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By Will Randolph
This summer, in preparation for our annual McConnell Scholar retreat, Dr. Gregg assigned us all Wendell Berry’s 1971 book on Red River Gorge, The Unforeseen Wilderness. Unfortunately, I could not attend the retreat this year—a sad beginning to my final year at the Center—but, because I so often find Berry’s work influential to my own way of thinking, I sat down and read the book over a couple days during the summer. As is typical when reading Berry’s work, it was a rewarding experience.
In The Unforeseen Wilderness, Berry describes and defends the natural beauty of Red River Gorge in an attempt to save it from being destroyed by the construction of a dam on the Red River. In 1993, the dam project was abandoned and the Gorge remains one of Kentucky’s many prized natural treasures alongside Mammoth Cave and the Daniel Boone National Forest. Today, Berry’s testament to the Gorge endures as a moving celebration of natural beauty and a plea for mankind to better appreciate and steward what God has given us.
Yet what I found most poignant in Berry’s book was not the exhortation to preserve the natural world we so often find ourselves trying to control, but instead his description of the abruptness that follows speeding away from civilization and arriving in the wilderness. I’ll let Berry speak for himself:
“...though I am here in body, my mind and my nerves too are not yet altogether here. We seem to grant to our high-speed roads and airlines the rather thoughtless assumption that people can change places as rapidly as their bodies can be transported. That, as my own experience keeps proving to me, is not true. In the middle of the afternoon I left off being busy at work, and drove through traffic to the freeway, and then for a solid hour or more I drove sixty or seventy miles an hour, hardly aware of the country I was passing through, because on the freeway one does not have to be. The landscape has been subdued so that one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one’s whereabouts. One might as well be flying. Though one is in Kentucky one is not experiencing Kentucky; one is experiencing the highway, which might as well be in nearly any hill country east of the Mississippi.” (The Unforeseen Wilderness, 51-52)
One thing I like about Berry’s writing here is his admission that he uses the highways to get where he is going. There can be no doubt that it is extremely convenient to hop on a four lane freeway and speed toward one’s destination. You only have to consider how long it would take to get from point A to point B without the interstate system to understand its usefulness. I drive from Louisville back home to Franklin, Kentucky regularly during the semester. On I-65, that trip takes me two hours. Without the interstate, it would take me three hours. Without 31-W, it would take me more than four. I like being able to get home and back quickly, and I’m glad the interstate lets me do that.
On the other hand, I find Berry’s description of what it’s like to quickly leave one place and arrive in another hauntingly accurate. When I drive on the interstate I tend to disregard the landscapes and places I’m driving past. Like Berry says, I experience the highway instead of Kentucky. I could be anywhere—on any highway—in the US. Granted, Kentucky is still beautiful when seen at 70 miles per hour, but it’s difficult to appreciate its beauty at that speed. And while my body makes it to my destination immediately upon arrival, “my mind and my nerves'' aren't quite there yet. For example, after I make it home to Franklin via the interstate, it can sometimes feel like my mind is back in Louisville, or at least somewhere trailing behind me on the road. In moving from one place to another so quickly, I have not taken the time to accommodate my thoughts to the place I am going. Instead, I am consumed by the monotony of wide pavement, gradual bends and curves, guardrails, semi-trucks, angry drivers, golden arches at exit signs, and all the rest of the interstate environment.
It’s this exhaustion with the same old drive from Louisville to Franklin and the feeling that my mind could not catch up to my body that prompted me to look for a slower, less-direct route home. I considered taking 31-W first, since it still provides a relatively direct course, but at a lower speed. After charting everything out on Apple Maps (I didn’t trust myself to rely on road signs), I took off from Louisville one Friday morning. That trip was an eye-opener. I drove through towns I had only read the names of on interstate exit signs, and I was actually in the landscapes I had viewed from the highway. I passed by downtowns that reflected the struggles and the hopes of the people that lived in them, with crumbling facades surrounding picturesque courthouses. Most importantly, I slowed down. Without other cars racing beside me, I was patient both with myself and others. On the interstate, it’s easy to become frustrated with a driver going below the speed limit. It’s much harder to do so on a winding country road where the slow driver is a farmer hitched up to a trailer full of hay bales.
Eventually, however, after several trips up and down 31-W, the drive became as monotonous and robotic as a journey on the interstate. I resolved to find another route from Louisville to Franklin. But Siri only shows so many options, and I don’t own an atlas. Thankfully, Google Maps allows anyone to customize their own driving path and save the directions. I used that feature to chart a route from Louisville that would meander me along rural roads through parts of Kentucky I had never seen. I would still get to Franklin, but the journey would be slow and roundabout. That is exactly what I was looking for. The next time I left for home, I drove through Ekron and Guston in Meade County, Irvington and Harned in Breckenridge County, over Rough River Dam, then through Caneyville and Roundhill, until I linked back up with 31-W in Bowling Green.
Berry’s words held true for me on that trip. I paid attention to the country around me, I let my mind catch up to my body, and I gave concessions to the places I traveled through. I still use the interstate if I need to be home or back to school by a certain time. And if I’m traveling long distances, I’ll take the 8 hour drive on the interstate over a full day on backroads. But any chance I get, I use the untraveled roads.
Will Randolph is a McConnell Scholar in the class of 2022. He is studying political science, Spanish, history, and English literature at the University of Louisville.