First Solo Road Trip Part 7. Virginia/Kentucky

Somewhere South KY


Somewhere South KY


Bridge, KY

Bridge, KY

I spend much of the day driving though and passing close to places called: Glade Spring, Marion, Wise, Grundy, Big Stone Gap, and Hazard county (Of the Dukes of Hazard fame, perhaps.) and other villages, which I cannot find on my map. Somewhere on these winding roads, I make a wrong turn and end up underneath an enormous and very impressive iron rail road bridge which straddles a ravine with a wide river at its base. Very picturesque. I sit with ahead of me a folk in the road which turns into narrow dirt tracks that quickly disappear into the thick forest and I wonder if I have reached the end of the road? I pull over looking for the River and bridge on the maps but cannot find either. I sit smoking and sweating in the suffocating afternoon heat, dazed and dizzy with driving these endless twisting roads when a pickup truck speeds up from one of the dirt tracks out of no-where and skids to a halt next to me. The window immediately winds down and I am met with the smiling dusty face of a weathered man in his fifties with a wild nicotine stained beard. 'Lost?' he says, laughing, which sounds like escaping air and showing a wide smile of yellowed teeth. 'Yeah, I reply' and he immediately recognizes in my accent that I am not from around here. He asks and I tell him I am English and he goes on to tell me I really AM lost, laughing hard all over again! He then turns off his engine and I begin telling him about my trip and how I arrived at this bridge. He is curious and asks lots of questions, smiling broadly all the time and then starts telling me about this place and this bridge and that it was the biggest of its kind in America when it was first built: ‘God in Hell knows when”. He tells me too that the ferry, which used to cross the river taking cars, linking up the road, hasn't run for twenty years and I will have to backtrack some miles to get across. He then goes on to tell me that over the years he's seen hundreds, just as lost as me, scratching their heads at this very spot. 'When I was a kid', he says, ‘this is where we brought our dates. I was up here one time (a friend of his), who had just signed up for the army and shipping out the next day to Vietnam, was dangling some blonde girl over the edge, by her ankles, telling her she ain't no damn good and I told him to put her down or he'd be going away for a long time and it won't be with the army neither..' He tells me also about his childhood and when he was a baby he was real sick and couldn't drink nothing 'cept goat milk’ and has drank it ever since. Slept on ‘nothing but a pillow’ for the first two years of his life.. He talks about his family and of one of his cousins went to live in Italy to play in the Milan orchestra and how he sent musical instruments - small tubas, back to his boyhood school, a few miles away, to replace the ones that were stolen. All the while he is talking he is smiling and shaking his head in a constant kind of amazement and disbelief at what he and I are saying. We are there for almost an hour when he suddenly says he's gotta go check on his sister and he is gone as quickly as he arrives, without a farewell..