Lookout Mountain

N 35.0135° W 85.3416°
I sat with my Camelbak behind my head, my body cupped in the slant of the rock, twisted at the hips, my legs crossed and crooked. The heat was oppressive. I couldn't stay awake, really: I couldn't. The fellowship meal at the East Ridge Adventist Church had knocked me out. Postprandial.
When I woke up, the back of my shirt was drenched in water that had leaked from my Camelbak's bladder. I hadn't cranked the lid closed. The rubber gasket is failing slowly, and though I guess that's something I could replace, it's something I won't. Not yet. Besides, that way I had a healthy base of wetness to use as a starting point as we hiked up to Point Park from Craven's house on the eastern edge of Lookout Mountain.
If you're savvy like me, you buy an America the Beautiful pass which gets you free parking and entrance at Point Park on the Saturday you arrive and at the lake above Ocoee Dam 1 the Saturday before you leave. If you're savvy like the young adults from East Ridge, you park at Craven's house for free and walk to the top, again: for free. My method would have involved a lot less sweating, anyway. The summit path we walked snaked back and forth up the mountain, twisting over ruts and logs and hillocks. The ridge pushed up into the sky on one side and slid down to the river on the other. My shoes clicked on the occasional rock, and I could feel sweat sliding down my back with the leaked water from my backpack.
"Hey, Curtis."
"Yeah."
"I've been asking people this question and I want to know your answer. If you were ruler of the world, what would be your first three orders of business, and where would you put your secret base?"
"Oh, okay."
"It doesn't have to be secret. Where would you put your base?" For whatever reason, my mind always jumps ahead of me, and I unconsciously assume that to become supreme ruler, you would essentially have to be a supervillain and your base would, therefore, be secret.
"Let me think," Curtis pants out, breath on the edge of ragged.
I ask these sorts of questions a lot. I don't know if mind exercises are just easier, or if they feel fun and that's why they work, but an insane hypothetical tends to draw people out faster than, say, asking about their first breakup or their mom's quilting. It's all harmless, but I can poke at things when it's your fake future we're discussing, and not your real past. I can pull things apart, and you don't get hurt by it. When I was on the Blue Ridge Parkway, I asked this question of Sarah.
"I would put my base in the Painted Desert." I heard her say she would put her "face" there, and I thought that would be awesome.
"What, like visible from space, or something?"
"No, invisible. I would make it blend with the landscape."
"So you would use native rocks and vegetation, and . . ."
"Yeah, really make it blend in."
I had a picture of an enormous woman's face staring out from the rocks of the high plains at anyone lucky enough to get a hundred kilometers above. I thought this was brilliant, and said so.
"No, my base."
"Oh, that's disappointing."
Sarah said she would change the world's economic incentives to be oriented towards the greater good, not personal gain. "Wealth," she argued, "should not be the major motivator of human actions."
"Okay. But what if my greater good--my personal happiness--is dependent on how fast a car I can drive? And I don't need to go to school for that. Just get me a fast car."
"You have to go to school."
"So who decides what this ultimate good is? Because if it's not me . . ."
"I decide. You go to school."
"Can I still get that fast car, though?"
"It can't be a gas guzzler. Probably a Tesla."
"Okay, you have my vote. I'll take mine now, please."
We did laugh, but I poked the weaknesses in her economic platform a few more times just to see if they poked back. I'm not sure, but I think that might be why we won't be friends forever, why she didn't give me her phone number and I didn't press her for it. Why when I make it to Oakland, I'll ride past the nonprofits and not call to ask if their designer's name is Sarah, just so I can check up on her. I think she could tell I wasn't the sort of person she needed, and all because she was hypothetical ruler of the world for four questions.
I'm still waiting for Curtis' answers, explaining Sarah's. He's ahead of me on the path, so his words are sometimes harder to make out. He only turns around to look at me for half of a sentence or less before the rocks demand his eyesight again.
I don't remember his answers, which annoys me. We talked about diseases and AI and energy independence--he's bullish on nuclear power, like me, but not to the level of Chris Dant--but I can't remember even where he said he would put his (secret) base. It bothers me that I can't remember. But I do remember being utterly comfortable with his answers, with poking holes, with hearing him shore those holes up. I remember revealing my concerns about space travel and hearing him echo it all back to me. (And I think his reflexive first policy decision was "Resign.") But as much as I don't remember exactly what he said, I do remember stopping where an old hotel was built on the edge of the cliff and staring out at the river aghast.
"If I had a time machine, I would come back and stay here," he said.
"Oh, man, I am right there with you. This would be the most boss hotel ever."
On the way back down, I asked Chris Dant the same questions. He was a little more Chris Dant than Curtis was, whose answers were aligned with his sociopolitical beliefs. Chris was infinitely more practical.
"First order of business. Find who your enemies are and eliminate them, because once you've consolidated power you want stability, and you're sure to have enemies."
Woah.
"I would put my base in a mid-sized city, I guess. It would be fun to be in a volcano for some geothermal power, but there's nothing to be gained defensively from that. I would prefer to blend into a city that's small enough to not attract attention to the military installations and not be big enough to be the target of a biological attack." Chris wants to remain in power, because he assumes that his fifth and eighth and fifty seventh policy will be more valuable than his first three. I got to hand it to him: it makes sense, even though it technically doesn't reveal anything new to me about his character and his mode.

Just for the record? Base on the moon. Get to Mars, make all policy decisions by double-blind randomized controlled longitudinal study, establish benevolent, self-improving AI. At that point, the show runs itself.

At the top of the hill, there's a humdinger of a view. I heard a woman say "Oh, of course. I see it looks like a shoe, now." I looked down and finally saw that the bends in the river made Moccasin Bend look like a foolishly obvious name, but I had always assumed it was named that because it was a staging area for the Trail of Tears. It's a shoe. I saw some couples strung up in hammocks together and a film crew shooting b-roll for House Hunters. I climbed down to the shelf below the Ochs museum and saw through the broken glass to the stripped interior layered with construction materials and dust. I got my passport stamps from the guest center (to be taped in, later: nobody said we were going to Point Park, just that we were going to "a place on Lookout Mountain," so I didn't bring it). But I remember the conversations I had that day more than I remember the things I saw. Maybe: because I've seen the things before.
The first time I went up the mountain, I went with Lauren Souza. I don't remember why or what year, but I do remember the sun going down on a constant conversation. In those days, I feared that to be silent was to betray a weakness in your relationship. If you don't have anything to say to a person, you're not as compatible as you think. I've slackened my death-hold on that opinion, but silence is still a bad sign in a friendship I want to develop into love. Delight was silent with me a lot, at the end. It's been a long time since that afternoon on the tip of Chattanooga's pompous park, and a lot has happened. But when I reached out to Lauren, tentatively (she's one of five friends I have left in the area, so why not?), she betrayed no hesitation. Of course we can hang out. Coffee shop, you say? Sure, I'll be there at 10. We talked well, like real friends who haven't seen each other for a while. But we talked more honestly than people in our situation do.
After an hour of sharing out the changes we've made and the places we've been stuck, she walked into a question she didn't know the answer to. She asked about Delight, of course, and much later and much more innocently than I expected. I had pictured this going a lot of ways, but this sideways accident I didn't see coming. I didn't need to tell Lauren, and maybe it would have been best for me if I hadn't. But she was once my friend, too, and I don't have any motives for revealing or hiding my wife. She didn't know what to say, but she sighed and opened up with: "Well, if you've shared, it feels right that I should share." She told me about a trauma she's finally living her way out of. We talked about our own hesitant, abortive relationship, for a brief moment. We were honest about the garbage people we were in the past, and we said how much we hoped for the future. It was weird. It's not what you would expect from a conversation with someone you crushed on so long ago. Maybe it's my own vicious honesty that drew honesty from her. Maybe it's the type of friends we've always been, and other relationships we shared were all just diversions from this one truth.

And maybe, it's just part of being an adult, this being able to talk about things that hurt without fear. Maybe grown-up humans face their problems instead of running from them. But this last idea? It feels like a lie.