Shady Grove. I tell my patients a story about Doc Watson… he was blind. His son helped him tour and played guitar with him on the road. Then his son was killed in a tractor accident, and for many many years Doc quit making music. Then his son came to him in a dream and said ‘Go back out there and make music again. Stop grieving for me.’ So Doc went back and had a second career. But Doc said his wife never recovered from losing their son. Some folks never recover from grief.

I’ve always felt the Natchez Trace is a time warp. From the Native Americans who used the Trace to early settlers, to bicyclists, to the 45 miles per hour motorists with no commercial vehicles or RV’s, it’s a hypnotic drive back in time. There wasn’t a single other motorist in my direction the entire drive.

When I was driving the back roads, literally dirt roads of my youth to Marina’s when I got to the familiar roads- Dry Fork, Cathy’s Creek, Scotch Branch, Biffle Lane… all the memories of my childhood school bus route flooded back. Scratch Biffle an old timer farmer guy sold the Farming Crew aka my Dad strawberry plants to plant on the commune where I was born when I was a little girl.

There’s a part in Wind In The Willows where after Mole goes to live with Rat on the River Bank for a year, they’re walking through a field and Mole can smell his old home. Mole starts to cry and Rat doesn’t know what’s come over him. That’s how it felt. No words to describe it. My husband said I was tripping on the Trace. I love how tripping implies time traveling through the past. Like Nora Ephron said true love is related to nostalgia. And nostalgia is longing for a period of time that never existed, except in our skewed memories.

Ida Santana, MD

Written by

Muck Raker, Feminist, Anti-Racist, Addiction Medicine Physician. Hailing from Nashville

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