Appalachian Surreality

At some point in every road trip, you’ve got to stop and get some food. We delayed this for some time yesterday thanks to my grandmother’s considerating in packing sandwiches to eat on the road. While this helped our travel time substantially, and the prosciutto was top-quality, there does need to be a break along the way and hot food has some inherent appeal over packed sandwiches. While the Appalachian Mountains were quite beautiful, we just had to stop somewhere. The Wife spelled me from northern Indiana to just south of Indianapolis, but I drove the bulk of the 1,450 miles we put on the car this weekend.

Our rest stop on our return trip was in Corbin, Kentucky. Corbin is the point where the old U.S. highway routes 25-East and 25-West converged. At this spot, an entrepreneurial former Army private opened a filling station, which became successful and to which a motel and a restaurant were added. Harlan D. Sanders’ restaurant really took off when he perfected a method of pressure-frying his chickens and in the 1950’s, he personally franchised the concept (and the recipie) all over the country. His nickel-a-chicken payoffs quickly grew into the fast-food giant that today is Kentucky Fried Chicken, and it all started in Corbin. Harlan Sanders was never an actual Colonel in the military; “Colonel” was an honorary title given to him by the governor of Kentucky (who was also one of his investors) and Sanders used the title relentlessly in promoting himself.

The original restaurant is gone and much of “The Colonel’s” property was condemned to build Interstate 75. A re-creation now stands near where the original used to be. That’s me standing out in front of it. Inside is a somewhat-nicer re-creation of a 1940’s roadside diner, with a display of a re-created 1940’s-era kitchen with some of Sanders’ original equipment and some other appropriate displays. The restaurant today, however, is a modern KFC with a contemporary menu, complete with the potato-flake mashed potatoes and the gravy that Harlan Sanders himself called “sludge” and “wallpaper paste.”

Just outside the faux-original Sanders Cafe there were some interesting advertisements. Apparently it’s election time in Kentucky, and the race for Jailer in Laurel County is hot. (Query as to why there is a special elected office of Jailer.) Lonnie Owens wants to be the Republican nominee for Jailer — which apparently is different from the office of Sherrif. And you’ve got to imagine that, pretty much anywhere in the country, getting the Republican party nomination for Jailer is pretty much a guarantee of winning the general election. A particularly classy touch is putting the billboard next to the tattoo shop advertisement.

Also interesting are the many anti-abortion billboards around Corbin, and one set of billboards advising Christians not to worship on Sundays and to not celebrate Easter because those traditions have their roots in pagan practices. This is a level of religiosity which utterly baffles me. Caring what day of the week or what time of year a particular religious ceremony is observed seems to ignore the point of the ceremony in the first place, and it reduces the religion to little more than a set of magical rituals and arguments about how to perform them.

But all of that weirdness belongs to Kentucky, not Tennessee. The Wife and I are not going to be travelling along I-75 again for a long time, and we’d noted a bit of Tennessee surreality needed to be documented, too. One of the largest adult bookstores I’ve ever seen is located just off I-75 in Caryville, Tennessee. Next to it is an RV park and repair facility owned by someone who apparently does not like his neighbor and has erected a gigantic cross next to it, apparently in an effort to either deter the religious from going to Adult World, or to inspire thoughts of church and religion next to this den of sin and debauchery. I doubt if it works, but the juxtaposition of the sex-toy superstore and the gigantic cross is quite disarming — and something likely only to be found in the middle of the Bible Belt where religion reaches hysterical levels of intensity.

The Appalachian Mountains are heartbreakingly beautiful this time of year, with all the trees finally filled in and wisps of fog and cloud floating about. We’ll miss all the green when we live in the California desert. And there’s weirdness in California, too. But there is a great deal of weirdness here in the south. Our sojourn through Kentucky confirmed for us that the weirdness is not confined to Tennessee but seems to be well-distributed throughout all of Appalachia.