Project Dateline

Photos By Charles Bertram

CBERTRAM@HERALD-LEADER.COM

Story By Amy Wilson

AWILSON1@HERALD-LEADER.COM

KODAK –

Since early summer we’ve been visiting Kentucky towns with fascinating names. This is the 17th in our series of back-road adventures.

The leaves are abandoning the trees in a fire-sale fashion now in Perry County. The elaborate disengagement ritual betrays the ardor that the leaves must feel for the trees. How else to explain the colors of departure? How else to express that the leaving is hard, than to send up signals that can be seen for miles?

As if someone would venture in to rescue them from this splendor.

Somewhere between the brown summer vines that have given up the fight already, and the pine and hemlock that will stay green for spite, are the red maple and yellow poplar, the hickory and ash, the black gum and river birch, the mimosa, the locust, the cypress, the silverbell.

Wayne Williams has seen 53 autumns here. He has seen the hills full and the hills stripped. Even stripped, he says, “at sundown, it looks like the rays of heaven upon us.”

The Kodak Church, no denomination evident, sits in the middle of this former coal camp and welcomes worshipers every Wednesday and Friday. Sundays, people go to Vicco for their devotion. But there is plenty of evidence of God’s grace being shed right there behind Wayne’s house, which this very morning is chugging out gray-blue chimney smoke for contrast.

The leaves in the trees all around are falling to willing deaths, their desire so strong to blanket roots in winter. They fall as well to cover a slew of transgressions and trash that man has left behind. The Taco Bell cup, the rusted-out sedan, the IGA plastic bag.

It’s like a washing away of sins, this draping of hills that are 300 million years old with the color of peach flesh and pomegranate, chartreuse and salmon and every yellow known to man.

Such majesty was not lost on a man named Combs who christened this town Kodak right after Mr. Eastman put the first camera in the hands of the amateurs. That was somewhere around 1888, and it is simply too good a story to not be true. The monument to the Combs family lies just past the big tipple that used to move coal for the Kodak Mining Co. The Combs statuary — it honors William, Margaret, Thomas and Shadrack — is the first of many different family graveyards on the mountain that stands as entryway to town. Years of tending the graves have left detritus of their own — spent silk roses dropped over the side. Likewise the used foam and faded ribbon from memorials past.

As if the hillside and the dead need such pale adornment.

Such addendums to the landscape are expressly warned against here. Witness a sign on a tree in the woods surrounding Kodak: “God arranges his world so that doing his will results in the greatest good for the greatest number. Do his will. Be a good caretaker for God, please don’t litter his land.”

Loretta Mullins came up in this place, too. She once tamed first-graders at the R.W. Combs Happy School — that’s in Happy — where she taught for 31 years. Loretta, who once used leaves in a lot of school-day crafts, is moving the brown crunchies into the creek now with her leaf-blower, while Sam, her husband, rakes what refuses to yield to the blower.

The season came early this year, Loretta says, and all this early-morning leaf-moving is mostly to keep down the coming fire danger. And to, once again, force her to spend some time considering the grandeur.

The Mullins live on land that has always been in the family. It used to be full of American beech trees, but someone saw fit to put a sawmill down in the midst of them and now, alas, no more beech trees.

They would be a magnificent shade of silver now. Blinding, really.