Huntsville

This was the last one, the final trip in this year-long odyssey of exploring Alabama. I finished reading books weeks ago, and this trip, with its one scheduled interview, was the one outstanding task on the slate.

Huntsville is a city I had never been to. Well, at least not as an adult. Something in me thinks that I went on a field trip when I was a kid to the Space & Rocket Center, but I'm not completely sure. I don't have any solid memories but I think I went. The only other chance meeting with Huntsville is that my wife has a cousin who used to live in nearby Madison for a while, and we went to visit her once about ten years ago, but that's about it. This is a city I knew almost nothing about.

Huntsville barely gets mentioned in the state histories until Werner von Braun based his federally funded space program in the city, mainly because of Redstone Arsenal located nearby. As a result this city, which during periods has been larger than Montgomery, the capitol, has gone through booms and busts associated with defense contracts and aeronautics funding. Someone told me recently -- and I don't know if this is true -- that Huntsville has more Ph.D.s per capita than any other city in the nation.

I had to scrap my plan of coming up on Huntsville via a very rural route (for reasons that I'll explain in another blog post), in favor of a more mainstream route. I had originally planned on taking Highway 231 out of Wetumpka, traveling north through Sylacauga and up to Talladega, before threading through northwestern Alabama mainly on Highway 431. But I ended up taking that desolate stretch of I-65 northbound, right through the center of the state. I-65 between Birmingham and where I-565 splits off to Huntsville is a corridor that runs through the Appalachian foothills past almost no towns at all. Most of the names on the signs are not to be seen from the highway: Blount Springs, Empire, Hanceville. Only Cullman shows any semblance of life visible from the interstate, which is why I wanted to avoid this route.

North Alabama is my missing link in this project. I have not spent any time in northern Alabama in my life. I once went on a camping trip with friends to Dismals Canyon near a town called Phil Campbell in northwestern Alabama, back in the mid-1990s. Dismals Canyon is reportedly one of the only sites in the world with naturally occurring glow-worms. But there are so many places I have never been: Fort Payne, which calls itself the Sock Capitol of the World, and Scottsboro, the site of the infamous lynching. I have never been to Muscle Shoals, where so many famous bands, like the Rolling Stones and Lynyrd Skynyrd, recorded great albums.

After going there, Huntsville strikes me as two different places at once. My hotel lay on University Boulevard, a thoroughfare lined with every national chain you can think of: Target, Olive Garden, Holiday Inn . . . miles of suburban sprawl along a three-lane highway full of too many stoplights. But the other Huntsville, the one I encountered on Sunday was altogether different. After a good breakfast at Mullins Restaurant, where I interviewed Wyatt Akin about his Skate Alabama project, he suggested heading down to Maple Hill Cemetery, the oldest cemetery in Alabama, which sprawled for acres, too. And the nearby Twickenham homes were old and majestic, giant mansions piled side by side on curving, hilly streets.

I'm glad Wyatt suggested taking the scenic tour of the older part of Huntsville. I was prepared to come home and write something unflattering about a city where all I saw was a bland array of tech-company office buildings and chain restaurants, with the only bright spot being a glimmer of downtown nightlife. Passing by one alleyway bar on Saturday night, we heard a cover band blasting out a rendition of "Lay Down Sally" but decided not to stop. Huntsville seemed like a place I needed to spend more time to really understand, a widely spread-out city with way too many smart folks for their own good. When I inquired to Wyatt in the interview about how Huntsville seemed to be largely absent from the state's history, he replied that it was a town that more heavily relied on federal government decisions than state government decisions. Being from Montgomery myself, that's a little hard to fathom, but I think he had a point.