Picked up Mom and Dad for our trip to Kentucky’s “Holy Land” and bourbon country. Beautiful sunny weather for the drive to our first stop, the Maker’s Mark facility in far-flung Lebanon, KY.
The approach to the distillery was not without drama as we had to take a winding road for miles that was - quite literally - one lane. With a cliff on the right side. This seemed like a glitch in the roadway software program, some sort of bad miscalculation. Not only did we experience more blind curves than Max has “maxidents” but even if I could see another car coming I’m not sure how I was supposed to avoid hitting it. It seemed kind of unbelievable that this was.a 2-way road and I comforted myself by thinking this was a one-way but just not marked, although that begged the question whether I was going the right way on it?
Miraculously (this is the Kentucky Holy Land after all) no cars came although after we got off it I saw a car apparently trying to enter the “one-way” two-way road. Our tour guide would later start his talk by saying that if we wanted to avoid that road on the way out let him know and he’d given an alternative one.
According to the Guinness Book of World Records, this is the world’s oldest operating bourbon whiskey distillery, going back to 1808. It’s been in the Samuels for four generations, or six if you include “under the radar” moonshining. They built the mill over the stream that rolled through the attractive property but the source of the water for the bourbon is a nearby lake. The whiskey is made up of 60%+ corn, 20% wheat and a bit of barley, and all the corn and wheat are sourced locally, within sixty miles, and the barley which doesn’t do well in Kentucky comes from the upper Midwest. They have a proprietary yeast (not only that, but their rather eccentric and distinctive bottle with the weeping red wax that drips over the bottle, has been made intellectual property that forbids other distilleries from copying that. It was the brainchild of Mrs. Samuels who had seen some cognac bottles with a wax top and liked the look. She also was responsible for the shape of the bottle and the labeling and even the name - “Maker’s Mark” was the mark that creators left on pewter objects for which she had a fetish for and which were displayed, despite them seeming a bit plain to me.)
It was pleasant to walk in the labyrinthian buildings, to smell the yeasty cauldrons of boiling yellow liquids, to see wood shelves, stories high, holding oak barrels that impart color and flavor to the raw alcohol for a period of 5-7 years. The special “46” whiskey is made with extra strips of non-oak wood sitting in the bourbon barrels. One building was dynamited from a limestone hill creating a rock wall and a cooler environment for the speciality whiskeys.
We walked by the old-fashioned looking labelers to the room where the bottles were filled with the liquid bronze of finished whiskey. Bottles are first cleaned before the fill with a flush not of water, but by (what else?) bourbon! After the whiskey goes in the bottle via machines we come to the oddest sight - a conveyor belt of bottles with women on either side dipping the tops in red liquid at a rate of one every couple seconds. It reminded me immediately of the old Laverne and Shirley scene (borrowed from “I Love Lucy”) of the girls in a factory trying to keep up with the machine. In the background there was a digital sign with “Goal: 3164. Actual 3134”.
Next up was the tasting room and set before us were six glasses with tiny amounts of whiskey in each. The first was the familiar classic Maker’s Mark, 90 proof. Then had two more that were of increasingly higher proof (same recipe, just less watered down). The fourth was the “46” variety, the one with unique flavoring of the extra wood in the barrel. The fifth and sixth were varieties with different combinations of different woods in the barrel. Personally the classic and the “46” were the best to my completely uneducated taste.
Mom was not impressed, probably drinking only one of hers and ignoring the passionate tour guide's trying to say that the alcohol doesn't sting going down but "hugs".
Afterward, in the gift shop, I got some classic Maker’s Mark and while I was not really into doing the wax on the bottle thing the lady at the counter pointed me to another counter where, shockingly, the guy handed me a heavy apron, separate sleeves, and gloves. I was to put on all this gear on just to dip the top of a bottle in the ol’ red wax. It certainly seemed like lawsuit protection insurance given it would take an idiot to so fumble this that they’d burn their hands or arms or torso. But of course we’d just had a whiskey tasting so there’s that. But it still seemed like overkill wrapped in overkill. I did an appropriately rookie job despite detailed instructions, but it just makes it look more hand-crafted to me.
We next checked into the hotel before heading to dinner at the Rosewood Bar & Grill as recommended by the shuttle driver who had taken us in a glorified golf cart up the huge hill after we learned the main shuttle bus had a failed transmission. Delicious dinner and a fine Kentucky IPA. Later I watched the “Fields of Dream” MLB game while overlooking a cornfield right here, outside a hotel in rural Kentucky.
**
Friday: We hit mass this morning after long and winding road of eight miles, making our way to St Rose Priory which stands on a breathtaking bluff and is replete with authentically old gravestones. The church looked like some sort of medieval castle crossed with a gothic church that almost had me believing it must be a recent build given the fairytale quality. Like Disney World. But it was real and old and I was a fan:
"Established in 1806, the proto-priory remains the oldest Dominican religious house in the country. Its Tudor-Gothic church, built the same year, is the oldest standing structure west of the Alleghenies still in use as a church."
Later I “jogged” (walked?) two miles along the hilly country adjoining picturesque Meadow Creek Farm:
"Jim and LaVerne Avritt’s Meadow Creek Farm gives Lebanon, the Heart of Kentucky, its Bluegrass horse farm connection. The pedigree of the farm, and its horses, is impeccable...The operation is home to Precious Beauty, world champion and top two-year-old filly in North America, with almost a million in earnings. And the pedigree of the farm’s breeder and trainer is well established in the standardbred world: Jim Avritt, Sr. has been working in that world for 55 years."
**
Later we drove by an odd group of black buildings in nearby Loretto, perhaps two dozen of them, without any markers or ornamentation. Even Google Maps refused to give up the goods on what this was. It looked ominous, like a government black op site where they keep UFOs. Naturally I pulled in towards the gate, noted it was locked up and there were cameras around, only to see a white vehicle coming towards us presumably to question and detain us. The vehicle opened the slow gate and - suspense! - there was just a good ole boy driving who, when I asked, said it was huge storage facilities for Maker’s Mark. Mystery solved. Not everything's a conspiracy even in these days.
**
Next up, around noon was the big deal, the real deal, the reason for the deal: the Abbey of Gethsemane. We made it just in time for the 12:15 Sext psalm-prayers although Mom had to go to the bathroom. Then we wandered to the gift shop and we fell into deep near-sleep while watching a 30-40 minute video of monks chanting psalms interspersed with nature scenes and scattered dialogue. It felt healing although I was chagrined the monks pray more before 8am than I do the whole day. They’re like the Marines of prayer.
Later we asked a guy cutting grass where Thomas Merton’s grave was. (We’d probably still be wandering the grounds, ten hours later, had Mom not stopped him from mowing.) He was a garrulous sort as one might expect from someone who works with monks who have taken a vow of silence and offered he went on a retreat here one time and the rest is history. Turns out you had to go into doors into the retreat house and I felt like we were trespassing when I saw the monk eyeing us, although not in an unfriendly manner - and then we went outside a side door to a deck overlooking the monk’s graves with many a warning sign saying, “Silence here, do no talk” which Mom took merely as a suggestion. Before long she found “Father Louis Merton”, festooned with a rosary. All simple white crosses. I saw other monk graves from 2021 and one so newly buried (they don’t use coffins) that he didn’t have a white cross marker up yet.
Mom had shown me a book with a riveting anecdote by Howard Storm about his seemingly finding Thomas Merton at Merton’s grave, or some sort of otherworldly encounter. He mentions Merton’s Gethsemane cemetery poem so I looked it up:
Brothers, the curving grasses and their daughters
Will never print your praises:
The trees our sisters, in their summer dresses,
Guard your fame in these green cradles:
The simple crosses are content to hide your characters.
....
You need not hear the momentary rumors of the road
Where cities pass and vanish in a single car
Filling the cut beside the mill
With roar and radio,
Hurling the air into the wayside branches
Leaving the leaves alive with panic.
See, the kind universe,
Wheeling in love about the abbey steeple,
Lights up your sleepy nursery with stars.
...
Teach us, Cistercian Fathers, how to wear
Silence, our humble armor.
Pray us a torrent of the seven spirits
That are our wine and stamina:
Because your work is not yet done.
But look: the valleys shine with promises,
And every burning morning is a prophecy of Christ
Coming to raise and vindicate
Even our sorry flesh.
Then will your graves, Gethsemani, give up their angels,
Return them to their souls to learn
The songs and attitudes of glory.
Then will creation rise again like gold
Clean, from the furnace of your litanies:
The beasts and trees shall share your resurrection,
And a new world be born from these green tombs.
**
Refreshed by our Abbey experience, we headed back to the hotel after stopping for playing cards and snacks at a Dollar General where the friendly checkout lady was a Utah transplant who was originally from Tennessee and now lives in Loretto, KY, a city which wikipedia reports as having 713 people and a 3.5 square miles size. Only in America? Our records show the number of people who have lived in Tennessee, Utah and Loretto is exactly one. At first I thought her “y’all” was picked up awfully quickly, having been living only two years in Loretto, but then she mentioned the Tennessee background.
We also checked out the historic St. Joseph Proto-Cathedral which was quite fortunately open, the priest apparently early due to a miscommunication on the time for a wedding.
Enjoyed a cigar at the hotel before our next adventure, that being the Old Talbott Inn / Stephen Foster Story combination. Poor planning leads to substandard results and in this case it came to bite us since Bardstown is no sleepy Southern town. Definitely not on a Friday night. My affection for ghost-ridden taverns dating back to the early 1800s is nonpareil, and this was like the Lebanon Ohio's Golden Lamb on steroids. Framed in the building is a Catholic newspaper account, dated 1836, mentioning how stage coaches stopped in Bardstown and stayed at this inn. People had slept here were born before the Revolutionary War. And yes it was said to be haunted. But today it was only haunted by hundreds of living souls, all of whom wanted to be fed. I approached the hostess warily and asked how long for a table of three and received the death sentence: “one hour”. This at 6pm and we had an 8pm Stephen Foster show. I told her about the show and she didn’t like our chances. She was overly eager to offer other places as options.
One of them she mentioned was across the street which was essentially two different restaurants with the same name, one outside and one inside. The inside one said “40 minutes” and took my phone number and called me an hour and fifteen minutes later saying my table was ready. The outside one? We’ll never know because we ditched them both. I walked around the block, checked a couple places, called one place, and confirmed the fact: you can’t get a table at a restaurant on a Friday night at 6pm in Bardstown.
So instead I found a burger joint, picked up three sandwiches to go, and we took them to a nearby “Third Street” bar. A silver lining was the draft IPA was pretty sweet.
We arrived early to the show and there’s something special about outdoor theatre. The stars, the fireflies, the hum of August locusts, the slow dusk-to-nightfall. It’s been a couple decades since the last time I’d experienced that. And I was not disappointed by the quality of music or acting or energy or colorful antebellum dresses but only by the sheer length. This was a 2.5 hour marathon that some people, incredulously, have experienced multiple times. The winner tonight was someone who had seen it 31 times. I don’t think you see something 31 times unless it’s a religious ritual of some sort, although I’m not sure I can understand the religious significance after my one time. I calculated he’d spent approximately $900 for tickets over that span (or one Bengals playoff game). The problem with the show was that you had the basic plot by minute ten: guy meets girl, girl wants security and heart, has one guy who provides one and another who provides the other. So she is torn: what will she do? And we revisit that dilemma over and over for the next two hours until at the very end this most indecisive girl in the history of humankind decides she wants the starving artist. Bottom line: inside this 2.5 hour musical there is a solid 1.5 hour musical lurking. I feel like you need a lot of patience and a lack of AAHD for this one.
At intermission we’d strategically moved a million rows up from our coveted sixth row seats only to find ourselves right below play-by-play commentators who decided to completely ruin the mood for those of us who haven’t seen the musical before. Rude. And we now also missed the facial expressions of the folks on stages, which is missing a lot. But in return for these negatives we had the positive of being able to exit quickly at night’s end, beating everyone in the whole stadium to the exits even at the cost - admittedly high - of missing possibly the greatest rendition of Stephen Foster’s greatest song: “My Old Kentucky Home”. But we had 35 minute drive along the most curvaceous roads I’d ever seen (although curiously google took us back an easier way?).
The lack of a religious element in the play at a time Christianity was a significant cultural phenomenon was likely in keeping with reality for Foster who according to one site, “lived and worked as if he were not a believer. A nonconformist, he never joined a church and rarely attended services. The songs that he chose to write of his own volition were purely secular.”
He was a troubled soul. His marriage was in trouble almost immediately and they ended up getting separated; the Foster family initially blamed Jane for not being a good wife but then reversed course. He drank heavily during the last decade and, unable to write songs, was impoverished and his death was premature and either an accident or suicide. The problem with beautiful dreaming is it's not intended to be the primary beauty in this life, which is reserved for "God Alone".
