by Kirk Ross
You roll through some of the most amazing places, places where you can’t help think about geological time and forget for a moment that your hurtling down a road made of petroleum and crushed stone just over whatever speed the law in that area allows.
It all goes by in a blur, but drive the drive 50 or 60 times and the lay of the land sinks in – the hills and valleys, the places cut by rivers and cutoff by mountains with jutting peaks, rolling places where sure-footed animals graze and deep, protected valleys where the people settled. These are places with names far older than the country that now claims them, older than the written word. They were here long before us. In the end, they’ll be all that lasts.
Most of my people crossed the mountains early, just after our nation was born, following the routes up the rivers forged by western civilization. The Native American family of my grandfather’s grandmother crossed over to the great Ohio Valley not long ahead of them. This is the place left flat and fertile by glaciers and still enlaced with lakes and waterways created by their retreat.
I am from that valley, married to a girl from that valley, and as much as we love where we live now, when we cross the big river at Louisville, we’re back home again.
Our route across the mountains is spectacular anytime of year. It winds through highland Virginia, skirting the Jefferson National Forest, then drops down into the West Virginia’s Paint Creek Valley, crosses the Kanawha rivers near Charleston and runs the length of eastern Kentucky, during which the ridges turn to rolling hills and the rolling hills to grasslands.
Driving it in the winter, not always advisable, is when you can really see the contours and the marked transition from the pine forests to places where the mighty chestnut once ruled and its successors – poplars, oaks and elms – now dominate. This time of year, it is every shade of green in varying degrees of luminescence.
Looking out the window at night in any season is a reminder that there are at least a few places left sparsely settled, even in the heart of North America. In these places, rounded, ancient mountains move by in almost total darkness and humankind is evidenced only occasionally by a tiny string of lights down below in a void that seems to go on and on and on. Stars still shine above these. I’ve seen them.
Like most trips, this almost-summer one was for visiting the home folks. In my case, it included a drive to the ancestral homelands down on the river and the annual Ross reunion, always a tender and somewhat surreal affair.
Now in its 93rd consecutive year, there’s usually a theme. This year’s was Extra Scottish, and during the meal an excellent bagpiper serenaded all 103 of us with such verve that conversation was mainly confined, except between numbers.
After he took a well-deserved break, family visiting occurred while prizes were awarded for farthest traveled, most recently married, youngest and oldest. Then the latest in family history was highlighted, including a talk on the character of our family by my Uncle Bud, which ended with him reciting Sam Walter Foss’ “A House by the Side of the Road†– you know, the one that goes: “Let me live in my house by the side of the road/And be a friend to man.â€
Later, after the cakewalk, while the kids whacked at a piñata and parents and grandparents took pictures, I browsed the collection of our family history spread out on tables in the back of the assembly hall, getting lost in the letters to and from home of my father’s uncle lost in the Great War.
Fed and all caught up with everyone, my father and I slipped away and headed to the levee to look at the river and ponder things. It’s what you do if you’re from there. And so we did.