Many roads merged in Time
Short takes » 'The Parkways Projects' and the CCC who crafted beautiful structures into being as The Great Smoky Mountains and Shenandoah National Parks were linked by two visionary parkways
“You have to be careful of that one; it’s a tricky poem—very tricky.” ≈ Robert Frost on ‘The Road Not Taken’
Doors, portals, roads and paths.
Once in a lifetime opportunities come around about five to seven times a week; we just don’t recognize them for what they are. But we hammer ourselves in efforts to be certain, and certainty never arrives. I’m not so certain that certainty even knows how to knock. But I know it glides like an owl in a humid night.
Certainty does have a long history of eluding us.
As a matter of fact certainty always seems to me to have always been a very elusive state of being. One that maybe is perhaps a state which is best thanked for offering us all a brief interlude rather than a long domain.
I’d rather try to fathom those once in a lifetime moments, and tease from the Fates the myriad offers they’re trying to allow us. Although, it has often occurred to me that the Fates are smirking at our inability to hear their whispered sentences; our lack of awareness of their presence within moments, of their genuine wish that we would once, maybe just twice perhaps own our measured lives, slow our gaits and our linear trajectories to remain carefully on that road so known and tended by ourselves, so carefully wrought and customized beyond the pale of our own beings.
Years ago, the Civilian Conservation Corps were formed to allow millions of persons to suspend their lives in order to take a chance in the elsewhere places, to learn new skills and to watch new horizons arise on terrain unfamiliar to themselves. It was a promise of renewal, a road to recovery, especially along the route of the proposed National Parkways through the Southern Appalachian region of America. It was a promise of a living wage, two words become one that recently has been an increasingly accelerated term in the annals of modern American socio-economic history.
Some found more than a vocation by signing on to the CCC; they found their voices, a purpose, and so their lives emerged from those opportunities and interactions with renewed hope and aspirations. In the wake of their passing, millions upon millions more have traversed their bridges, have slept in trail shelters hewn from native rock by their hands, and in time, untold millions of eyes born of decades hence have witnessed their works erode away in time.
Yet, their works still whisper, within a soft spawned policy of decay, in which many of these venerable builds, these legacies wrought from the hands of young men in the 1930’s, are being allowed to deteriorate.
I’ve chosen this particular photograph to represent what the individual states are doing to preserve the historic architecture of the CCC era, when our Nation will not. The CCC presence was far more prevalent in the National Park System, yet over time, the CCC flattened out (as I am doing as a chronicler in The Parkways Projects) to include five states adjacent to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, The Blue Ridge Parkway, The Skyline Drive, and the Shenandoah National Park. South Carolina and Tennessee State Parks are restoring these CCC builds carefully and lovingly. While I’m not yet able to speak of Virginia, North Carolina and Georgia, I expect to find in continued travels that they are doing the same. Which creates a very weighty question: Why are these beautiful structures being allowed to deteriorate in our National Parks System? It is a very real question, a very cogent story, one steeped in the essence of our immediacy as a Nation.
"Maybe that was what happened when people grew up in a place where mountains shut them in, kept everything turned inward, buffered them from everything else. How long did it take before that landscape become internalized, was passed down from generation to generation like blood type or eye color?" ≈ Ron Rash
“Many roads merged in Time,” digital photograph, image Copyright 2023 Tom Ogburn, words all rights reserved. The original visitor’s center at Big Ridge State Park, Tennessee, June 2023.