Mile Marker: My First American Road
Notes from a week at my old Kentucky Home
The Farm
Long before I traveled the meandering roads of the American West or rode a tuk-tuk in Peru into the Amazon, I traveled a road captured in the pictures below. This road is not famous; you will not find it on travel blogs or on YouTube channels. It is not a particularly scenic or important road, yet it remains central to my origin story. This road runs from the house where I grew up—and where my parents still live—to the fields and woods of the farm my family has worked for forty years this fall. In other words, it is home.
There’s so much I have to say about Kentucky, family, and my constantly evolving relationship to this land, but my focus today is simply to share a bit about my recent visit along with some photos of home.
After three years in the desert, Kentucky in the summer is a deep sigh of relief. The first thing I notice when I step out of the airport in Nashville is the humidity and the abundance of greenery.
All along the drive from Nashville to home, I marvel at how green the land is. It’s not that I wasn’t aware of this when I lived in Kentucky, but after so many years in hotter, drier climates the contrast is startling.
In popular culture Kentucky, and Eastern Kentucky specifically, is still spoken about as a land of deficit—the Hatfields and the McCoys, coal mining, bootlegging and snake-handling—but there is, and always has been, so much more to the land than these tired old tropes. There may still be gaps in the region relative to other parts of the country, but from the vantage of middle age what I see when I go back there today is not deficit, but abundance. Kentucky is doing a lot better than certain West Coast cities I’ll refrain from discussing today.
How many people got to grow up on 200 acres of land? How many people get to see their parents become great-grandparents actively engaged with their great-grandchildren? Yes, there were hard times and we didn’t always see eye-to-eye, but this is the reality of my life in Appalachia. This is my Kentucky, a place with generational roots, home-cooked meals, and fields to walk in the summer sun.
The grass under my feet is wet with dew, and fireflies are abundant as Venus and Jupiter slide into conjunction opposite a full moon rising. Scenes like this happen all the time, and for so many years I took them for granted, but I will not take them for granted anymore. I’ll savor all of these moments as long as I have them.
When you live far away and your parents cross the threshold into old age, you start to realize there are only so many trips home remaining. One day this house will pass to someone else, someone else will tend these hills, my parents will pass from this land, and when they do, a part of me I’ll never be able to replace will go with them. So for whatever time remains, I’m going to take it all in—the sunrise, the sunset, the neighbors’ geese and guineas squawking at night. Don’t take any of it for granted.
The Family
As much as I love the land, and as grateful as I am to be here, the real reason for being here is of course to be with my family. I cherish watching my parents settle into the gentle rhythms of old age. My dad dotes on his great-grandson, showing a tenderness and affection for him that I wish he had discovered sooner. Time is funny that way; you go away and expect to come back to the home you left thirty years ago, but everyone has gotten older, and it’s only in photographs that the reality that you’ve gotten older too sets in. The hair is gray and receding, the young man’s body is gone, and the little kids you left behind there are adults with kids of their own. The wheel keeps turning.
On the last day at home my family gathers at the hunting cabin my father built by hand at the back of the farm. My dad and I target practice and after several rounds I manage a few respectable shots. I congratulate my father for finally having a master marksman in the family, but he ain’t buying it.
As night falls we grill on the open fire and my sister sneaks me some whiskey for my soda. It’s not long before it becomes evident that it ain’t just Coke I’m drinking as my rowdy side starts to come out.
The next day we have a fish fry, one last meal before I head back to the oppressive heat of Phoenix in summer and leave my family a thousand miles behind, which weighs on me more the older I get. My life is in the west, but part of me will always be at the head of that holler, up a dusty farm road.
🚜 🦌 🇺🇸🚜 🦌