Blue Highways: Louisville, Kentucky

Click on the Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Crossing the Ohio River and whipping around Louisville, we drive with William Least-Heat Moon into the bourbon and horse country of Kentucky.  Maybe we'll order a mint julep and sit out on the porch, or maybe we'll just drive onward.  Check out the map by clicking on the thumbnail.

Book Quote

"I took the nearest Ohio River bridge at Louisville and whipped around the city..."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville, Kentucky

I've never been to Louisville, though that's no surprise since there are a lot of places that I've never been.  I don't know much about Louisville except for the Kentucky Derby, the Louisville Cardinals basketball team (especially in their heyday when they were one of the top seeds I loved to hate in the NCAA Tournament), and the Louisville Slugger bat.

My connection to Louisville got a lot closer recently when one of my friends, Patrick, got married to a law school colleague, Jillian, just after both finished their law degrees at LSU.  After a short stint in Lexington, Kentucky, where Jillian is from, they moved to Louisville where Patrick is employed in a law firm.  Their wedding was an interesting mix of New Orleans, where I met Patrick and which is a city that both of them love, and Kentucky.  In other words, food served at the wedding had a distinct New Orleans flair, but the drinks and the overall vibe were all Kentucky.

(An aside here.  I gave the best man speech at Patrick's wedding, where I called him a true hero.  Patrick was a New Orleans city employee who was assigned to the Superdome during Katrina, and endured all the hardships and horrors of being there until he was evacuated with other residents to Houston.  As far as I'm concerned, any person who endured the Superdome, from whatever walk of life, is a hero, but Patrick had responsibilities and he took them seriously.  He helped the sick and wounded, he helped find food and medicine, and he helped evacuate people.  He had to make decisions that might mean life or death, and he often deprived himself to help others.  He suffered from, and for all I know still suffers from, post-traumatic stress disorder due to his experiences there.  Such experiences might jade any person, but Patrick still has one of the most generous hearts that I know.  I will always admire him.  Louisville, you got a good man.)

One interesting pre-wedding activity was a visit to the Woodford Reserve distillery in near Lexington, a subsidiary of the Brown-Forman Corporation.  I had never appreciated whiskey that much.  My father was an inveterate drinker, and his favorite was Early Times whiskey.  I was surprised to find that Early Times is made by the Brown-Forman Corporation, which is headquartered in Louisville, and is the official whiskey for the Kentucky Derby Mint Julep.  I just remember it not tasting all that great - though I probably haven't sipped any since I was a teenager - and it is full of bad memories associated with my father's alcoholism.  Years after my father died, my mother or my sister would still occasionally come across a half-full Early Times bottle that he had stashed somewhere out in the barn or in the back of a closet.

However, the visit to the Woodford Distillery made me appreciate Kentucky bourbon.  I had been a fan of Irish whiskey after my wife turned me on to it.  I remember, early in our dating, when I ordered a Scotch and soda.  "What are you drinking Scotch for?" she asked dismissively.  After she turned me on to the Irish, I really never went back, though I am now developing a taste for the occasional Scotch thanks to some friends who like it.  But I never thought American liquor could be that good.  But Woodford changed that.  I liked its taste, especially straight.  My wife, who always bragged that Irish whiskey was triple distilled, unlike the demon Scotch, was surprised to learn that much of the craft of making bourbon at Woodford was derived from Irish techniques and that Woodford bourbon is also triple distilled.  I ended up drinking a lot of it that weekend, and we bought some that comes out on special occasions.  We used it to toast the memory of a recent friend that died, and who would have appreciated the gesture.

I'm not sure what my point is here, other than that a corporation in Louisville may be connected with a whiskey that brings up bad memories of my father, but now a bourbon by the same company is also connected with great memories of the beginning of a lasting love and marriage, and Louisville is now the home of a good friend and his lovely new wife.  My antipathy toward the Louisville Cardinals has diminished over time, and I always like catching the "most exciting two minutes in sports" when the horses take the track at Churchill Downs for the Run for the Roses.  So, Louisville, you've come a long way in my estimation, and you may see me traversing your streets and sampling your wares sometime.

If you want to know more about Louisville

Consuming Louisville (blog)
I Heart My City (Louisville) by Michelle Ray
Leo Weekly (alternative newspaper)
Louisville.com
Louisville Courier-Journal (newspaper)
Louisville Hot Bytes (blog)
Louisville Travel Site
Metromix Louisville
'Ville Voice Eats (blog)
Wikipedia:  Kentucky Derby
Wikipedia:  Louisville

Next up: La Grange, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Corydon, Indiana

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

William Least-Heat Moon wants to put the miles between him and his troubles, and we're going along with him like a fly in his van riding shotgun.  For a reference point on our journey, click on the thumbnail to get to the interactive map.

Book Quote

"...through the old statehouse town of Corydon, I drove to get the miles between me and home.  Daniel Boone moved on at the sight of smoke from a new neighbor's chimney; I was moving from the sight of my own.  Although the past may not repeat itself, it does rhyme, Mark Twain said.  As soon as my worries became only the old immediate worries of the road - When's the rain going to stop?  Who can you trust to fix a waterpump around here?  Where's the best pie in town? - then I would slow down."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Marker commemorating Indiana's first capitol at Corydon. Photo by Kathy and her Buckethead H., on http://travel.gather.com. Click on photo to go to site.

Corydon, Indiana

The quote above cites one of my favorite authors, Mark Twain.  The idea that the past does not repeat itself, but rhymes, appeals to me on so many levels.  I've faced this in many aspects of my life.  You hear the phrases "the more things change, the more they stay the same," or "we are doomed to repeat our mistakes."  I think that these phrases touch on part of Mark Twain's idea.  For me, when it seems that I finally get a handle on things, especially those situations that really set off negative reactions or times of self-despair or even self-destructiveness, I go through a learning process.  I think to myself okay, I know how to handle these situations in the future and I will never go down that road again.  But other situations come up that bring on the same negative consequences in my life.  The situations seem different, but once you peel through layers of disguise, connections begin to reveal themselves.  Only after I've gone through the whole damn process again do I realize that indeed, I was just relearning what I already learned.  It can be very frustrating and maddening, but after the fact, I realize that Twain's rhymes were there if I'd only recognized them.

I don't know about any of you, but I have some of the spirit of moving on when one has the "sight of the smoke of a neighbor's chimney."  I am an introvert, and am often uncomfortable around large groups of people.  In addition, I grew up in a small town, and it's taken about twenty years for me to get used to living in cities.  My wife despairs of me sometimes, because she loves to take advantage of cities and I, if left to my own devices, usually don't do the things that cities offer best - live music, theater, restaurants and other activities.  Were I living in Daniel Boone's time,  I might have done what he did and moved on when people got too near.  But I'd probably come back from time to time, because I like people.  As did Daniel Boone, who was largely responsible for settling Kentucky and served in the politics of the state in his later life.

Don't we often do that, whether or not we live in a city, or on a remote ranch somewhere?  Humans seem driven by the need for people, and companionship, but also a need for our own space.  This causes some interesting clashes, especially in our society where the old frontiers defined by seemingly limitless geography have given way to the new frontiers defined by how far we can go in the electronic, virtual world.  People immerse themselves in computer activities, such as I do in this blog.  It's a solitary thing that divorces us from the reality around us.  A young man plays World of Warcraft and doesn't talk to another live human for weeks.  A woman builds an avatar and disappears into Second Life.  Yet even as they divorce from reality, they seek community in these places.  Facebook is the most popular social networking site on the internet, with millions of people seeking companionship in their Facebook friends.  World of Warcraft is interactive gaming with others, all solitary, sitting at their computers and connected to each other in the game.  We don't often hear of the Daniel Boone's of this frontier, though some have decided to chuck it all and go "off the grid."  We tend to think of them as a little crazy.

I don't know whether this aspect of our society is bad or good.  I think the lack of real community is a negative, but you can't help but admire the new and innovative ways people are finding each other.  Someone like William Least-Heat Moon, even as he drives to put the miles between him and home and the problems he is running from, can't help but pass through towns like Corydon, reminders that the world exists and that we can always plug back into true reality when and if we must.

Ho about a little information about Corydon?  It was the second capitol of the territory of Indiana, and the first state capitol.  It was also the site of the only Civil War battle in Indiana.  For those of us into 70s television, the town was the birthplace of James Best, better known as Roscoe P. Coltrane, sheriff in the Dukes of Hazzard (the original TV series).  The town is also known for its festivals and town activities.  So, there's a bunch of reasons to stop there!

If you want to know more about Corydon

The Civil War and Corydon
Corydon Democrat (newspaper)
Corydon, Indiana (PDF from Center for Minority Health at University of Pittsburgh)
Historic Cordyon
History of African-Americans in Corydon
Wikipedia: Corydon
Wikipedia:  Images of Corydon

Next up: Louisville, Kentucky

Blue Highways: Cannelton, Indiana

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Moving across southern Indiana, we follow William Least-Heat Moon in the initial stages of his journey around America.  Click on the thumbnail of the map for visual reference of our location.  It's also interactive, if you click on the points.  Feel free to follow along the tours on Google Earth, accessible by the link on your left.  I have fixed the link problem with the Kerouac Google Earth tour, so check that out as well.  As always comments welcome, via the link at the end of this post.

In case you're wondering why sometimes my posts deal with the place, and sometimes not, here is the explanation.  I am sharing with you my thoughts as I read, not simply providing information about the places that I am listing.  I always give links to learn more about the place, but the posts are simply what comes to my mind after reading the passages.  That's what the "tour" in Littourati is about.  The words take me on a tour of someplace in my memories or experience, and I share them with you.  I hope that through all of these elements, the literature, the maps, and my reflections, the readers of this blog will find something of value.

Book Quote

"On past the old stone riverfront houses in Cannelton, on up along the Ohio, the muddy banks sometimes not ten feet from the road.  The brown water rolled and roiled.  Under wooded bluffs I stopped to stretch among the periwinkle.  At the edge of a field, Sulphur Spring bubbled up beneath a cover of dead leaves.  Shawnees once believed in the curative power of the water, and settlers even bottled it.  I cleared the small spring for a taste.  Bad enough to cure something."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Cotton mill, built circa 1854, in Cannelton, IndianaCannelton, Indiana

When I was young, I wondered where the Noyo River came from.  It flowed in the summer along the eastern edge of our property with a deep greenish color that made the rocks in its bed look different underneath the water than when I pulled them out.  It made little splashes as it rushed over a large pile of buried rocks and emptied into what we called our swimming hole.  That section of the river was only half of the piece I knew about about it.  It came from somewhere and it went somewhere.  I knew where it went, but I didn't know where it came from.

Where did it go?  It went on about another 23 miles to its mouth in my hometown.  There, the river was wider, deeper, and the greenish tint had a little of the blue about it.  It was filled with fishing boats which used it as a safe harbor.  Somewhere underneath the masts were the fishing boats of my uncles, the Norcoaster and the Kristy.  Just about at the breakwater, the river met the ocean, and green gradually faded into the blue of the Pacific.

Where did it come from?  That, I didn't know.  I knew that in the winter, the river could be a raging torrent.  In the summer, it was a serene placid creek.  My father said that it came from springs farther upriver, but I never saw those springs, and I never understood how so much water could originate from what sounded so small: "springs."

I can't remember when I saw my first real spring.  Perhaps it was along the Mule Ears Trail in Big Bend National Park, where suddenly in the middle of the desert a blooming oasis appeared, complete with the sounds of numerous insects buzzing around.  Perhaps it was on my many hikes in my native Northern California, but I didn't take the time or register what I was seeing.

Yesterday, my wife and I and some friends made a hike in the Sandias, the mountains against which Albuquerque is nestled.  We chose to hike on the Armijo Trail because Toro Spring could be found at the end of the trail.  Unfortunately, some of my friends weren't in prime hiking shape, and the trail to the spring from the end of the Armijo Trail was a bit rough.  I had seen the spring before, basically a hole in the ground, surrounded by some rocks, where water bubbled out of the ground and became a small creek rushing down into the little Armijo Valley.  It is a serene placid place.  It still amazes me that water just appears out of nowhere, just some hole in the ground, and within a few yards becomes a stream that eventually becomes a river that eventually ends up in one ocean or another.

Springs are awfully symbolic.  A life-giving substance, so elemental to existence, welling up from the earth like a gift, quenching our thirst or curing us of maladies, before rushing off to others farther down the line.  We drink, we expel it, it goes back into the earth or evaporates into the atmosphere, and becomes once again the water we gratefully drink on a hot day.  William Least-Heat Moon, despite the awful taste of the sulphur spring, touches the circle of life even as he starts his circular journey, rushing off down the road like the rivers and streams rush on through life.

A little about Cannelton, a small city of less than 1500 people.  The cotton mill in Cannelton was once the largest industrial building west of the Alleghennies.  In 1960, a Northwest Orient flight crashed near Cannelton and Tell City, and a memorial has been placed eight miles from Cannelton.  While a lot of theories, including a bomb, were looked at, it was eventually determined to be caused by an in-air detachment of the wing due to a flutter. 

If you would like more information on Cannelton

Blue Heron Vineyards
Cannelton Foundation
Lafayette Spring
Northwest Orient Airlines Crash Memorial Site
St. Michael Catholic Church
Wikipedia: Cannelton
Wikipedia: Cannelton Cotton Mill
Wikipedia: Cannelton Locks and Dam
Wikipedia: Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 710

Next up: White Cloud, Indiana

Blue Highways: Grayville, Illinois

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

William Least-Heat Moon stays a night in Grayville, and makes an impression on a farmer in Well's Restaurant at morning breakfast.  Click on the map to locate Grayville, and don't be fooled by the map.  The horseshoe in the river doesn't exist anymore - you can see the actual course of the river in the satellite view.

Book Quote

"[The man] adjusted his cap.  'So what's your line?'

"'Don't have one.'

"'How's that work?'

"'It doesn't and isn't.'

"He grunted and went back to his coffee.  The man took me for a bindlestiff.  Next time I'd say I sold ventilated aluminum awnings or repaired long-rinse cycles on Whirlpools.  Now my presence disturbed him.  After the third tilt of his empty cup, he tried to make sense of me by asking where I was from and why I was so far from home.  I hadn't traveled even three hundred miles yet.  I told him I planned to drive around the country on the smallest roads I could find.

"'Goddamn,' he said, 'if screwball things don't happen every day even in this town.  The country's all alike now.'  On that second day of the new season, I guess I was his screwball thing."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 5

Hard Times Fish Market in Grayville, Illinois

Grayville, Illinois

Have you ever been looked at as odd by someone, or by a group?  You might be doing something, standing out from the crowd in some way, and you're seen as being different, and different not in an interesting way but in a way that is slightly disturbing?

It's kind of interesting how, when we challenge someone's notion of what is normal versus what they think of as abnormal behavior, that we get that reaction.

Clearly Least-Heat Moon's (LHM) venture around the country on small roads qualifies as being weird, perhaps abnormal, to this farmer he encounters.  Because we don't have much of a backstory on this farmer, it is hard to say what his life was like and whether he did anything that went against the grain in Grayville.  Probably not.  He probably was born and raised to be a farmer.  Perhaps he had his exciting and different moment when he served in the military.  Perhaps that was in World War II or the Korean War, or, if he is young enough, maybe even in Vietnam.  But that was not something that was out of the ordinary, it was expected of a young man of the time.  If he hadn't had that experience, he might have never left Grayville except for the odd trip to St. Louis, which would have made him feel out of place and uncomfortable and therefore he only went once or twice and never went again.

I've not been really wild and crazy, but I have done some things that have been seen as going against the grain, or different.  Right out of college, I joined a volunteer program called JVC.  It was under the auspices of the Jesuits, a Catholic order of priests and brothers, and I left California and went to Milwaukee where I lived with three women and another man in what we called a "community."  We all worked, for what amounted to $75 a month personal spending money, in social service organizations.  I lived in the middle of the inner-city, taught at a school in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods, and suffered through property crime in our house and watched a couple of my housemates get beaten on the street.  As I related these stories to my family and friends, their reactions typically were "and you're doing this because...?"  I was doing it at first because after college, I didn't feel like I had any other options (English majors are great until you need to find a job).  I later did it because I felt like I was doing something socially worthwhile that would help those who were poor.  I finally learned that the end result gave me more than the people I supposedly were helping, but who had more street smarts and common sense than I did.  The kids I taught had grown up before their time, and they were streetwise and in many ways smarter than me.  The end result was I rejoined for another year, and lived for eight years beyond my volunteer experience in the inner-city and continued to work in service positions.  My extended family shook their heads at times, but I came to love it and found a group of like-minded people that I could count on and who could count on me.

In 1998, I went to Bangladesh, where a different manifestation of being different and odd enough to attract attention happened to me.  In a month-long visit, I learned that being whiter and taller than everyone else made me an object of curiousity.  My clothes were different.  I spoke a different language.  I traveled in areas where the appearance of people like me might come once in a generation.  In the town of Rajshahi, a crowd followed me as I looked in store windows, watching me window shop.  Everywhere in Bangladesh that I stopped in a restaurant outside of the capital of Dhaka, crowds would gather to watch me and my Anglo companion eat.  When we stopped to take in the sight of the Bangabandhu Bridge across the Jamuna River, the 5th longest bridge in South Asia, people stood near us to watch us look at the bridge.  It was strange, to say the least, to be such an alien object that just my very presence made me worth watching.  I didn't have to do anything but just stand there, and I was an attraction.  It was both an ego-boost and an unnerving experience.

I think LHM describes a bit of both in this passage.  He is an object of curiousity to the farmer, who recognizes that he is not local, and a bit odd because of what he is planning to do.  LHM finds it unnerving enough to think about saying something that will make him seem more "normal" in the future, as he doesn't want to be a "screwball thing."  But sometimes, we just don't have that option.  I had a choice to go back to whatever a normal life is when I lived in Milwaukee, but in Bangladesh, there was no way I would ever be normal in that society.  We do what what we can with what we have, and live with whatever people think of us otherwise.

If you want to know more about Grayville

City of Grayville
Topix.com/Grayville
Wikipedia: Grayville

Next up: Tell City, Indiana

Blue Highways: Lebanon, Illinois

Click on Thumbnail for MapUnfolding the Map

Heading into Illinois, we follow William Least-Heat Moon and Ghost Dancing as they continue their 13,000 mile trek around America.  As always, Littourati, your comments are welcome!  Click the map to check our progress - we've got a long way to go!

Book Quote

"In the approaching car beams, raindrops spattering the road became little beacons.  I bent over the wheel to steer along divider stripes.  A frog, long-leggedy and green, belly flopped across the road to the side where the puddles would be better.  The land, still cold and wintery, was alive with creatures that trusted in the coming of spring.

"On through Lebanon, a brick-street village where Charles Dickens spent a night in the Mermaid Inn; on down the Illinois roads - roads that leave you ill and annoyed, the joke went - all the way dodging chuckholes that Time magazine said Americans would spend 626 million dollars in extra fuel swerving around."

Blue Highways: Part 1, Chapter 4

Street in Lebanon, Illinois

Lebanon, Illinois

When I was young, some of my most vivid memories occurred when we had to drive on rainy nights.  I grew up on the North Coast of California, and rainy nights were always very wet, very aromatic of the redwoods, firs and pines of the area, and particularly on a stretch of Pudding Creek Road which headed toward my house, full of frogs.

On rainy nights, there were hundreds of them, jumping across the road to get from one side to the other.  There wasn't a lot of traffic on Pudding Creek Road, but the occasional car would cause a veritable frog massacre.  The next morning, all kinds of crushed frogs lay bloody and eviscerated on the road.  It looked pretty cool when I was a kid, but now as an older and environmentally conscious and conscientious adult, I hate to think how much we contributed to the planet's steadily eroding population of frogs and other amphibians by driving over so many of them.

Least-Heat Moon's (LHM) vivid picture of the frog really brings that memory back to me, along with his description of the raindrops on the road.  In really hard rains, the raindrops splashed on the road and at night, in the car headlights, it is a virtual explosion of light on the dark surface.  When the rain was coming down hard, and I've had more than a few experiences of these kinds, I've had to bend my body into all kinds of contortions to be able to see center divider stripes, or side stripes marking the blacktop boundary of the road, to be able to steer effectively.

I also remember riding over roads that would put LHM's saying about Illinois roads to shame.  In our car, every time we went on a trip we had to take "the can."  The can was dreaded by all of us.  If we could get through a trip without having to resort to the can, we were all happy.  The can was basically a Folgers or some other coffee can, lined with a plastic baggy and covered with a plastic lid, which sat at the ready.  The roads out of my town were all windy, twisty, up and down affairs.  The can was for us kids, who got carsick a lot.  One of us might get carsick and vomit in the bag in the can, and then the plastic lid would cover it and it would stay in the car for the rest of the ride until we got where we were going and the gastric contents could be put in the trash or dumped in the toilet.  Usually our car had a nasty, vomity smell in it for a while when we were on these trips.  If someone else got sick, then the can would be used again...in which case the newly sick person would be staring into and getting a whiff of the previous sick person's puke.  Needless to say, that usually helped the newly sick person let loose his or her own load of puke.  I don't know why we just couldn't pull over and let people puke on the side of the road, like everyone else.  What can I say?  Our trips were kind of disgusting at times.  One issue for my youngest sister in her therapy as an adult revolved around traveling on windy roads precisely for this reason, and both she and I have not vomited in decades because of our disgust of it.

Mermaid House Hotel: Lebanon, Illinois

Enough about puke.  I'd like to know how the Mermaid Inn in Lebanon became so called, because it is nowhere near a body of water where a mermaid might be.  Charles Dickens did stay there a night and used the opportunity to visit the Looking Glass Prairie, and legend has it he might have based A Christmas Carol on his stay, though I would find that hard to believe given that to me, A Christmas Carol is decidedly English.  If he based it on an American stay, wouldn't he have set the story in the United States?  He did have his character Martin Chuzzlewit from the novel of the same name come to America, so he did use material in America for his novels, but I just can't see it in The Christmas Carol.  I hope in his carriage and wagon rides through the United States, he brought a can for the twisty sections of the trail.

If you want to learn more about Lebanon

Chamber of Commerce: Lebanon
Fezziwig's Market
Historic Lebanon
Language of Landscape: Looking Glass Prairie
McKendree University (oldest university in Illinois)
Mermaid House Hotel
Wikipedia: Lebanon

Next up: Grayville, Illinois