Stairs and Bagpipes

 

I hung out with a friend from college yesterday and she showed me around some of the scenic bits of Northern Kentucky. We drove up and down curvy roads and sat and stared at the Ohio river, and the smoking refinery across it. The last stop on this meandering tour of Northern Kentucky was Devou Park and the gorgeous overlook of Cincinnati that I almost managed to capture in the photo above.

Before it got that dark, we found a mysterious stairway descending down into the woods that surrounded this hill. And because it seemed like a good idea at the time we started climbing down it, to see where it led. And when it continued not to lead anywhere we continued to follow it because we couldn’t stop now, not after we’d climbed down so far. Eventually, the stairs just stopped, in a residential neighborhood, overlooking a street we’d driven up what felt like hours before to get to the out look in the first place. I’d been sort of hoping it would take us all the way down to the Ohio River, but that’s probably because I have a notably poor sense of direction. Being in the midst of my re-read of Lord of the Rings I started to think about Fangorn as we made our way through the trees that grew so close over the old and broken stairs that sometimes you had to duck to get under them.

They climbed and scrambled up the rock…They came at length to the edge of the shelf almost at the feet of the old stump; then they sprang up and turned round with their backs to the hill, breathing deep, and looking out [north]ward. They saw that they had only come some three or four miles into the forest; the heads of the trees marched down the slopes toward the plain. There, near the fringe of the forest, tall spires of curling smoke went up, wavering and floating towards them.

That’s where Merry and Pippin were the last time I read about them, on the Greyhound to Cincinnati, and it encapsulates what the climb back up those stairs, and the view after, was like.

After driving down from the hill we went to a bar in Covington, Pike Street Lounge. This was a neat little place, with trophy animal heads hanging above the bar stylized out of bronze. There was a band, Fat Chance, playing. And this band, they had a bagpiper–although he didn’t play bagpipes with the band, just a sort of introductory number. This college that my friend and I went to, our mascot was the Fighting Scot (that link’s a .gif, for your viewing pleasure) and we had a pipe band. Scotland the Brave elicits an intense sense memory in me. Hearing it on bagpipes through my window the first day of spring that it’s nice enough to open your window encapsulates my college experience. I could see this from my house’s porch Junior and Senior year. My friend and I, already nostalgic from hanging out together and talking about “old times” (yes, I realize that’s a ridiculous thing for a 23 year old to be calling them) were nearly done in by hearing that song in the middle of a hipster bar in Kentucky.

What I’m trying to say is that there were a lot of feelings yesterday evening.