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WESTERN KENTUCKY: Lost & Forgotten, Found & Remembered
REVIEWS
a review by Jeffrey Scott Holland One might have thought it would be difficult to find inspiration in a Kentucky cross-country road trip on foot, in this god-forsaken nanotech-walmart-RFID-Halliburton-iPod new millenium we currently inhabit. After all, it's hard to get back to one's roots these days when what's left of the wilderness is so pockmarked with cellphone towers, toxic waste dump sites, covert Government installations, and built-overnight housing developments with names like "Spruce Acres" even though there isn't a spruce tree in sight. Leave it to Sarah Elizabeth and Ron Whitehead to distill the moonshine of inspiration from the genetically modified corn of today; to make lemonade from the lemons of the 21st century. The inevitable comparison to Kerouac's "On the Road" looms large, but this ain't Jack and Neal boozing and whoring their way across the desert: this is more like Walt Whitman and Emmylou Harris on safari, as William Burroughs put it, "deep in the heart of
darkest America." Their journey begins by walking the gauntlet of Dixie Highway on foot. This in itself merits some sort of award, and could probably stand alone as the subject of a book. Pink porno parlors and liquor stores highlight a road strewn with dead animals, broken bottles, abandoned clothes and condom wrappers. Frightening "Deliverance"-style characters lurk everywhere. As their sojourn continues, they speak of their encounters with snarling dogs, rat-filled trailers, derailed trains, Fort Knox paranoia, hobos, motels, hitchhiking, roadkill, creosote, junk food, corporate convenience stores, (and mom-n-pop general stores that carry mostly the same stuff), greasy diners, bootleggers, rattlesnakes, and dangerous bloodsucking pests such as ticks, mosquitos, and policemen. Outside it's America. And yet, it really isn't a grim story, and what keeps it from being such is the emphasis placed on family and on history. The carpenter's glue that holds these wood shivs together is Ron and Sarah's rememberances of what happened on this land before it became dotted with gas stations, and their strong tribal sense that includes not just their blood relatives (who are interviewed at length) but the greater circle in its most inclusive sense, including the ghosts of Pee Wee Reese and Bill Monroe. Best of all, at the end of the road there is no pot of gold, save that which Ron and Sarah already carried there in their hearts. The trip itself is the reward of wisdom, not the path to it. Like Captain Willard finally reaching Kurtz in "Apocalypse Now," Sarah Elizabeth and Ron Whitehead hit the confluence of the rivers and report, "We became aware of how little we know, how little anyone knows."
Taking the long journey home BRUCE HOPKINS CONTRIBUTING WRITER Appalachian News-Express Of
all the states in the Union, only four share a peculiar similarity:
They are long, far longer than wide, almost too long to have any real
cohesiveness between the starkly different geography of each part. From
the spine of the Appalachians, the rivers of Virginia and North
Carolina rise and flow east to the Atlantic Ocean. From that same
spine, the rivers of Kentucky and Tennessee flow toward the
Mississippi, and as they flow, east or west, the terrain changes from
mountains to plateau to rolling plains. Unfortunately
for the people of these states, between the beginning and the end of
those journeys are people who do not really know much about the rest of
their respective states. Because
of this anomaly, the western part of our state is largely unknown to
many Eastern Kentuckians. We rarely have relatives there, since our
families migrated over the years to northern industrial centers to find
work, and if they did move west, it was usually no farther than
Lexington or Louisville. We
know little about our Western Kentucky brethren, and that is a shame.
For that reason alone, it is worth purchasing a copy of Sarah Elizabeth and Ron
Whitehead's book, Western Kentucky: Lost and Forgotten, Found and Remembered. Ron
is a teacher, writer, and publisher who lives in Louisville. Sarah Elizabeth, is a writer and singer. Both of them were
born and raised in Western Kentucky. They decided to
walk from Louisville to the far western reach of
Kentucky, where the Ohio meets the Mississippi, and record their
experiences in this book.
The
book includes a daily narrative, photographs, poems, and articles
written about them as they journeyed through towns like Central City,
Matanzas, Woodville, and Kevil. Except for Paducah, it is doubtful
their names have ever appeared in print in Eastern Kentucky.
Journeys
always make interesting reading, but there is something else about this
book that recommends it. Except for the lack of mountains, Western
Kentucky, at least through the eyes of Ron and Sarah, is hauntingly
like Eastern Kentucky.
They
dodge coal trucks on their hike, step over roadkill on back roads
where, like most other Kentucky roadways, there is no appreciable
shoulder to walk on. They meet some people who are friendly, some who
are suspicious, and some who can't understand why they would want to
take such a long walk. They
stay with friends or relatives along the way or stay in cheap motels or
even in an abandoned building on a concrete floor. They befriend stray
dogs and commune with deer, rabbits, eagles, turtles, and spirits. They
walk by marijuana fields and scenes of ecological disaster, and they
look at polluted streams where they fished when they were young. In
short, they could have made the same trip east of Louisville as they
made to the west. But
what is most important about the book is that they completed a journey
that is somehow required of all of us: They went home, and
surprisingly, their homes are little different from our own. Their
people face the same challenge of adapting to a modern world where the
good things are sometimes outweighed by the bad. They
recapture memories in old cemeteries, in trailers and run-down houses,
and in the faces, old and young, of their families. The names are
different; the mountains are missing, but there is no difference in the
hearts of the people of Eastern and Western Kentucky. They have the
same joys and tragedies, and it has been too long that Kentuckians do
not realize that connection. It
is a popular convention of literature that you can't go home again;
that when you grow up you somehow have to leave and say good-bye
forever. Most books that are beloved, like Harper Lee's To Kill A
Mockingbird, go back to another age, for better or worse, and describe
what happened there because it cannot happen again. That's why memoirs
remain popular, because they illuminate the past. What Sarah Elizabeth and Ron Whitehead have done is something different; They did go home again.
It is not where they live now, nor is it likely to be the place where
they die, but they went back and captured their journey, their pride in
their land and their people, in this book. They proved that you can go
home again. What's more, they proved that you
have to.
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