Flying Roadtrip

Thursday, my best friend and I took a flying roadtrip west.  We started in Port Gibson to see the giant golden hand on the top of First Presbyterian.  From there, we went on the back road that never ends to see Windsor Ruins.  Finally, we finished up in Natchez where we ate at Mammy's Cupboard and toured Longwood before we had to turn back home.

I'd been on mostly this same trip last year and shot a ton of pictures.  It was so different having my friend along.  We talked in that way that people who have known each other forever can do as we traveled, and it wasn't necessarily that anything earthshattering was said.  It was just nice to have someone to say something to.

For both of us, this was sort of an abbreviated version of a long trip we took in 5th grade, the Mississippi Trip.  Both of us remember bits and pieces of that tour of our state.  My friend had a Polaroid camera, and she took pictures everywhere we went.  On this trip, she had her husband's good Nikon instead.  There was a gentle echo of that other trip so long ago as we traveled.

The sites themselves were much as I saw them last time.  Windsor didn't have a carload of thugs napping under the shade trees this time, and part of the single-strand wire fence built to keep people out of the structure was down, but everything else was just like it was before.  The big gold hand in Port Gibson was still large and golden.  Longwood was still frozen in time, silent, majestic, dreaming.

Of them all, Longwood always moves me most.  I don't know why I keep going back there.  There's something about the innovation and the forethought that Haller Nutt put into the design of that house that makes the unfinished part so much more poignant. The potential for wonder that is revealed in all the existing details is tantalizing and somehow saddening as well.  What would it have been if it could have been finished?  Would it still stand today, or would it have been torn down, burned up, forgotten and discarded?

Every tour I've had through the house has been a bit different depending on the docent.   The only thing I don't like about any of these tours is that the guides don't give you enough time inside simply to absorb the history and the feeling of the place.  It deserves a moment of quiet contemplation, of silence, of listening to the wind through the oaks outside.  It deserves a moment for the mind to paint the red brick walls with lustrous plaster, to create the missing statues in the domed niches, to remove the planks that hide the interior or the onion dome and add the mirrors that would have lit the whole house with their reflection.  Instead, there is sort of a brief patter, a quick "run-through," and next thing you know, you're being ushered politely, gently out the graceful front doors and into the nuclear heat of a Mississippi summer where, quite frankly, it is not possible to imagine much of anything that doesn't involve glacial cold.

It feels like there are a million untold stories in Longwood.  I am sure this is true of every house, past and present.  There is just something lingering in the air and the objects there, though, that invites imagination to embroider details.  There are paintings of those who lived there through time, and there are the very beds and books they used and loved.  The hand-drawn plans of what was to be created line the walls.  Tools and packing crates with hand-written address labels sit as though workers will return to tidy up soon.  Objects picked with care to provide comfort and beauty remain.  It feels like a place that lives in a half-life, wanting to be more but knowing that somnolent state is all that it will ever know.

Today is the 149th anniversary of Haller Nutt's death.  Heartbroken by the way his fates fell during the Civil War, he contracted pneumonia and succumbed.  I can't help but think that when he died, he must have been so worried about everything, his failing fortunes, his family and what would become of them after he was gone, the treatment he'd received at the hands of a government he had not defied.  He was a brilliant man by all accounts, and that shattered half-finished magnificent experiment of a house is terribly, terribly sad.  I wondered how often he stood in the center of that main floor or roamed the upper levels forbidden to modern tourists, worrying and hoping about the future, seeking some way, any way to bring some level of control and sanity back to his world.

I don't know if I'll make this same trip again, and if I do, I don't know that I will  go back to Longwood.  Likely, at some point, I will travel that way again.  There is so much in Natchez to see that I wouldn't have to go there to have something to do.  I am pretty sure I will make my way up that curving and treelined drive again, though.  The sad majesty of what awaits at the end seems to demand it.