Traces of the Past
When you’re exploring America’s back roads, you often encounter reminders of an older era. Sometimes you are confronted with a full-tilt anachronism like this:
As I cruised out of the National Park into private lands, I passed a farmer baling hay. No big deal… except this chap’s hay rake was propelled by only two horsepower – as in two horses. Pretty unusual to see such an old piece of mechanical farm machinery actually doing the job it was made to do a hundred years ago.
I was dawdling at the stop sign at the corner of his hay field, trying to figure out if I could get a photo of him without disturbing him, when the moment got even better. This Amish guy turned his team out onto the road behind me and started coming up on the truck. I turned the corner, and he came right along with me. When I glanced ahead I saw why.
Two hundred yards ahead was what must have been his homestead: a neat white clapboard house on a knoll with a bright red barn straight off of a jigsaw puzzle box. In the farmyard a young woman stood gazing toward the driver and team, her hand shading her eyes beneath a black bonnet. Running around her skirts were two small children, both dressed in the same pastel fabric that she wore.
I swear it was like a living Norman Rockwell painting right there in front of me. The tableau was perfect, and I didn’t want to spoil it or offend them by stopping to take pictures, so I settled for quick snap of the rear view. I knew it would result in a lousy shot, but I took it anyway in the interest of the “picture or it didn’t happen” law of the Internet.
The photo didn’t really matter anyway. The image of that impossibly sublime postcard moment is forever etched in my mind, and that’s what counts.
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Like an old yearbook inscription from somebody who’s face you’ve long forgotten, the discovery of this invisible restaurant evoked more questions than answers. Other than the sign, there wasn’t a trace of Jenean’s remaining. Not so much as a paint line in the parking lot, bent pipe or post warping in the Kentucky sun was left to betray the outline of the vanished eatery.
Did fire obliterate the place? Was the building loaded on a truck and carted away? Perhaps a tornado lifted the cafe up donuts and all, and sent it over the rainbow where bluebirds fly?
We’ll never know what happened, or if Jenean’s pie was extra tasty or not. It’s just another mystery to ponder as we head on down the road.
