The Little Dirt Road

Have the storms of life broken your limbs away, and left them by your side?

Is the love that you knew when this tree first grew, still carved deep in your heart?

I still go walking with my wife down a country lane where I rode my bicycle as a kid in the fifties. Though it has recently been widened and paved, parts of it still wind through the woods as it did back then. The tall trees stand along the road side with the tops lapping over as it did when I was young. This place is in Blackford Bottoms of Hancock County Kentucky about a half mile from a community called Gatewood, and is the place where my grandfather Ernest Lott grew up. This area is also called Tywhoppity bottoms. According to our folk legend, this is what the indigenous Americans had called it before the European settlers came. It means the sound of water flowing over a hollow log.

Most all of the land has been bought up by one land owner now and has been consolidated into a large grain farm, with a few of the better barns left standing. My great grandfather had a little farmstead along a bend in the creek in this area called Sunlite. Parts of it have been left undisturbed since it was a lowland slough and had little worth as cropland. There is an old beech tree at the edge of the woods there, with its limbs all broken down and names carved in its trunk. It struck me when I first saw it; somehow I felt a connection to that old tree, and I knew that I was going to write a song about it (I did and it is called "The Little Dirt Road").

Fifty years ago there were several little farmsteads along this road, each with a team of horses or a small tractor. There were small patches of corn and tobacco all along it. No one living here had any money, and for these folks, times had never been very good. Their great grandparents settled this land. They cleared out a little patch of woods with an axe and grubbing hoe, and built a home out of logs and split rails. They raised most of their own food for themselves and their livestock, and had little patches of tobacco that they would sell for cash to buy cloth and tools to keep them going. They cut wood or bartered for coal that was dug locally in small mines for heat and cooking. My granddad operated one of these mines as a supplement to his farming. The surface coal veins were only about three feet deep, and he would crawl back into them on his belly and hand dig the coal out with a pick. The people had no medical treatment options other than folk remedies and what a traveling doctor from Lewisport could carry in his medicine bag. Many of the young and old would die from diphtheria or pneumonia and other illnesses that today could be treated easily.
Their lives didn’t change much during the Great Depression because they didn’t have very much to loose –except for those who had mortgaged their property and they even lost their livelihood. For most of the people living here, just about anything would seem better than what they had; poverty, floods, sickness and death. They could only dream of moving out to a better place and thought they would never look back if they ever did.

One day while my wife and I were walking, we came upon an old man who had parked his car alongside the road. He had on hunting garb and said he was turkey hunting, but said that he hadn’t seen anything. His empty gun was laying in the back seat and he was looking out into the fields with binoculars where the farms used to be . We struck up a conversation with him and found out that this spot was his home when he was growing up. He pointed over to the edge of the field where a clump of trees were and said that was where his family cabin stood. He said they tied a boat up to the loft window in the 1937 flood and had to tie the house to the trees to keep it from floating away. He said his little sister died there in the dead of winter with pneumonia, and the doctor couldn’t make it over to see her. (Note: The picture is of a house in the area that is similar to the one the old man was talking about, but is not his actual house. His house was torn down years ago.)

I asked him about the beech tree with the names carved in it. He said there was a whole grove of trees there at one time. They would clear the debris from under them and carry loose dirt to pack down for a community gathering spot. This was the main entertainment for them, since they had no electricity or radios. Old and young would come and the local musicians would play and sing (my grandfather and his children were some of them). They would build a big bonfire, sing and dance and meet their sweethearts and future spouses there. This is no doubt how the names got carved on the trees. During those brief moments of good times, their hopes and dreams of a better life burned as brightly as the bonfires into the misty night.

(You see, the first settlers brought their music with them, and they passed it down. They played and sang at worship services, at weddings and at funerals, and at these types of community gatherings. They played through wars and floods, through hard times and good, lifting each other’s spirits, adding to the joyful celebrations, and consoling each other in their times of loss. They were not competing with each other. Each gave according to his or her talent and all were beneficiaries.)
The old man said that they finally sold the farm and moved out West to Oklahoma looking for a better life. But there were still problems with the Dust Bowl droughts and that didn’t work out either, so they came back to Owensboro, KY where he found a job as a diesel mechanic. He worked at that job until he retired. He said that he was diagnosed with cancer about ten years ago and they gave him just a few months to live. He didn't give up though. He lost one lung to cancer, but has since recovered, and has not had any other ill effects from it. He still lives in town and comes out to the country to hunt occasionally, although I think it is more to reminisce than anything.

This "old man" is me. The one we talked to was "really old" {:o)

Dan Bowlds