Kentucky river writers

North of Center

Also, big congrats to long-time Kentucky River writer Wes Houp, recent winner of the James Baker Hall Book Award for emerging writers

My introduction to Kentucky writing came through Bob Sehlinger’s A Canoeing & Kayaking Guide to the Streams of Kentucky, which I purchased within weeks of moving to Lexington in the summer of 2000.

Sehlinger is not native to the Commonwealth. As best I can tell, he lived around the greater Atlanta area in the mid 1970’s, where he and other paddling buddies stunt-doubled on the Chattooga for Burt Reynolds and the other stars of Deliverance. The Kentucky paddling guide was one of a series of state guides that his Menasha Press put out during the decade.

The writing is utilitarian. Sehlinger needed to grab the paddler’s attention and to describe any potential dangers (and delights) along the way. In a pre-GPS world, he also had to deliver the reader to a put-in and take-out, which could be miles away from most anything. History, both cultural and natural, often gets reduced to a few lines repeated across multiple watersheds. A Sehlinger river will flow through beautiful scenery or mild scenery. It will go past trees or farmland or urban sprawl. It will sit upon a rock bed or a gravel bed or a mud bed and sometimes, I believe for literary effect, a gravel-mud bed.

In my now much-expanded library of Kentucky-based books, A Canoeing and Kayaking Guide to the Streams of Kentucky is not likely to stand alongside my Richard Taylor or Frank X Walker or John Filson books.

But as a measure of the capacity of great writing to expand one’s own understanding and connection to our place in the world and the people residing thereupon, I’ve found Sehlinger to be first-rate. I cannot think of another Kentucky author whose work has so consistently gotten me out of Lexington, onto the state’s backroads, and into its out-of-the-way communities.

Writing and reading is not just reducible to the enhancement of intercultural connections with the otherworld, of course. Here again, few Kentucky books have brought me as much pleasure as A Canoeing and Kayaking Guide to the Streams of Kentucky. I mean this truly, from my head down to my toes. Pure pleasure. It remains my most weathered of books, subject to rain storms, underlinings, folded pages and, here recently, a disintegrated binding and frayed veneer cover from overuse. With me, it has traveled from Heidelburg to Lockport. Been pulled at rock shoals and gas-stops across the Commonwealth (and twice in Tennessee). Consulted in Sprout. Ruminated upon in Blue Heron and Billows and Bolthouse Ridge.

No surprise, maybe, that much of what I have come to know and love of Kentucky is filtered, Sehlinger-like, through the state’s watersheds. So much so that I often mentally categorize Kentucky writers as poet kings and queens of the waters they have plied. Harriet Arnow running errands along the pre-damned Cumberland River. Richard Taylor paddling Elkhorn Creek. Gurney Norman rabbit-shit-gardening the headwaters of the Kentucky River. Wendell Berry writing in his long-legged house at the tail end of the same river. Harlan Hubbard row-boating the Ohio over to Indiana. Their literary remnants, I am convinced, haunt our waters, stimulate the diatoms.

To this list of Kentucky watershed authors, we can now officially add Wes Houp, the High Bridge native who was recently announced as the first winner of the James Baker Hall Book Award for emerging authors. Poet of the palisades.

I haven’t read it yet, but the title for Houp’s award-winning book of poetry, Strung Out Along the Endless Branch, leads me to believe it is centered more around the real and imagined waters that surround Houp’s current home in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where he has lived for the past 15 years. But make no mistake. Wes is first and foremost an author and poet of the palisaded inner bluegrass portion of the Kentucky River. A true river writing rat.

He has so fully captured the wonder and awe of life surrounding the river here that longtime readers of North of Center may chafe at the “emerging” tagline for a writer who, since 2010, has been producing mind-blowing poetry and prose, not to mention comics and other art, in its print and online pages. (And who has also appeared in other sporadic Kentucky-connected outlets going back to the 1990s.)

Much of his North of Center body of work comes from a series of travel narratives of the Kentucky River that Wes wrote between 2010 and 2013, with a particular focus on the author’s High Bridge home. (Pro tip: Start here with Part 3 and move backwards to Parts 2 and 1.) If you are thinking…Kentucky River, small town, agrarian-based poetry and prose….yes. High Bridge is a palisaded, inner-bluegrass, upriver, Port Royal. A river town haunted by poet kings. It is more than that. Different than that. But it is that. The work stands up to that.

Below is a 2012 excerpt of a Houp dispatch of a night paddling Pool 7 of the Kentucky River. In it, Wes channels Kentucky author and geologist Willard Rouse Jillson while paddling towards Jessamine Creek. Part geologic history, part literary analysis of a forgotten regional author, part religious exegesis, part paddling narrative, the writing is pleasing and serious. Sehlinger for the artsy-fartsy types. Berry for the paddling and cretaceous set.

Why did it take so long for Wes to be discovered? You got me. He was not really hiding. He circulated in print and song in the cultural hub of the state, the Athens of the West, a place stuffed to the gills with artists and other regional producers of culture and knowledge.

One guess is that a cosmopolitan Lexington culture so belly-button focused on horses, bourbon, and Appalachia as stand-ins for authentic cultural place-making could not quite register the Jessamine County son of a tobacco farmer who was building prose poetry out of river morphology, forgotten geologists, and slackwater paddles upon a river that flowed beneath them and at a distance too far beyond Man O War Boulevard but too close to home.

Enjoy the piece—and a long overdue congrats to my paddling buddy and one of the best writers and songwriters of his era to come from the Bluegrass. I look forward to packing the book along on my next river trip.

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An old photograph, a young geologist and evolution

Two miles downstream from White Oak Bar, past Buzzard Bar on the right, Candle Stick Rock looms high on the palisades at the leading edge of Polly’s Bend.  In 1920, a 30 year-old geologist named Willard Rouse Jillson posed for a photograph at the base of Candle Stick Rock, a nimble 45-foot pillar of limestone standing out and protruding up from mineral- stained cliffs some three hundred feet above the river.  Over millions of years the combined forces of wind and water, working around and behind what must have been a vertically oriented fold of limestone, left what appears now as a precariously stacked chimney.  Erosion around and between each stratum of limestone gives the illusion of individual boulders frozen in a Paleozoic balancing act. 

And there, in the black and white photo, stands a self-confident Jillson, all cavalier five-foot whatever, his jacket unbuttoned, left hand in trouser pocket, and ranger’s hat cocked ever-so-slightly on his head.  In the foreground, another stiff-brimmed, dusty ranger’s hat and opened rucksack, dropped haphazardly on the narrow, sloping limestone ledge, presumably effects of the unseen photographer, suggest a hastily planned portrait.  The two of them, Jillson and his companion, are literally on the brink of a 400 million year freefall.

Born in Syracuse, New York in 1890, Jillson studied geology at Syracuse University, graduated in 1912, and spent the next five years working as a field geologist for the petroleum industry. 

With his brothers, Jillson surveyed and invested in the burgeoning oil fields in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, an early professional direction that would have significant implications later for his adopted home in Kentucky, where he settled in 1917, married a good Floyd County girl, and used his academically-enhanced but natural talents to dowse the depths for the burgeoning oil and coal industries.  After a brief stint teaching geology at the University of Kentucky, Jillson was appointed Deputy Commissioner of Geology in 1919 by Governor Augustus O. Stanley and in 1920 directed the 6^th Kentucky Geological Survey.  He held the post of State Geologist for the next 12 years.

The photograph of Jillson at Candle Stick Rock, like hundreds of others taken in the field during the Geological Survey, captured the man at the beginning of what would become a prolific career not only as a field geologist but as a writer. From his initial appointment as Deputy Commissioner in 1919 to his death in 1975, Jillson published hundreds of articles in hundreds of scientific journals, in addition to numerous monographs.  His writing wasn’t limited to science; he published biographies of Edwin P. Morrow, the 40^th Governor of Kentucky, Paul Sawyier, Kentucky’s celebrated impressionist painter, and Daniel Boone; he collected and anthologized “youthful rhymes and verse”; he wrote regional and local histories; he documented Kentucky’s major literary figures and works.  His interests cut across historical periods, academic disciplines, and the domains of life.  Of most pertinence here is his book on the river, The Kentucky River: An Outline of Drainage Modification of a Master Stream During Geologic Time, published in 1945.

The Kentucky River Valley must have represented El Dorado for a young and ambitious geologist.  The approximately 100-mile stretch of palisades offered relatively easy access to the region’s oldest (and arguably most interesting) geologic structures, not to mention early settlement history, and Jillson, evidenced by the flurry of writing beginning in 1919, dove in headfirst.  So much of his writing is of little interest to literary scholars; his prose is that of a consummate scientist speaking to other scientists.  In The Kentucky River, Jillson’s concerns are Cretaceous headwater diversions, Tertiary stream piracies and Pliocene period drainage modifications—riveting subject matter for neither public masses nor literary elites.  But interspersed throughout, we glimpse the scientist waxing philosopher waxing citizen:

While it is the purpose of this little volume to outline and describe the principal changes the Kentucky river has met during the geologic past, it is hoped that all lovers of nature who turn to the beautiful, but rugged valley of the Kentucky for their moments of out-of-door leisure, will find in these pages a somewhat expanded vista into the largely inscrutable order of the universe.

and later

It is, therefore, perhaps a melancholy, but none the less impressive thought, that in the undoubtedly long period of time ahead, when man and his civilization, which has found a dependable way to read the record of the geologic past, has, like many another once dominant form of life on this earth, passed entirely away, the Kentucky river still governed by immutable geologic laws, again unappreciated and unknown, will continue to sweep on in its ever changing valley while eastern continental North America shall endure!

As he did throughout his career, Jillson preferred the long view.  He was a man of his time, a positivist.  His long view was forged in science, an intimate reading of the physical earth; however, his “objective” understanding of the truth of the cosmos was tempered by Christian teachings.  When pressed on the matter, he sounds consummately Jeffersonian.  Science leads the intellect, while religious teachings hold the potential to mold morality.  His editorial in The Lexington Herald from 1922 opens with unambiguous denunciation: “Let the ignorant and uninformed deny it whenever or wherever they will, the fundamental principles of organic evolution are indisputable” and “do not need to be defended.”  In short, these principles “are above argument.” Yet in the next breath he acknowledges “Christ-like attitudes and broad evolutionary understandings are not incompatible.  Jesus said, ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.’” He closes his “Thoughts on Evolution” with compromise:

It is a demonstrable fact that the foremost evolutionists of America are good and godly men, highly respected in their communities and by the world.  Would that all our Kentucky youth were more like them, as high in their ideals, as broad and useful in their role of service, and as upright and as Christ-like in their physical and mental relations to themselves and to mankind.

All told, his scholarly background in geosciences and his passionate understanding of geomorphology (particularly in the Kentucky River valley) tell him that the Earth and all its creatures are inextricably bound together in chains of events stretching back billions of years, but his upbringing and general respect for the institution of Christianity tell him that the human capacity for the rational, the ethical, and the moral is only enriched by religious observance. The confident man in the photo—the dashing young scientist, balancing on a narrow ledge high above an ancient river with Candle Stick Rock balancing its top-heavy burden beside him—was undaunted by the psychic balancing act of science and religion. Leave truth to science and moral teaching to god.

~Wes Houp, 2012

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OK. Here’s a quick Wes poem, too. From the archives:

Turn of a Season

Reliable as
memory of spring,
wood thrush,
what will
happen next?
When will
the good times
run out?
How
you have come
so far
with the same
simple song,
swallowing
anxiety
and fear
like a little
green caterpillar.

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Republished with permission.

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