Bluegrass Blues

I went to Kentucky to hike, rock climb, and, I would discover, eat pizza.

I called my parents from Lexington Bluegrass Airport, and my father said something like “Enjoy the, well, they don’t really have good barbecue there, do they? Enjoy the food!” I ate pizza each day, but each bite taught me more about this slice of the world.

I had spent the prior week before colleagues, “I’m going to Kentucky this weekend. Weird, right? Yeah, it’s Eastern time. Sure, I’ll be online Friday. I don’t know, they must have coffee shops” I texted a high school friend from Lexington for advice, but beyond that, I knew nothing.

Among other important pieces of information, my friend recommended my three favorite Lexington pizza joints.

The first place, Pies and Pints, was right downtown. A few bites in, I realized this seemingly local place was instead a regional neo-chain where folks don’t realize it’s a conglomerate until it’s too late. Something about “house pies” and “local brews” lulls the customer into supposing that a kind, small-town couple owns the place. Wrong. Pies and Pints is as ubiquitous as Edison Bulbs in scrappy regional cities. They display a ticker of Tweets mentioning third-tier cities from Birmingham to Dayton.

Pies and Pints represented the same homogenization as our Airbnb. On the surface, it was nice, clean, and new, but in reality, the shower curtain fell down if I breathed too close to it. A neat little chalkboard said “WIFI” and offered no further information.

An hourglass in the bedroom had a permanent two minutes’ worth of sand in the bottom. When I got out of the shower Thursday, before Ben showed up, I jumped through the roof, convinced that a watch-less, time-conscious intruder had just tipped the thing over.

I sensed the place’s designer had seen a Facebook video about “upcycling” shipping containers to “reinvigorate” neighborhoods. In reality, we found ourselves in an ugly home among charming but rundown shotgun shacks.

Airbnb has sustained legitimate criticism for raising rents and ruining neighborhoods. This was the sort of neighborhood where people congregated on front porches as evenings cooled down. A few kids ran comfortably among the homes, never looking both ways before crossing the street. Meanwhile, inside our shipping container, we agents of big-city values complained about how we had no ice machine.

Ben and I, despite smiles and greetings, were outsiders. On Thursday evening, a big strong mutt bolted towards me, barking and drooling. Two older guys who were hanging out on their porch with their pooch congratulated me on being “a smart young man” and having the good sense not to run away. Had I done so, they smiled, the dog would have lunged for the kill. I translated this as: “you could be worse.”

Bolstering the business case of short term rental properties, we undermined this neighborhood’s rent security. Our presence was more a symptom than a cause, however, as a craft brewery on Sixth Street and a taproom on Third had already begun to close in on this sleepy block of Fifth Street. In the blink of an eye, the string lights would be hung.

The place was spotless and sterile-charming. Yet, I’d hoped to sit in a rocking chair on the front porch with a bourbon rather than enjoy the metal box’s air conditioning and a New England Belgian-Style American Ale.

I felt a bit more in line at Goodfella’s Pizza, which slings pizza nightly until 2. Large slices, mouth-burning cheese, a sweaty guy operating the oven: this place had it all. University of Kentucky paraphernalia alternated with stills from The Godfather, Goodfellas, and The Sopranos on the walls.

The bars we dropped into subscribed to the Goodfella’s school of design. They had just the right amount of crap to remind us where we were: in Kentucky, yes, but also a college town. We could have just as easily been in Madison, Ithaca, or Bozeman. The difference between this universality of university and the imitation urbanity of Pies and Pints is subtle, but it’s there.

The University of Kentucky was founded at Ashland, Henry Clay’s great estate, home to some spectacular trees. Lexington is also home to Transylvania University. Thanks to Lexington’s Oxford-esque density of historical plaques, I learned not only that this vampire school predated Williams by thirteen years, but also that it educated Jefferson Davis. One can’t help but wonder if in this era of refusing to take down confederate monuments, this institution puts the President of the Confederacy on their admissions material.

On the roof of Belle’s Cocktail House, we marveled at the city’s glass skyscraper over olds fashioned. The bouncer had claimed Ben’s drawstring corduroy shorts were athletic wear, even though nobody’s exercised in cotton since the 1800s. He made what he swore was a one-time exception and expected gratitude in return.

We spent the next evening at two Third Street bars without dress codes. In the first, we shot pool over ponies of Miller High Life, which nearly stayed cold on the 90 degree night. After a series of fruitless shots, a couple of women asked if they were distracting us. I asked if we were playing that bad, but that wasn’t the followup question they wanted.

We crossed Third Street to the Green Lantern, one of the best bars I’ve seen. We and everybody else watched a band over $2 cans of Cincinnati’s favorite Burger Classic Beer. In his last moment of lucidity, the drummer announced that only cheap beer could bring together Cincinnatians and Lexingtonians. I guess the two cities have a Harvard-Yale thing going.

Each band member, except of course the bassist, spent some part of the show screaming on the floor. The guitarist thrashed so hard he knocked the microphone stand into the crowd of 14, who loved it. This bar of course had a porch where people sat all night drinking two dollar beers, talking about music, and looking for a breeze.

Our stated purpose for the visit had been the hiking and rock climbing in the Red River Gorge Geological Area, “the Red” to insiders. A couple of friends had rebuffed my complaints that Chicagoland had no nature by arguing that people hike at Indiana Dunes State Park, an hour away, or Wisconsin, two hours away, or Kentucky, six hours away. So we found ourselves here.

The beta was that the climbing community hung out at Miguel’s Pizza, our third pizza place. Miguel’s is not just a pizza place.

On Saturday, a ranger sent us to hike the five mile trail around Courthouse Rock. We and two other groups traipsed in circles, lost, bumping into each other like Mrs. Pacman and the ghosts. So, we hiked a bit too much on too hot a day, but by 4:00, when we bought water at a gas station, they had reduced the heat-lamp breakfast sandwiches to half price. There’s always that.

The Red has been a top place for climbing ever since there have been top places for climbing. At some point, a now 60-something year old gentleman named Miguel operated an ice cream shop for tourists visiting for the gorge’s natural arches. Miguel was a nice guy, and he gave jobs to some of the dirtbag live-in-their-car climbers bopping around. They got hungry, and they asked Miguel why he didn’t sell pizza.

Miguel made the pizza, and He saw that it was good. Miguel separated the pizza from the ice cream, and he let folks camp on the grass around the shop for what is now $3 per night. Word spread, and they came from all around to enjoy the hospitality and good vibes.

A friend I met climbing in Chicago got me in touch with Max, who’s about our age and has now spent two or three years climbing and running pizzas at Miguel’s. Most Miguel’s customers spend the night on the premises, and once they order, they take their restaurant-sized number stand to lord knows where on the property. So, running pizzas means running through a commune trying to discern who eats meat, who ordered pineapple, or where more Ale81 was needed.

Max is an awesome guy, and several of the folks we chatted with at the wall said that he was the cleanest of all the climbers they knew who lived in their cars.

Indeed, beyond being a fantastic climber and a great time, Max was the most sensible of all the car-dwelling friends I’ve made on my adventures. He grew up in Chicago and had a big city wit. He explained how, living in a van in Kentucky instead of a bustling metropolis, he sometimes goes crazy. When he’s homesick, he drives to Target, which is the same everywhere. Not even in Kentucky is Target relaxing.

After climbing, which was great and all, we sat with him at Miguel’s, chatting over a couple of beers. A friend of his, Lee, joined us.

Lee was from the area and had an accent. He was a climber by trade, but he had just come from the jumping rock along the river. In the 100 degree heat, I said I was jealous: jumping off a rock into water is one of life’s great pleasures. He said it was nice but less exhilarating than trying to hit big rocks with small rocks. I laughed. He was serious.

While Miguel’s may turn into a Bonnaroo-esque tent city when climbers flock from far and wide on less sweltering long weekends, it has its fair share of quiet nights. I asked how they might pass a 100 degree Tuesday evening. Max and Lee laughed and explained how usually, they sat under the porch in front of the pizza shop, or where we sat at the picnic tables under the Zen Den, and they threw rocks at targets. I am obligated to not tell you what the Zen Den is, lest I ruin the secret. Locals only.

From the porch, they threw rocks at the guardrail on the highway. From the picnic tables, they threw them at the gutter and the recyclable bottles of Central Kentucky’s favorite ginger-based sodapop, Ale81: “A Late One.” Sporadically, a pebble ricochets and plunks an older person quietly reading while waiting for the temperature to drop. The bookworms jump bolt upright, flustered, only to find a few drunk 20somethings howling with laughter a few feet away. Remember that climbing is a dangerous sport, and we all in the community trust one another with our lives.

While Max, Ben and I got along great, I realized that he and Lee had few options but to be chums in the minuscule pizzastock community. He explained to me how it was a good life, and one of the best places in the world to be a dirtbag: camping was cheap and legal, and part time jobs were accessible. Yet, too many evenings he found himself wondering whether there was anything else he could do beyond the same ole thing.

I, the strung out young professional, could not fathom the quantity of time he described. His plan for the rest of the afternoon was to finish the beers we shared with him, sit in the shade, look for a breeze, and wait for it to cool down enough so he could go to bed in his van.

Despite his words of caution, I thought back to his lifestyle with a pang of jealousy when the person in front of me reclined their seat into my lap in the last row of the flight to Dallas.