A Trip to Kentucky

This post is about the trip we took to Kentucky for Thanksgiving last November. I’ve enjoyed being retired and I don’t do anything very quickly or promptly anymore. 

Having  recovered from our long van trip of the late summer, we once again left our home in Western North Carolina and  followed Interstate 40 down the western escarpment of the Blue Ridge Mountains, through the gorge of the Pigeon River, down 2000 feet of elevation and into the Great Appalachian Valley east of Knoxville. Then leaving the interstate we headed north and west and 700 feet up in elevation onto the Cumberland Plateau. There we spent three days at the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area on the Tennessee-Kentucky border. The Big South Fork is one of my favorite places; it is isolated, not much visited, and spectacular. The Cumberland Plateau is part of the sedimentary western portion of the Appalachians that stretches through  Tennessee, Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia up into Pennsylvania.  It is geologically distinct from the Great Smoky and Blue Ridge Mountains where we live in Western North Carolina. Our mountains are uplifted ranges of metamorphic and igneous layers with ranges and peaks.  The Cumberland Mountains in contrast are sedimentary layers of a highly eroded seabed with lower and less varied elevations. It is certainly a different experience hiking in the two regions. Around our house everything is up; up to the peak, up to the ridge, over the saddle, up to the gap.  Our streams are steep, fast-flowing and filled with boulders.  At the Big South Fork in contrast, down is the dominant direction; down off the plateau, down along the bluff lines, down into the gorge. Streams and rivers may meander.  And the rocks are completely different; layers and layers of sandstones and limestones with cliffs and arches and overhangs.

After our time at the Big South Fork, we drove four hours further west to spend Thanksgiving with Laura’s parents in Henderson, Kentucky.  Nan and Joe continue to do well at ages 89 and 94, and are comfortable in their home of 65 years. Nathaniel and his wife Lisa joined us from Roanoke, Virginia which was a wonderful treat for Nan and Joe.

After Thanksgiving I made a short trip to Louisville while Laura stayed with her parents. I grew up in Louisville and I always enjoy seeing the changing city. This visit I bicycled parts of the Louisville Loop, a new 100-mile bicycle path under construction which will circle the perimeter of the metro area when it is completed. In the prosperous eastern portions of the city the path is well constructed and beautiful with signs and parking and restrooms.  It’s another story in the no-knock-warrant sections of the western city.  There the path is discontinuous, frequently just a painted area on existing streets and not always obvious.  Don’t even think about finding a public restroom; (“Excuse me, I was born here. May I use your bathroom?”) But the architecture is interesting and there are views of  Olmstead-designed parks and historic neighborhoods and industrial areas along the Ohio River.

I took a short detour off the bike path in the West End to see the childhood home of Cassius Clay, later renamed Muhammad Ali.  Ali was born in Louisville and began his boxing career in the city. I never paid much attention to Ali while he was alive, but I have recently read about him and watched videos of his appearances. I admire his early, courageous and very public opposition to the American involvement in the Vietnam War.  In his words, “Man, I ain’t got no quarrel with them Viet Cong… Why should they ask me to put on a uniform and go ten thousand miles from home and drop bombs and bullets on brown people in Vietnam while so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs and denied simple human rights?…  My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America… How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.” As a result of taking this stance he lost his boxing title and career and was threatened for five years with imprisonment. He was 24 years old at the time.

With fifty years of historical distance It is hard to argue that Ali was not correct.  His analysis of the Vietnam conflict now appears far more accurate than the  Domino Theory and Peace with Honor justifications of the Truman,  Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon Administrations.  It is a complex subject: these leaders had witnessed Nazi and Soviet aggressions and the Communist victory in China. They, as we all are, were products of their times and they had reasons for acting as they did. But in the case of supporting American involvement in Vietnam they were wrong. Our involvement from 1950 to 1975 brought Napalm, Agent Orange and tremendous firepower to a regional conflict in a poor country. Without such involvement the conflict would presumably have been far shorter and less destructive.  Our tax dollars paid for the  7 million tons of bombs dropped on Indochina during the war, more than triple the  tonnage of bombs the U.S. dropped on Europe and Asia during all of World War II. Unexploded ordnance continues to detonate and kill people today in the region and has rendered much land hazardous and unsuitable for cultivation.

It is of course easy for me, with my nice laptop and comfortable living room, to look up stuff on Wikipedia and voice criticisms. But it is just tragic: by 1967 the Secretary of Defense had concluded that the war could not be won and that the Vietnamese Communists did not represent a threat to the larger world democratic order. His concerns were reported to President Johnson, but were not shared with the American public.  President Johnson apparently felt differently than did Muhammad Ali and   American involvement in the war continued for five more bloody years. In 1975 the war ended with the communist victory; no further dominos fell.

It would be nice to think that we as a country learned something from this horrible war. We certainly learned to not have a draft; it is much easier to conduct a militaristic foreign policy if only a very small percentage of the population will be tasked with the killing and dying. We learned to be respectful of returning service personnel and to thank them for their service.  We clearly did not learn to apply care and humility in the application of our military power. 

In my medical practice I cared for a lovely elderly couple for many years until they both died of old age in their eighties. They were kind, gracious people.  He was a bee keeper and would bring me gifts of honey in Mason jars. Their son sustained a traumatic brain injury in Vietnam when he was 20 years old. He was left disabled and unable to live independently. His parents declined nursing home care for him and cared for him in their home until he died from complications of his injury 22 years later. It took a good deal of bureaucratic effort, but his death was acknowledged as a combat death and his name was recorded on the Vietnam Memorial in Washington.