The Bluegrass and Beyond

Lexington was born and grew up around the Town Branch of South Elkhorn Creek, but over the past century we’ve done our best to pollute it, bury it and forget about it.

Water finds its way, though, even if it sometimes needs help.

Town Branch Trail Inc. has been working for a decade to develop a greenway along the creek west of downtown. The first fruits of those labors will be on display next weekend, when the initial two-mile section of the trail is opened with a benefit concert and bicycle rally.

The Freedom Concert, with music by Cora Lee and the Townies and Fifth on the Floor, is at 8 p.m. Friday at the new Buster’s in the restored Old Tarr Distillery, which backs up to the creek on Manchester Street. Admission is $10, with all proceeds going to the trail project.

The next morning at 8:15, the public is invited to meet at Cheapside for a police-escorted 10-mile bicycle ride out and back on roads to the completed trail section off Leestown Road and Alexandria Drive. There will be a hospitality tent at Lewis Manor, a circa 1800 home beside the trail in Marehaven subdivision.

When I walked the trail last week, people were already using it.

Workers had just installed stone-cutter Richard McAlister’s beautiful sandstone benches and furlong posts made of finely crafted “Kentucky marble” limestone. And there were several new signs along the trail explaining Central Kentucky’s landscape, geology and ecology.

Van Meter Pettit, the Lexington architect who put together the trail project, sees it as more than a place to exercise; it’s a way to learn about Lexington’s history and environment. It’s also a way to rehabilitate and protect the watershed and help deal with runoff and pollution problems that have grown with the city.

“There is a compelling story to why we are the way we are that even many natives don’t understand,” he said. For example: Lexington’s downtown is long and narrow because it was built along Town Branch, which now flows beneath Vine Street.

Town Branch runs along the west side of the finished section of trail, just beyond tracks that were part of Kentucky’s first railroad line.

In one section, the trail goes around a giant, centuries-old tree, surrounded by a stand of native cane. When the first pioneers came here 250 years ago, much of the Bluegrass was covered with cane. Now, it’s hard to find.

“This is about as good a snapshot of authentic Kentucky as you can get,” Pettit said.

On the east side of the trail is Central Kentucky’s modern landscape: several new subdivisions.

Efforts to build trails in established neighborhoods often are met with “not in my backyard” opposition. But these subdivisions are new, and many homeowners are building decks and landscaping their yards to take advantage of trail access.

Indeed, subdivision developer Dennis Anderson was key to the Town Branch Trail’s success. That’s because he realized the trail would not only be an amenity for his development, but would help with drainage and be a financially attractive way to use undevelopable land.

“Without him,” Pettit said, “this trail would have been a nice idea that never would have happened.”

With this section of trail finished, Pettit is now turning his attention to another one-mile section that has funding. The remaining five miles is under feasibility study while trail organizers seek money, easements and rights of way.

So far, Town Branch Trail has received about $2 million in grants and other funding and $1 million worth of donated land, Pettit said.

Plans call for the trail to eventually be at least eight miles long, going from this first finished section to downtown. It will end along Manchester Street near Rupp Arena, where developers of the Distillery District plan to rehabilitate the stream and incorporate the trail into their multi-use project.

Eventually, Pettit would like Town Branch Trail to connect with the nine-mile Legacy Trail being built from downtown to the Kentucky Horse Park, as well as other walking and bike paths.

Even further in the future, there is talk of developing a trail beside the railroad line from Lexington to Versailles and eventually Frankfort.

So come out and see this first piece of Town Branch Trail. You’ll get some exercise, learn about Lexington and see how creative people are harnessing our rich heritage to literally pave the way to a better future.

Bill Fortune, my friend and cycling buddy, called one evening last fall with an announcement: “I’m going to ride across the country.”

Fortune, a veteran law professor at the University of Kentucky, is phasing into retirement, so he finally had the time to pedal coast-to-coast. At 68, he’s in better shape than most people 20 years younger. But he thought that if he was going to make the ride he had long dreamed about, he needed to do it now.

So, in mid-June, Fortune flew to Seattle and met up with two guides and 14 other cyclists, many of whom had retired after careers as a nurse, a banker, a helicopter pilot, a builder, a lumber executive and a physicist.

Their trip was chronicled on a Web site whose name probably summed up the thoughts of many of their friends and relatives: www.crazyguyonabike.com.

After dipping their tires in Puget Sound, the riders set off across the northern United States and Canada toward Portland, Maine. Over the next nine weeks, Fortune said he learned a few things about himself and a lot about his fellow countrymen.

Fortune said he knew he was in for an adventure the first day when the group pedaled out of Seattle. The cyclists met a group of locals on bicycles headed to the summer solstice celebration in the counterculture neighborhood of Fremont. They were wearing body paint — and nothing else.

There were many strange and ordinary sights to come as the group pedaled more than 60 miles a day and spent nights in small-town motels, campgrounds and church basements. Bill called occasionally to update me on his progress, and I got more details from his wife, Beverly, a Herald-Leader colleague.

Of course, there was a lot of beautiful scenery: The peaks of the Cascades and Glacier National Park; the endless prairies of South Dakota, Montana and Wyoming; and the beautiful Erie Canal towns in New York state.

There were famous landmarks such as Mount Rushmore and the Little Bighorn battlefield, where Indian warriors’ graves now have marble stones noting that they died “while defending the Cheyenne way of life.”

But what impressed Fortune most were the places he never would have stopped to see, and the people he never would have met, had he been driving through in a car.

There was the couple in Waterville, Wash., who bought and renovated the abandoned Lutheran church where they had been married years before. Now it’s beautiful again, and the couple rents it as a wedding chapel.

There was the museum in Stanford, Mont., with a vast collection of salt and pepper shakers. Fortune now knows that Buffalo, Wyo., claims to have the world’s largest swimming pool, and Huron, S.D., the world’s largest statue of a pheasant.

There’s a section of the Berlin Wall standing in Rapid City, S.D. And in a museum in Manitowoc, Wis., there’s a replica of the biggest thing to ever hit town: a 20-pound chunk of the Russian satellite Sputnik. It landed in the middle of a Manitowoc street on Sept. 5, 1962.

“You see the country in a different way when you’re on a bicycle,” Fortune said. “If you made the trip in a car, you couldn’t see it as slowly and intensely as we saw it.”

Fortune marveled at the vast openness of the West as he passed abandoned houses and towns depopulated by a changing economy. Many people had lived in their small towns all their lives, but their children had left in search of jobs and a more exciting lifestyle. He saw human despair on Indian reservations, and noted there was at least one bar in every Western town, no matter how small, and gambling machines in every bar and gas station.

The cyclists agreed that the West ended and the Midwest began when they crossed the Missouri River in eastern South Dakota near the Minnesota line. Gradually, the empty country gave way to tidy farms and farmhouses and well-kept small towns.

The cyclists were invited to a church ice-cream social in one town, a rhubarb festival in another, and a county fair in rural Michigan. They attended Aebleskiver Days in Tyler, Minn., a festival dedicated to a spherical Danish pancake.

The people Fortune met along the way were open, friendly and more broad-minded than he expected.

“They were interested in what you were doing, and they wanted you to be interested in what they were doing,” he said. “They wanted to talk about the history of their small town, and its prospects for the future, which often weren’t good. And they loved to tell you about something that you don’t know anything about.”

In South Dakota, Fortune ran into a crew of Kentucky men with R.J. Corman Railroad Group, busy laying track across the prairie. He met a couple from Africa who had traveled throughout the United States looking for a place to settle before they bought a small campground in Waterville, Minn.

He had a long conversation with a woman in Fond du Lac, Wis., about sturgeon spearing. “Her whole family was into sturgeon spearing,” he said. “It has to do with cutting a hole in the ice and standing over the hole with a spear and waiting for the sturgeon to swim under your hole.”

By the time Fortune had dipped his wheels in the Atlantic Ocean in Maine, his last few ounces of fat had turned to muscle.

A week before his journey ended, he called me from upstate New York so we could make plans for a Louisville-to-Bardstown ride the weekend after he returned home. Even after pedaling 4,100 miles to get a view of America from a small, hard bicycle seat, he was eager to ride more.

“I’ll bet you’re coming back with legs of steel,” I told him.

“I don’t know about that,” he replied. “But I sure have a butt of iron.”

And a new appreciation for small-town America and its people.