The day I moved to Chattanooga 27 years ago, I gazed out my car windows and thought, I can’t believe I get to live here. 

I wasn’t driving past the aquarium or the revitalized downtown or anything new or manmade. I was on I-24 East, gaping at the stunning juxtaposition of Lookout Mountain, the Tennessee River, and Moccasin Bend.

Moccasin Bend is an archeological treasure, the site of 12,000 years of continuous human habitation. But the first thing I learned about it was that there’s a mental hospital there.

A major mental hospital should be near a major medical center. A state hospital shouldn’t be sitting on a National Historic Landmark. (Neither should a county firing range. When the weather is right, I can hear gunfire from Moccasin Bend at my house a couple of miles away.)

 Last year funds were approved to replace the hospital, and Tennessee got a rare chance to make things right. By moving the new facility near a medical campus, the state could better serve psychiatric patients. By moving it off the peninsula, the state could fulfill a promise it made in 2003, when Moccasin Bend became part of Chickamauga & Chattanooga National Military Park.

Instead, despite public pushback and a petition and educational campaign by the advocacy group National Park Partners, the state plans to rebuild on the same spot. Repeating a 60-year-old mistake when it would be just as easy to do things right is par for the course for Republican-led Tennessee.

We could have been accepting federal dollars to expand Medicaid, saving our rural hospitals and saving hundreds of thousands of Tennesseans from being uninsured.

We could have been disbursing, rather than hoarding, federal dollars intended to help the working poor get a toehold into the middle class.

We could have believed the doctors who warned us an abortion ban endangers women, and the data that told us loose gun laws endanger every one of us, including our children.

There’s one stretch that’s a long, long uphill—so gradual that you wouldn’t notice it’s a hill unless you’re on a bike. At the bottom of that stretch, we were riding in a clutch with an older man on a pedal-assist bike as well a little girl on a pink bike. Before long the older man glided ahead of us and out of sight. Tim, with his eighteen speeds, pulled ahead of me with my seven. 

Pedaling harder than any of us, like her life depended on it, and falling farther and farther behind, was the little girl on the pink bike, the steady report of gunfire in the distance.

It was a heartbreakingly beautiful day.

Allison
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