johnbyronkuhner.com

order prednisone for dogs online I love the enchantment that love sheds over the world. It is the best companion for an adventure: the unknown is no match for it, the same way you do not fear to hear the worst things about a person you truly love: you love them so much anyway, knowledge can only add to the passion, the way a great flame is only made hotter by the wind. With this in our hearts we headed for Port Royal; and it was an expressed love, that is to say contagious; Berry, having caught it himself, had given it to us; and it was his great love for his home that we found ourselves immersed in and reincarnating.

endearingly We passed the Smith Berry winery, which as I understand is owned by Berry’s daughter.  It was itself an example of the retooling of farm life to the modern market: wine requires more skilled labor than growing staples (or tobacco, which they were doing before), and hence can command a better wage and provide a better living for farmers.  Alcohol is one of the more pleasant ways to encourage local business.  The Berrys had a strong presence in the area: the lawyer’s office across from the courthouse was theirs too: John Berry’s.

Soon enough we came into the tiny tiny town of Port Royal, which of course was neither royal nor a port.  The place was so unimpressive I was deeply impressed.  It would have been easy to discount Berry’s principles if he had been writing about some place that had a thriving local economy; easy to think of him as a facile thinker if his glorification of small-town life had been based on some impossibly pretty vacation town.  Port Royal offered no advantages to his principles, besides the fact that there were no other principles available.  In our entire twenty-mile drive we had not seen a single corporate outpost: no gas stations, no big supermarkets, no little markets, no Domino’s or McDonald’s or Subway.  Almost no businesses at all, really: Rick’s Farm Center Restaurant (open til 5 p.m.; it was also the general store); a sign proclaiming the UNITED CITIZENS BANK AND TRUST COMPANY in the one brick building; a Methodist Church, and a post office.  There was an empty storefront, that looked like it could have been Jayber Crow’s barber shop.  But that was it.  It was around 6 p.m., and there was no one around.  We walked up the sidewalk, and then down it.  An overweight father and son drove up to the post office and went in (people with post office boxes had keys to get into the lobby).  I mentioned to him that we loved Wendell Berry and were wandering around and he seemed unimpressed.

Dicentra cucullaria, Dutchman's breeches.

We took a side road, looking around for a white clapboard farmhouse that might have been Berry’s.  We were looking for sheep too, we knew he had sheep.  We came down a slope toward the Kentucky River – which was a fair distance away, and even in its valley we found no port – and came into what must have been a long-untouched forest, as this one spot, in the area, had a beautiful display of native wildflowers, Dicentra and Mertensia and Dentaria.  It was beautiful.

We drove around down on the river-bottoms, looking at old tobacco-barns falling apart; found a big redbud that had split and fallen, and Catherine got out to collect the blooming branches to bring back home.  My back hurt so much I dreaded having to get out myself, but I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to gather in such beauty, for nothing makes so fine a home display as the branches of a flowering tree.  We crossed a creek and found what I believe was Phlox bifida, an unusual plant; and Claytonia and even a pair of Delphiniums. We wandered around mapless for awhile, and pronounced everything good.  We hadn’t found Berry himself; but there was something right about that; we had come closer, close enough to know that he was real.  The archivist had given us Berry’s address; he received visitors on Sundays; I would write to him, and try to see him on a Sunday on my way back from the bike trip.  Now that I knew about the Berry center I could perhaps keep up with what they were doing; Berry himself had just been in New York a few weeks ago at Cooper Union, and I hadn’t known about it.

The Kentucky River bottoms.

We returned to New Castle, looked at the closed shops, marveled at this part of the world where there were no stores open at all, not even gas stations, and dropped off Berry’s maple syrup at the Berry Center.  We then drove back to Frankfort and ate dinner in a nice diner.  We would try yet again to leave for the Smokies tomorrow – and leave we would, though with the truck being what it is I suppose it is no surprise when I say we did not make it.