Watchful.
When I drive into Lexington, I travel a picturesque stretch of Highway 68 that winds through steep limestone cliffs surrounding the Kentucky River known as The Pallisades. There are some narrow passes on that road that can make uninitiated drivers hold their breath; wedged hard between jutting overhangs of rock rising a hundred feet above the road and a tiny guardrail that my grandmother could have stepped over on a bad rheumatism day, even us veterans of the trip count ourselves lucky when we don't encounter a semi or a big old John Deere tractor pulling a swaying wooden trailer stacked high with hay bales.
Coming back southwest this afternoon on 68, about a quarter mile before the bridge separating Jessamine from Mercer county, I noticed a potentially disturbing feature on the rock wall about fifteen feet above the roadway. A boulder roughly the size of a Chevy Tahoe seems to be intent on loosing itself from the rest of the mountain sometime this decade. I hadn't noticed that chunk of rock before; that in itself isn't surprising, as usually I'm intent on jamming my thumb repeatedly at the 'Scan' button on my radio in search of something I can listen to with a clear conscience. Today, though, for whatever reason, the geometry of how that slab of the mountain is clinging to the cliff face just didn't look right to me. There are streamers of honeysuckle and Virginia Creeper cascading down the face of the boulder, and it occured to me that perhaps the roots of all those vines are busy probing the fissures behind the rock, looking for a piece of real estate to call their own. Perhaps all those vegetative interlopers are hastening the day when that block of limestone slips free of the thousands-of-years-long grip of inertia and goes ambulatory - so very ready to give us latter-day visitors to the mountain a lesson in gravity that we won't soon forget.
Coming back southwest this afternoon on 68, about a quarter mile before the bridge separating Jessamine from Mercer county, I noticed a potentially disturbing feature on the rock wall about fifteen feet above the roadway. A boulder roughly the size of a Chevy Tahoe seems to be intent on loosing itself from the rest of the mountain sometime this decade. I hadn't noticed that chunk of rock before; that in itself isn't surprising, as usually I'm intent on jamming my thumb repeatedly at the 'Scan' button on my radio in search of something I can listen to with a clear conscience. Today, though, for whatever reason, the geometry of how that slab of the mountain is clinging to the cliff face just didn't look right to me. There are streamers of honeysuckle and Virginia Creeper cascading down the face of the boulder, and it occured to me that perhaps the roots of all those vines are busy probing the fissures behind the rock, looking for a piece of real estate to call their own. Perhaps all those vegetative interlopers are hastening the day when that block of limestone slips free of the thousands-of-years-long grip of inertia and goes ambulatory - so very ready to give us latter-day visitors to the mountain a lesson in gravity that we won't soon forget.
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