Fiction
Tripping With Death High Above the Barren River
Finding God and Skynyrd traveling backwards in a Pinto
The Barren River runs fast here, slicing through the forested green gorge, its metallic blue waters dotted with white outcroppings of rock, like a lost field of mushrooms dropped down among the foothills of western Kentucky.
College students come here where the river plunges twenty feet over the falls, the mist from where the waters splash off the limestone below creating cool wet clouds that rise and hover, leaving tiny wet droplets on your tanned skin.
Seeking space from exams and empty wallets, eighteen-, nineteen- and twenty-year-olds come to the Locks to sip cherry hooch mixed with pure grain alcohol and trip on shrooms. Those wise know to keep one in your group moderately sober as a trip to the Locks requires traversing a one-car-wide path that splits a sheer grey wall of granite and a dizzying drop of some 40 feet to the river below.
And it is here, forty-five degrees vertical on that thin ribbon of road, where JD has decided to stop his hand-me-down hatchback. He needs to piss and it won’t wait until we reach level ground.
I sit in the back seat alongside Adelphi and we tip our beer cans together. “Cheers, mate.”
