My month in Kentucky

My take on Kentucky

where I went this month

You can see I made a valiant effort to cover a lot of Kentucky, despite spending so much time fooling around with my broken heater.  I missed the small piece of Kentucky that borders the Mississippi River and the whole chunk north of Lexington.  But I managed to see probably the majority of the land.

Kentucky’s land

Kentucky has several large cities – Louisville and Lexington – and several much smaller cities – Frankfurt and Bowling Green.  It has a number of decent-sized towns, like Owensboro.  But mostly what it has is farmland and forests.  The western part of the state isn’t flat, but the hills aren’t particularly high; in contrast, the eastern part of the state gradually increases in elevation until you find yourself in the Appalachians.

Kentucky is a beautiful state.  It has rivers everywhere, huge forests, wonderful mountains, scenic views of one kind or another all over the state.  Even the farmlands are likely beautiful when they aren’t somewhere in the harvesting stage.  This month the farmland has been more like seeing a man who is usually clean-shaven with a chin full of stubble – not at its best.

Kentucky’s people

Kentuckians are proud of their state’s beauty.  They love it.  They’re happy to recommend their favorite beauty spots to visitors.

Unlike some states I’ve visited, Kentuckians don’t seem bothered by an urban vs. rural divide.  It feels more integrated here, in a way, as if all the parts made up the whole, rather than one part pulling against other parts.

Most of the people I talked to liked where they lived – and the usual reason I was given was that it was quiet and they liked their neighbors.  A few people said they like the beauty of where they live but that they can't find a lot to do for entertainment.

I didn’t myself see signs that Kentucky has a problem with unemployment, though I would expect they do because the coal industry has been such an important part of the economy.  Some coal towns are trying to reinvent themselves, with varying degrees of success.  Black lung disease is surfacing as a serious problem here.  I heard on the radio one day that Kentucky has the 8th highest rate of food insecurity in the US, which must make things difficult for the children.

Kentuckians seem to put a premium on education, based on the number and size of their universities and colleges.  There’s currently distress because the state funding mechanism for education has gotten messed up in some way and the education fund is significantly short of money.  I’m sorry I won’t be able to hear how that comes out.

On the flip side, I met almost nobody who was willing to give me even so much as a smile on their own – I had to initiate all contacts.  But when I did, I found Kentuckians to be very friendly and even chatty, once they got going.  This being part of the South, I guess I expected a more spontaneous welcome for strangers than I saw.  Still, they opened up just fine if I started it.

The vast majority of residents are white, and more than half of the black residents live in the Louisville area.  This sounds to me like there’s likely still racial problems here and there, which doesn’t seem right in a state that started the Civil War by voting to stay officially neutral.  But I know there are plenty of apologists for the Civil War heritage – as I found in the conversation I heard at the Jefferson Davis Museum – and that doubtless makes itself felt if you’re not a white person here.

As I’ve been driving through areas that are so very rural, and through Appalachia in particular, I’ve thought about the mental pictures and preconceptions I and millions of Americans have held about people who live here.  The reality I saw bears little resemblance to those ideas.

I’m sure here and there way back in the hills are little shacks – but then I’ve seen those in Texas, too.  I haven’t seen any here in Kentucky.  The houses I see in even very rural areas are all kinds: wood frame houses, red brick houses, parked trailers alone and in trailer courts, stone houses – some small and some fairly grand like those in nicer old parts of Austin.  All sizes of houses.  No shacks.

Most people I’ve talked to have very strong country Kentucky accents, but then I’m in the South again so the Southern accent is to be expected.  And rural areas all over the country show stronger versions of their regional accents than the urban areas do.

One big surprise for me was no horses.  I'll bet I didn't see many more than a dozen horses in the whole month I was here.  For a state that claims the title of Horse Capital of the World, that seems really odd.  And I don't know why.  Many days the weather was plenty mild enough for them to be out at pasture, but I saw nary a one.

Something else I didn't expect were the large numbers of people who smoked cigarettes.  Buildings open to the public appear to be smoke-free, because I never encountered indoor cigarette smoke.  But that made the smokers more obvious by being shunted outdoors.  I know tobacco is a major crop here, but I'm still surprised so many people use it, given the cancer-causing facts that are general knowledge these days.  But they sure do.

Kentucky drivers

Kentucky drivers are a lot like Texas drivers – fast.  They mostly don’t tailgate, but I've had them drive pretty close to me when I’m not going fast enough for them (which was often on these roads).  I heard a few honks, too, when I or another driver wasn’t fast enough to go on a green light, but most honks were for a wake-up-the-light’s-green sort of situation.

Kentucky’s roads are unlike any I’ve encountered so far.  In some ways they were much like West Virginia’s, because of being winding and going up and down on the hills and mountains.  And in general they’re well-maintained, as West Virginia’s roads are.   But the lanes just aren’t wide enough for my RV to fit comfortably on many roads, and many of them are so narrow they don’t even have a white stripe to mark the edge of the road.

Kentucky’s state roads go flying off in all directions – one will run for miles from southeast to northwest in a moderately straight line, then suddenly turn and go southwest for many more miles.  In any other state, that road would take on a different number when it made that turn, but not here.

And then there are the many roads that have several numbers - all state road numbers - any one of which might show up here and there on a signpost (if there are any signposts) without any system I could see.

State road numbers might have one digit or two digits or three digits or four digits – and they’d all be state roads, not county roads.  It appears there’s no order or system for numbering them.  I’m sure that’s fine for locals, but it’s disorienting for visitors.

Add to all that the problem of seriously inadequate signage, both in towns and on highways.  It all makes it really hard to navigate.

What I wanted to see that I missed:

Lots of things, besides those I mentioned in my daily posts.

I’m going to be missing the range of mountains along the Virginia border that include Kentucky’s tallest: Big Black Mountain, at 4,145’.

There’s a retirement home for thoroughbred horses just outside Lexington called Old Friends.  Some very celebrated horses have lived and still live there.  A tour is $15, though, and I wasn’t feeling well enough when I was in the area to take several hours out of my day walking a fairly long distance, as they warned us we would on the tour.  But next time.

And next time, of course, I’d want to see racing at Churchill Downs.  I think there was racing at Keeneland, near Lexington, when I was there, but it isn’t the same for me as Kentucky Derby territory.

Paducah has a River Heritage Museum that I'd likely find interesting, given its location on the Ohio River.

Henderson, a town I ended up being routed around, has the distinction of being called “the most beautiful town on the Mississippi” by Mark Twain.  Not likely to be looking quite the same now, but I’d want to take a look and see.

Louisville Stoneware, the oldest working pottery factory in the US, is in Louisville, which I didn’t know about when I was in the area.  They have factory tours.

I was a few days too late for the World Chicken Festival in London, held each year in the last weekend of September in honor of Col. Sanders’s first restaurant opened down the road in Corbin.  They pull out the World’s Largest Stainless Steel Frying Pan and serve chicken fried in it during the festival.  Sounds like a lot of fun.

When I skipped the Kentucky Music Hall of Fame I made a mistake.  I’d forgotten that the Everly Brothers were born and raised in east-central Kentucky, not to mention Rosemary Clooney, Lionel Hampton and Ricky Skaggs, to name but a few.  Next time I’m in Kentucky I won’t give it a miss.

Cumberland Falls State Park is the site of a nearly unique natural phenomenon: at the full moon, it’s possible to see a moonbow (like a rainbow) at the falls.  This feature is found nowhere else in the western half of the world, and in only a few places elsewhere in the world.  And it’s right here in Kentucky.  Sometime I’d like to see it.

Elizabethtown is home to Schmidt’s Coca-Cola Museum.

Apparently there’s a Creation Museum in Petersburg, at the National Headquarters of Answers in Genesis.  I think that might be an interesting place to visit.

I would have really liked to learn more about Kentucky history while I was here.  From my pre-trip research, it looks like this state has been up and down like a yo-yo in several areas: its industry and economy, its dealings between workers and management, its environmental protections, its education funding, its stance on slavery and civil rights.  I’d like to know more about how Kentucky sees itself, rather than how the history books have written it.  My next trip here, I’ll try to learn more.

My conclusion

I’m going away feeling ambivalent about Kentucky.  In some ways I liked it very much.  I think it’s a state of great beauty and great pride.  It’s a hard-working state.  It has pleasant people who like each other a lot.

What I didn’t like so much is that it feels almost clannish all over the state.  The way folks won’t talk to me first – almost nobody would – and that’s unusual in my experience; folks were fine once I got things started, but I had to work at it.  The way it’s hard to get from one place to another unless you already know where you’re going – which I rarely did – and even knowing where to go didn’t make it easy to get there on these narrow roads.

I guess I’d say that Kentucky has a lot I’d like to come back to – but only for a visit.  (Although absolutely no camping trips in the month of October, one of their busiest camping months.)  It's just that Kentucky doesn’t seem like a place where I’d want to live.  Just not friendly enough, I guess, though it certainly has a lot going for it otherwise.