We spent Election Day in Kentucky, which in a surprise upset elected a Democrat governor that night. The pundits had a lot to say about variability in party preference at the Kentucky local level, despite their solid red performance in Presidential elections, and we got to see a bit of that.
First we spent two nights in Paducah, one of 180 UNESCO “Creative Cities” committed to “placing creativity and cultural industries at the heart of their development plans” (there are only 9 of these cities in the United States). Downtown Paducah is surrounded by flood walls, making it look like a medieval walled city (but without the turrets). These were built by the Army Corps of Engineers after the Ohio River flooded massively in 1937, completely inundating downtown.
On the inside, the walls have been painted with a series of murals depicting local history and culture. Paducah is also home to the National Quilt Museum, which we had heard about from Grandma Fran, and the quilts there were truly mind blowing works of art.
And, we learned from our new friends Michael and Victoria, in the early 2000s Paducah launched an “artist relocation program,” which sounds quite alarming but actually means that the city drew artists to its historic “Lowertown” district by offering them essentially free housing if they were willing to renovate dilapidated structures and stay and create in town.
This program is one big reason why Paducah is now, in Michael’s words, “a blueberry floating in a bowl of tomato soup.” The local coffee shop — now in two locations! — has posted a manifesto (their word) outlining the owners’ commitment and responsibilities to the community and their workers. Its walls are covered with posters and business cards about massage, theater productions and feminist speak outs.
One location of the coffee shop is attached to the next-door bakery, Kirchoffs, first opened in 1873 and still making some pretty phenomenal breads and sweets. There’s also a clothing boutique in the front with some sweet little yellow rain slickers and funky bags for sale.
All over town there are studios and galleries and artists selling jewelry and weaving on the street. It’s thoroughly lovely and we gave some serious thought to moving there — the schools are apparently good, too! — but we also heard it gets bitterly cold in the winter, so, maybe not. Not that we’re complete weather lightweights or anything.
From Paducah we moved just a tiny bit south to a resort marina in the town of Grand Rivers. Grand Rivers is less blueberry, more tomato soup. Folks were wearing Trump 2020 hats at the spa. A man at the bar chatted with the bartender about recent conversations they’d had with people who tried to justify abortion as being okay, but not the death penalty. (In truth, it’s encouraging that these conversations are actually happening.) The bar also had a sign warning women not to drink alcohol “before conception.” Just...think about that.
Byron and Cynthia, who landed in Grand Rivers from Wisconsin a few years back and decided to stick around, invited us to dinner at the local Italian restaurant, a New Yorker-owned pizza place. Really good! We got to drive with them into town past the Kentucky Lock and Dam, a Tennessee Valley Authority facility that generates hundreds of thousands of kilowatts of hydroelectric power, as well as a large empty lot which they told us is normally heaping with coal. This turned out to be the Grand Rivers Terminal, which processes 12 million tons of coal a year. Meanwhile apparently the dam’s hydroelectric power is exported elsewhere, and according to Byron and Cynthia the local economy and culture both continue to be driven at least in part by the coal industry.
A couple of days later, we headed south into Tennessee and then Alabama, outrunning a cold front that brought the first major freeze of the fall, and the potential for significant ice and snow. Definitely not down with that. Our route took us through the huge artificial lakes created by the TVA dams, in water just a few feet over sunken roads, bridges and buildings — little reminders on our charts hinting at the civilization buried, perhaps now forgotten, after progress plowed through.