Kentucky - Day 12 - Driving back west

Kentucky Dam State Resort Park, Gilbertsville
Saturday, 12 October 2019

I somehow managed to lose a contact lens this morning.  It's lucky that I have a couple of other pairs I brought along, just in case, because this was one of those cases.

today's route (the southern one)

As I drove out of the campground this morning, I saw a whole flock of Bluebirds playing around by the side of the road.  So nice, on a pretty sunny morning.

I heard on NPR this morning an interview with Julie Andrews, who said something like this: People don't stop growing as they get older; people continue to grow or they continue to diminish, but whichever they do, they've been on that pathway for a long time.

That's enough to make you want to take a good look at what you're doing and reminds me of something I read long ago, that old people are the people they've always been, and if they were sharp when they were young they'll continue to be sharp when they're old; if they were oblivious when they were young they'll continue to be oblivious when they're old.  I'd remind myself of that sometimes when I was dealing with elderly relatives, and I wonder how young people will see me in the next few years.

After a few miles I left the interstate to turn on State Route 79, which turned out to be a very narrow road, with lots of hills and curves that I didn't want to drive fast on, and no place to pull over for the surprising amount of traffic that was out early on a Saturday morning.  And the directions had me stuck on this road for 25 miles.  It got to be tiring.

I was driving through more farmland - soybeans turning yellow, mostly.  I saw some other crop, now dead, that I couldn't recognize.  Later I figured out it must be the soybeans after harvest, waiting to be cut down like the cornstalks.

I was thankful when I left that state road and turned into a divided US highway for 50 miles or so.  I passed a Mennonite Church and, here and there, Amish horse-and-buggies and bicyclists on the highway.  Given the ridges marking the sides of the roads, and given the high speed traffic, I'd think they'd have a hard time negotiating this road.

I knew the drive to the next campground was less than 3 hours so decided to stop off at Jefferson Davis's birthplace, which was almost directly on the way.  I'll do a separate post about that visit.

Davis was born at a tiny town now called Fairview, and a church now stands on the spot where his family's cabin stood.  As I passed through the town, I saw 3 more churches.  It's such a small town I can't figure out how they come up with enough folks for even one congregation.

Fairview sits in Christian County.  Maybe that has something to do with it.  And these days, I'm a little surprised there's still a government entity named Christian.

I passed a turnoff to go to Robert Penn Warren's birthplace.  I looked him up and learned that he's still the only person to have been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry.  He was the first US Poet Laureate.  Probably his most famous novel was All the King's Men.  I'd always heard that it was a thinly veiled book about the Louisiana politician Huey Long, but Warren himself was exasperated by this characterization.  There's an interesting article about this at this link.   www.theguardian.com/all-the-kings-men

I came to the much larger town of Hopkinsville (about 35,000 residents), passing a road sign that said the Trail of Tears crossed there.  As far as I can tell, a route northwest from Tennessee through what's now Hopkinsville and up around the present-day Land Between the Lakes to Missouri is part of the most northern route taken on the Trail, and the only part to pass through Kentucky.

Growing up in Texas my only information source about the Trail of Tears came from history books, likely sanitized accounts.  But to me it's like slavery, which we had plenty of in Texas (one of the Confederate states) - both deeply shameful parts of our country's history that turn my stomach.  I don't like facing them.  But a map of the Trail tells me I'd better start facing it because I'll be spending the next 6 months coming across many parts of the routes that made the total Trail.  Beginning next month in Tennessee.

(internet photo)

The Land Between the Lakes is an acclaimed place of beauty, and most Kentuckians I've talked to have told me to be sure to go there.  It's a peninsula that spans both Kentucky and Tennessee, bounded on the east by Lake Barkley, created from the Cumberland River, and on the west by Kentucky Lake, created from the Tennessee River.  I think this piece of land actually became a peninsula when a canal was cut to connect the 2 rivers.

JFK designated it a National Recreation Area, which was first managed by the Tennessee Valley Authority, and more recently by the US Forest Service.  In 1991 it was designated a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, but that designation was withdrawn in 2017, one result of Pres. Trump's environmental policies.

It's still a lovely area, heavily forested, as you can see in that photo above.  Oddly (to me), it's used not just for hiking and camping and boating, but hunting is allowed there and there're also imported herds of elk and bison still living there.

In addition to several heavily used USFS campgrounds on the peninsula, there are Kentucky state campgrounds on both the east and west sides of the area.  I stayed in the one on the west side.  To get there, I crossed the TVA's Kentucky Dam, with an enormous hydroelectric facility there.  It was too late in the day for me to stop today, but I want to go back before I leave the area.