On my way back from Fall Creek Falls, I took the long way around through Sparta and Smithville. Just outside of Sparta is the community of Gum Springs which my mom grew up in. I had stopped there a handful of times and decided to spend 20 minutes of my time driving by my grandparent’s old house.
I managed to get there based soley on memories. No road maps. No knowledge of street names. Merely remembering the route I would travel almost every other weekend during the early elementary years of my life. The look of the fence at the turn off from Route 70, the small store across the street from my mom’s elementary school, the church where my parents were married, and the narrow road going to my grandparents’ farm….
From 1977 to up until my grandfather died in 1985, my parents would pack my sister up in our 1977 Volkswagen Beetle (later a 1982 VW Rabbit) and go to the farm to see my grandparents. Now, about 25 years later, here I was in my own Beetle driving along country roads of my childhood. I guess at times, history repeats itself.
The farmhouse is rented out to a family I don’t know. I paused briefly as I drove by it. It didn’t have as big of a yard as I remember it. Of course everything seems bigger when you are young. The electric fence which held the cattle had been dismantled. The only cattle in sight was across the street where my great-grandmother’s house once stood. Outside my grandparent’s house, a young girl played. I didn’t dare to stay too long, making myself at risk for being an outsider near private property.
The church where my parents were married hasn’t changed much. My mom says that membership has dwindled, probably loosing many of their members to larger churches within the town of Sparta itself. Rural churches as a whole are dying out.
As I drove along I found myself jealous of those resident’s lifestyle of rural culture. Sometimes I want to live in rural areas thinking that the slower lifestyle would make me happier.

This weekend around 150 folks from church went camping at Fall Creek Falls. It’s a 10+ year tradition, something that I’ve been a part of for around 3 years. Seems to get bigger each year, with more and more families coming, and more and more people upgrading to campers.
I think our worship service Sunday morning at Fall Creek Falls was how God would have wanted worship. We traded our suits and ties for shorts and t-shirts. Our pews were folding lawn chairs. Our big screen was the clouds in the sky. Just a simple worship service in a wooded campground. I’m sure if you took away the pop-up campers, the Winnebagoes, and the lawn chairs, it would have looked very similar to how the early Christians would have worshipped.
Sunday at lunchtime it rained. Rather than sit in the tent all day, I decided to drive toward the park exit and found myself heading toward Pikeville. With 2 restaurants, one being a McDonald’s, I decided to try to find more variety in Crossville. Crossville is a wannabe Cookeville. No doubt both cities are rivals of sorts. In Crossville I found myself in one of the most run-down Long John Silver’s in the state. The furniture looked as though they came from a Goodwill swapmart. The floor behind the counter was dirty and in full view of the customers. They served Coca-cola, which is a rarity among the Yum! branded restaurants (sister restaurants being Pizza Hut, Taco Bell, and KFC). I began to think that the LJS was probably an independent (read non-corporate) owned entity, which hadn’t yet gotten the corporate memo to serve Pepsi and to clean up their dining room. I should have gone to the Wendy’s down the block.
Perhaps due to directional insufficiencies and shear laziness, I didn’t get to see the Falls. I drove around trying to find the lookout and Buzzard’s Roost Monday afternoon, but never did succeed. I gave up and drove toward Spencer.
I’ve always had a fascination toward Buzzard’s Roost after being introduced to it 9 years ago at a church camp at Fall Creek Falls. I had revisited it a handful of times, both physically and through photographs since then. There is a safe area, a deck built by the road, then just in front of the deck, is a rock outcrop. Merely taking too many steps in the wrong direction would mean falling a few hundred feet to the bottom of the valley.