7.

In Kentucky I finally felt that I was seeing something new. I think any road trip out of the Midwest is really just a quest for hills, a quest for a land where you can’t see all the way to the horizon. It’s strange, because in Illinois we may have the widest view of anywhere, and yet the places we look for to be ‘beautiful’ always afford us a lesser view of sky and horizon.

We found hills in Kentucky, and I think in my memory they’ll always have a blue hue to them. I’ll remember Kentucky as the roads that lead into Lexington, and I’ll take their windings and the dips and rises along either side, the tiny towns that perch in between these hills, to be representative of the entire state.

For whatever reason the city of Lexington stuck out in my memory like it should be something to drive though. I’m not sure if I thought it had historical significance or it I remember my grandfather saying something about how nice it was. Whatever the reason, we drove through it, and I was rather disappointed. Again though, I can’t say why. I don’t know what I was really looking for. The only thing I remember distinctly is seeing an old building that had been used for a Union hospital in the Civil War. That got Jon and I talking, and neither of us could remember whether Kentucky had been with the North or the South.

Our plan after Lexington was to drive to Richmond, where Jon’s family farm was. He had been telling me about the farm since we realized our route would take us through Kentucky. Jon’s grandfather had owned a tobacco farm. Jon’s mother had been raised there, and Jon had been there when he was a child. When his grandfather died the property was sold, but it was his dream to buy it back one day and turn it into a camp. He called his mom to get directions, and we were going to drive there and ask whoever owned it if we could look around.

Once beyond Lexington we were in the hills once again, sometimes on the ridge with valleys sloping off to either side, sometimes in the valley with a stream keeping pace and cattle watching us disinterestedly. Eventually the hills started getting slightly more rocky, the slopes more steep, and myself more nervous, having noticed a sign a while back that seemed to indicate the lack of a bridge ahead. I asked Jon if he had seen it.

“I saw a sign saying no trucks,” he answered.

“Yeah. Did it say something about a ferry?”

He shrugged. “That would be weird.”

It had been a while since we had passed through the last dot on the map, and I had a vision of the road coming to an end and a rickety boat manned by disreputable backwoods men, men who would extort money from unsuspecting tourists who didn’t want their car at the bottom of a river. I asked Jon if he thought we would have to put my car on a boat, but he didn’t answer.

The road was winding, so when we saw a final sign warning that the road ended in one thousand feet, we couldn’t yet see what was going on. Jon scrutinized the map, and sure enough there was a river intersecting the road we were on. There was also a tiny abbreviation reading ‘FY.’

“I guess that stands for ferry,” he said.

We swept around a curve (hesitantly, because I still had visions of my car in a river), and the road did indeed come to an end. When I tell this story now to our friends I say something like, “We were out in the middle of nowhere, winding through these hills, and all of a sudden at the bottom of this valley the road just ends,” and then I make this emphatic motion with my hand indicating the road ending. That’s exactly how it happened too, and Jon and I just kind of sat there staring.

The river was probably a couple hundred feet across, and a sign told us to stop at a certain distance and wait for the ferryman to signal for us to board. The ferry was not currently on our side but was just pushing off from the opposite shore. To my relief it seems a rather stalwart vessel, and it looked large enough to carry one or two cars easily. In fact, soon it was delivering some sort of minivan to our side, so I supposed it could handle my car.

We were excited, because we knew this would make a good story, and road trips are all about good stories. The ferry got to our side, the gate slammed down, and the vehicle aboard drove out. A man who had jumped out to tie the ferry to a jetty signaled us to drive up into it. Since we’re just stupid kids from the city and were worried we might disrupt the complicated task of getting from one side of the river to the other, once aboard we rolled down our windows and just gawked at the river. When we were about halfway across a ferryman came out of the cabin and told us we could get out and look around.

The ferry was large enough to carry three vehicles, actually, and basically consisted of a little control cabin and a long floating driveway that cars parked on. There were towers with guide wires on either side of the ferry on both sides of the river, so there was no danger of being swept down the stream. It was run by two ferrymen, and when I try to remember them now they end up looking just the same. They were old and friendly with big bushy beards.

We asked them, in more words or less, what the heck was going on.

“There’s been a ferry on this river since 1785,” one or the other explained to Jon and me. “It’s actually in the Constitution that unless it’s not operated for a period of two years, they can never build a bridge here. Too much historical significance. There was an Indian chief who got the rights to run a ferry across this river, which is the Kentucky River, but back then it was pulled on a chain that ran across the river. Back then it was also part of Virginia.” He pointed to the cabin where two flags were flying beside the Stars and Stripes: Virginia and Kentucky. “You’ve got to get congressional permission to fly that one here.”

We reached the other side and one of them tied the boat off. We could probably have stayed and talked to them for hours, and we would have felt good about it too because I bet they don’t get too many people daily that are as incredibly interested in the history and day-to-day operation of a ferry as we were then, but we only talked for a little while before cars came down the road and we had to get out of the way. They did tell us more though, about the number of cars that cross daily (maybe around one hundred) and about the town on the other side of the river (Valley View, dying now, but it used to be bigger than Lexington; they’d float logs down the river for the sawmills). I wish we would have parked the car and ridden back across with them, but we still had a ways to go before Richmond.

“Road trip, eh?” one of the men said when we told him of our plans. “Well, be sure to get in jail. You can’t go on a road trip without getting in trouble at least once. But not here in Kentucky. Wait till you get to Tennessee.”

Besides all that excitement, we almost hit a rooster that was wandering in the street in Valley View. For some reason that was almost as exciting to us as the ferry.