I was in Charleston, W. Va., a few weeks ago, and despite my friend’s propensity to inflect his voice with the mannerisms of a southern belle when driving anywhere vaguely away from the mid-Atlantic seaboard, there hadn’t yet been anything particularly regional or interesting about the trip. My expectations for events are always too great, and after an afternoon of putzing around the city, I was beginning to fear that the weekend would be a bust.
Walking in a non-descript residential neighborhood, though, a middle-aged man suddenly yelled out to us from his front yard. It took me a while to figure it out, but his request was exactly what it sounded like-that if we kept walking down the street, about ten steps later, we would get to the top of a small hill. One of us needed to raise a right hand if there was a yellow car parked in front of a yellow house, or a left hand if there wasn’t. It was too elaborate a request for such a simple purpose, something he could have clearly done himself. But I understood the message. “I’ve got a newsflash for you, Walter Cronkite,” he was really saying, “you’re here for the long stretches in between events.”
It’s an important lesson if you’re ever in Lexington, Ky., which was our next stop. The city is entirely ringed by Route 4, a high-density highway of strip malls and motels. The city’s center, meanwhile, has no identity of its own: It merely repackages the seedy underbelly surrounding it into an easily digestible atmosphere, with garish results. Thus you find the Mellow Mushroom, a family-oriented eatery at the heart of Lexington, themed entirely around hallucinogenic drugs. Children fidget around brightly colored toad and fungus displays while scruffy, progressive-looking employees serve BLTs, apparently lulled into a false sense of security. Uncomfortable in this bizarre atmosphere, we decided it was time for Route 4.
Unfortunately, the cold weather seemed to keep most of the disreputable element of Lexington off the streets; there were only its signs. Construction was everywhere, though much of it had stalled and even begun to regress and decay. “Shaftway Inc.” (obviously a front for “Giant Titanium Clitorises Corp.”) had been commissioned to do most of the shoddy work. Titled “Ladies of Virtue,” a mural outside a hair salon in one strip mall depicted the property’s employees-three out of five of them wore animal prints.
So, there is, of course, a typical America of the 12-string guitar out there. Around halfway between Charleston and Lexington, outside the town of Olive Hill, is an unnamed outcropping of houses where two establishments face each other across a street. One welcomes outsiders, while the other quietly shuns them before asking to be left alone. Both play bluegrass—though here, as in every other place I passed by that weekend, it was about the notes they didn’t play.
