Changing Patterns of Community

Like my father’s father and his father’s father, I am from a particular place along the banks of the Kentucky River. The community of High Bridge experienced its heyday long before I was born. In fact, over the course of my father’s life, key features that typically come to mind when we think of community—a market, grocery or country store, a post office, a garage, a train station—had already vanished. By the time I was born, only the oldest residents harkened back to those heydays. Before every household owned an automobile, passenger trains stopped 4 and 5 times a day, connecting citizens of this rural, river community with larger cities to the north or south; and on weekends, excursion trains brought sightseers and day-trippers down from Cincinnati to take in natural beauty of ancient cliffs and the confluence of the Dix and Kentucky Rivers, or to dance in the historic pavilion of High Bridge park, attend Sunday camp-meetings or simply marvel at the engineering feat of High Bridge. The train station was abuzz with arrivals and departures, and, for the most part, people living in High Bridge welcomed travelers, sightseers, and day-trippers alike. The river, the palisades, and the bridge had put this place on the map.
When I was four, High Bridge lost its Post Office and its own ZIP code, 40330. By the time I was five, the last general store went out of business. When I was a teenager, public access to the bridge was prohibited. Just in the last several years, Lock and Dam No. 7 has been permanently sealed with concrete, like most of the locks in the upper half of the Kentucky, its massive steel lock-gates welded shut. My father laments that he doesn’t know “a damned person in High Bridge anymore.” As in many small communities across America, young people grow up and move away to find opportunities elsewhere. I know this. I’m one of them.
In America today, everybody, at some point in life, lives in a sort of educational, economic or professional diaspora. Wendell Berry, Kentucky’s most renowned public intellectual, identifies two competing tendencies in American cultural. The weaker tendency belongs mostly to our ancestors, those first-comers who saw a beautiful, rich, open landscape before them and said, “No farther. This is the place” (4). He notes that this was also the tendency of Native Americans—to see the intrinsic, life-sustaining, domestic possibilities of a place and settle wholeheartedly into the rhythms and resonances of that place. The stronger of the two tendencies, and the one that seems to hold sway over our current culture, however, is what Berry calls “some version of the search for El Dorado” (4). The allusion is to the early Spanish explorers on the North American continent, who were looking for gold, which was, maddeningly, always somewhere else, somewhere over the next rise, across the next river, beyond the next plain—somewhere beyond the edges of the map. Today, our continent has been mapped down to the last pebble, yet the tendency to see our own places as existing somewhere “out there” persists and we persist, as Berry notes, “with largely the same motives and with increasing haste and anxiety, to displace ourselves—no longer with unity of direction, like a migrant flock, but more like the refugees from a broken ant hill” (3).