Blue Highways: A Journey Into America, Page 2

  “Hunger’s the word,” I said.

  We talked and I sat waiting for the question. It got there before the olives and celery. “What do you do?” the husband asked.

  I told my lie, turned it to a joke, and then gave an answer too long. As I talked, the man put a pair of forks, a spoon, and knife into a lever system that changed directions twice before lifting his salad plate.

  He said, “I notice that you use work and job interchangeably. Oughten to do that. A job’s what you force yourself to pay attention to for money. With work, you don’t have to force yourself. There are a lot of jobs in this country, and that’s good because they keep people occupied. That’s why they’re called ‘occupations.’”

  The woman said, “Cal works at General Electric in Louisville. He’s a metallurgical engineer.”

  “I don’t work there, I’m employed there,” he said to her. Then to me, “I’m supposed to spend my time ‘imagineering,’ but the job isn’t so much a matter of getting something new made. It’s a matter of making it look like we’re getting something made. You know what my work is? You know what I pay attention to? Covering my tracks. Pretending, covering my tracks, and getting through another day. That’s my work. Imagineering’s my job.”

  “It isn’t that bad, darling.”

  “It isn’t that bad on a stick. What I do doesn’t matter. There’s no damn future whatsoever in what I do, and I don’t mean built-in obsolescence. What I do begins and stops each day. There’s no convergence between what I know and what I do. And even less with what I want to know.”

  Now he was hoisting his wife’s salad plate, rolling her cherry tomato around. “You’ve learned lots,” she said. “Just lots.”

  “I’ve learned this, Twinkie: when America outgrows engineering, we’ll begin to have something.”

  6

  IN the morning, an incident of blackbirds happened. Swarm following swarm wheeled above Ghost Dancing and dropped into the tall oaks to watch the dawn. They seemed to be conducting some sort of ancient bird worship of the spring sun. New arrivals fluttered helter-skelter into the branches but immediately turned toward the warm light with the others. Like sunflowers, every head faced east. The birds chattered among the fat buds, their throaty squeakings like thousands of unoiled wheels. Heat-Moon says it’s the planting season when the blackbirds return; yet not long after sunrise, the warm and golden light disappeared as if the blackness in the trees had absorbed it, and it was days before I saw sun again.

  To walk Main Street in Shelbyville, Kentucky, is to go down three centuries of American architecture: rough-hewn timber, postbellum brick, Victorian fretwork, 1950s plate glass. Founded in 1792, it’s an old town for this part of the country.

  At the west end of Main, a man stripping siding from a small, two-story house had exposed a log cabin. I stopped to watch him straighten the doorway. To get a better perspective, he came to the sidewalk, eyed the lintel, then looked at me. “It’s tilting, isn’t it?” he said.

  “There’s a little list to it, but you could live with that.”

  “I want it right.” He went to the door, set up a jack, measured, then leaned into it. The timbers creaked and squared up. He shoved a couple of two-by-fours behind the lintel to hold it true then cranked down the jack. “Come in for a look,” he said. “After a hundred and fifty years, she’s not likely to fall down today.”

  1. Bob Andriot, Tony Hardin, Kirk Littlefield in Shelbyville, Kentucky

  “That’s before people started jacking around with it.”

  The interior, bare of plaster and lath, leaked a deep smell of old timbers. Bigger than railway ties, the logs lay locked in dovetails, all careful work done only with ax, adz, froe, and wedge. The man, Bob Andriot, asked what I thought. “It’s a beauty. How long have you been at it?”

  “Ten days. We want to move in the first of April.”

  “You’re going to live here?”

  “My wife and I have a picture-framing and interior design shop. We’re moving it out of our house. We just bought this place.”

  “Did you know the log cabin was underneath the siding?”

  “We thought it possible. Shape of the house and the low windows looked right. We knew some were along Main.” He went to the door. “That little house across the street. Could be one under the siding. A lot of cabins still buried under asphalt shingles, and nobody knows it. I’ve heard Kentucky’s got more log houses than any other state.”

  A squarely solid man stepped through a back window. Andriot said, “Tony here got himself one last year in Spencer County.”

  “But I knew what I was gettin’,” Tony said. “It wasn’t sided over. Some fellas clearin’ a field were discussin’ whether to burn the cabin or push it in the holler. We were lookin’ for a house, so we bought it and moved it. Only three inches off square, and I know factually it’d been there since eighteen oh seven. Good for another couple hundred years now.”

  “Tony’s logs are chestnut and a lot more termite-resistant than these poplar logs here,” Andriot said. “Somebody let a gutter leak for a long time on the back corner, and termites came up in the wet wood. Now that end’s like a rotted tooth, except we can’t pull it. So we’ll reinforce.”

  He took me around to the east wall. “Look at this.” He pointed to a worn Roman numeral I cut between adz marks into the bottom log. The eighth tier had a VIII scratched in it. “They’re numbered, and we don’t know why. I don’t think it was ever moved. Maybe precut to a plan.”

  “A prefab nineteenth-century log house?”

  “Don’t think this was a house originally. Records show it was a coach stop on the old road to Louisville in eighteen twenty-nine, but it’s probably older. Main Street’s always been the highway.”

  “What about the gaps between the logs?”

  Andriot stuck a crowbar between two timbers and pried out a rock caked with mud as hard as the stone. “They chinked with rocks and mud, but we aren’t going to be that authentic. We’ll leave the rocks but chink with concrete.” He locked the crowbar onto a wooden peg, its color much lighter than the logs, and pulled it free. “Hand-whittled oak. Sniff it.” The peg smelled of freshly cut wood. “You’re sniffing a tree from seventeen seventy-six.” Andriot touched his nose. “Gives you a real sense of history. Take it with you.”

  He asked where I was from. Tony listened and asked whether I had ever read Walking Through Missouri on a Mule.

  “Never heard of it, but I like that title.”

  “It’s about an old boy that tramped across the state a hundred years ago. Boy that walked it wrote the book. Now, that’s good reading.”

  A head popped in the window. “Hey, Kirk,” Andriot said. “Coke time.”

  “I went yesterday.”

  “And today,” Andriot said.

  Kirk crossed the street to the Exxon station and came back with three Cokes and a Kickapoo Joy Juice. “Ran flat out of Coke,” he said.

  There was a discussion over who had to drink the “Injun piss.” “I’ve never had it,” I said. “Let me try it.”

  “Man won’t never come back to Kentucky now,” Kirk said.

  We sat on the plank floor and talked. “You know,” Andriot said, “this old place makes a difference here. To us, of course, but to the town too before long. I feel it more than I can explain it. I don’t know, I guess rescuing this building makes me feel I’ve done something to last. And people here need to see this old lady. To be reminded.”

  “Old lady? That’s not what you were calling her yesterday.”

  “That was yesterday. She gets better as she gets older.”

  The men got up to work again, and we shook hands around. When I got to the sidewalk, Kirk called to me, “What about the Injun piss?”

  I thought before I spoke. “The red man’s revenge.”

  I drove on east. I thought how Bob Andriot was rebuilding a past he could see and smell, one he could shape with his hands. He was using it to build something new. I envied
him that.

  7

  U.S. 60, running from Norfolk, Virginia, to Los Angeles, used to be a major east-west route. But Interstate 64 now has taken up the heavy traffic and left 60 to farm pickups and kids on horses. For the blue highway traveler, freeing roads like this one is the purpose of the interstates. Comprising only one percent of American highways, the interstate system has opened a lot of roadway to the dawdler. And a lot of space: the billboards have followed the traffic. The Department of Transportation expects the interstates to carry a quarter of all traffic by the early eighties; that statistic, more than any billboard legislation, has cleared the back roads of the United States.

  I came to a ramshackle place called Smitty’s Trading Post. Smitty was a merchant of relics. He could sell you a Frankfort, Kentucky, city bus that made its last run down Shively Street, or an ice cream wagon made from a golf cart, or a used bulldozer, or a bent horseshoe. I stopped to look. Lying flat as the ground, a piebald mongrel too tired to lift its head gave a one-eyed stare. I pulled on the locked door, peered through windows grimed like coalminers’ goggles, but I couldn’t find Smitty. A pickup rattled in. A man with a wen above his eye said, “Smitty ain’t here.”

  “Where is he?” I was just making talk.

  “You the feller wantin’ the harness?”

  “Already got one.”

  “What’d you come for then?”

  “I don’t know. Have to talk to Smitty to find out.”

  “That’s one I ain’t heard,” he said.

  8

  FRANKFORT is a tale of two cities. Once the citizens called it Frank’s Ford after Stephen Frank, a pioneer killed by Indians in 1780 near a shallow crossing in the Kentucky River. As the town grew, people found the name too rustic. Not wanting to chuck their history entirely, they changed it to Frankfort, although there were probably more Bolivians in town than Germans. If it made cosmetic sense, it didn’t make historical sense, and the people cut something between them and their beginnings.

  A traveler coming from the west sees no hint of the town because the highway abruptly angles down a bluff into a deep, encircled river valley that conceals even the high dome of the capitol. If you’re ever looking for the most hidden statehouse in America, look no farther than Frankfort.

  The river loops from the east bluffs to the west bluffs and back again, a serpentine among old buildings that almost makes the town a little Venice. Had it not been for the last thirty years, Frankfort would be an architecturally distinguished capital city with streets of forcefully simple, aesthetically honest houses and shops. But the impulse to “modernize” nineteenth-century commercial buildings, an impulse that has blasted the business districts of almost every town in the country, defaced Frankfort. The harmonious, proportioned, historic lines of the buildings now wore veneers of ceramic tile, cedar siding, imitation marble, extruded aluminum, textured stucco, precast concrete; and the street level had become a jumble of meretricious, tawdry fronts. But at the second- and third-story levels, graceful designs in brick and stone remained; disregarding the plywood over the upper-story windows, you had unrenovated history. Frankfort or Frank’s Ford, take your pick.

  Old Frankfort did nothing to prepare me for the new Frankfort that spread over the eastern bluffs, where the highway ran the length of one of those carnival midway strips of plastic-roof franchises. It was past noon, and I could have had lunch from any of two dozen frylines without knowing I was seven hundred miles from home. Maybe America should make the national bird a Kentucky Fried Leghorn and put Ronald McDonald on the dollar bill. After all, the year before, franchisers did nearly three hundred billion dollars of business. And there’s nothing wrong with that except the franchise system has almost obliterated the local cafes and grills and catfish parlors serving distinctly regional food, much of it made from truly secret recipes. In another time, to eat in Frankfort was to know you were eating in Kentucky. You couldn’t find the same thing in Lompoc or Weehawken. A professor at the University of Kentucky, Thomas D. Clark, tells of an old geologist who could distinguish local cooking by the area it came from and whether it was cooked on the east or west side of the Kentucky River.

  But franchisers don’t sell many of their thirty-three billion hamburgers per year in blue highway towns where chophouses must draw customers through continuing quality rather than national advertising. I had nothing to lose but the chains, and I hoped to find down the county roads Ma in her beanery and Pap over his barbecue pit, both still serving slow food from the same place they did thirty years ago. Where-you-from-buddy restaurants.

  9

  NOT out of any plan, but just because it lay in front of me, I headed for the Bluegrass region. I took an old road, a “pike,” the Kentuckians say, since their first highways were toll roads with entrances barred by revolving poles called “turn pikes.” I followed the old pike, today route 421, not out of any plan either, but because it looked pleasant—a road of white fences around Thoroughbred farms. Many of the fence planks now, however, were creosoted and likely to remain the color of charred stumps until someone invents a machine to paint them.

  Along the Leestown Road, near an old whitewashed springhouse made useless by a water-district pipeline, I stopped to eat lunch. Downstream from the spring where butter once got cooled, under peeling sycamores, the clear rill washed around clumps of new watercress. I pulled makings for a sandwich from my haversack: Muenster cheese, a collop of hard salami, sourdough bread, horseradish. I cut a sprig of watercress and laid it on, then ate slowly, letting the gurgle in the water and the guttural trilling of red-winged blackbirds do the talking. A noisy, whizzing gnat that couldn’t decide whether to eat on my sandwich or ear joined me.

  Had I gone looking for some particular place rather than any place, I’d never have found this spring under the sycamores. Since leaving home, I felt for the first time at rest. Sitting full in the moment, I practiced on the god-awful difficulty of just paying attention. It’s a contention of Heat-Moon’s—believing as he does any traveler who misses the journey misses about all he’s going to get—that a man becomes his attentions. His observations and curiosity, they make and remake him.

  Etymology: curious, related to cure, once meant “carefully observant.” Maybe a tonic of curiosity would counter my numbing sense that life inevitably creeps toward the absurd. Absurd, by the way, derives from a Latin word meaning “deaf, dulled.” Maybe the road could provide a therapy through observation of the ordinary and obvious, a means whereby the outer eye opens an inner one. STOP, LOOK, LISTEN, the old railroad crossing signs warned. Whitman calls it “the profound lesson of reception.”

  New ways of seeing can disclose new things: the radio telescope revealed quasars and pulsars, and the scanning electron microscope showed the whiskers of the dust mite. But turn the question around: Do new things make for new ways of seeing?

  10

  IT’S an old debate here: Is bluegrass indigenous to Kentucky or did it come accidentally to America as padding to protect pottery shipped from England? As for the rock under the bluegrass, there’s no debate. Water percolating through the soft limestone leaches out the calcium and phosphorus that make for strong yet light-framed stake winners whose spine and leg bones have the close grain of ivory rather than the more porous grain of horses pastured in other areas.

  And it’s also limestone percolation that engenders good handmade bourbon; after all, hundred proof is half water. To make bourbon with purified water, as today the distilleries must to maintain consistent quality, is to take the Kentucky out of the whiskey. And that raises another old debate in the Bluegrass about who made the first straight bourbon. One group holds—with evidence as good as anyone’s—that it was a Baptist preacher.

  In Lexington, I passed row after row of tobacco warehouses and auction barns on my way into the thousand square miles of bluegrass wold once called “God’s footstool,” a fertile land where pumpkin vines grow so fast they wear out the melons dragging them along. So they say.


  Ghost Dancing leaned in and out of the easy curves—running east, west, south—and I steered a course over the swells of land. The captain before his binnacle. Past creosoted tobacco barns with silvery galvanized roofs, past white farmhouses, down along black lines of plank fences that met at right angles and linked the countryside into a crossword puzzle pattern.

  It was late afternoon, and mares and foals were coming to drink at small quarry pits cut into limestone outcroppings. These old exposures of rock had furnished the material for the miles of mortarless fieldstone fences that slaves built in a distinctively regional style more than a century ago. Held together only by the cut of one stone conforming to another, the walls consisted of horizontal slabs laid on each other to a height of about three feet, then capped by smaller pieces set on edge to form a jagged top. New Englanders, proud of their piled dry walls, have nothing to match these of the Bluegrass for precision. But where runaway cars had knocked down the fences, the rocks had been heaped haphazardly back. Like the slaves, the skill and time necessary to build a good stone fence were gone.

  Among catalpa and black cherry trees, a billboard pictured beams radiating from a carmine sun surmounted by a cross; below was THINK ABOUT IT. So I did and found the Gospel According to Acme Outdoor Advertising an abomination. But then, it’s such mixtures that give the Kentucky flavor of born-again religion, bourbon whiskey, bluegrass farms, burley tobacco, and blooded horses.

  The highway, without warning, rolled off the plateau of green pastures and entered 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.