8.

Jon’s grandfather’s farm looked like an old photograph. This is because in Kentucky evening doesn’t just mean things getting darker and darker. As the sun sets behind hills, things also get more and more grainy. I felt that the blue-grey barns on the ridge should have been visible, that there was enough light still to see them, but the quality of sight had deteriorated, and soon the lights on the pickup we rode in with the farmer were cutting through only a smoky dimness. That probably is not how dusk always is in Kentucky. Maybe the clouds had something to do with it.

We had gotten lost in Richmond trying to find the road to Jon’s farm. I-52 seemed to disappear and reappear at will, and Jon still maintains there were two separate roads bearing that number. After a few phone calls to his mother and comparisons of dimming memories, we finally found the correct road.

In Kentucky it seems you pave a road to get to farms. In Michigan the roads are just there, dusty grids out beyond the towns, and you base your farm-placement off that. The road we were on was certainly a Kentucky road, and it seemed to go farther and farther, winding with the only intent of stringing together random modular homes and farmhouses. There didn’t seem to be much sense in it. We finally arrived though, just as everything was starting to look like the old photograph, and Jon grew more excited.

“The old driveway used to cut up through here, between the trees. This paved driveway is new.”

There was a sign announcing this land as “Silverbend Farm”. The road had been through a valley. Turning onto the driveway we climbed up to where a small house sat on a rise.

“That’s where my mom grew up.”

We sat in the driveway for a moment, Jon rather excited but unsure. The plan was simply for him to introduce himself to whoever was home, explain who he was, and ask if we could look around and take pictures. I volunteered to wait in the car. He left and was gone for long enough that I began to get bored. A curtain in a back window of the house lifted for a moment and a face looked out. When Jon came back, he was practically jogging. In the car he held out an unsteady hand, shaking with nervousness.

It turned out that the people in this house were actually just renting it from the man who owned the farm. The woman in the house had called the farmer, and he was on his way over to unlock the gate for us. We sat in the Firebird as the night got dimmer and the light behind the house reached farther. Finally a pickup truck rolled up the road from the opposite direction and climbed the driveway.

Later, when we were back in the car and driving toward Nashville, Jon will tell me that the farmer had been drunk. I’m not too good at picking up on stuff like that. He had seemed to me simply a slow-spoken, friendly man who dimly recalled meeting Jon’s mom and aunts on one occasion. Jon also said that when I had gotten out of the truck to unlock gates in the pasture for the truck to drive through he had made fun of me for being a city-slicker, but if I were a farmer I quite possibly would have made fun of a pair of random guys who wanted to be carted around some fields in the growing dusk and who couldn’t figure out how to work a simple latch.

We piled into the truck with him, two guys in a tiny pickup with some other guy they had never met, driving around because one of the guys has some recollection of the farm that the other guy now owns. It all seemed rather surreal to me. Jon and the farmer pointed to barns on various hills, Jon saying what he remembered and the farmer saying how it had changed. Jon’s grandfather had grown tobacco, but the farmer didn’t do that anymore. Something about government buyouts, and now the money wasn’t there. The land had become grazing space for cattle.

The fields were muddy, and the truck bounced across them and waited for slow-moving cows to get out of the way, sometimes giving them a helpful shove with the bumper. Jon remembered an old farmhouse that had stood in one of the far fields. He said that when he was a kid it had been used to store hay. The farmer had demolished it. “It was dangerous,” he said. “People were always calling me up and asking to look through it with metal detectors and whatnot. I didn’t need a liability.”

I wondered what anyone out here in the hills of Kentucky would be doing wandering around abandoned farmhouses with metal detectors, and I wondered about a farmhouse that had been abandoned when Jon’s grandfather had the farm. I asked Jon, but he couldn’t remember if his grandfather had ever lived there.

Besides the farmhouse, the farm’s new owner had done rather well. The three barns that had been in various states of disrepair and decay when he bought it had been fixed up and were standing sedately in the growing dimness. They were something to see, lumbering like frozen beasts as the hills grew darker around them. I understood what Jon loved about this place, and I sympathized with him when the farmer proudly pointed to all the formerly wooded corners of the property that had been cleared.

“There were trees all up through here,” Jon would say, pointing.

“Yup.” The farmer would grin. “Dozer took care of them.” Then he would point out another area that he had cleared. Jon was distraught, and I wondered what I would do when my grandfather’s property passed into other hands and was changed.

The farmer took us back to the front entrance, and we thanked him for his tour. He shook our hands, got back into his truck, and drove away. It was now completely dark.

Since it was dark and we would see nothing of the country anyway, we allowed ourselves to get on Interstate 75 and follow it down to Road 80. I can’t remember now where Road 80 was or where it led, but it was supposed to get us to Nashville eventually. What I do remember is the incredible emptiness. We would drive for miles without seeing any light or sign of habitation. I think we were traveling through some sort of vast state park, but without getting out a map and checking for sure I would have no idea. I do remember that the exits from the freeway were scarce enough that there was a time when we were actually worried about running out of gas. We finally found an exit at a lonely place called Edmonton. My headache and our weariness added to the unreality of it all. We pumped gas in a thin sleet and walked across a parking lot to a crowded McDonalds. Then it was on, through Bowling Green, in and between a constant fleet of trucks, onto I-65, and finally into Nashville.