Ode to Nicholasville Road

When Craig and I started dating, he was newly back in California after a three-year stay in Lexington. I was having the “living somewhere else” experience five hours from home in Southern California, and I marveled at his moving 2500 miles away. That was, I thought, truly a chance to experience life in another place. I would press him for particulars about the town: landscape, weather, and especially the University of Kentucky, where he received his master’s degree.

One day, we thought when married, we would vacation in Kentucky. Just once for old time’s sake. Craig could show me the laboratory where he worked, the natural features of the area, and the house where he rented an upstairs apartment. It would be a way for me to connect with a part of him that seemed lost at the time. Craig had settled back into the Central Valley as if he’d never left, taking a job regrettably but unavoidably in the B.S. income bracket. His master’s degree was an “extra” for his employers, it gave them bragging rights but didn’t reflect on his day-to-day activities.

We became disillusioned with this chosen path four years into our marriage, and soon planned to discover another part of the country together. Poised on the brink of a huge change, I felt comforted when the best offer came again from Lexington. We were moving to a place that Craig knew well. I felt an odd sense of coming home, even though I had never been there.

As we settled into the area in July, I would see things I knew from Craig’s stories and feel an instant connection. Limestone cliffs terraced the roadsides as we took drives out of town. I would point out Cracker Barrels and White Castles as if they were national landmarks. Picket fence rails shuttled by, although by this time most business have painted them black for durability and economy. Only a few iconic horse farms, most notably Calumet Farms (that housed the Queen of England when she came to see the derby last year), still have the white picket fences that grace the postcards.

Only one aspect of my new town caused me dismay: Nicholasville Road. It forms the bottom spoke of wagon-wheel Lexington, absorbing the workers and scholars of the southern part of the city and outlying areas, feeding them into the heart where they park and go to work and school. Every evening the process is reversed, the traffic getting heavy in the center of town as the cars head out towards shopping, restaurants, and homes. I had a macabre fascination with this image, so foreign to California with its longitude-and-latitude gridded towns. There were no center spokes in Ripon. North and south streets were named for trees (Acacia, Orange, Walnut, Maple) and east and west streets were numbered (1st, 2nd, 3rd).

“Lexington has traffic,” Craig would admonish me, “You’ll have to get used to the patterns.” I would shrug, determined to stay off Nicholasville Road. It wasn’t so much the congested traffic, or even the traffic accidents that dot the road on Friday nights like sesame seeds in a breadstick. I couldn’t make heads or tails of Craig’s descriptions of the lanes. “Since the traffic needs change so dramatically and predictably, the lanes on Nicholasville Road blink to northbound in the morning, and then southbound in the evening to accomodate.” Craig would tell me how this was accomplished and I would sit, wide-eyed, wondering how this could be feasible. Every morning, as cars turn onto Nicholasville for the commute downtown, there would only be one outbound lane and one turn lane on their left. In the evening, the process is reversed, and only one usually packed lane goes into the city when everyone else is trying to get out.

Craig would tell me stories of accidentally merging into the wrong lane, unused to the flow of traffic at that particular time of day. The absolute worst thing was to be maintaining course when the lanes changed. You’d be driving along when a sign blinked to life over you: Lane Changing: Merge Right, necessitating a frantic swerve to avoid the oncoming traffic that would momentarily bear down.

Nicholasville Road was not for me, I thought. There would be plenty of roads to travel, and I could certainly stay away from this monument to confusion. It seemed an easy concept, but Craig and I rented a townhouse off Man O’War Boulevard due south on the wagon wheel. The moment we signed the lease, we headed off to find food and ended up at the Arby’s at Nicholasville and Reynolds Roads.

“Where do the lanes change?” I wondered, squinting in the distance to see if I saw any cars on a collision course.

“Further down past New Circle Road,” Craig replied. As the city expanded, modern city planners prescribed wider roads with more lanes. It is only in the center of town, the “old section,” that things had to be adjusted according to available space.

I had a few weeks before work started to stock my pantry and buy things that had been too difficult to ship. All the necessary stores, Target, Bed Bath and Beyond, and Meijer Foods, clustered on Nicholasville Road, taunting me. I began to venture out in the car after Craig left for work, checking lanes and turns compulsively though still far from the city center. I also developed an intense affinity for Culver’s Frozen Custard, also on Reynolds Road via Nicholasville. I began to view Nicholasville Road as the magnetic needle of my Lexington compass. If I got lost, I traced my course back to New Circle, which loops around the city in the middle, the inner stabilizing circle of the wheel. New Circle would eventually take me to Nicholasville, and from there I could find my way home.

Soon I learned that the straight path to UK every morning lay clearly down Nicholasville Road. I could wander through obscure neighborhoods, meandering over to Harrodsburg or Tates Creek Roads, if I wanted to double the commute time. A month in a circular city changed my concepts of road orientation. In Modesto, California, a city gridded like the graph paper I used in high school math class, if I didn’t like a particular road I could always drive a block over and find a parallel way to where I wanted to go. Lexington’s wheel divides into individual pie slices. Three left turns, instead of four, mean ending up on the same original street. To find an alternate route, one needed to travel along one side of the triangle to find a correctly-angled road. The next way into the city center may be five or ten minutes away.

On my first day of work, Craig sat in the passenger’s seat and I drove, the most practical arrangement because his stop was closer than mine. I passed New Circle Road without incident, and then the road curved upward ahead of us, revealing inner Nicholasville Road. I stared at what seemed like a million stoplights, as well as sets of square lane markers that suspend over the road to direct traffic. Each lane is marked with a red X, a green arrow, or two white turning arrows, announcing the status of the lane at that time of day. I gripped the wheel tighter, determined to stay in the same lane for safety. All in all, a commute on Nicholasville Road isn’t bad. According to my coworkers, whose evening commutes down Richmond Road or Newtown Pike can top an hour, it’s the most predictable commute in town.

Eventually, I could relax my grip on the steering wheel and take in the charm and character of this Lexington landmark. Near the university, the road is flanked by rows of charming large houses, most of which are now divided to let as one-bedroom apartments. Stopped at the Regency Pointe intersection, I regularly notice a squirrel climbing up the pole and scampering across the wire that holds the lane change markers. Obliviously suspended over seven lanes of traffic, he bounds cheerfully to the other side of the road and safety. After completing his shopping at Kmart, I can only assume, he will scamper back to his home, carrying tiny bags of nuts, berries, and perhaps some microwave popcorn. After I pass New Circle Road, the verdigris roofs of Lexington Green are on my right, and I can see the fountain pool that forms a stunning backdrop of Regatta’s Seafood Restaurant. Someday we want to eat there.

As I perfected my Nicholasville Road skills, effortlessly tracking the lane changes, I didn’t have too many problems. Once I waited with my left blinker clicking, suddenly noticing that the cars were honking steadily as they roared past, the tones of their horns dopplering high and then low. What was the matter? Was my turn signal burned out? Was smoke pouring out of my exhaust pipe? Did I have a flat tire? No, I noticed guiltily, I was attempting to turn out of a southbound lane, which had changed over when I wasn't looking. As the Nicholasville Road regulars will tell you, it happens to everybody.

Lexington drivers, though in full possession of Southern manners when they get out of their cars, are fiendishly exacting when surrounded by three tons of SUV. If there is the slightest perceived aberration in my driving, a three-second horn salvo will inform me. If I don't immediately correct, the first blast is just a warm up. Every morning, I dutifully check for an open lane and make a right turn onto Nicholasville after dropping Craig off at work. More often than not, I am greeted by a horn blast. One or more cars, in the time it took me to look forward and initiate the turn, have insinuated themselves into the space I planned to occupy and bear down on me with incredible speed. Affronted, they announce their displeasure at my presumption, their fists lingering on the horn for ten or twelve embarrassing seconds.

After Craig unloads his things and heads off to class, I continue down Nicholasville Road, which becomes historic Limestone Avenue somewhere in the middle of the UK campus. A two-land road becomes abruptly one way, and in the evening I have a choice of several one way streets that parallel Limestone, pointing me back into UK to collect Craig and head home. The strangest part of this section of my journey is the pedestrians. With no regard to crosswalks, stoplights, or safety rules, they barrel nonchalantly into six lanes of traffic, picking their way through the lanes as cars zoom past them on both sides. If caught in an awkward light change, they will stop and gawkishly stand in the middle of the road, waiting for a break in traffic to dart through. On my first trip down Rose Avenue, which cuts through campus to the back of UK Hospital, I dutifully stopped at least thirty times to let pedestrians wandering obliquely to the curb cross in front of me. Not only did I anger the cars behind me, it took twenty minutes to go a mile. I soon mellowed into the local attitude of braking to avoid a collision with a pedestrian but otherwise ignoring them.

Years ago, Craig was one of those pedestrians, daily on foot because he lived close by. He was constantly disgusted by the way cars ignored him, speeding by inches from his legs as he lawfully and carefully crossed an intersection at the crosswalk. I bristled at his account of a woman getting out of her car after hitting him as he bicycled past. Clearly bewildered that HE had not been able to avoid HER, she nevertheless handed out her contact information and took off. Craig never called to ask her to fix his broken bicycle. “Pedestrians have the right-of-way!” I said angrily. “She should have known to stop for you!” Now I see it slightly differently. Lexington drivers, weary of dodging walkers weaving in and out of lanes like players of a Frogger video game, ignore pedestrians as a defense mechanism.

I was also completely unprepared for the way the roads change names and directions at will in Lexington. Continuing on the same street through town, one might experience four name changes. When finding directions, one must look both ways to see if the street you’re looking for gets renamed while crossing the intersection. The best example of this is Main Street, which starts out south as Richmond Road and becomes Leestown Road as it veers north.

Streets in general don't follow the same direction; if lost I sometimes try to angle south but find that the road keeps curving to go east or west. Streets can also suddenly turn one-way, with one direction ending or veering off to become another street. My worst intimation of this fact was when, one week newly arrived and ignorant, I amended the directions I had been given to Ally’s kennel, turning right earlier than I was told because I recognized the area. Immediately, I noticed that I was staring into the grilles of five lanes of oncoming traffic. The familiar street, I discovered, was now one-way, and not going my way. My car limped forward, greeted by horn blasts, until I could duck into the exit of a parking garage and make a U-turn that probably broke six separate traffic ordinances.

On Nicholasville Road’s wagon wheel, all of the main spokes bear the names of the outlying towns. Richmond, Winchester, Paris, Leestown, Harrodsburg, and even Nicholasville point to slightly smaller communities that interconnect with the culture and life of Lexington. Many people live in the outer areas and work in the city, or even the opposite.

Nicholasville, a growing community listed at around 20,000 people, is blurring the boundary between Lexington and itself. The two are sending out feelers of connective tissue in the form of shopping centers and restaurants. Soon only the Fayette County/Jessamine County boundary line will tell us where the two cities part. This could turn out to be confusing. A few weeks ago, I was pointed home on southbound Nicholasville, handling the lane shifts expertly. I whipped out my cell phone and called a carpet store for directions.

“You’re located on Lexington Avenue, right? Where is that?” I asked.

“Well,” said the store clerk, “you get on Nicholasville Road, and we’re four miles past Man O’War,” he directed.

“Okay, I’m on Nicholasville now,” I said, relieved to be close by, “where did you say I turn?”

“You’re IN Nicholasville?” he clarifies.

“No, I’m in Lexington, but I’m ON Nicholasville,” I shot back. “Am I getting close?”

“Well, we’re in the town of Nicholasville, so you have a ways to go. When you get here, you’ll see us on the right,” he instructed.

“Yes, but where do I turn?” I asked, confused.

“You don’t turn. The road curves a little at Brannon Crossing, but you don’t have to turn,” he said cheerfully.

“Well, then how do I get to Lexington Avenue?” I wondered if it was worth the effort to continue.

“What?”

“When I am IN Nicholasville ON Nicholasville, where do I turn to get to you on Lexington Avenue?” I asked again, exasperated.

“Oh!” The light of understanding shone on our benighted conversation, and he gave me a quick local geography lesson. I was in Lexington on Nicholasville Road, but if I kept going south, I would be in Nicholasville on Lexington Avenue. Nicholasville follows the same rules as Lexington does, naming its main artery after the town it leads to.

“It doesn’t confuse the locals,” he chuckled. “You’re not from around here, are you?”