The Dust Bowl

A City Boy Lost In The Woods

My uncle was a bootlegger who ran whisky and beer from Lexington, up north, into “dry” (i.e. liquor prohibited) Boyle County surrounding the sleepy, one-horse town of Danville, Kentucky. I spent part of a summer there, a clueless 13-year old New Yorker who didn’t understand why Uncle James insisted on driving at 70 miles per hour through corn fields and down unpaved back roads when there was a perfectly-good interstate highway just over yonder. In 1970’s New York City, you could buy beer on literally any street corner any day of the week except Sundays. It never occurred to me that Uncle James was doing anything illegal, I mean, it was just beer. In my naiveté, I thought, “Wow, that’s a lot of beer,” and hoped my uncle wasn’t a drunk who’d be zooted all the time. Beyond that, I thought little of the matter. To call Danville a one horse town was to give it credit for half a horse too many. For me, the most remarkable thing about that summer was how many young girls and their moms offered themselves to me sexually without blinking. There frankly was not much else to do in Danville but drink and screw and, even not quite hitting full stride into my teen years, I had ample opportunity to do both—and chose neither. I was what we used to call “saved,” back in the days when that term actually meant something. Beyond that, the idea of actual sex—as opposed to the invented sex me and my friends would lie about hanging out in the municipal parks on Linden Boulevard—scared me to death. My uncle had no bathroom in his house and only well water to supply his family. To take a bath after a long day of pig farming and bootlegging, I had to drag a huge tin tub into one of two bedrooms and fill it with boiling water from several kettles offset by cold well water from a garden hose. It was a version of America I’d never seen or even read about, these country folk. Gathering for meals out on the lawn on this huge picnic table Uncle built with his own hands. The bluest of skies. My thirteen-year old cousin Ann drove her own truck, and my twelve-year old cousin Buck, my namesake, had his own horse. His own horse. And all those girls, and all those young moms of young girls, making absolutely no big deal about bringing my virginity to an abrupt end. It was paradise. Americana as I’d never dreamed it. This dusty, back woods spec of a town called Danville. So imagine my shock and awe that the city of Danville, Kentucky, hosted the 2012 Vice-Presidential debate at Centre College. I kept flinching whenever the location was named because this metropolis, jammed with throngs of coeds, is nothing whatsoever like the dirt road-and-winding creek dust bowl I remember from my youth. All of which, I suppose, reflects the changing times and changing America.