I took a time-machine trip with a friend a couple weeks ago.
Well, to be honest, the machine was actually a 2012 Subaru Outback. But it had no trouble carrying us back into the past.
It started as a jaunt to Berea, Kentucky, to see the Celtic music festival held there every year in August. It would take us most of a full day to travel from our homes to Berea, but signs along the way told us that it wasn’t only miles we were traveling, but decades, centuries, and even millennia back into the past.
There was the sign for the 1862 Battle of Richmond, where the Union suffered more than 12 times the casualties of the Confederates. Rebs captured more than 4,300 Union troops in what is called the most “complete” Confederate victory of the whole Civil War.
Farther down the road a sign pointed the way deeper into in the past, to the one-room log cabin birthplace of Abraham Lincoln in 1809.
And then a sign sent us still farther back, past Fort Boonesboro, where in 1775 Daniel Boone and his men crossed the Kentucky River and established the second-oldest European-American settlement.
And then we passed through Lexington, Kentucky, where in 1854, a freed slave named Henrietta Wood lost a historic legal battle to regain her freedom after she was kidnapped back into slavery. Born sometime between 1818 and 1820, Wood had been a slave until 1848, when she was granted her freedom by her master. But five years later, she was kidnapped and sold back into slavery. After her failed attempt to regain her freedom through the courts, she remained a slave for the next 12 years until after the Civil War ended in 1865. With slavery now abolished, she sued her kidnapper, and though the trial was delayed for nearly a decade, in 1878 twelve white jurors awarded her $2,500 (the equivalent of nearly $65,000 today) in what is the largest known sum granted by a U.S. court in restitution for slavery.
By the time we got to Berea, we were almost dizzy with the history swirling all around us.
Once in Berea, we strolled for a while on the quaint campus of Berea College. As luck would have it, this was “move-in weekend,” where new students ambled along pathways searching for routes to their classes, which would begin in the next day or two. All of them wore the sparkle of the future in their eyes. And just seeing them was another trip a half century into the past for us, when we were their age.
Berea College was established in 1855 — the first college in the South to welcome not only both men and women, but also both white and African-American students, even though Kentucky was a slave state at the time. The college charges no tuition (it never has), but requires all students to work a minimum of ten hours per week.
Wait…what? Tuition-free college? Before this trip, I’m sure I heard a guy on Fox News call it an impossible future fantasy hatched only in the fevered dreams of pie-in-the-sky socialists. Turns out “free college for all” has been a reality in the heart of America for more than a century and a half.
And all it took for us to find it was to turn off the TV talking heads and hop into a 2012 Subaru time machine.
The music festival we had come to see was the time-travel trip we hoped it would be, with groups of musicians on Celtic fiddles, pipes, whistles, bouzoukis, guitars and mandolins, playing songs brought from Scotland and Ireland to the Appalachian region as early as the late 1700s. The sessions were small enough that musicians and listeners were able to get acquainted over the weekend, and even share meals together. Some sessions explained the history of a song, or even the history of an instrument’s development, like the Irish pipes or Scottish bagpipes.
And our time machine kept purring along on all cylinders.
By Monday, after an entire weekend of sitting in a car or on hard wooden chairs at a music festival, we ached for a bit of a hike, so we headed for the bucolic trails just outside of Berea leading up toward the Pinnacles, where we might get a glimpse of the pastoral Kentucky landscape.
But even there we found ourselves slipping back in time, as pathway signs pointed the way to a rocky site called Indian Fort, where native Americans gathered together not just centuries ago, but millennia.
It was a hot day with thermometers ticking past 97 degrees. Still, the humidity was only moderate, so we took the path off toward East Pinnacle, a rocky spire that gains almost 600 feet in elevation from the start. Though the path is wide and flat at the base, it narrows as it weaves 2.6 miles upward over boulders and tree roots. A welcome breeze blew as we climbed higher.
We stopped often, wondering whether it was wise for two travelers on the wrong side of 70 to be climbing a mountain on a blazing hot day. With the time machine sitting in the parking lot, the passage of years is no friend to the knees, lungs, back or heart. Should we turn back?
We met a few other travelers along the way (all of them decades younger) who told us that the top wasn’t too far away.
Well, maybe just a bit farther, then.
Two and a half hours later we stood at the top of the Pinnacle, stunned not only by the beauty of the panorama, but awed by all the places a time machine can take you if you put it on cruise control.
Author, musician and storyteller TR Kerth is a retired teacher who has lived in Sun City Huntley since 2003. Contact him at trkerth@yahoo.com. Can’t wait for your next visit to Planet Kerth? Then get TR’s book, “Revenge of the Sardines,” available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other online book distributors.
