“ONE THING AT LEAST IS CERTAIN, THIS LIFE FLIES”
The relatively flat terrain and the well-groomed fields of knee-high corn and tobacco ended abruptly as I crossed the line into Knox County. The car dropped off the smooth pavement with a thud and I was forced to throttle back to a crawl. No doubt, the early pioneers who came through the Cumberland Gap some fifty miles to the South and forged onward to this point figured they had reached the proverbial Promised Land. Laurel County stretches Northward from this county line and consists largely of rich flat farmland. I was born in Knox County and this is where the lower ridges of the Appalachian Mountains begin. I was once again on the old graveled road I had traveled so often as a growing boy. Clouds of thick yellow dust began to billow up behind my old ford and now all I could see in the rear view mirror was a thick cloud of potential mud. I did not remember the road being so full of dips and curves but then I could not remember ever having traveled this road in a car. Our family could not afford that luxury and our only mode of transportation, aside from walking, was a rickety farm wagon pulled along by a team of mules. The roadbed had been worn and scraped into the lower side of the continuous chain of ridges that form the ancient stream valley of the Knox Fork creek.
Once every two or three years the county would run a grader over the road as a part of their money strapped maintenance program. However, most of the basic engineering had been accomplished hundreds of years earlier by herds of deer, buffalo, and subsequent bands of Indians. All those intrepid beings had naturally picked the path of least resistance through these foothills of the Appalachians during their perpetual hunt for food.
This rugged stream valley had always been to me like the fabled “sleepy hollow” of Washington Irving’s classic. On more than one occasion as an amorous teenager, I had volunteered to accompany one of my sweethearts home from church along this dirt road. A young man with raging hormones will go to about any length for a goodnight kiss. Nevertheless, the reward was never worth the agony of the long walk home alone, especially at night.
When darkness descends on one of these hollows here in the mountains, you can say for sure it is dark. Like Ichabod, I too would whistle a nervous tune while I feigned nonchalance and slogged along toward home. But then, when images of the headless horseman galloping out from the bushes or darting out from behind one of the big oak trees along the road became too vivid, I would run the last two or three miles with imagined steam from the horses flaring nostrils on the nape of my neck. The most beautiful sight in the world was that lamp my mother always left burning in the window when I was away at night. I would be in bed and pulling the covers up over me before our old screen door slammed behind me.
Occasionally I would come upon a
