Installment Three

I have left my ancestral home-place several times in search of my place in the world. In my case, the decisions to leave were based solely on the desire to advance professionally. In academia, my chosen profession, common wisdom has it that worthwhile, long-term opportunities are only found elsewhere. Nestlings must leave the nest if they are to take wing, fly, and find territory of their own. Usually, these flights of maturation and identity are significant, take you out of your region and land you in unfamiliar places.
Once you’ve been away for a while, learning the rhythms and resonances of a new place and reliving your old place only in memories, it is easy to recognize change. Each time I return to central Kentucky to visit my parents, I can feel the shifting sand. Fences aren’t where they were before. Old trees are gone. Bulldozers have reconstituted entire hills. Houses spring up in fields I thought cows would graze for eternity. Tobacco fields are subdivided and given quaint names that identify precisely what has been lost: “Rabbit Run,” “Quail Covey,” “Dogwood Trace,” and “Tranquil Estates.” And no one, I mean no one, farms anymore. Once the region’s cultural pride and primary source of income, tobacco farming has gone the way of the condor, if you’ll pardon the expression.
Until only very recently, I farmed tobacco with my father and older brother on a piece of land that borders the Kentucky River. In the days before paved, four-lane highways, the river was the primary means for area farmers to transport their crops to warehouse markets downstream. While this aspect of the river’s utility to farmers disappeared long before I came onto the scene, the importance of the river as a geological and cultural landmark, with its breath-taking palisades and vistas, isolated bottom-lands, and mysterious, remote, yet invitingly lush tributaries, still reverberates in my consciousness in concentric waves. And a large part of my value and respect for the river is tied to knowledge of its past, how it intersected the lives of my predecessors and helped sustain their humble yet fulfilling ways of life.
I’m certain that my predecessors would think me incredulous should I suggest that small farm operations, small family tobacco farms are disappearing along the Kentucky River and that most probably will be all but extinct within my lifetime. Incredible, yes, but sadly true. Tobacco simply isn’t profitable for a small farmer anymore. My father was the holdout, too, the last of the old-time dirt farmers in High Bridge to hang it up for good. Unfortunately, the demise of tobacco farming is in keeping with the trend of this place. At this point in time, the rich, fertile land that supported generations is rapidly becoming a new generation’s El Dorado—developers’ dream-tracts of rolling meadows, cheaply obtained, easily subdivided and sold for incredible profit. Short-term, monetary gain is replacing the long-term, agrarian commitment that protected and maintained the land and sustained the small communities and families.