Part 4
This is the final part of a four-part series. To start from the beginning, click here.
My trip was about all finished, but I wasn’t in a
hurry. I retreated from the edge of the
water, leaving the puddle of radioactive waste and my prime skipping rocks
behind.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed this when you wander through
the forest during autumn, but it’s a totally different experience than during
the warmer months. You can see a lot
farther, for one thing, so the backdrop muddles together a lot more in the
distance. Moving is generally easier for
the same reason; no leaf-laden branches and surprise thickets to impede you. The sound, though is probably the most
fascinating difference.
In the spring, when a breeze comes up, and especially when a
storm is coming, you hear a cacophony of leaves rubbing together, making that
deafening, but somehow also relaxing, sound of leaves brushing together. In the fall and winter, though, when the
trees have forfeited their protective layers, they rattle together like
bones. It reminds you that, in the end,
you’re just visiting some big, upright sticks.
The wind cuts right through, making you feel exposed, even when you’ve gone
far off the path.
I could see the green hill from which I came through the
branches, even from the other side of the linear wood. On the other side, the rough path I’d seen
earlier bore me back towards the bridge to Kentucky.
Wait, what?
I checked my phone’s weather app; 65 degrees. Somehow, despite being 33 degrees outside of
its limits, this little snowpile endured.
I touched it to confirm its identity, and sure enough, it was cold and
wet but surprisingly firm. The exact combination
of shadow, wind patterns, and sheer determination kept this little pile of snow
alive. Good job, snowpile.
I finally reached the end of the dirt path, which had risen
almost to the level of the elevated, paved path I’d taken to circumvent the
Falls of the Ohio.
This visitor center met me at the end of the road. It’s fairly new, as I recall them talking
about the renovations in the Courier-Journal a few years back. I didn’t have to go in, but I’m sure it would
have told me more about the reason the Falls of the Ohio are both naturally and
historically significant.
Thankfully, this artfully crafted hunk of bronze gave me a
hint. Apparently, the famous Lewis and
Clark expedition convened here; though the visitors’ center might not say it, the
legendary expedition did not “start the clock” here. That would be some 250 miles west of here,
just north of modern-day St. Louis.
Lewis and Clark were some of the first white people to move west across
the land to the Pacific shore, and their expedition helped pave the way for America’s
western expansion. Mind you, someone was
already there, but that’s a story for
another time.
The statue’s faces were kind of creepy, but I suppose you’re
not supposed to look at them that closely anyway.
Exercise and
education! It’s probably for the
best. My entire knowledge of Lewis and
Clark can be summarized from their spurious appearance in a cinematic oeuvre of
great import.
There was a vehicular road and a sidewalk that ran
concurrently east of the center, so I kept to the skinnier of the two and
pressed on.
With as far down as the shore was, I suppose the path I’d
used had taken me up rather than
coming down to me. The little dots of
people down there were enjoying the nice weather, but some were actually
looking for something. It wasn’t loose
pop cans, a lost cell phone, or a washed up bit of ambergris. No, they were looking for fossils.
It appears that this region is more widely known for its
paleontological value more than its chance meeting between two in a long line
of explorers. The flat shore, which has
been slowly eroded away, is home to fossils of all shapes and sizes, presumably
washed onto the shore and buried over millions of years. It seems that the park’s geography is a
perfect breeding ground for historical evidence pile-ups.
Fossils are really, really
old. I mean, I get excited when I find a
ten-year-old piece of trash on the side of the road. These fossils are several orders of magnitude older.
One day eons ago, those bones were moving, those shells housed a living
creature, and those teeth were seeking out anything else to bury themselves
in. You can literally hold history in
your hand.
As fun as it’d be to find a fossil, the plethora of signs announcing
a strict rejection of the “finders keepers” rule made the prospect a bit less
exciting. Besides, I’ll let those kids
down there find ‘em.
This is the Fourteenth Street Bridge, another of Louisville's
many crossings of the Ohio, but one very few humans actually cross. The Big Four Bridge is old, but the
Fourteenth Street Bridge was already an antique in the former bridge’s
heyday. This thing was built three years
after the Civil War ended and is still being used today. It only carries rail and very brave human
traffic, but don’t think I didn’t consider how to get up there. There was a hill that led right to it and
everything.
If you can’t read the bold, red sign, it says:
“Danger: Leave Fossil Beds When You
Hear Siren
“Water Subject to Sudden Rise and
Turbulence When Gates Open”
You see, the large concrete retainers on the left are part
of the Louisville locks system, allowing ships to move down safely through a
series of water tanks that adjust the elevation of the water to allow large
ships to bypass the otherwise impassable Falls.
When I was younger, my dad would take me to the locks on the Kentucky
side just to watch the ships come in, the water to flood out onto the spillways,
and the emergence of the vessel on the other side of the dock several dozen
feet lower.
This is what the Falls look like now, a trickle of what I’m
sure they used to be, and controllable, no less. I went down a dirt path to the edge, as close
as I could get, just to listen to the calming, rushing water. No matter how you manipulate the water
itself, the sound is the same.
Technically speaking, from the Fourteenth Street Bridge
eastward, the rest of the park was city property. A large, green embankment sat on the north
side of the road, so I climbed up it and walked along it to see what was on the
other side.
Turns out it wasn’t much the average pedestrian would be
interested in seeing.
These rusted, industrial tanks held some unknown matter, and
further research turned up nothing, except that they didn’t want you to know what’s in them.
Maybe it’s Coca-Cola’s secret mixture, or KFC’s “offshore” stockpiles
of its signature herbs and spices. Maybe
it’s sarin. Either way, they looked
cool.
There’s the Colgate clock!
If you’ve fallen asleep on a familiar south-to-north road trip, you
could wake up, see the Colgate clock and know exactly where you are.
I’d been walking along this ridge for a couple minutes,
moving my feet involuntarily to stay on clean grass. Wait, clean grass? Yeah, it appears this ridge is a popular
hangout for the local geese gaggles. Fun
fact: did you know a group of geese on the ground are called a gaggle, but in the
air they’re called a skein? Like a skein
of fabric, I guess. Anyway, their, uh,
post-consumer meal remnants were scattered all over the top of the ridge. Like, all
over. Every step was an obstacle course.
At the end of the ridge, the western tip of the
Jeffersonville levee abutted with the shaped earth, and I briefly considered
walking along the narrow, concrete top of the levee. I dunno, though, I ain’t no Ezio. Instead, I clumsily ambled down the natural
hill to the park below.
Aww, wedding pictures! When I took this walk, my wife and I had just
celebrated our five-year anniversary.
This young couple had a great day for pictures, and I’m glad they did;
planning a November wedding with anything
outside can be a crapshoot in Louisville.
Luckily, the dice came up right for them. It was a bit windy, but you’ll take 60-degree
weather in November however you can get it.
There’s our city.
I’ve spent the majority of my life there, and there it is in its
late-afternoon pallor. In fact today had
been kind of a wild day for weather. The
clouds were racing across the sky so fast that the sun would be completely
obscured or overt five minutes apart from each other.
With the Second Street Bridge in sight, I walked the last,
uneventful blocks along the edge of the levee.
It was at this point that my wife’s camera, burdened by my itchy shutter
finger, filled up its small memory card.
It had already been nearly full when I left, I came to find out, but I
took a moment and cleared maybe 20-30 duplicate pictures to make room for the
last half an hour.
Now, the Second Street Bridge is –
Oh.
Well, never mind.
Disappointed at the foiling of one portion of my plan and
the lack of a backup plan to get across a different way, I resigned myself to
go back the way I came and cross the Big Four again.
As stated earlier, construction is a perennial sign of
progress in Louisville, as it always seems you’re being rerouted one way or the
other, or the roadbed has been ripped up to the point where you might as well
be driving (or in this case, walking) over gravel. On the other side of the
underpass, I considered a drink at the gas station and declined in the interest
of time.
I have seen this sign many times before, and for the life of
me, I still don’t know what a jake
brake is. I have never seen a sign like
this anywhere else in the world. From my
days of interest in street racing and modified cars, I figured it had something
to do with J-turning, which is where you drive in reverse, swing the wheel
hard, give it enough gas to keep from stalling and hold the turn until you’ve
made a 180 degree turn and are facing the direction in which you were
originally reversing. In my mind, I
think that should always be illegal. The
adding of the “brake” part made me think it was just doing that but using the
E-brake instead of the application of steering input and throttle.
I was tired of my ignorance, so I looked it up. Jake braking, it turns out, is a mechanism in
diesel engine that allows for efficient engine braking. As a stick-shift driver, I brake with my
engine all the time, both to save my brakes and out of laziness. Engine
breaking is usually reduced or absent in a lot of modern automatic
transmissions, as they often don’t bog down the engine when you’re not giving
it any gas. But jake braking is
apparently a more purpose-built way to do it, and I assume it is particularly
loud, hence why you can’t do it after six.
My guess is that’s the descending roar you hear from some semis when
they slow down, especially on a downward incline. Either way, don’t do it after hours; I’m sure
it’d be a weird ticket to receive.
I turned down Pearl Street from Court, looking to cover the
chunk of the street I’d missed by detouring off it on the outbound leg. Not two houses in, a cat greeted me on the
well-decorated porch of a local resident.
A handsome
resident. The cat, I mean. No idea about the bloke or dame who lived
inside. Cats are funny porch-dwellers;
they watch you like a person would, but they never say anything. In fact, you can walk up to them without
getting funny looks. Not like I did
that.
The next house over bore an intriguing warning emblazoned on
its boarded-up door.
It amazes me that there are still folks who rummage through
old houses for the copper wires, fittings, and pipes that fill the walls. Not that I’d condone it at all, but defacing
pennies just seems easier. The thing I
find most interesting about this sign is it could just as easily be for one potential
extractor as it could be for the other.
It could be to deter scavengers, yes, but it could also be for the
builders, who could legally forage the copper out of the walls before
demolishing it. Either way, there’s
nothing here of interest to either of them.
The men who were working in the obelisk in Big Four Station
Park were no longer there, and I rounded the long walkway up to the Big Four’s
deck.
The walk back across was still breezy; the guitar man was
still jamming, and his bucket looked much more filled than it did earlier. I emerged on the other side, and the couples
of the evening had started to come out for a walk; people of all ages, but the
number of high schoolers surprised me.
When I was growing up in Louisville, there were several known places you
could more or less loiter: Bardstown Road, a mall, some of the more interesting
parks. It’s nice to know that there’s
another place to add to the list.
We’ve got as many skyscrapers as we did when I was a kid, so
the skyline is a very nostalgic look.
I’d recognize ours in a heartbeat just from the profile. The building with the rounded top is Kentucky's
tallest building. For most of my youth,
I remember they called it the Providian Tower, then AEGON bought it, but I
don’t even think they’re there anymore.
I like our city.
I like America.
The walk went about ninety minutes long, but I had a great
time, and I got lots of steps in. It
just seemed wrong to such a nice November day go by without enjoying it. That was something my father always said,
“you don’t get these kinds of days all the time.” He’s probably right.
***
Thank you for following me on this fun and winding journey!
Miles By Foot is concluding its first year, and although
staccato at the start, I have every week planned for the coming year, and I’ll
be travelling to places besides Louisville, and I want to bring you with me.
January will feature a walk I completed before this one, if you could believe it, but it was really a great
time, and travelers, walkers, or both will find it interesting. It's the first I did that required real out-of-state
travel, and getting there and back was half the fun!
I hope these pictures inspire you to get out and explore the
world right outside. There’s so much to
see!
Keep going –
Matt
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