Kentucky Stonehenge

The thing I like about rural Kentucky is that when you take away the fireworks megastores and equestrian estates, it seems like the state’s mission is to emulate the rest of the world on a smaller scale.  Maybe it’s just an optical illusion effected by the mountains, but I swear everything just seems little in Kentucky.  Last week I stopped in Munfordville, a quaint town surrounded by whiskey distilleries and extensive systems of natural caves, where I found one of the more unique miniatures I’ve seen in that state: ”a bit of ancient society” in what has come to be called Kentucky Stonehenge.

After taking the five-minute historic walking tour of Munfordville and reading plaque after plaque about the town’s Civil War history, I was a little afraid I’d seen all it had to offer before I’d even finished my granola bar.  I walked into a corner building labeled “Welcome Center” in search of someone who could either confirm or deny my fears.  Luckily, the friendly woman behind the counter was eager to help.  When I told her I’d already visited the first three or four landmarks she suggested (as I took the last bite of my breakfast), she leaned forward and reduced her voice to a whisper as she slid an open brochure towards me.

“We have a Stonehenge,” she intimated.

Of course, I’d never heard of anywhere except for Wiltshire County, England having a Stonehenge. I asked her to elaborate. She explained that some guy with a lot of extra time, money and resources had traveled around the greater Munfordville area some years ago collecting all the big rocks he could find, and then piled them up in his yard to mimic the original Stonehenge because he thought it looked cool. She gave me directions and encouraged me to go check it out.

“It’s in his yard?” I asked. I was a little hesitant to tromp around a random Kentucky gentleman’s private property, especially when I’d seen Confederate flags, rifles and neon NO TRESPASSING signs on more than one front porch since leaving the interstate for Munfordville.
“Oh, it’s fine,” she said. “We send people there all the time.”

So off I went, down a winding gravel road…and sure enough, there, in someone’s side yard, was Kentucky Stonehenge.  As I cautiously stepped into the grass I looked around for signs warning trespassers to stay away and, seeing none, proceeded to snap pictures. As I did so, a man walked out of the house and before hopping into his pickup truck, gave me a big wave and a bright smile. I think I was more relieved in that moment than I’ve ever been in my life. Kentucky might be a little intimidating from inside a car, but stopping in Munfordville made me realize how eager everyone is to share their miniature world with outsiders more familiar with the full-scale thing.

Stonehenge, Jr.

Chatlanta

I initially decided to undertake the task of promoting small-town culture as worthwhile because of how deeply offended I am every time one of my friends from cities and suburbs says “but you’re from the middle of nowhere.” I am from somewhere — actually, I’m from the town that’s exactly five hundred miles from both Chicago and New York, if you want to get all cartographic on me — and I die a little bit inside every time someone suggests my hometown doesn’t matter.

I get made fun of because the house I grew up in is surrounded by cornfields, because my high school soccer team had to pull girls from three different schools just to fill the roster and because I’ve been late to work more than once thanks to combines and Amish buggies. It’s annoying. What bothers me most, though, is this idea city kids have that all of these circumstances equal misfortune. They seem to be under the impression that the American dream equals the American suburbs, and while the fact that I eagerly left Crawford County, Pennsylvania for “The City too Busy to Hate” does not exactly make me the ideal spokesperson for rural life, the more I talk to people from areas like my hometown the more I realize that they’re probably even less interested in city folk than vice versa.

Case in point: I went home for fall break in October 2006, a couple months into my first semester at Emory. While I was there, my brother and I made a short video of the town where we live, my alma maters, our home, and our family. When we went to my grandparents’ farm and asked my grandfather to offer up a shoutout to my friends at school, he did so enthusiastically.
“Hello, you rebels from Alabama!” he shouted at the camera.
I tried to explain to him that Atlanta is not in Alabama. He quickly lost interest and went outside to feed the pigs.

Furthermore: during a recent trip to Pennsylvania I stopped at the Market House in Meadville, a farmer’s market of sorts which offers a variety of local foods and crafts. It was the first weekend of western Pennsylvania’s strawberry season and a man and woman were seated at a table just inside the door selling fresh homemade strawberry shortcake for $3.00 a bowl. While I declined their offer because I had just eaten my weight in frozen custard, I stopped to talk to them when they asked about the D80 slung around my neck. I told them about the project and they loved that I was trying to play the role of small-town and small-business advocate — something they themselves had become so immersed in over the course of their lives that they apparently had very little clue or care about went on outside Crawford County.
When the man found out I was coming from Atlanta, he said, “Oh, Chatlanta!”
I must have looked confused.
“They call it that because it’s so spread out that you can’t tell where Chattanooga ends and Atlanta begins,” he explained.
I am not sure who “they” are, but I have never in my life heard this city called “Chatlanta”.
He continued. “Did you move there before or after that big boom when it got huge?”
From what I understand, Atlanta grew exponentially during the mid-twentieth century, when the Civil Rights movement was huge and Atlanta-based corporations like Coca-Cola, Delta and Georgia Pacific were expanding in response to new technologies and greater demand for their respective products and services. Since this boom, which occurred about forty years ago, the city has continued to grow but at a much slower rate. I assume, then, that this original growth spurt was what Mr. Chatlanta was referring to. While I have been told, on occassion, that I look a little older than I actually am, no one has ever before suggested that I was pushing sixty. For my own sake, I have chosen to deduce that this man was inadvertently expressing his indifference towards Atlanta and not suggesting that I might be over the hill.

Watermelon eating contest

June 21, 2008 at the American Cancer Society Relay for Life in Saegertown, Pennsylvania.

The Spillway

Once upon a time, during the Great Depression, Pennsylvanians found themselves severely out of work. As a result, men who had lost their factory jobs were employed by the government to carry out a whole host of very important and worthwhile projects that would benefit their communities for decades to come. One such project was to pave the streets of Meadville with red bricks in order to give the people of Crawford County another reason to complain. As far as I am aware, this is the only purpose the still-existent brick roads of Meadville have served since they were created. Another project, a major source of income and tourism for the area, was the conversion of a swampland/onion field on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border into a 17,088-acre lake that would become one of the Commonwealth’s most popular attractions as part of its largest state park, Pymatuning. While the Pymatuning Reservoir and its surrounding areas boast excellent boating, fishing, camping and swimming, most people who have been there will tell you that its most memorable aspect is none of these — rather, it is the Linesville Spillway, “Where the Ducks Walk on the Fish”.

A few miles from the causeway that provides the (unfortunate) connection between Pennsylvania and Ohio, there is a section of Pymatuning shoreline notorious for its conglomeration of carp and waterfowl. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Spillway to watch one of the greatest interspecies battles ever arranged as the masses of fish (which outnumber the tourists) emerge from the depths of the lake and fight for stale bread tossed to their gaping mouths by the attraction’s visitors. On any given day people will come from across the country and from a few miles down the road to see the fish. The crowd is made up of everyone from grandparents to grandchildren and fish bread is purchased with everything from food stamps to Benjamins. The diversity that can be found at the Spillway is pretty astounding when the fact that the 2000 Census determined that average Crawford County resident was 35 and white with an income of $26,000. The number of outliers in both directions is pretty substantial when you attempt to fit Pymatuning tourists into any sort of bell-shaped curve, and I think there are three reasons for this: first, anyone can get his or her hands on a piece of bread. (If not, the fish aren’t picky. The only stuff they don’t like seems to be soda pop and corrugated cardboard.) Second, anyone can drop a piece of bread (or anything, for that matter) over a railing. But finally, and most importantly, humans seem to have a kind of morbid curiosity that leads them to seek out experiences which meet a certain point on the unpleasantness threshold. Seeing thousands of slimy brown carp with bulging eyes and round, smacking mouths flailing around at one’s feet seems to satisfy this underlying desire to a T.

Never in my life have I seen anything else so outrageously disgusting that I cannot, no matter how hard I try, tear my eyes from it. The Spillway casts a deeply disturbing spell on those who attend it and while you’ll have nightmares about carp for years afterward, I guarantee that you will not be able to resist a return visit. Usually on this second trip you will be accompanied by a skeptical friend who cannot quite grasp what you mean when you say “My vacation was great. I’ve never been so repulsed.” Whether you come back with a photograph, videotape or “CARPE FEED’EM!” t-shirt as a memento, people who have never been cannot and will not possibly understand what you’ve gone through. The Spillway is the first place I take people when they come to visit me and it is one of the last places I go when I know I’ll be out of town for a long time. It’s the kind of thing that somehow manages to really put life into perspective. If I ever feel my emotions start to get the best of me, all I have to do is think of the Spillway and I’m instantly back to my old, hard, indifferent self.

The Peach Festival

I have been to a good number of festivals in my day, which is due in part (if not entirely) to the ability and determination of the good people of western Pennsylvania to promote and celebrate the fruits of their labor. Thousands of people are entertained within a five-mile radius of my parents’ house every year at Conneaut Lake’s Pumpkinfest and Strawberry Festival as well as Linesville’s infamous Waterfowl Weekend. When your hometown is covered in a blanket of snow for eight months out of the year, mild days filled with duck calls, pumpkin rolls and shortcake are not only acceptable but are encouraged and demanded by the residents of such areas.

As a person bred to be an avid festival-goer, then, I think it goes without saying that I am perpetually on the lookout for an outdoor celebration. Unfortunately, I have been disappointed by the ones I’ve stumbled upon since my transplant into the Atlanta social scene. The weather here is decent year-round and the majority of the metro population are neither hunters or farmers, which I guess is the reason why I’ve never been up to my ears in bratwurst, pie and airbrushed wolf t-shirts since coming to Georgia. The lack of the aforementioned has left a gaping hole in my heart that gets bigger with every passing weekend, so when I found out about the Georgia State Peach Festival in rural Byron, GA I naturally peed myself with excitement.

The Peach Festival not only has its own website and a toll-free telephone number, it is heavily advertised in metro area newspapers and apparently on local cable as well. When I first got wind of the week-long festival last month I immediately planned to make the 2+ hour trip to Byron for the opening day events on June 13. As the day drew nearer the weather forecast called for strong thunderstorms, 90-degree heat and 100% humidity across Georgia, but this didn’t deter my plans and I assumed it would not prevent the good people of the Peach State from paying homage to the fuzzy orange fruit.

Boy, was I wrong.

I took one road, I-75, from Atlanta to Byron on Saturday morning. The highway was packed with minivans and motorcycles, which are the two types of transportation most commonly associated with the Pagan celebrations I have come to know and love. Wow! I thought. Those inflatable slides are going to be packed! I might not even be able to find a parking spot! When I got off my exit and no one followed me, though, I became confused. Sure, the sky was a menacing greenish-gray and the wind was fairly strong, but it wasn’t storming yet — a rainless festival day was still a definite possibility. Even a slightly to moderately rainy Saturday should not have caused a problem.

I followed my directions, provided by the Peach Festival Official Website, to the “Byron Peach Shops”, where I expected to find a multitude of quaint small businesses and sidewalks lined with peach vendors. Instead, I found a Beall’s Outlet and a Big Lots and a parking lot that was empty but for a couple of large inflatable slides (as promised by the internet), one hot dog stand and one makeshift truck bed/peach stand. Four kids were playing on the slides and one old man was reclining in a lawn chair, a peach in one hand and a pack of Reds in the other.

It took three trips around the parking lot for it to sink in that this was the opening day of the Georgia State Peach Festival in its entirety. I would have cried if it hadn’t been for a cheap, delicious basket of two dozen peaches, the only positive thing I gained from the experience. Just as I was making my purchase it started to thunderstorm and the kids and the old man scattered, leaving the vendor in the portable hot dog stand in the middle of the parking lot between two enormous slides. This was the sight in my rearview mirror as I headed back to the interstate and the one that will stick in my mind as the most incredible defamation of the word “festival” I have ever seen. I would never wish such disappointment on anyone, and I really don’t even want to know what “The World’s Largest Peach Cobbler!!!” looks like.