While I scribble this on a grocery sack from the back seat of a 172 and gaze at the lush, green ridges and valleys south of London, Kentucky, I’m thinking these hills and “hollers” probably look the same as when Daniel Boone and the settlers came through the Cumberland Gap just east of here. Even now it’s mostly unspoiled if you can ignore the strip mines and the huge, ugly wounds where machines have lopped off entire mountaintops to claw at the coal. I lean socially and politically pretty far right of Genghis Khan, but I still believe every American should see the Appalachians from an airplane at 5,500 feet before being eligible to vote.
We’re on a Cub quest, and I’m musing that it’s the latest in a lifetime of Cub quests. This chapter opened when I met the pilot, David Cain, whose family farm, Cain-Tuckee Acres, has a nice grass strip with two hangars just 10 minutes south of Cincinatti’s Lunken Airport, in my 180.
