Night Five... The Rosenbergs of Prestonsburg
I pull out of German Bridge not knowing whether I’ll be back for dinner, but suspecting that backtracking isn’t in my mission plan, Donnie shakes my hand and tells me, “It’s been an honor.” He’s fucking with me. Somewhere out on the winding road into town some signal kicks in along with two hundred text messages, a hundred whatsapp messages, 50 emails and a half a dozen voicemails trying to reschedule the call that never happened despite double confirming it before slipping the grid. Donnie doesn’t like it when people waste his time either. He said it would take him 15-20 minutes to get to Prestonsburg, but that it’d probably take me an hour. Donnie’s a lot of things, but he ain’t a liar.
Emerging from the woods and the trees and the water and the campground after two days, Prestonsburg takes on the air of a big city. I’ve passed a handful of those dying frontier towns, backlot facades with no one home, so a stoplight takes a second to register. The winding two lane gives way to four lanes and parkways as I roll through Main St, stopping as I always do, to photograph the closed down other era marquee of the shuttered movie theater. This one’s called The Strand. A lot of ‘em are called The Strand. If I had a billion dollars, I’d go town to town re-furbishing and re-opening all of these little theaters and giving entertainment away for free. Johnny Theaterseed.
John Rosenberg calls to see if I got lost just after I’ve finished being lost and I’m finding chain stores and highway workers and real growth, real expansion, modernized schools and arts centers and a bit of a shock as I pull down the last street next to Prestonsburg Elementary and rest Dumbo in a driveway where I figure we’ll camp for the night. It will never cross my mind to sleep indoors. I’m becoming a stray.
Now lemme tell you a little bit about John Rosenberg who everyone calls John Rosenberg, including his wife Jean Rosenberg who everyone calls Jean Rosenberg including the entire population of Prestonsburg, Kentucky. Or so it will seem. He’s a Jew born in the 30s in Germany whose father got them on the last boat to America to escape the Holocaust. He and my father crossed paths in the early 60s in John Doar’s Civil Rights Division of Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department where they spent their days combing through voter registration logs in Mississippi, Alabama and Tennessee finding proof that the local clerks and registrars only required a person to recite sections of the Constitution by heart if that person was black. They spent most of their time losing voter rights cases in front of crooked Southern judges until they’d stacked up enough losses to justify federal intervention. Their days driving backroads and walking muddy fields and poring over microfiche helped pave the way for the Voting Rights Act of 1965. John met Jean, a Quaker from Pennsylvania who married him up north without an officiant and will proudly tell you that it was ordained by the signatures of every witness on the certificate which hangs beautifully framed first thing you see when you walk in the front door. It was his idea to pile into a 1968 VW bus and head south again where his crusading heart drew him to what would become AppalRed: the Appalachian Research and Defense Council. Jean thought they’d stay a couple of years. In a couple more years it’ll be fifty.
“This house is lived-in,” John tells me as I slip off my shoes at the mat and hold up on Sadie for a beat. It’s not necessary. John’s on the floor in the living room petting her and pointing out photos on the walls of all the dogs they and their children have rescued over the years. Their daughter brought home so many strays they paid for the vet’s garage. Seems I’ve come to the right place. Jean puts out cookies and apples and trail mix and coffee because, “That’s what I do. I put things out.” The house is from the 50s, the decor is from the 70s, beautifully faded orange and yellow shallow shag carpeting, vintage coating the kitchen floor, lifetimes of photos and art and newspaper clippings in frames and the accomplishments of children now grown and quests still on the horizon. Wes Anderson's set decorator may have been through here just before me.
Did I mention I’d never met these people before? I find my voice as we talk, it’s dust bunnied up pieces of accent and drawl which a couple of clear sentences sweep away until I remember myself again. Which matters, cuz they’re asking. We take the dog for a walk down around the new school and they point out all that’s been renovated since their kids went here. Jean calls John the Chamber of Commerce, there’s so much he wants to show me: Stone Crest, the law offices, the town of David, the MAC, the science center, the farmer’s market, I think they want me to move in. I think they want everyone to move in.
In Eastern Kentucky, they want you to eat more, and they want you to stay a while. Before I’m on the road again, Jean will tell me, “People bring their passions and their interests. People make a town better.” I’ve had a lot of thoughts about abundance on this ride, about the abundance of land, of food, of motor vehicles, of time, of room. I keep thinking to myself that everywhere I’ve been could happily absorb more people, would happily absorb more people. Seems that people don’t fear people when they look them in the eyes. People fear people they don’t see everyday. The Commonwealth of Kentucky has a negative population growth, more people are moving out every year than move in. I start working up a prospectus in the back of my head called “Save America. Leave California.”
John and Jean Rosenberg invite me to come to an event with them, the 50th Anniversary reunion of the folks they came down here with to build the town of David. My brain is burning hot just from conversation with the two of them so I beg off while they change into khakis and button downs, the day’s damp heat fading. Jean points out to me where the shower is and the washing machine and I, well, I appreciate the hint. John shows me how to work the tv which is horrifically shouting that California is on fire. I worry that I caused it. That’ll be all I’ll ask about for the next week whenever I run into anyone with a tv. Finally, John digs up an ancient folder with the factory settings on their router, of course, and I type in a thousand random numbers and letters so I can take advantage of their wifi while they’re gone.
I don’t enjoy it. Not in the slightest. After an hour online in their living room, I start to feel like I’m in an office and my right eye is twitchy. I shut the computer down and go outside and sit on the porch with my dog and watch the sun sink. That’s how they find me.
“Have you eaten?” Jean asks, and of course I’ve forgotten. I’ve barely moved. I throw a blanket down on the backseat of their Camry and Sadie climbs up on the bench seat next to her new best friend John and I take shotgun while Jean drives us up to Stone Crest in time to catch the sunset. We pass baseball fields, plural, and equestrian centers on the way up the former coal roads through the mountains that were scalped for surface mining. Their former representative, onetime attorney general, led the movement to turn the ridge into a golf course then built his stately manor at the apex and christened it Braveheart. Jean parks next to a wide flat vertical wood panel painted with a quilting pattern. These mark places of cultural significance or just places really all throughout Kentucky. They’re on barns and buildings and out in the middle of fields. They’re in the parking lot of a public course where you can rent golf carts with shiny rims and hit a ball around the ridge of the earth. There’s a party going on the porch of the clubhouse and by the time we’re within spitting distance someone calls out, “John Rosenberg,” in a tone that sounds like it’s preceded by an implied, “The Honorable.” “Jean Rosenberg,” follows from another voice and the two of them are up on the porch greeting people they’ve worked with, helped out, or, no kidding, delivered. Jean started teaching lamaze and modern birth techniques here in the early 70s at a time where you pretty much weren’t allowed to say ‘vagina’ under any circumstances. John was the first man in a delivery room in Kentucky when their first was born. Never occurred prior to that I suppose that there was any reason a husband should be in there. What’s he doing anyway?
Sadie and I walk a lap around the clubhouse and listen to the band play twanged up Huey Lewis covers and we throw waves at men with beer bottles as the sky grows purple for about, oh, a thousand miles in every direction. Jean meets us on the far side and we gather John before the light’s gone because she doesn’t like driving in full darkness. It’s been better since the cataract surgery last year, but that didn’t do anything to solve the problem of John’s backseat tension. At the base of the mountain, Jean rolls a strip of restaurants and my determination to eat good bbq leads us to The Pig in a Poke. The big stack of wood in the drive tells they run their own smoker out back and I don’t know much, but where there’s smoke there’s bbq.
They sit across from me and watch me pound beef brisket and mac and cheese and a baked potato like I’m that kid in the Dick Tracy movie. What a shitty movie. What a shitty reference. God damn, I’m hungry. I knock back a Pabst on tap and learn that this was a dry county until just five years ago. The notion that there’s a bar upstairs and beer on draft and bottles in hands is all brand new. I’m scarfing down the baked potato, my father loves baked potatoes, and resisting the urge to say something trite like, “Tell me about my father,” especially since they’d rather tell me about the town. While I hear some of the details of the controversial cases John worked on behalf of miners rights, human rights, he touches on what my father did, how he gave his heart here, to the same cause. Somewhere in here or the in the car, it slips out that Jean visits with inmates at the nearby maximum security prison, just sits with prisoners who’ve asked to talk to somebody, who’ve requested a human connection. She tells me of a convicted murderer, gang member since 16, locked up for life, at 41 he comes to the realization that he has to split with his gang even though it means a death sentence. He spend the rest of his life isolated in the SHU, except when he gets a visitation from an 80 year old, white haired, beaming Quaker who just wants to be his friend.
These people are a persistently unfolding panoply of benevolence. The kind that cause you to reach for new words.
Meanwhile, I eat so good, perform so well, that after sitting with just waters, John orders the same meal to go. He’ll have it tomorrow. Back in their living room, John Rosenberg settles into a well-loved recliner and turns on opera on PBS. Jean Rosenberg pours us each a large snifter of brandy and the dog curls up between our feet as we listen to Turandot.
