Our national identity
is to be found in diners and city parks, cypress swamps and little towns, local
church services, at Home Depot, on city streets and lonely country roads.
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| I may have the wrong footwear for Buffalo... |
As much as I like overseas travel, I’ve never felt the urge
to teach in another country. Landscape painting conveys a deeper shade of
intimacy that I simply don’t feel when visiting other places. I enjoy them, but
I don’t love them in the same way as I love the US and Canada.
I took this trip to pave the way for a workshop in the Deep
South. Why didn’t I just head to the more familiar eastern seaboard states? I’m
familiar enough with them that a road trip wasn’t necessary. The central south
has been calling to me for a long time, although I’m still not sure what it’s
saying.
I usually approach Kentucky from the north. It seems very
southern compared to Ohio. This time, driving up from Mississippi, it seemed northern,
its drawl flattened out to a midwestern twang. Either way, its identity is confused.
This is where the great antislavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin,
was set. When Eliza struggled across the frozen Ohio River, she was literally
leaping from slavery to freedom.
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| One-lane road, central Kentucky. |
And yet, nowhere was ‘brother against brother’ truer than in
Kentucky. The state tried to sit out the Civil war, but its self-declared neutrality
was ignored by both sides. Eventually, it cast its lot with the Union. But
southern sympathies were strong, and a group of citizens formed a shadow
government that joined the Confederacy.
I came to love Kentucky when I did art festival in Louisville. Now I take every opportunity to shun-pike through this
state. It has beautiful farms, lovely steep hollows and hills, and the biggest
known cave system in the world. But I was being a serious driver yesterday,
intending to get from Bowling Green to Buffalo, NY in one shot. That meant sticking
to the Interstate system like a burr on a saddle-blanket.
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| Dogwood and distillery. |
Maybe it was the knowledge that there was snow ahead, but I
couldn’t resist veering down the Bluegrass Parkway. This runs east to Kentucky horse
country. These are the most manicured farms in America, and the horses—even the
ones free to graze near the road—are beasts of singular beauty. The spring
grass is in, and the horses were gamboling in the sun.
Before I got that far, I saw a sign for Kentucky’s Bourbon Trail. That eventually
put me on a series of one-lane roads. The blind corners, cropped hedges and small-town
distilleries reminded me of the Isle of Skye.
Most of us, when we say we’ve ‘been to’ a place, mean we’ve
driven through on the Interstate or we’ve flown in, gone downtown, eaten at trendy
restaurants and seen a few tourist sites. You really don’t learn much about
your country like that. Our common ground is to be found on the old Federal routes,
at diners and city parks, in cypress swamps and little towns, at local church
services, or talking to the guy at Home Depot. We should all do more of that.
