The length of the Kentucky

Life by rheotaxis, part 3

By Wesley Houp

Collinsia verna. Blue-Eyed Mary was the first species of spring wildflowers to seduce my imagination as a young man of 23 living on the river at High Bridge. At a time when most of my friends from high school and college were discovering the music-scene (albeit anemic) in Lexington and Louisville and immersing themselves liver-first in the sporadic but engulfing barscape of the city, I was cultivating a healthy respect for the instant isolation the Lock 7 pool offers to anyone with a boat and time. In April the lush banks of Cedar Run glowed in the half blue, half white brilliance cast by a million Blue-Eyed Mary’s. Cedar Run was one of the few places to boast such a generous stand. To see it full bloom is a prize enjoyed by scant few.

Cedar Run is one of those creeks that boaters (paddlers and otherwise) pass by without as much as a second glance. For those who launch at Frankie’s ramp just above Lock 7, the spectacle of High Bridge pulls all attention skyward, and most are headed for the cold, clear lake-bottom waters of the Dix River and the lure of current-dumb, farm-trout in the tail waters anyway. The small, shallow mouth of Cedar Run is no more than an afterthought with outboards full-bore. Harrodsburg’s municipal “straw” slurping at the downstream side also casts a quasi-industrial pallor, complimenting the massive limestone pier supporting the southern leg of High Bridge—the two man-made structures obscuring the magnificently severe gorge.

Just inside the mouth, though, moss-covered stone piers mark the spot where the old stage road bridged the creek, and immediately up to the right, the road to Shaker landing snakes around the cliff. Covering the banks on either side, the Blue-Eyed Mary harmonizes with the blues of Dwarf Larkspur (Delphinium tricorne), Virginia Bluebell (Mertensia virginicus), Greek Valerian (Polemonium reptans), Purple Phacelia (Phacelia bipinnatifida), Quaker Ladies (Houstonia caerulea), Blue Phlox (Phlox divaricata), and Wild Hyacinth (Camassia scilloides), a pointillist’s pallet of blues from which to paint a thousand skies.

The first time I stumbled on this singular beauty I was stoned; it was dark. And then my flashlight died. It snowed later that night, the kind of freak April snow that falls like torn pieces of Wonderbread. In the frozen, growling morning, the blooms were shriveled up, wilted lavender peering up beneath tiny hoods of snow.

The uprooted clumps I clawed out, wetted with each stroke of my paddle, bled earthen veins across the flat, plastic bottom of the 14’ Coleman canoe as we pushed against the brown current; we were hung-over, otherworldly, and fully given over to the bristling cryogenics of spring morning snowfall. That afternoon I transplanted Blue-Eyed Mary on the edge of the flood-plane in my backyard. Laura planted Sweet Woodruff in a half whiskey barrel. We drank homebrew, made a snowman and watched it melt in the greening Sunday-noon. For dinner, more trout. When we drained the last of the homebrewed pilsner, I trekked up the lock-hill to Ricky’s.

Bootleggers

In a dry county like Jessamine, it’s commonsense policy to maintain good relations with your community bootlegger, particularly if you’re prone to bottle fever on Sunday afternoons. On any other day of the week, financial sanity should outweigh proximal convenience, and the 45-minute to an hour roundtrip to Nicholasville or Lexington for retail liquor is justifiable. But Sundays are special in the hinterlands—that first (or perhaps last) day of the week reigned over by preachers, old maids, and fried chicken. And, of course, bootleggers like Ricky G. Sundays in Driesville always necessitated a more liberal manipulation of the wallet. The menu went something like this:

Old-Milwaukee, Pounders: 6 @ $1 per can

Jim Beam #7: 1 @ $10 per pint bottle

Certainly not retail, but not altogether prohibitive prices either. A modest splurge of personal resources foisted upon me by dispassionate and remote powers of authority. Other distillations of devil sauce could be gotten, I’m sure, but I never made it past Old Swill and Mr. Beam. And I’ll admit there’s a palpable thrill that jolts a young man’s backbone when he knows he has raised the floorboards beneath this Nation of Laws, crawled through to the musty underworld, and traded legal tender for bootlegged liquor.

Ricky G’s driveway could accommodate only one car at a time, and on any given Sunday the overflow traffic might line the road over the hill, across the creek, spilling into Gullett’s dead-end driveway. Those more furtive customers might turn around and park, engines idling, lights off, in the gravel lot at High Bridge Union Church, waiting impatiently for the line to clear and never once asking forgiveness. Just another night of second-class business on First Street in High Bridge.

After several years of patronage, I felt comfortable enough to follow Ricky into the darkened backroom, my hand crumpled around the cash in my pocket, and watch with fascination as this hometown entrepreneur opened a hinged piece of wood paneling to reveal the narrow, stocked shelves of—get this—a refrigerated, load-bearing wall. That’s right. A fucking refrigerated wall.

How he struck upon the idea of a refrigerated wall is simple. For years, bootleggers have hidden their wares in walls. How he actually constructed such system is the real puzzler. And each time I deliver this fascinating detail of the story, I’m never completely satisfied people understand, appreciate, or even believe the significance of such an invention. If there were a bootleggers’ hall-of-fame, the invention of the refrigerated wall cavity would surely warrant Ricky G’s immediate induction.

As a native son of High Bridge, like Ricky G, I had an inside track. My presence at Ricky G’s on a Sunday night had the natural ring of an innocent neighborly calling. Those other shadowy figures waiting in cars outside were just business. I was family. I was the one that was offered a seat in front of the television in the living room while Ricky muttered over his shoulder, “Wait here and talk to Lucille while I go deal with these shithogs. I’ll be right back.”

Lockmasters

Bootlegging booze was his cottage industry. By day, Ricky G carried the big wrench down at Lock 7. Actually, by the time he assumed lockmaster duties, turning the capstan by hand to open and close the locks (an endeavor that required several men) had long since given way to manhandling an electric drill motor that allowed a single lockmaster to operate a lock unassisted. River traffic by this time was somewhere south of anemic, so the only time and energy-consuming responsibility was taking care of the grounds.

The vast majority of Ricky’s on-the-clock time was spent idly watching the clock, shooting the shit with “Hoot” Gibson or “Walleye” Waller or Harvey “the Gut” or any one of a number of locals that considered a trip to the locks part of Standard Operating Procedure—an important component of one’s daily constitution. The Lockmaster’s house had long since been dissembled, and the well-worn horseshoe pits were lost to weeds, so, aside from lawn-care, chitchat, and shooing away the occasional truant or juvenile delinquent, being Lockmaster was about as close as one could come to a non-job job as is possible, and Ricky managed the operation with the pride and skill of a professional do-little. A do-little, that is, perched aside the mighty Kentucky.

Even still, Ricky’s tenure wasn’t completely devoid of actual lockmastering. In the summer and fall, the occasional pleasure-boater and fisherman from Frankfort required passage upstream, and the Dixie Belle, which operated from Shaker Landing just upstream occasionally locked down to the lower pool to treat passengers to a view of the mineral-stained cliffs around the bend toward Brooklyn. Aside from the Belle, though, the only large vessels were work barges hauling men, materials and equipment to lock and dam repair upstream.

As the last Lockmaster at High Bridge, Ricky unwittingly occupied a special, and I would say somewhat sad, place in the story of the Kentucky. Though mechanization had dumbed-down the job, the title of Lockmaster was nevertheless one to wear with pride, and whenever boats would come a-knockin’, he’d jump into action with the same eagerness to please as did so many of his predecessors.

The length of the Kentucky

When you drive down to lock 7 now, or any other lock for that matter, not much is going on. You might see a fisherman or two, a car full of hooligans drinking beer. But that’s it. These once vital and culturally vibrant places have fallen into disrepair, and the decision to seal the lock doors has segmented the river for good, or at least for the foreseeable future. Call it travesty or misadventure, at every turn, on every occasion it seems we’ve done wrong by the river despite our intentions.

Granted, creating slackwater allowed communities along the Kentucky’s corridor to grow and provide more and more opportunities as populations doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and so on. And surely without the relatively reliable pool-depths provided by impoundment, municipal straws would have to stretch far and wide to find enough water to satisfy needs of their populations and businesses.

But closing up the locks and doing nothing is not a long-term fix to our water-needs. Another drought like the one in 1988 will certainly push us to ever more radical alterations to the Kentucky’s current. And this is not the stuff of fantasy. On more than one occasion, groups have proposed damming and flooding the palisades section of the river. Again, I think of the poet Richard Hugo:

Those who favor our plan to alter the river

raise your hand. Thank you for your vote.

Last week, you’ll recall, I spoke about how water

never complains. How it runs where you tell it,

seemingly at home, flooding grain or pinched

by geometric banks like those in the graphic

depiction of our plan. We ask for power:

A river boils or falls to turn our turbines.

The river approves our plans to alter the river.

First of all, the Kentucky River Authority must re-envision itself—reassert itself in the political process on behalf of the river and not just the people of Lexington and the other water-strapped cities and towns. For once, let’s first think of the river, and this means a comprehensive “think” of the river as both endangered species and vital resource, a vital interest to an entire region, with direct impact on the health and future of a much larger watershed (the Ohio). A logical first step would be reinvestment in the locks and dams, coupled with a concerted effort to protect the headwaters above each fork from further degradation by the coal industry.

Responding only to crisis, as we seem to have done from the beginning, with patch-up jobs and lower-cost short-term fixes to the aging lock and dam infrastructure, is only good till the next crisis. But it’s not too difficult to imagine catastrophe: chain-reaction failure. It has happened before. In March of 1905, floodwaters flanked the dams at locks 10 and 9, and both pools were lost—a disaster that took an entire year to remedy. How would a disaster like this affect cities like Winchester, Lexington, or Nicholasville, Harrodsburg, or Frankfort (to name a few) in 2011? And what radical alterations would such a disaster legitimize in the eyes of policymakers?

Having lived most of my life in and around a lock and dam community, I can say this with surety: when the locks were in operation, the community was more vibrant, and a river community that’s more vibrant could very easily be a community that’s more attentive—more protective—of its river. Exactly how the Kentucky River matters to the people will, in large part, help determine its future. Will we continue to alter the river to maintain our growing needs, inflated desires, and self-interests, or will we change something about ourselves, our behaviors and perceptions, to protect the integrity of the river and by doing so serve our own best interests? The latter would seem to be the essence of life by rheotaxis.