TODAY'S VIEWPOINT
A step back in time brings relief to the soul
RHETA GRIMSLEY JOHNSON

. . . it's rare to drive through any city these days without encountering an accident or some other obstacle -- but tonight is different. This stormy night is filled with more than sirens and tail lights; it is filled with raw irony and a longing.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- Three of us are in a van, just passing through, or trying to. We are stuck in quittingtime gridlock in a terrific rainstorm. One of this city's skyscrapers has windows lit to spell out "PEACE," but we are hours from finding any.

Traffic stretches endlessly in both directions, and every now and again a wrecker appears from nowhere, swimming against the tide. All of us in the conga line of cars bide our time, waiting for the vehicle ahead to move a few inches so we can make tortured progress.

As always in such situations, I think of the long-haul trucker who philosophized aloud one night: "I've never hauled anything anywhere that I didn't meet someone coming from the opposite direction carrying the same load."

That might be the most profound description of modern life I've ever heard.

There is nothing dramatically different about this rainy night in Nashville traffic -- it's rare to drive through any city these days without encountering an accident or some other obstacle -- but tonight is different. This stormy night is filled with more than sirens and tail lights; it is filled with raw irony and a longing.

Roughly two hours earlier I'd been safe in a peaceful, clean, quiet, hidden cloister, as different from the tangled interstate scene as night is from day. It was a mother's womb of a place, one you don't leave easily.

I will not tell you how to get there, or give an exact location, or even name the state. The people who live there don't want uninvited company.

Suffice to say, it was a deep, dark hollow between abrupt hills that cut into the sky like saw teeth. A friend of mine who knows the longtime inhabitants -- they call the place simply "The Holler," because for them there is no other -- let me tag along on a brief visit.

It took a four-wheel-drive to navigate the 2 miles of buckboarding creek bed that serves as a driveway. The fern-flanked entrance was something, in and of itself. But then you arrive at a clearing, and the patriarch's house. You realize you've traveled more than a couple of miles into the woods.

You've gone back 75 years.

The quality of light and sound is different, and I don't mean just the dark of the cabin at high noon because there is no electricity. "We don't have 'lectric, and we don't want it," a son says. Nothing is blinking, ringing or droning. No cell phones erupt into irritating ditties.

All sounds are of nature. Fires crackle in two wood-burning stoves -- one for heating, the other for cooking. Birds flutter at a shelf built outside the kitchen window pane. Children crawl on the floor, pretending to be cats. A small lap dog snores.

And the adults talk. With no television as background prattle, the conversation is spirited and soulful, the way talk used to be. The couple lives willfully apart from the modern world, relishing independence and ignoring most so-called progress of the century past. They are religious, though the brand is not clear. They are not Mennonite or Amish, though the wife says they once lived amongst the Mennonites and learned much.

Cleaving to one another and yesterday, they simply opt out of the confusion, gadgetry, traffic and excess -- hallmarks of today's society. They stay at home. They make or grow what they need. They sell horse harnesses and wrought-iron strap latches and other forgotten treasures that some of us still want. For amusement, they throw tomahawks at targets, or invite family and friends to the house to cook a hog.

Sounds impossibly quaint, an ivorybilled kind of life. A life that comes with its own drawbacks and problems. But the amazing thing is that it exists in the same world as traffic hells and shopping malls.

In The Holler, they know where they belong and realize they are already there.

(c) 2008 Rheta Grimsley Johnson Distributed by King Features Syndicate