August 2, 2003

• I’m in Nashville. Tomorrow’s my grandmother’s 100th birthday party, and 95 people will be there, including me. Catherine Cobb Mitchum. Maybe you’ll see her on the news or something.

  Went to Echo Lodge yesterday, with my sister and her two sons. We wandered around on the banks of the South Harpeth… My sister and I reminisced about going over there most summers, while the boys mostly hinted (maybe not so subtly) that they wanted to leave.

  I have to admit that the Lodge (a log cabin on a hill by a river) is somewhat spooky. The upstairs in particular always creeped me out as a child, and I never went up there before I was a teenager. I think a big part of it is the steepness of the stairs, the dark corners and recesses, the mounted fish heads, the silent and dusty spinning wheel… There’s even a decrepid reed organ up there, to complete the haunted house archetype.

  It’s odd to me how a place that’s simply dark and old can be transformed into the set for a haunted house movie so easily. It’s also odd to me how the family tradition of keeping the place creepy is still in tact. No one will ever move or even touch the spinning wheel. We could probably get a bunch of money for the organ, too, even in its’ state of disrepair. But no one will take the time or make the effort; the place is frozen in time. Those things have always been there, and always will, until they’re dust.

  It’s owned by a generation of the family that moved away. That is, no one lives near enough to make use of the place on any regular basis. The political situation is such that no one dare change anything. There’s a caretaker who keeps the weeds from overtaking the place, and keeps the river access road maintained. But that’s all.

  That’s how our memories are. We want to maintain them, but really we’re just putting them in formaldehyde. We want them to be a certain way, to reflect a certain something. My dad and his brothers spent whole summers there, their father being a gentleman farmer. They want to remember those times, and hold on to the times their children played in the river and hiked through the woods. The place is pinned to a stretch of time when they were growing up, being raised, and a stretch of time when my generation was growing up.

  One of my nephews was trying to express his annoyance at being there by shocking us. He said that by the time he inherited the place, he’d sell it and make a pretty penny. His intent to shock aside, he has a point: It’s a money hole on a hillside to anybody whose childhood isn’t linked to it. A beautiful money hole, but a money hole nonetheless.

  My childhood is linked to it. Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of being there. 8 years old, amazed that my uncle Bill could cut watermelon with a string (you saw it, as with a garotte), chasing my cousins around, capsizing a canoe in the river and swimming up under it… Gathering rocks, plants, insects. We’d get fireflies and put them in a jar and take them back to my grandparents’ house, and use them as a night light.

  I told my sister that my interest in travel and the outdoors no doubt stems from summers at the camp. She agreed, and said it was the same for her. I think we’re both incredibly lucky.

  I wish there were a way for Echo Lodge to be a dynamic memory, instead of a static one. It just sits there and decomposes, like childhood memories as we get older. Maybe that’s it’s lesson; that you can’t go back, can’t really revisit. Childhood is for remembering, not reliving.

  Nashville is growing. The area around the camp is more gentrified, ever more suburban. Property values are going up. It won’t be long.

  And maybe that implies another lesson: Things fade of their own accord, unless you make the effort to keep them vivid.

  • 3:11 am
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