Episode 14: Beyond the painted falls

“The farther you go, the less you know. ~ Lao Tzu”

It’s easy to overlook that our first real impact comes on the immediate environment we live in. Footprints in the mud. Cigarette butts tossed out of passing cars. Discarded plastic pop bottles. Tags and graffiti. I’m a huge fan of artful graffiti. A well done tag, a picture, a memorial… these things have meaning. Tags on railroad cars, for example, are a way to take back something the corporations have stolen. I believe that. I also believe that murals in public places are a way of putting back something that modern life has taken out of us. So when I saw the faded waterfall mural on an underpass heading west up Algonquin Parkway, I was immediately drawn to it. It had been there a while, and it was clearly meant to be some Not Urban scene… something tropical and wild. Something undefeated and not buried in concrete.  I mused on this as I walked, still feeling like I had a pretty good notion of the direction I was going since I knew which way the river was.

It was somewhere in this space of place that I took a turn I didn’t need to take and ended up going another few miles more than I meant to.

All I wanted to do was take a walk. It was a Monday in July.  And sometimes on Mondays I went to the day room at the Gratitude House in Louisville’s Russell neighborhood. Sometimes to volunteer. Sometimes to hang out. I’d been hanging around less and less, but mostly because life was busy and taking me in other directions. But on that Monday, I decided to  head on down. On foot.

It’s a 15 minute car ride. About an hour by bus. On foot,  according to Google Maps, it would take me 4 hours.  But since I amble a BIT slower than Google Maps estimates, I gave myself 6.

Yes, I checked Google Maps. I’ve talked before about the problem of travel and digital shortcuts. Just wandering and seeing where the road takes you is becoming increasingly rare. GPS makes it possible to take the most direct route from Point A to Point Z, ignoring all the possible points in between.  But if you live in a city of any size, more than likely you haven’t explored all of it. I’ve lived in Louisville for almost 8 years and while I’ve learned a lot of the city’s geography, there are still pockets of the city I haven’t learned. I didn’t want a step-by-step path to Russell; but I did want to check the route ahead of time. Not so much because of the Point A to Z factor, but because I didn’t want to depend on GPS and my mental map of the city had a huge gap in it that coincided with the area I planned to walk through.

Heading out of the neighborhood was easy, and so was the first turn westward, down Winkler Avenue – what I’ve come to consider the unofficial border between the south end of Louisville proper and campus. The turn up Algonquin Parkway marked my departure from anyplace I’d walked previously. True, I had driven that way before; but geography is different on foot than it is behind the wheel. Driving requires a level of attention that means most of the landscape is erased. The increased mental static from living in a hyper-connected but less communicative age makes this even worse.

I knew my little walk about  would send me through some old neighborhoods. Although I started out early, I knew it was going to be hot… it had been a sweltering and dry summer after a water-logged spring… so I took water with me, and some salted peanuts for protein. The salt’s important too, if you’re sweating a lot. Trust me on that one. I was once saved from a painful bout of swollen legs in Tempe, Arizona by a bag of nacho flavored Doritos.

The west end of Louisville has more than it’s share of abandoned industrial areas. Some were still in use, but at one point all I walked by was chain-linked land where buildings had been reduced to concrete slabs.  In one stretch the fencing had been there so long that the earth was starting to take it back. Weeds and beautiful wild flowers had grown up so bushy that the metal was almost indistinguishable in places.

Abandoned industrial areas tell fascinating stories – maybe the most American of stories, full of ambition, sweat, and rot. The commitment in land and other natural resources was immense; the commitment in labor was immense; and then, one day, it’s just gone.  Sometimes they are almost cities unto themselves; sometimes communities crop up around them, providing nearby housing for workers; Glendale, Ohio, is an example of this. And sometimes they move into communities and add growth, revenue, and affluence to neighborhoods that may not have found it otherwise. But when the factories close and the jobs are gone, they leave these communities and neighborhoods with all the infrastructure that built up around them – without the revenue or tax base to pay for it.

Empty buildings, barbwire fences slowly being eaten by the earth, forgotten slabs of cement – that’s what gets left behind when greed is done feeding. In cities, at any rate. In the mountains it’s all mudslides, land that can’t be farmed, and generations of illness from toxic water runoff. And in the digital age, it’s easier not to see the damage we have wrought. All we have to do is tell the GPS to take the fastest route.



Thanks so much for listening to  Episode 14 of a Record of a Pair of Well Worn Traveling boots.  Please be sure to show some love by subscribing to this podcast on ITunes, Spotify, or whatever podcatcher you use. Check out the past episodes and look for Episode 15, the Christmas episode, in two weeks. If you really enjoy the podcast, please consider becoming a patron on our Patreon Page: www.patreon.com/wellwornboots. It’s only $5  a month and it means you’ll get a little extra for your patronage.



Thanks again for listening. May the road ever rise to meet your feet.