Along Route 62 in southwest Kentucky lies a small town named Big Clifty. Settled in the early 1800s, Big Clifty grew as an agricultural settlement, boosted by the railroad in 1874. The name comes from Clifty Creek’s limestone cliffs. The cliffs are not visible anywhere nearby, but the railroad is a prominent marker that runs through the middle of town. Google AI describes it kindly as a town “known for its self-reliance, strong community and connection to the land…a classic small-town American story, strengthening from its rural beginnings…” — a town that lies in the balance between the 19th and 21st century, but leaning more to the early 20th century, where my story begins.
In early December, on an adventure to move a friend, Terry Parke, from New York City to Dallas, we took a detour and stopped in Big Clifty, the birthplace of his mother, Ruth Terry Parke. Terry recalls fondly his prior visits as a young boy to this place 70 years ago. His grandfather owned a seed and feed store in the middle of town, though the only evidence is an exposed threshold stone on a bare lot. To the north of the store, across a gravel parking lot, the house sits where his mother, his aunt and uncle were born and grew up. Across the street, behind a Dollar General, is a 117-acre field once owned by his grandfather.
Today, on a chilly day in December, we are on a mission. Ruth Parke, who died in 2001, is with us on this trip. Since Terry moved from Columbia, South Carolina, to New York City, his mother’s ashes have resided in a Dunbar Crematory Services cardboard box. As part of Terry’s plan for moving out of New York City, we rented a 10-foot U-Haul to make the drive together. The move included taking his mother’s remains, driving through Big Clifty, Kentucky, and dispersing the ashes in the farm field near Clifty Creek.
We arrived without invitation, unpacked a box of ashes from the back of the U-Haul, and poured them from a plastic bag into a clay urn commissioned from Windwood Studio. Weeks before, Terry sent emails to the current owners of the property. He did not hear back from them. We take our chances and brazenly march over the soft ground to the center of the field. We discover a large circle made by a tractor tread, as if created for the occasion, befitting our spontaneous ceremony.
Videotaping this event on my iPhone, I feel the sacredness and absurdity of the moment. I close my eyes and listen to Terry fumbling with the urn on the ground. I open my eyes and gaze up at the overcast sky. The two of us stand in this open field that once belonged to his grandfather and a stranger now farms. Terry removes a flint Native American knife found in this field by his uncle from a leather pouch that he carries in his breast pocket, plunges it into the soft earth, marking the center of the circle. He takes the urn from the ground, removes the wing-like lid, and sprinkles the ashes in two concentric circles around the artifact. Quietly, he offers a few words for his mother, puts the lid on the urn, and returns the leather pouch with the artifact to his pocket. He resolutely stands and walks in silence across the field toward the U-Haul truck parked on a dirt access road.
I stay behind, in the center of the field, camera aimed down at the dusted circles and slowly pan up to record Terry walking back toward the truck. The camera continues upward to the sky. I hold in this moment a brief thought for Ruth and all life on earth.
As cliché as it sounds, I feel how temporary our time is on the planet, how the circle of birth, death and regeneration continues the cycle of life into the future. Generations of forgotten life go back in time. And generations move forward in time. Terry has no children. His lineage stops here.
I reflect on cemeteries across the country, plots with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of tombstones—recording name, birthdate, and death date. I’m standing here, having recorded this small ceremony, thinking that there is no marker that will remain in the open field. The bits of bone and ash will disappear with the wind and rain back into the farm field, and crops will grow in the spring.
Ruth Terry Parke was a slight, delicate woman. She lived to the age of 84 and gave birth to an only child, who became a friend of mine. She accrued no fortune in fame or money, lived what one might call a simple, unremarkable life.
Here I stand in this forgettable moment in the middle of a farm field in Big Clifty, thinking about the 700 miles left to drive. “On the road again,” as Willie Nelson writes, “seeing things we’ll never see again.”
Terry is driving the truck. We remain in sacred silence, past his mother’s elementary school, now an abandoned business, past the turnoff where his wild cousin raced her pickup on her 16th birthday, past the rusted but still viable railroad trestle once featured on postcards, past the Clarkson cemetery where his mother’s family lies, past the local bank a relative ran, and beside the train track that gave life to this rural area and then took it away when it ended passenger service in the 1940s. A circle of his mother’s spilled cremation ash and bone clings to the bumper for many miles, perhaps all the way to Memphis.