Book Review - Western Kentucky: Lost & Forgotten, Found & Remembered

by Stephen George

There’s something about Beat writers that’s simply not rational, some bad brain wiring that leads to spiritual sojourns that border on the insane. It’s forever part of the human impulse to find one’s limits, to test the personal constitution and subvert human intuition to more aptly mirror that of a migratory bird. Louisville’s power couple of poetry, Ron Whitehead and Sarah Elizabeth, embarked on a Beat excursion last April 30, when they took the first steps of a 325-mile hike that began at their Cherokee Park apartment and ended at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers deep in Western Kentucky. And while “On the Road” it is not, that can be forgiven. Nothing is.

Their stated goal was to reclaim some state pride by helping others to do so, and they achieve it several times over. The book is peppered with vignettes of family feuds and famous moonshiners, of capital crimes unpunished and the old Kentucky spirits that lurk about when the moon is bright and the wind is just so. As well, Sarah’s a balladeer whose music bears a strong connection to the state’s natural majesty, although it’s a different energy than bluegrass. In her notebook she scribbled lyrics for the title track to the album she needed to leave the city to finish, When the Redbuds Bloom.

To the extent that the Whiteheads attempted to produce a travelogue with a rawness that parallels their constantly blistered feet, they succeed. This is a 275-page shared journal entry. It rambles on like a jamband might, picking up on new riffs without ever quite following up on some that precede them. “Lost & Forgotten” is profoundly linear, almost to a fault, and although interesting storylines emerge from time to time — the book is also, in fact, a charming reportage of a clutch of Big Country personalities from Nowhere, Ky. — they’re more like a series of solar eclipses than the creeping fingers of a plot.

The couple — during the hike, Ron is 54 and Sarah 25 — share a sort of existential crisis, the classic case of being alone in a crowd, with Thoreau’s need for that which can only be offered by wide swathes of open field and country-blue skies. Subconsciously they explore Man’s relationship to Nature, systematically scorning adversarial run-ins with SUVs and the occasional train.

Ultimately, although its identity seems somewhat confused, the book reads like a family history of the Western portion of the state. It’s insider but not insidiously so, insular but not too self-aggrandizing, although self-indulgence is not entirely avoided: There’s a long interview with Ron’s parents, which is nonetheless rather informative, as well as a robust collection of newspaper clippings from regional papers that covered their journey as they moved through towns.

Moreover, the book is a response — nay, a rebuttal — of the inferiority complex that a disproportionate amount of Louisville and, it seems, Kentucky residents exude. Here is a text to make you shake your fist with pride, if only for a few transitory moments.