"Rocky Road!" I Scream

I-75 in the northern Tennessee/Kentucky areas is not a place where you want to go careening off the road.

Just about every time we drive north on I-75 for some trip or other, I whip out the camera and take some pics of the rocky roadside cliffs. They look almost man-made, but of course, they're not, well, not totally. The rocks are laid down in almost perfectly horizontal strata, and then when the road crews blast the rocks away and trim a bit, you get this ... horizontal strata lines with some vertical lines probably made in the blasting/clearing process. Even knowing what it is, it's still cool to see. I mean, come on! The horizontal lines are straighter than the stone barbecue pit (PRESUMABLY made by humans) pictured further down in the blog.

Which reminds me of a funny story about my parents. A few years ago we were walking about in the north Georgia farm where my father grew up. We walked up to "the holler," a mountain hollow above the valley that most of the farm is in located in. We came across a low stone wall less than a foot high. My father said, "Well you went to college, what do you think of that wall?"

I looked carefully at the wall. It was clearly a retaining wall that my grandfather, my father and my uncles (I have about five of them from my dad's side of the family alone) built so they could farm in the Holler. And I knew what Dad was up to at that moment. So I said, after examining the wall, "Well the workmanship is too crude to have been built recently. I think Indians may have built it! In fact ..." I looked at the wall again. "In fact, that workmanship is too crude for Indians. I don't think human beings built this wall at all. It must have been built by Neanderthals."

If you could have seen the grins on my parents' faces when I came up with that lulu ... ah, life is good sometimes.