Heartland Travel I

I got a sense of the culture of Owensboro, KY yesterday evening when I drove up to the Holiday Inn Express. The first building next door to my hotel was a place called White Lightning Liquors.

Now I have actually seen the genuine Kentucky moonshine only once. I was at a party in Lapeer, MI back in the early 1980s with my former colleagues on the Lapeer County Press, and one former County Press journalist had come up from down south somewhere with a bottle of moonshine, a liquid clear as water in a two-liter Coke bottle. To northerners like us, it was something of a novelty, and people passed it around. When the bottle got to me, I unscrewed the cap and took a whiff. The stuff smelled so foul that I could bring myself to take a sip.

I later recounted this story in an APA (Amateur Press Association) I was writing for at the time. Another APA hacker, a gentleman from Alabama, replied to me saying, "Hell, Ed, you ain't sposeta smell it! You're sposeta drank it!"

So after checking into my room, I walked over to White Lightning Liquors to see if they had any. It was a pleasant night for Kentucky in July, after a very hot day. A rabbit skittered out of my way as I walked across the lawn.

As it turns out, it's White Lightning Liquors in name only -- it was a standard-issue liquor store, with no illegal stuff anywhere in sight. It did, however, have a drive-through, which tells me that Kentuckians in this part of the state take their drinking at least somewhat seriously. (I heard of a place in Wyoming that actually had a drive-through bar -- now that's really taking your drinking seriously!)

I bought some cabernet and took it back to the room, which was equipped with a refrigerator, where I deposited it. I was thinking I might need it later. I'd been to Owensboro once before on business, about 10 years ago to visit a soy processing plant alongside the Ohio River. At the time, the place struck me as dirty, smelly, poverty-stricken, and without much of anything to do except sue your neighbors recreationally -- in other words, a lot like Decatur Fukking Illinois, only smaller.

Things seemed to have improved at least a little. This time, Owensboro actually had gotten a handful of chain restaurants. I'm not generally a fan of chain restaurants, but in this case, it was a definite improvement. I wound up going for dinner two exits down the U.S. 60 Bypass to a Texas Roadkill, where I figured I could at least get a decent steak. It was, although at one point -- part of the restaurant's theme, I guess -- about six or seven of the wait staff lined up next to the booth where I was sitting and started performing a line dance to the kuntry mewzik on the loudspeaker system. I just sat there and smiled at them, the sort of smile one might reserve for an autistic sibling discovered painting on the walls with his/her own shit. I tried real hard not to let it ruin my dinner.

Then I went over to the Buffalo Wild Wings down the block and played their Buzztime TV trivia game for a while, then went back to my hotel.

Today, after my first stop of the morning at a Perdue Farms feed mill in nearby Livermore, KY, I headed back in to Owensboro to find a public library where I could go on-line and check e-mail. The library turned out to be located in a fine neighborhood of old Victorian homes, the kind you hope to find in a town in the Upper South. So all in all, my experience of Owensboro had improved over the 1990s.

The place still smells like White Lightning, though.