I Finally Get Moved

After a few days, I returned to Pennsylvania. If I was going to Hell, I might as well get my things in order first; maybe even write a will. I never got around to that, but did finally get packed. The pickup looked like the Kallikaks were moving en-masse, but it was just me with all my junk, and I do mean junk. But it was, after all, MY junk.

I made the trip without incident. I got there during February and got me moved in, then I turned around and went back to Pennsylvania with the pickup truck and picked up my car, a 1963 beetle, and came back. I came back into a heavy snowfall. So I then noticed the seventh thing about Louisville: nobody had a clue how to drive in the snow. I had occasion to drive down Lexington Road, which has exactly one moderate hill in its own length. I was going up the hill, which was far from being cleared of snow. There were vehicles stalled all over that hill, including a city bus that was sitting more or less sideways. I still got around it, only to see a four-wheel-drive Jeep stuck on the hill. A four-wheel-drive Jeep? I was breezing on around it in my Volkswagen like it was a summer day. What was wrong with these people?

Which brings me back to the sixth thing I noticed about Louisville: Smoking was the state religion. Go into a convenience store, and you'd have smoked about half a pack's worth by the time you got back into the open air. Go into a grocery store, and there would be people puffing away in every aisle, cigarettes dangling from their lips as they bent over the meat case, ashes falling all over the packaged meat. Spent cigarette butts littering the sides of every aisle, and lurking under anything that was lurkable under. And the cigarette displays at the registers were huge and well-stocked.

Cigarette smoking has always been the bane of my life. It has brought me more misery than virtually anything else. I am incredibly sensitive to cigarette smoke. If someone's smoking in a car ahead of me on the highway and has the window cracked, I smell it. And what it does is make me feel a little nauseous and give me a bit of a headache.

So why in God's name did I move to Louisville, and why in Hell did I stay there once I got there? This was a question I was genuinely asking myself after about three years, and would have cleared out of town them but for . . . I'll save that for later.

The Shock of First Exposure

I wasn't prepared for what I saw in Louisville, or at least that end of it. This was my first exposure, but it was actually only the tip of the iceberg.

One of the first things I noticed was how flat it was. My God, it was flat. I was later to learn that much of Louisville and Jefferson County is old swamp land left over from glacial days, and that's why it's so flat. Me, I'm partial to a little topography, so I was a little dismayed at the flatness. But I could see some hills from the new apartment.

The second thing I noticed were all the dented cars. Coming from Pennsylvania, which had a strict state inspection, I was unprepared for the condition of the Louisville -- or at least Okolona -- automobiles. It seemed that every second car had at least a serious ding, if not an outright crumple, with many having frank holes, and here and there one was an accordian sculpture. And people were driving around in these. I wondered with apprehension just how bad Louisville drivers were.

The third thing I noticed was the litter. There was litter and filth everywhere I looked. Fast-food wrappers, beer cans, pop cans, dirty diapers, cigarette butts, pop bottles, cigarette packs, fast-food bags, and so on and so on, piled against the curbs, cluttering the gutters, lining the ditches, blowing across the sidewalks, everywhere.

And the fourth thing: the ditches. Every main road was lined with ditches.

And the fifth thing: All the treeless expanses of pavement. Everything that could be paved pretty much was, no space for trees. And no trees.

All in all, it looked a bit like my vision of Hell, but I was determined to make the move. I did so want to get out of Dodge, or, in my case, York, Pennsylvania.

So I stayed a couple of days and returned to Pennsylvania. There I diddled around for a few more months and tried to save up a few pennies to make the trip with. I finally left for Louisville with the pickup truck full of stuff, got down there and unloaded, then turned right back around and went back to Pennsylvania for a month or so, then drove my 1963 VW Beetle down there full of more stuff and settled into the apartment.

In which I somehow wind up in Louisville, Kentucky

I was desperate. I'll admit it. I was sick and tired of eking out an existence in southeast Pennsylvania. I saw creeping Urbania in a Republican atmosphere, and my life wasn't working. I was working a miserable excuse for a job, I felt no incredible closeness to my parents, and I just wanted to get the Hell out of Dodge.

When my best friend got married and they moved to Louisville, I helped them move. I borrowed my brother's 1954 Ford F-250 pickup truck and we rented the biggest trailer available from U-Haul, confident that the truck could handle it -- and it could, no problem. We crammed that trailer full and piled the truck bed to over-capacity. Ann was already living in Louisville, and had gotten an apartment. She was working full-time as a nurse.

We had already agreed that I could move and stay in the apartment with them while I got a job and got ready to get a place of my own. This seemed made-to-order: a place to live in a city more accessible to the American interior, closer to Kansas City where relatives lived, and just as far from my parents (and brother, for that matter).

I did not reckon with what living in Louisville would be like. But more on that later. In fact, that is the subject of this work: Twenty years in Louisville, slowly dying in Hell. Once again, I have now gotten the Hell out of Dodge, but this time to someplace far, far better.

Anyway, about that first trip down: Everything was going fine; the truck could handle the load with no problem. I had fixed the exhaust problem that had made the truck a sleep-inducing aid: a combination of vibration, loud white noise, and heat pouring back into the passenger compartment had a way of inducing narcolepsy in the most committed insomniac. After my extensive ministrations, the truck was now behaving itself and allowing itself to be driven.

So everything was going fine until we hit the first tunnel on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. The Turnpike has lots of tunnels, going through massive mountain ridges that are lined up in parallel, north-south rows (and the Turnpike, of course, is going east-west). The first tunnel is actually one of a pair of tunnels with a scant two hundred or so feet between them: Blue Mountain and Kittany Mountain. So we're halfway through the first tunnel, and the truck just up and stops running.

We coast to a stop while I'm desperately trying to restart the engine, but nothing. So Alan stations himself in back of the rig, desperately waving traffic around us in the semi-darkness, and I'm buried in the engine compartment, looking exactly like prey struggling against being swallowed, trying to find the arcane cause of the breakdown. I had just tuned up the truck, and it had gotten a new engine the year before, so the whole breakdown was quite mysterious.

After only scant minutes which, of course, seemed to span the entire Jurassic or so, an immense shadow blotted out the light in the tunnel behind us, and I looked up to see an enormous red truck. This vehicle was like nothing I'd ever seen before; it was really, really wide and tall, but not very long. The driver immediately zipped right around in front of us, backed up to the pickup, threw a chain on us, and had us towed out of there before I could recover my senses sufficiently to comprehend just What the Hell Was Going On.

We were deposited on the roadside, and learned that such a truck was kept at every tunnel for exigencies just such as this: It was a combination tow truck, fire truck, and general emergency vehicle. We further learned that there were full-fledged, well-staffed monitoring stations at each tunnel. We visited this one and found that they monitored all kinds of things going on in the tunnel, and immediately knew that we were stalled out just from looking at their air quality guages!

I was desperate to figure out the cause of the breakdown, and I was soon back under the hood. Everything seemed to check out. All I could figure was that the condenser (for the spark) had failed, new though it was. This had happened to me once before, and I could see no other explanation: the points were still smooth and shiny except for that one little tiny inevitable corroded spot, the spark plugs still looked like they had just been installed, etcetera, etcetera. So we were able to arrange to pay a prince's ransom to have a new condenser delivered to us from the nearest town.

It finally arrived, and I prepared to install it, and stopped short. And reached down. And flicked at the distributor supply wire. And found that it was firmly welded to the exhaust manifold. THERE was the problem. All the current for the spark had been going directly into the engine block. A fix so simple that I could have solved it in ten seconds, had I seen it. And I did fix it in ten seconds, and we were on our way.

So we arrived in Louisville and drove down to Okolona, where the apartment was. I started to have misgivings.