This is a short series of posts about things discovered along the way.
I came to central Kentucky to visit Mammoth Cave National Park, and spent a week in the area North of the park but only a day in the cave. This is the part of traveling America I like best – the unplanned adventures and unexpected discoveries that come when you have more than enough time in your schedule for such things to occur organically.
What follows are a series of short passages from this time in the Kentucky hill country:
A Sailor Home from the Sea
The Park Service scatters a load of crusher run gravel occasionally on an old road that skirts the North side of the Mammoth Cave property. I suspect the motivation is mostly to allow fire crews to protect the area, but the road also provides access to a few backcountry trailheads and remote cemeteries from before the government acquired the Park.
Down an even narrower side track off this road I discovered the Webb Cemetery. The dense forest gave way to reveal just a bit of blue sky as the sun filtered through the hardwoods, dappling gravestones old and new. Some were so old the inscriptions scratched by hand into sandstone slabs were indecipherable after being worn by decades of water and lichen. Others were only a few years old, polished modern monuments with crisp computer machined text.
I wondered at these new arrivals, particularly a fresh marker on the grave of an infant that had died a hundred years before. What story was behind that stone? Who remembered that sad event of a century ago and felt compelled to buy the monument and carry it to this lonely place?
The morning was warm and still. Gnats had found me, buzzing around my head and encouraging me to wrap up my service and return to the safety of the truck cab. On the way back, I noticed a bronze plaque marking the resting place of a Seaman. It was covered with needles from a nearby cypress, so I removed my cap and used it to brush them off. As I stood there reading the marker, from nowhere a small puff of breeze pushed the gnats off my face and I heard a single, clear note of a bell.
Looking up I saw a set of windchimes in the tree above that I had failed to notice before. Message received, sailor. Fair winds and Godspeed.
