Part 2
Along Spring Street, locally important buildings lined the
streets: the Masonic lodge, and the local hardware store. I love local hardware stores; we have one up
the street from us where we’ve gotten keys made for every apartment we’ve had. The gentleman who ran that place has been
doing it forever, and he’s always happy to joke with you, even if you’re a new
customer.
A quick jaunt across 7th Avenue put me right beside
the Vintage Fire Museum, complete with a restored antique right out front.
I’m no classic car expert, so I couldn’t tell you the year,
the make, the model, or any of the modifications done to this fire engine. The vehicle was in excellent condition; there
was someone there who did know all
those things, and had lovingly cared for this vehicle for a long time. It did bear the mark of another city:
Leominster. The only Leominster in the
United States is in Massachusetts, located in the center of that state about
forty miles west of Boston. How the
truck got here from there must be quite a story.
Although you can see the museum, you can’t hear it.
Some kind of blues or country museum emanated from the other side of the
building, and as I walked north on Spring Street, it got louder.
This band, along with perhaps two or three dozen spectators,
were enjoying the beautiful afternoon with song and food. This museum doesn’t look like it’d charge
much for admission, if anything at all, so I’d peg it as a fundraiser for the
museum or some other charitable cause in the community.
I suppose one of the ancillary benefits of having a bunch of
old factories and warehouses that have fallen into disuse is the opportunity to create haunted houses. We’ve got spookhouses of all kinds, with all
sorts of interesting (read: apocryphal) backstories to entice young and old in
for a scare. Industrial Nightmare was
one of the more popular ones, though it appears it was closing for good at the
end of this Halloween season.
Around Louisville, and I’m sure where you live, too,
billboards that flank the local highways are still plastered with
advertisements for haunted houses long into November and even up till
Christmas.
Although fog machines, make-up,
and necromantic practices are becoming more advanced, the idea of a haunted
house is still delightfully quaint in its concept. It’s an annual circus. I hope they never disappear.
Just a bit farther and it’d be time to hang a left.
As you take I-65 north from Louisville, you cross the river
and are immediately presented with “Exit 0,” a hitherto unmatched phenomenon in
the interstate system, at least in my experience. I had walked
almost to the first actual exit in Indiana, but before proceeding on my trip, I
had to get past this arterial highway.
My plan was to head under the interstate, emerge on the
other side, and meander through the industrial side of Jeffersonville before
getting to –
Oh. Well, never mind.
I walked past the sign a few paces, just to see if it was
physically possible for me to cross through.
Obviously cars wouldn’t be allowed through, or even a motor
scooter. But what about something with
the precision and dexterity of an unencumbered human being? Several workers were moving dirt, so I
decided it would be best to let them be and find another route.
Time to go down the aptly named Indiana Ave., a side-street
at the edge of town. The west side
remained undeveloped. The other side
held dated, but well-maintained homes and apartment buildings. At the next intersection I turned right,
skating the edge of a car dealership.
Another sign on the other side informed me that road was closed, but the
sidewalk appeared open and was not blocked.
Good enough, right?
Along this freshly paved stretch of road, an abandoned
tractor trailer sat. The side was blank,
but the mudflaps bore the name of the bread company, “Klosterman.” I hope that the bread on board got out alive,
poor things.
I was consigned to the only path possible under I-65, which
required me to backtrack all the way to Court Street, and even that was currently under construction,
too. I sidled in between the orange
barrels as the traffic roared through the underpass. The concrete structure tends to box in the sound, so the air
no longer dissipates the sound waves, much the same reason that popping a balloon is much
louder inside than outside.
I crossed the under-construction onramp entrance carefully and, after
clearing the road, noticed a bird flying overhead and landing on a sign that
sat beside the onramp. The hill to climb
onto the ramp was steep, but I clamored up the side, camera slung over my
shoulder to free my hands.
It looked like a hawk, which are pretty common in our neck
of the woods. The zoom on my camera
wasn’t enough to get a good angle, so I inched closer. Even at my best angle and with maximum
digital enhancement, I couldn’t get a great shot.
Then, after posing for what it felt like was long enough, it
took flight with four great flaps of its wings.
What a diva.
Getting down the hill proved to be more challenging, as scree, rebar,
and loose patches of soil peppered my route down the hill. I slung my camera back over my shoulder and
took it at a bit of a run. I slipped at
the last second but didn’t put said tails over said teacups.
This next stop was familiar; Kye’s is an event venue and, I
think, a catering company, too. My
senior high school formal was held there almost ten years ago. Really make a twenty-something feel old, why don’t you.
At this point, I had to alter my walking plans to accommodate the
new route. While I’d originally planned
to just cross and continue, I now had to rendezvous with my original
checkpoint. Or, I suppose, I could forge
a new path entirely with the help of my phone’s map. I figured I’d try to maintain the original
plan as long as possible.
Looks like I missed the invite. There’s even a lonely wallflower, secluded in the top left.
I think a lot of times we forget how big things are. It’s easy to
think things are small when you’re whizzing by them at seventy miles an hour,
but being at ground level reveals the true height and scale of everyday
structures. That light pole is probably
two hundred feet tall. The concrete
pieces in the foreground couldn’t be lifted by a whole construction crew working
together. Just something to remember.
It became clear that proceeding to my original rendezvous,
Montgomery, was not going to be possible.
The road was incomplete to get there and the intersection ahead was
fully blocked off, meaning that proceeding with my original plan would have been
trespassing at best and dangerous at worst.
I backtracked to Clark Avenue, took a left and went alongside the Colgate
plant.
The Colgate plant, which has been here for almost a century,
is most famous for the huge clock that sits atop of it, visible from the
Kentucky side of the river, but more on that later. The factory beside me was silent; I’m not
even sure Colgate made toothpaste there anymore. It felt eerily like a school, with its
well-maintained brick walls, straight lines, but with architectural styling
reminiscent of a place of learning, not an industrial facility.
The building right next door was directly attached to the
larger plant complex. This building, a
considerably newer addition, looked to have been constructed in the middle of
the 20th century given its chromed metal and color palette, but I
couldn’t say for sure. The structure on
top is a smokestack or exhaust of some sort, perhaps for a foundry or some
chemical furnace. Neither toothpaste nor its current packaging have metal to my knowledge, so I’d imagine it’d be the latter or something else
entirely. The curve of the building was
particularly attractive yo mr. This one, for
some reason, also looked more like a school than a workhouse.
The door was dusty and presumably locked, maybe even
chained, from the inside. People had
written graffiti, if you could even call it that, in the dust on the glass
door. As I doubt this unassuming portal
was the main entrance to this imposing facility, it may have been a visitor
entrance or a service entrance.
Clark Avenue took a northerly curve as I proceeded down the
sporadic sidewalk, swirling around behind the plant. This back lot seemed unused, leading me to
believe that, in fact, the Colgate plant no longer operated. The grass in the asphalt that you see, brown
and stiff, is perhaps the largest indication of a dearth of activity, combining a
lack of maintenance and repaving with the lack of traffic to run over any
nascent grass buds. I don’t think the
plant has been empty for long, maybe five or six years, but this drove that notion home
to me.
Passing beneath one railroad underpass, I found myself in a
neighborhood.
The roads were pretty quiet on this particular Saturday, and
the fickle sun kept deciding to what extent and how long it would live behind
or before the clouds, creating a fading and swelling of sunlight across the ground. The weather belied the season, and after over
an hour of walking, I was neither hot nor cold, even in the absence of a coat.
Look at this relic!
Classic cars have always been popular, but classic motor homes are a
rare taste. The make, Barth, doesn’t
exist anymore, with its last model rolling out of the factory almost twenty
years ago. This particular vintage appears
to have been produced between 1975 and 1985, with my guess being that it’s on
the newer side of that estimate. Knowing folks in
Jeffersonville are in it for the long haul, it wouldn’t surprise me if the
owner had owned it for its whole lifespan and retained it as a hobby, or
perhaps a point of personal pride. This
specimen is in really good condition. I
particularly enjoy the generically patriotic plate on the front of the coach,
but it definitely adds to the charm.
This little mutt was at the fence and, as I lifted my camera
for a candid shot, he noticed me and barked loudly right as I opened the
shutter. It startled me how loud and
piercing his instinctual howl was. As
I’m sure they’d been conditioned to do, his little friend came to visit.
I said hello to said little friend.
However, lest the owner of these understandably defensive animals think
I was there to cause trouble, I kept moving.
At the nearby intersection of Clark and the forgone Montgomery Avenues, I noticed something peculiar. The church at the northwest corner was named
Colgate Baptist Church. The green space
and aquatic center on the northeast side was inside Colgate Park. Was this little neighborhood called
Colgate? Had I left Jeffersonville
entirely?
I crossed the intersection to ride alongside the park for a
spell.
Across the road from the grassy park, a cluster of aged trees
jutted up from the leafy earth. A
drainage creek seemed to feed them from a small gulch below.
I reached a crossroad of Arlington Road, a small side-street
that would lead inevitably to the Falls of the Ohio, the road I was on, and a
footpath that flanked the other side of the park. I stopped on a bench to consider my course of
action, having laid down about four miles or so already. I weighed my time, answered a couple texts,
and stood, convinced that I had the time to take the path that backtracked along the
eastern edge of the small park.
This was a charming diversion; aside from a small post at
the entrance that restricted anything wider than a bicycle down its path, the
paved walk was uninterrupted and completely empty. The trees rustled with the significant breeze
of the day, the sound of a thousand leaves scuffing together interspersed with
clack of naked branches tapping their neighbors. The walkway was significantly raised on a
ridge of sorts perhaps fifteen feet above the fairly level park below.
About halfway down the path, I spotted a father and
presumably his two young sons in the park below. It looked like they had a small bow and were
shooting at the well-defined earthen ridge for practice. He looked up, somewhat surprised, and greeted
me, and I returned his salutation.
I can’t help but think that the sport of archery has gotten
such a boost thanks in part to The Hunger
Games movies and books. Although
it’s just an assumption, it’s nice to think that the lead, a young girl, has
inspired young boys to do something active and fun. Kids' bows have popped up for sale in
every large sporting goods store and big box retailer I’ve been to since the
success of The Hunger Games
franchise. I have to admit,
Katniss/Jennifer Lawrence does makes it look pretty cool.
The slope of the footpath either descended or the park’s
grade ascended, as soon as I was nearly level with a fence that enclosed the
town’s aquatic center, which had already been in hibernation for well on two
months.
When I was a kid, the pool you went to said a lot about who
you were. In Louisville, you had the
option of several different pools, both public and private. The pool with whom I was a member was actually based in another subdivision, as our family didn’t live in a subdivision ourselves, and it was perfectly fine, if not a
bit boring. Several of my friends went there, and we'd go a couple times a week in the summer. There was Tom Sawyer’s pool,
based in a nearby state park, that charged a small fee to swim, and there was
Plainview and Lake Forest’s pools, a membership-only affair.
The coolest pool, in my opinion, was Lakeside in
Bonnycastle, which, if my hardiest memory serves, was built alongside a cliff and had the deepest pool in the
neighborhood at fifteen feet (my pool's deepest point was only eleven feet, and I suffered from
insecurity about that for years.) I went
there once for a classmate’s birthday party in third grade and continued to be jealous ever
since.
Apparently it was one of the most
expensive clubs in town. Another cool
pool, based in the nearby Oldham County, had slides and a play area like this
one, and that was among my favorites too.
If my sister and I prodded my dad enough, he’d take us the 45-minute
round trip to that water playground, too.
However, this little number seemed to fit the bill nicely
for a small town. As is, the pool had
been drained, which seemed too soon on a 65-degree day like today, but a freeze
had passed over the region just a week earlier, so it was for the best. As it was, this was a surprisingly expansive
pool, especially for such a small town.
Aww, a little buddy!
And his little red tongue, flicking out and smelling the world! Oh, sorry, buddy. I promise it’s not me.
When I was younger, I was really into snakes;
I had lots of painted rubber snakes like you get at the zoo. I have a crudely formed and
painted papier-mâché snake sitting in my parent’s closet somewhere. I had books about them and still know the
three types of venomous snakes found within Kentucky: the copperhead, the water
moccasin, and the timber rattlesnake.
This little fella seemed harmless. In some later research, it appears to be some
kind of northern brown snake, maybe not yet full grown or close.
I reached the end of the short walk and hooked a right back
onto Montgomery Avenue, crossing the empty street to the opposing sidewalk,
ready to push to the Falls of the Ohio at the end of the street.
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This is the second part of a four-part series; updates go up every Wednesday!
Keep going -
Matt
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