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Entries in Blue Highways (317)

Thursday
Jul152010

Blue Highways: Nameless, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapWhat's in a name?  Evidently not much, if your town is Nameless.  But wait, if it's Nameless, does it have a name or not? Perhaps Nameless is a name, or perhaps it could be a state of being.  Now I'm confusing myself.  Follow us as we track William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) on his journey around America.  To see where Nameless lies, click on the map.  Even though it's Nameless, I can guarantee this is the place.

Book Quote

"Nameless, Tennessee, was a town of maybe ninety people if you pushed it, a dozen houses along the road, a couple of barns, same number of churches, a general merchandise store selling Fire Chief gasoline, and a community center with a lighted volleyball court.  Behind the center was an open-roof, rusting metal privy with PAINT ME on the door; in the hollow of a nearby oak lay a full pint of Jack Daniel's Black Label.  From the houses, the odor of coal smoke."

Blue Highways:  Part 1, Chapter 16


Nameless, Tennessee

Why is Nameless Nameless?  LHM gives an account of the reason the town has its name in Blue Highways, quoting from Thurmond Watts and his wife, Virginia:

I stepped in and they both began telling the story, adding a detail here, the other correcting a fact there, both smiling at the foolishness of it all.  It seems the hilltop settlement went for years without a name.  Then one day the Post Office Department told the people if they wanted mail up on the mountain they would have to give the place a name you couple properly address a ltter to.  The community met; there were only a handful, but they commenced debating.  Some wanted patriotic names, some names from nature, one man recommended in all seriousness his own name.  They couldn't agree, and they ran out of names to argue about.  Finally, a fellow tired of the talk; he didn't like the mail he received anyway.  "Forget the durn Post Office," he said.  "This here's a nameless place if I ever seen one, so leave it be."  And that's just what they did.

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 16

Apparently, this is not the only story of Nameless.  According to Wikipedia, another legend is that when the application for the post office was sent in, the name of the community was left blank, and the word "Nameless" was stamped on the returned application.  Wikipedia also reports that a local official wanted the town to be named Morgan after the county's attorney general, but the Post Office demurred, saying that the name was still too freshly connected with a Confederate hero.  The official then said that if the name Morgan couldn't be used, he'd prefer that the community remain nameless.  And now it is.

Place names can evoke lots of feelings, both pro and con.  According to my sister, my hometown in California had a recent debate about placenames.  Seems that some, perhaps new residents of the town, wanted to change the name.  "Fort Bragg" was too confusing to people as it has the same name as a military base in North Carolina.  It also, according to these people, had a bad past in terms of its conduct toward the local native population as it was founded as a reservation.  These people suggested the name "Braggadoon" to evoke a sense of the magical and whimsical associated with the musical Brigadoon about a Scottish village that appears once every 100 years.  Perhaps not coincidentally, a local art and sign shop in town is called "Braggadoon," so it stood to make a lot of business if the name change was effected.  As you can imagine, there was lots of debate on each side.  I'm sitting here now, in my mom's house in Fort Bragg, so obviously the name change didn't happen.  But what was really interesting, especially reading the posts on the local newspaper's web forum, was how passionately people felt.

The interesting thing to me is speculating on whether Nameless, if given the chance today, would be able to get such a name at all.  A post office was established there, but being an unincorporated city, it is doubtful that it would get a post office at all if it applied for one today.  The Postal Service is cutting back, not adding, service.  It now delivers mail six days per week, but is considering cutting back to five.  The price of stamps seems to go up every six months or so as the Postal Service competes with e-mail.  Applications by small communities that want a post office would probably be denied.  So 100 years ago, Nameless could be Nameless.  Today, Nameless would be part of a larger district, and people would address their letters to Cookeville, with a special zip code for people in Nameless.  And therefore, today, many small, aspiring towns would truly be nameless, except in the minds of the locals.  Is that sad?  I'm not sure, because the feelings and thoughts of the residents are what truly matters.  If residents wish to be Nameless or nameless, it's their business.

If you want to know more about Nameless

Cookville Herald-Citizen articles about Nameless
Nameless, Tennessee (Song by The Travelers)
Online excerpt from Blue Highways:  Nameless
TripWow slideshow of Spring City and Nameless by Mary Pardue (including a photo of the Watts Store where William Least Heat-Moon visited)
Wikipedia: Nameless

Next up:  Cookeville, Tennessee

Wednesday
Jul072010

Blue Highways: Livingston, Tennessee

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapOut of Kentucky, into Tennessee.  The road goes ever on, and we're following William Least-Heat Moon on his journey.  Click the map to see where Livingston, Tennessee sits.

Book Quote

"At last the mountains opened, and I came into Livingston, Tennessee, a homely town.  Things were closed but for a highway grocery where I walked the fluorescent aisles more for entertainment than need.  Had I come for lard, I'd have been in the right place: seven brands in five sizes, including one thirty-eight pound drum.

"I drove back to the square and pulled up for the night in front of the Overton County Courthouse.  Adolescents cruised in half-mufflered heaps; a man adjusted a television in the appliance store window; a cat rubbed against my leg; windows went dark one by one.  I think someone even unplugged the red blinker light after I went to bed.  And that's how I spent my evening in Livingston, Tennesee."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13


Downtown Livingston, Tennessee
Livingston, Tennessee

If you've grown up in a small town in America, you've grown up in a place where nightfall means silent streets, empty sidewalks, and an eerie feeling as the traffic lights turn over to blinking reds and yellows. My town was no different from Livingston.  At night, everything shut down after a certain time.  The places that did remain open had something of the sinister about them.  The bars that remained open always had characters around and in them that were kind of scary, and I always got a vibe from my mother that they weren't places that you'd want to be in at night.

But that didn't mean that things completely went quiet.  As a high school kid, I knew about activities that happened in town.  If somebody's parents were away, it usually meant a big party at that house.  At times, parents didn't have to be away, because we had the gravel pits on the outskirts of town, or various places in the woods, or even the beaches.  Combine kids, cars, and alcohol, and you had a deadly combination.  A few of my high school classmates died before we graduated because of alcohol and driving.

I kind of liked the quiet of my town.  Night meant real darkness.  At home, about a mile out of town, I could walk outside and look up and see the vastness of the universe and the matter speeding away from each other in the form of stars and galaxies almost like they were at my fingertips, and so clear and bright that you almost thought the ground could be illuminated by them.  Night was quiet too.  Not many cars on the roads to mask the sounds of the nighttime frogs and insects.

Since I left home, I've lived in cities.  In most of them, nighttime is just another time of day with different activities.  In the cities, the streets have activity at all hours.  In cities, you are encouraged to go into bars to socialize with friends and people you hope to meet.  In cities, the sky stays softly illuminated at night, drowning out the stars in a golden halo from the myriads of streetlights and porchlights on the ground.  In cities, the sounds of cars on the streets or freeways gives a constant hum to the night.  You might not hear the frogs and insects unless you are standing in the right spot at the right time.

What's better?  I like the fact that I have so many things at my fingertips in the cities.  Restaurants, taverns, music, people.  In a few days, however, I will make my way to my hometown.  I will once again go to bed and when I turn off my light, I will be enveloped in complete and comforting darkness.  I will hear, instead of the whoosh of freeway travelers, the soft roar of the ocean in the distance.  When I look up at night, I'll again be fooled into thinking that I can touch the stars and galaxies.  And like in Livingston, the red and yellow traffic lights will blink their lonely signals into the night.

If you want to know more about Livingston

City of Livingston
Holly Ridge Winery and Vineyard
Livingston Enterprise(newspaper)
Overton County News (newspaper)
Wikipedia: Livingston

Next up:  Gainesboro, Tennessee

Friday
Jul022010

Blue Highways: Ida and Bug, Kentucky

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapLeaving southern Kentucky, we are about to go into Tennessee, but not without checking out a little bit of Clinton County first.  Click on the map to locate Ida and Bug.

Book Quote

"At Ida, a sign in front of a church announced the Easter sermon: 'Welcome All God's Children: Thieves, Liars, Gossips, Bigots, Adulterers, Children.'  I felt welcome.  Also in Ida was one of those hitching posts in the form of a crouching livery boy reaching up to take the master's reins; but the face of this iron Negro had been painted white and his eyes Nordic blue.  Ida, on the southern edge of Appalachia, a place (they said) where change comes slowly or not at all, had a church welcoming everyone and a family displaying integrated lawn decorations.

"I lost the light at Bug, Kentucky, and two miles later, at a fork in the road with three rickety taverns in the crotch, I crossed into Tennessee."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 13

 

Clinton County, where Bug and Ida are located

Ida, Kentucky and Bug, Kentucky

I really enjoy the picture William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) presents of the lawn jockey in Ida painted white with blue eyes.  It stands in stark contrast to the South that many of us (me included) in the North read and were taught about.  In truth, the South is much more complicated than some of my friends, who argue that we should let the South secede from the Union if they really want to, truly understand.

In 1995, I moved from Milwaukee to San Antonio with my wife.  Texas is on the far west side of what would be considered the old South, though Arizona seems to want to become part of the South as well in the last few years.  I'd grown up in California, then lived in Milwaukee for 8 years.  Milwaukee was about as Northern a city as you could have.  With Germans mainly controlling the power structure, it was a leftist stronghold for years.  While the rest of Wisconsin was giving America Joseph McCarthy and his fear-mongering about communists, Milwaukee was electing socialist mayors up through the 1960s.  We actually got to know the last socialist mayor of Milwaukee, who by the time we met him was a pretty old guy.

We moved to Texas, and we were convinced we would hate it.  In truth, our first year there, we really did hate it.  Everything seemed to be about Texas.  Not only is Texas part of the South, but it has a HUGE ego about itself.  The Austin Lounge Lizards make fun of Texas' attitude in their Stupid Texas Song:

"By God we're so darn proud to be from Texas - yahoo!
Even of our pride we're proud and we're proud of that pride, too
Our pride about our home state is the proudest pride indeed
And we're proud to be Americans, until we can secede"

Tortilla chips in the shape of Texas, pasta in the shape of Texas.  The Texas flag flown everywhere.  In the first store we went into, the yams had a sign with a yam in a hat with the Texas colors shooting guns in the air.  The Alamo was considered a shrine to Texas liberty - men must remove their hats entering it.  Jim Lehrer, distinguished newsman, told a story about how he was taken to task by the Daughters of the Texas Republic for some statements he had made.  We don't understand how a person born in Texas could say such things about the state, they wrote him.  He wrote back explaining that while he grew up in Texas, he was actually born elsewhere and didn't come to Texas until he was six months old.  Now we understand, they wrote back to him.

Despite all that hubris, we grew to love Texas.  The huge open spaces.  The varied people and landscapes.  The little weird places we discovered, like the art scene in Marfa, way out in the wilds of West Texas, to the Orange Show in Houston.  Sure, you'd find some crazy thing that would make you pause, like the time we rented a room in a Fort Davis B&B and the brochure had hand-written on it "no fornicating."  But seeing the bats fly out from under the Congress Street bridge in Austin, or taking a dip in Barton Springs, or catching Terri Hendrix or the Asylum Street Spankers at old dance halls like Gruene Hall or Cibolo Creek Country Club was fantastic and captivated us.  The music scene was like nowhere else, and introduced us to the Texas singer-songwriter.

While we were there, California passed a proposition denying most services to illegal immigrants.  Arizona recently passed a law allowing police to stop anyone they suspect to be illegal immigrants (in other words, people who look brown).  But in Texas, where the Mexican border is quite fluid and really starts at San Antonio, even under George W. Bush as governor, the state would have never passed such a law because of the ties between Mexico and Texas.  Republicans are now in control of the state but the state is still full of Texas Democrats, who are blunt, pointed and direct.  As I said, it's complicated.

Then we moved to New Orleans.  Again, things were not always as they seemed.  New Orleans is a majority black city in white Louisiana.  New Orleans history had both slaves and free men (and women) of color.  It had Creoles, mixed race people who made their own society to rival the white society, and some of whom owned slaves while others worked to end slavery.  Pre-Katrina New Orleans, when we lived there, was a mix, a gumbo if you will, of all kinds of different people living all kinds of different lives and doing all kinds of different things.  In one city, you could get your South fix by visiting a plantation, or eating at Galatoires or Antoines, or cruise the stately mansions along St. Charles Avenue.  Then you could visit Vaughns, where Kermit Ruffins plays trumpet and serves up red beans and rice, or catch the Mardi Gras Indians on Mardi Gras or St. Joseph's Day.  You might read Nell Nolan in the Times-Picayune as she lists the kings and queens of Mardi Gras and announces the various coming outs of debutantes, all white and beautiful, while outside a second line turns onto your street sending a member of the black community home.  A city where (until recently thanks to Katrina) African Americans dominated the political landscape, while the old white families dominated the economic landscape.  Again, it's complicated.

Now we live in New Mexico, where being Hispanic means that you are not Latino, and vice versa.  Here, being Hispanic means that you are descended from the Spanish conquistadors.  Being Latino means you are not.  Once again, ethnicity and race become very complicated.  An unsuspecting person might offend someone with a Spanish last name if they call them "Mexican."  Just like in the South, you can't take everything for granted and things that you think you know about people and ethnicities can be very different from reality.

There isn't much on the Internet about Ida or Bug, but there is quite a bit on Clinton County, where they are located.  The links I include, therefore, will be for Clinton County.

If you want to know more about Ida, Bug or Clinton County

Albany/Clinton County Chamber of Commerce
Clinton County News (newspaper)
Clinton County website
Political Graveyard: Clinton County
Wikipedia: Clinton County

Next stop: Livingston, Tennessee

Friday
Jun252010

Blue Highways: Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

In this post, we visit a Shaker community in Pleasant Hill, and I will muse on 19th century utopian cults and communities, some of which were pretty darn interesting and even a little strange!  To learn where Pleasant Hill is located, why not click on the map?

Book Quote

"From a window on the third floor, where grim watchers had assured Shaker celibacy, I saw far to the east a yellow smear from a power generating plant smokestack.  Some historians attribute the decline of the United Believers to their unnatural views on procreation and cite the Shaker song:

Come life Shaker life,
Come life eternal;
Shake, shake out of me
All that is carnal.

But, since the Kentucky Shakers disappeared at the time of widespread electrification, maybe the lure of a 110/220 way of life kept new blood away from Pleasant Hill.  After all, even the inventive people themselves (circular saw and washing machine) had to check a love of ingeniously useful mechanical gadgets and to guard against (as Howells said) 'the impulse of the age toward a scientific, a sensuous, an aesthetic life.'  The yellowed sky gave me the sense the Shakers were right and that I was standing in the future in that hundred-thirty-nine-year-old building.  Because they cared more about adapting to the cosmos than to a society bereft of restraint, the Shakers - like the red man - could love craft and yet never become materialists."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 12

 

Shaker village in the mist at Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

Pleasant Hill, Kentucky

In the last couple of years, I have read a few things about utopian communities.  Some might call them cults, others religious nuts, and some might find them to be refreshing alternatives to society.  One thing is certain: America has seen the establishment and decline of many of these communities centered around utopian dreams.

The Shakers were one group that fit into this type of  classification.  Structured heirarchically, they nevertheless practiced equality of the genders based on the belief that God manifested in both sexes.  Given that, they also practiced celibacy, believing it to be the purest form of spiritual expression.  They didn't forbid marriage, but they saw the root of evil in the fall of Man brought about by carnal desire, and believed that marriage was less pure than celibacy.  Men and women were separated into gender-based living quarters.  They also believed in the purity of hard work, and out of their industriousness they fashioned simple and functional furniture that was prized for its usefulness in the 1800s, and prized as collectors' items today.  They pioneered agricultural techniques, and were not adverse to creating and implementing mechanical solutions to problems such as water distribution.  Shakers also practiced communalism, sharing the resources of the community and limiting personal possessions.  It was a kind of religious communism of its day.

It all sounds nice and pastoral, and perhaps even pleasant if you can get past the part of no sex for the rest of your life.  But that was the tricky part.  The only way that the Shakers could replenish their population was through new converts and through adoptions.  After the Civil War, more people began moving to cities and less people were interested in such a lifestyle.  Even adoptions began to be regulated through private groups and the government and restricting the ability of the Shakers to bring in new children.  Evidently, by 2009, only three Shakers were left in the entire world.

There were utopian societies that were even more strange.  I'm talking really "out there."  Sarah Vowell, in her book Assassination Vacation, describes the Oneida community, another of the American utopian communities, as a community of "sex fiends" who believed in sex without male ejaculation, or what they called "Male Continence."  This practice was born out of the desire of the group's founder, John Humphrey Noyes, to never again subject his wife to the suffering of childbirth, especially that of involuntary impregnation.  This belief bred a whole set of practices that included older, post-menopausal women having sex with young men who hadn't learned how to control their ejaculations.  Girls, according to Vowell, were "annoyingly prone to falling in love," and "were ushered into womanhood by an older male, usually by an experienced boater like Noyes himself."  Thus everyone, under the group's adherence to a concept called Group Marriage, could have sex with whomever they wanted, as long as it was consensual and the practice of Male Continence was observed.  Paradoxically, any type of extreme passion for anything, including the arts was discouraged.  Mediocrity was the norm. The community even developed its own eugenics program.

 

Oneida community in action

While visiting my wife's parents in Florida, we made a special trip down to visit the site of the Koreshan Unity.  The Koreshan Unity, founded in the 1870s in New York, was another utopian community that believed that the earth is hollow, and that we actually lived on the inside.  They made a number of scientific experiments that they said proved that we inhabited the inside of a hollow sphere.  The community also practiced a religious communism, and women occupied the all decision-making positions that formed the Planetary Court, the only exception being the founder, Cyrus Teed (or Koresh).  There were three levels of membership in the group: non-believers willing to work for the Koreshan Unity who were allowed to marry and to participate in the secular activities of the group; believers who were allowed to marry but could have sexual relations only for reproduction purposes; and believers who made up the core group that did not believe in marriage and practiced celibacy.  The Unity moved from New York to swampland near Estero, Florida and laid out their New Jerusalem.  Unfortunately, after the death of their founder, who predicted that he would live forever, the group dwindled, and the last member died in 1981.  She was able to see the pictures of the earth beamed back from the space missions, and had to conclude after a life of being a devout member of the Koreshan Unity that the founder was wrong.  You have to think that might suck a little.

 

Koreshan Unity members at graveyard

Such cults and communities are around us and may even touch us all.  My wife grew up in Iowa, home of the Amana Colonies, religious communities known for their dairy products (my wife loves their cottage cheese) and the Amana appliances.  A friend of ours was raised in the Bruderhof, a Hutterite religious group somewhat related to the Mennonites and the Amish, that was founded in Germany and then moved to South America to escape the Nazis.  They now run successful businesses in the United States, and manufacture play equipment and classroom furniture for children, and equipment for disabled children and adults.  Our friend has a complicated relationship with his past in the group, but still maintains his connections with both current and former members of the community.

When I was in junior high school, the Jonestown cult's mass suicide was in the news for months.  The cult started out as the People's Temple less than an hour from where I grew up.  Even I, as a young man just out of college, joined a communal organization, the Jesuit Volunteer Corps, where I lived in a Catholic community, shared possessions with my community members and worked out in the wider community doing social service work.  The program shared certain characteristics, particularly communal lifestyle, with some of these more controversial and strange groups.  Lest one think that such communal living is easy, it isn't, and after two years of it I had my fill.

It all goes to show that humans seek out various degrees of communal living.  We consider those who want to be alone misanthropes and slightly off.  We cluster in towns and cities, while maintaining more or less independence.  We all share together somewhere on the spectrum, from lighting and power to, like Oneida, sexual relations in a group marriage.  But the extreme forms of communal living are hard to maintain.  All that's left of the Shaker community at Pleasant Hill now are silent buildings that stand as a testament to a belief system that once was vital and is now gone.  In the 1800s, with Shaker communities at their strongest, nobody living in them would have believed that their communities would disappear without the divine reappearance of the Lord or His Messengers.  Yet now they stand empty, tourist curiosities.  Their art of woodworking, elegantly simple, is prized by materialists the world over.  Their songs are sung by others.  Is it a sad ending?  Or is it just the way of things?

If you want to know more about Pleasant Hill or the Shakers

Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Kentucky Atlas and Gazetteer: Pleasant Hill History
Ott's World: Shakin' it Up in Kentucky (blog)
PBS: Ken Burns' The Shakers
Prose and Photos: Shaker Village of Pleasant Hill
Simple Gifts: An excerpt from Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring (Simple Gifts is a Shaker hymn)
Wikipedia: Pleasant Hill
Wikipedia: Shakers

Next up: Danville, Kentucky

Monday
Jun212010

Blue Highways: Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades, Kentucky

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

This post does not center around a city or town, but William Least-Heat Moon (LHM) stopped here along the Kentucky River to talk to a man about a boat.  I wonder if they ever finished it (this was 1978 after all).  Click on the map to discover where you can find the oddly named Brooklyn Bridge and the Kentucky River Palisades.

Book Quote

"The highway, without warning, rolled off the plateau of green pastures and enterred a wooded and rocky gorge; down, down, precipitously down to the Kentucky River.  Along the north slope, man-high columns of ice clung to the limestone.  The road dropped deeper until it crossed the river at Brooklyn Bridge.  The gorge, hidden in the tableland and wholly unexpected, was the Palisades.  At the bottom lay only enough ground for the river and a narrow strip of willow-rimmed floodplain."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 10


Kentucky River Palisades reflected in water. Photo by Lizette Fitzpatrick: Blog N Kentucky

Brooklyn Bridge/Kentucky River Palisades

Nowhere, as I researched why the Brooklyn Bridge over the Kentucky River is so named, could I find an answer.  I've been presented with a mystery.  Perhaps some reader who stumbles across Littourati can leave a comment and enlighten me.  Of course, we have the world famous Brooklyn Bridge across the East River that connects Manhattan with the bridge's namesake borough across the river.  Interestingly enough, a bridge that connects Cincinnati with Kentucky, known as the High Bridge, was designed by John Roebling, the designer of New York's Brooklyn Bridge.  When the High Bridge (now known as the John A Roebling Suspension Bridge) was completed in 1866 it was the longest suspension bridge in the world.

But the Kentucky River Brooklyn Bridge is a mystery.  Was it so named because, in that part of the country in 1871, it looked like a monumental achievement and on a par with the New York Brooklyn Bridge, then under construction?  Did locals simply refer to it as their Brooklyn Bridge, and the name stuck?  Considering that it crosses at a place where there aren't any major metropolitan areas, the siting of the bridge itself seems to me to be a mystery.

The Palisades, however, are no mystery.  Having not been to this part of Kentucky, I have never seen them, but the photos look beautiful.  I have seen similar rock formations in different parts of the country, but evidently the river and these formations stand out, especially in the fall when the leaves are changing.

LHM spends little time talking about the Palisades, however.  He's more interested in a boat he sees being built down along river.  He seeks out the builder, and finds an older, retired man and his wife who have invested their time, energy and sweat into building a boat that they hope will one day allow them to cruise the rivers down to the gulf.

Not being a seafaring type myself, partly because I seem to get seasick any time I am on choppy ocean water, I can still understand this call.  Both of my uncles were commercial fisherman (one is now deceased but the other is still fishing in his 80s), as was my grandfather, and the ocean was in their blood.  There is something between a captain and his boat.  The captain loves his boat as if it were a spouse.  LHM describes it well in talking with the builder, a man named Bill Hammond, and his wife Rosemary.  He sees a sign above the kitchen table which reads "A boat is a hole in the water surrounded by wood into which one pours money."  Rosemary adds "....And your life."

I remember my Aunt Betty, when my Uncle Elwin was out on the water up in Alaska, waiting for the radio to crackle so that she could make sure that he was all right.  It's every fisherman's wife's fear that she will learn that something happened to her husband in rough seas, that the boat went down.  Fortunately, that never happened because my uncle was a careful captain who made sure he and his crew were safe.  My other uncle, Bob, still takes his wife fishing with him.  If you're the spouse of a person who lives and loves boats, you have to indulge them, if not buy into their dreams.

I wonder if Bill Hammond ever completed his boat, Bluebill, and if he and Rosemary sailed away down the Kentucky River, below the geological columns of the Palisades silently standing and watching as they have for eons, to the Mississippi, the Gulf and beyond?  I hope they achieved their quest.

If you want to know more about the Kentucky River Brooklyn Bridge or the Palisades

Bridges and Tunnels: Brooklyn Bridge
Get Out! Kentucky River Palisades
Jessamine County: Kentucky River Palisades
Nature Conservancy: Kentucky River Palisades
Panoramio: View of Kentucky River from Brooklyn Bridge
Wikipedia: Kentucky River Palisades

Next up:  Pleasant Hill, Kentucky