the New Pantagruel

Kentucky on My Mind

by Eric Miller

e drove into Lexington hoping to find Kentucky, but got America instead. True, at first sight of the lush horse pastures and their handsome white fences I did start to belt out “Run for the Roses.” But singing prompted me to turn on the radio, where to my dismay I detected nary a trace of Kentucky—just clipped robotic voices from nowhere spitting out insipid song titles, advertisements, and traffic reports. Britney Spears’s navel was all the rage there too, a fitting symbol for a corrosive culture that dissolves every particular into the universal: navel-gazing of all varieties invariably follows.

We were anxious to find Kentucky, having already driven some 400 miles that day from our home on the north side of Pittsburgh. Following the Ohio River south along old and empty Route Seven we passed through such towns as Gallipolis, once a French settlement, and Marietta, which seemed to sprout out of nowhere. In siege-like fashion Ponderosa, Blockbuster, Wal-Mart and company encircled each, assaulting history with deadly aim. When we finally set up camp that night at My Old Kentucky Home State Park in Bardstown, we at last got to hear some Kentucky voices. The old fellow in charge of the campground gave evidence that the notion of place was still alive somewhere: he told my wife that he was keeping track of all of the different states the campers were from. But when Pennsylvania made license plates available to its residents featuring (1) a tiger prowling in a dense jungle (“Save Wild Animals”!) and (2) a locomotive roaring across a darkened landscape (“Preserve Our Heritage”!) I knew the reality of state-as-place was dead. Still, I felt no compulsion to bring this decent soul, denizen of another time and place, the unsettling news.

The Pittsburgher Stephen Foster wrote “My Old Kentucky Home,” Kentucky’s state song, while visiting relatives in Bardstown. He vividly if sentimentally captured an “olden” (as the Pennsylvania Dutch would put it) sensibility that made place integral to the well-being of the soul, although already in Foster’s time many Americans were sensing that all was coming unglued. The plantation that inspired Foster lives on as a state park, complete with a golf course and the stately old mansion, which we toured. The eighteen-year-old guide, with goofy white sneakers ballooning out beneath her hoop dress, could, alas, answer few questions outside of her memorized script. She even confessed that although she had lived in Bardstown her entire life she had never gone to see “Stephen Foster: The Musical,” performed nightly for more than forty summers in the park’s amphitheater. We did. The show certainly beckoned us back to another time, even if the sanitized story line and the fact that most of it was set in Pittsburgh (ironically) did much to diminish its appeal.

We were running out of time. A Glenn Campbell song from one of my dad’s old 8-tracks kept running through my mind: “The bluegrass is fine/Kentucky’s on my mind.” That was the problem: Kentucky was on my mind, but I was having trouble, now that I was here, actually seeing it. We passed several bourbon distilleries, the sweet pungent scent drifting out of huge white wooden storage barns. Was this Kentucky? We seemed to be getting closer—the pride the folk at Maker’s Mark took in their bourbon was obviously charged by local, long-term connections. A stop by Louisville’s Churchill Downs also let some of Kentucky loose; this tour guide was a straight-shooting, horse-loving, Derby-proud woman. There was something palpably other there. We bought t-shirts.

Thomas Merton, the Trappist monk so widely read in the 1950s, made his home in central Kentucky, at the Abbey of Gethsamani, the oldest abbey in America. Could it be, I wondered, that this Roman band preserves Kentucky as well as any other collection of natives? When I walked into the visitor’s center the monk at the desk was warmly discussing with a friend Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus—not a hopeful sign. But I learned there that Gethsemani’s monks sustain their mission by selling their own chocolates and fruitcakes, made with Kentucky bourbon. Tilling the soil, ministering the word, they wrap their universal gospel in local garments, swaddling clothes with a decidedly Kentuckian look. Accent intact.

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