Tag: Kentucky

Getting Away into Natural Bridge, Kentucky: The ultimate kind of Rebellion, Kindness, and Defiance

April is my birthday month and is always a positive benchmark for me. It’s always been my favorite month with all the life that returns from a long winter, and I always use the month as my own gauge into successes that need to be celebrated and things that need to be improved. But as a treat to myself, I wanted to go on a camping trip to Natural Bridge with as many of my family who could go and get off the grid for a few days in a place I grew up enjoying. My grandparents were from that region of Slade, Kentucky; during prohibition, my grandpa and his family ran moonshine, which I respect. I view moonshine differently than drug dealing for several reasons, even though I dislike intoxication of any kind all the time. I like to see independent and free people pushing back against a tyrannical government, and during prohibition, the government was out of control and deserved to have pushback, and that my grandfather and his father certainly did. Currently, we have a very dangerous government that is way beyond acceptable tyrannical tolerance, so for my birthday, I wanted to revisit a state park from my youth nicely nestled in the foothill mountains of the Appalachians and recharge. Over the last few years, my favorite mode of travel has been RV camping, so I wanted to take ours and live out of it for a few days, which is precisely what we did, and it was a wonderful experience. One of my sons-in-law brought their own camper, so we had a nice little family get-together down in the hills of Natural Bridge, Kentucky, and get away from the government for a bit.

Slade, Kentucky, where the Natural Bridge State Park and the world-famous Red River Gorge are located, is unusual because they have a particular hostility toward big government. Many census takers have found it impossible to do their job because the local residents simply don’t like government. So when you want to get away from big government and deal with people in a traditional Christian background setting in the Bible Belt, there aren’t many places in the world better. I’ve been to Natural Bridge a lot over my life, especially as a little kid. It’s been about ten years since my last visit. It’s not that it’s hard to get to; it’s very close to Cincinnati, Ohio, where I live. But my schedule has been busy; since my last visit, I have traveled around the world a few times, been to many countries, and experienced unique cultures. My opinion about the Slade, Kentucky region isn’t for lack of knowing anything else. But instead, it’s because I’ve seen a lot of other places that I appreciate that one of the best travel destinations there is, in my opinion, one that I knew well from my youth, was literally in my own backyard. It was a lucky experience to have, out of all the places in the world I could have gone, to have such a relationship with literally one of the best places there is. Our camping trip was wonderful, we had a nice campsite nestled in the hills, and we lived off the bare minimums and were able to let the world go for a bit, which was the present I wanted to give myself this year for a well-deserved birthday.

My wife and I started RV camping during Covid, and we will likely never do anything else again. I like hauling around my hotel room, bathroom, and refrigerator. It makes traveling so much better to step away from the grid as much as possible. I have a TV in my RV that we can stop and have a snack to take a break from driving and relax. Camper traveling with an RV has been a great experience, so doing that kind of camping at Natural Bridge brought together parts of the world that are favorites. It was all a gratifying experience. A lot of my family was able to come along, so it was nice to be around them and celebrate life while stepping away from the world of problems that traditionally come from government interference in our lives. Living out of a camper for a week in April of 2023 was enormously rewarding and recharged my spirit considerably. As a family, we had a good trip, and we were all grateful to have it. 

My wife and I had an interesting experience, a few actually, but one that reminded us just how good the world is without government in it. And people still live and get along without the stupid government imposing themselves into our lives. People left alone by government tend to do the right things without having a parental authoritarian in the form of government looming over our shoulders. For example, we went into town for some ingredients for smores and other snacks. And one of the items we needed was more firewood. So we were going to pick some up from a gas station down by the Mountain Parkway with a nice store. But the nice clerk there was a mountain woman from Appalachia, of course, and she told us that the wood that the gas station was selling was too expensive and you didn’t get very much. So she told us to go down the road around 400 yards to a tire mechanic with a little shed behind a Subway restaurant. He was selling a whole-wheel barrel of firewood for ten bucks. So we went down there to see him, and he loaded us up with firewood for our campsite. He had a rough mountain man accent; I would have needed subtitles to understand what he said. But we paid him the ten dollars, and he gave me a very large wheel barrel of wood to load into the back of our hatchback.

We couldn’t understand each other, but we quickly became good friends. That region is famous for many campfires, so he has many customers for his little enterprise due to the many campers who come to climb the world-famous Red River Gorge. It’s kind of a hippie culture, the rock climbers. More libertarian than anything. We probably wouldn’t agree on presidential picks or even drug usage. But we all do share a love of independence. Many of them come and camp with four people in a one-person dome tent with hundreds of others who can barely rub two dimes together in their pockets. And I find them refreshing, especially at Miguel’s Pizza, where they hang out. I’ve had pizza from everywhere, and the pizza they have at Miguel’s is a real treat. It was wonderful to pick some of it up and take it back to our campsite, where I had my reading chair set up next to the fire as all the kids played and enjoyed each other, and I had a stack of books to read well into the night as the sun set outlining the mountain tops and the dark sky stars made themselves obvious. It was a nice place to be, and it was certainly a great birthday present for me. No matter how much money you throw at recreation, it never gets better than that. 

Rich Hoffman

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The Tornados of Mayfield, Kentucky: Government using tragedy to grab more power for themselves

The Government Power Grab after the Tornados of Kentucky

It’s more than worth it after the media tried to portray Rand Paul negatively after asking for tornado disaster relief for his state to tackle a usually obscure issue of government interference.  Paul has a history of speaking out against every little bailout, but I understand Rand Paul and Mitch McConnell’s problem in Kentucky.  In many ways, it’s the only thing they can do now that the government has embedded itself into people’s lives the way they have.  They really have no choice.  Saying no to federal money would be like denying people surgery after they’ve lost a leg.  The only option but to bleed to death really isn’t practical. This topic deserves some analysis for the many evils that come after the tornados ruined the lives of many thousands of people in Western Kentucky, an area I know very well.

In some cases, there was a tornado on the ground for over 200 miles, so the level of destruction was enormous, even to the point where Rand Paul had to put his differences aside and ask for federal money when he clearly, otherwise wouldn’t.  There is something else at work here that is much more sinister than the tornados themselves.  In a drool of excitement, the media revealed it, and it’s something we must all contend with while dealing with these issues in the future.  The media and their partners in government ultimately want a universal wage to pay people and control them totally. To get there, they have an anti-work attitude about everything hoping to rob people of their joy of work so that the universal wage can become possible.  Where people would just accept the government check, accept what role the government gives them in a heavily managed economy, and lower their standard of living to such an extent that the government could justifiably become everybody’s parents from the perspective of a panel of experts who themselves are nothing but lazy slugs looking for a government check. 

The instant target was a candle factory in Mayfield, where reports were that the management there ordered workers to continue working even during the tornado sirens.  The communist governor Andy Beshear has stuck his nose into the situation to promise an investigation.  The media and government both quickly jumped into an anti-work sentiment indicating that safety is always first, no matter what.  Now, I have a long history with this kind of thing, and honestly, I would have kept working.  When there is something to be done, nothing comes between me or it.  However, the rules say that you are responsible for their safety if you employ people, so I would have let the employees seek shelter or even gone home.  If it had been me in charge that night at the candle factory, I would have been tracking the storm on my phone, and when the red part of the cell hit our area and moved on, I would have then had everyone return to their jobs.  The whole tornado drill would have lasted about 15 minutes.  The employees could have worked a little overtime to compensate for the lost time.  But, I can see why the management would have been skeptical of the storms and the weather reports.  Usually, the news is wrong about these kinds of things, just as they have been over Covid.  So when the media cries wolf too many times, people just stop listening.  Tornados in December are pretty rare, and I can see how management would have thought it a safe bet to ignore the news and keep working.  After all, some things needed to be done, and just because the media says something, it suddenly doesn’t make everyone who hears it culpable.  You see, that is the little secret that is really behind all this.  The media wants to do the bidding of the government and claim powers it doesn’t have, such as telling people when it’s safe to work and when it isn’t.  And they use every little tragedy that might come along to gain that power little by little.  So the management of companies that did not run for their lives when the media reported a tornado warning is under attack not just for not believing the news or ignoring the information, but in putting work and the need of it over all else.

I’ve ridden bicycles in tornados, I’ve worked through serious tragedies, I’ve steamrolled through every kind of problem imaginable.  There have been times when my wife and I only had one car, and I’d ride a motorcycle through snowstorms to get to work.  I am one of those never-call-off types.  Work is always the most important thing to me, to hell with what the rest of the world thinks.  And yes, I have been in charge of many workers under dangerous conditions, and everyone has always gone home without harm to their families at the end of their shifts.  People might get angry with me, but so what.  If there is work to do, that is always the highest priority, end of the story.  The media and government have been trying over a long period to gain control of work through socialism, regulation, emergency powers such as they did with Covid, and to throttle productivity into something they control.  Every time there is a tragedy like these tornados in Kentucky or a hurricane in the south, the government can’t wait to pass out confiscated wealth to the victims so that they can then set new rules against the qualification of money because they have become so litigious that all human resource departments are now slaves to every little government whim.    And in that way, Rand Paul had no choice but to take money from the federal government to help the victims.  Because that good ol’ fashioned “can-do” spirit that is quite well-known in regions like Western Kentucky is destroyed under the liability of making the wrong decision according to the government.  And nobody wants to take that chance. 

The government stuck its nose in our economy over Covid, and we have never recovered.  That is why fast food lines are taking too long, shipping is stuck in ports, and planes are canceling flights.  The government creates a liability to alter behavior and, thus, to tamper with the enthusiasm to be productive.  Most of the time, the media gets tornado warnings wrong, and even though that candle factory was pressed to fulfill orders during a holiday season, and the Amazon plant there was trying to stay on top of things, tornado or not, everyone would have gone home except for this extraordinary situation of a perfect December storm.  Without question, it was wrong not to let workers seek shelter, and people did die.  But, the government doesn’t really care about those deaths; what they want out of this tragedy is more control.  The management had the liability to follow the storm and to listen to what the “experts” said.  And because they put productivity over safety, according to the government, they are now accountable for what nature did to them.  And companies all across the country are watching and taking note.  When people wonder how companies become so “woke,” this is how.  They overreact to every government action because it’s really the only way they can stay in business.  And when compliance to the government becomes more important than the productivity of industrious effort, you have an economy that is moving more to the static. You are putting up with government interference that is far worse than the death of a freakish storm.  You have tyranny that is disguised behind safety and a government that looks to eat all innocent people in its perpetual desire to grow and dominate our lives from behind a desk of bureaucracy and wants to rule us all without the risk of a physical, risky takeover.

Rich Hoffman

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A Hung Effigy of Governor Andy Breshear: We don’t need parents in government, we need represenatives

I’ve had to explain it too many times to people from outside our state of Ohio, and with them knowing that its not uncommon for me to associate with politicians, especially at a high level, that Mike DeWine is a Republican in name only. Governor DeWine is not a rock star in political circles and is essentially a crotchety old man who falls off the mark quickly if things get too complicated. My idea of a good Republican governor in the wake of a Covid-19 measurement is Kristi Noem of South Dakota. She handled the coronavirus correctly, as did several of the other governors in more populous states, like Georgia and South Carolina. When DeWine won out in the primary I supported him because he had the “R” next to his name but I wanted Mary Taylor. My expectation of Republican leadership is someone like Kristi Noem, in just about every situation and Mary likely would have given Ohio that. But as I explained, DeWine lost me when he shut down the bars and restaurants back in March of 2020 forever and that is the difference between Republicans and Democrats. Republicans do vet their own while Democrats hang together like frat boys who screwed the same stripper at an initiation party. They never turn on each other. But Republicans do because they have values and when politicians go astray, there are consequences that conservatives are quick to express. Democrats don’t stand for values, so they don’t use them to measure behavior. Its that simple.

That is why even as I do speak with respectable Republicans about their division over what’s happening in Kentucky as protestors over the weekend erected an effigy of the tyrant governor, Andy Breshear at the state capital of the dictator hanging from a tree with the statement “sic semper tryannis” painted upon it, I side clearly with the protestors and my opinion of any Republican coming out against that action as weak. I don’t really care what history did at some point in the Civil War and whether or not a party comes down on the side of Lincoln or the rebels of that time period, we are living history now. We just went through the most stupid thing that humans have ever done to themselves across the world with the reaction to Covid-19 shutting down the economy all over earth over nothing, so the context of history is being written. You can’t study something like this in a book, there is no precedence for this level of stupidity, and people victimized by the idiotic behavior of these politicians wants somebody’s ass to pay for all the misery they caused. And who could blame them? It doesn’t matter that Mike DeWine is a Republican, or that Andy Breshear is a Democrat, they both became tyrants against constitutional concepts and they broke the law as the top lawmakers in their states—and for that there is either going to be an ass-kicking, or a change inspired through elections. Something must happen and the longer it doesn’t, people are going to get more and more angry.

The media position in this incident is all wrong, to use peer pressure to inspire behavioral change in the protestors by saying both Republicans and Democrats condemn this behavior of hanging an effigy of Breshear in a tree as a warning. Nobody cares what Republicans and Democrats think if those people don’t do the job they were elected to do and that is to manage their offices that they hold without bringing trouble to the people who elected them. When governors take it upon themselves to interpret their jobs to be parents of everyone, well, they have failed to do honor to their office and must be held accountable. Breshear has been following DeWine in Ohio for most of the Covid-19 shutdowns and going further just to put a liberal spin on things, and that has really crippled Kentucky. What Breshear has been doing has been madness to put it lightly. But so is what DeWine has done and both of these governors have been getting off easy to only have minor threats against them made with something like these effigies. To infringe upon constitutional liberties of people really is an act of war of a loser government against the people its supposed to protect. Protecting people from a silly, overblown virus is not in the oath that the governors take. Protecting their rights to the constitution is, and when they openly violate that, they are opening themselves up to the wrath of a very angry people. Nobody cares what Mitch McConnnell thinks about the effigy against Breshear. Nobody needs a lecture on the First Amendment, but politicians do need a lecture on the 2nd. There is a place for hate in this world and when politicians take advantage of the trust that voters put into them, and when politicians destroy jobs and livelihoods of people and their families, you bet your ass that there is room for hate.

This is the same Breshear who had police writing down the license plates of people attending church services during Easter Sunday services. Without the threats of violence, people like Breshear hide behind the law his desire for complete dictatorship over the people he’s supposed to protect, then blames it on concern for their safety. People see through that and they are angry, and they damn well should be. The 2nd Amendment isn’t for hunting rabbits, its for taking back our government from people like Breshear, DeWine and that crazy lunatic in Michigan Gretchen Whitmer. All those governors have shown that they will violate the state and federal constitutions on a whim and they need to understand that if they break the law that there will be ramifications. When people lose faith in the law and the courts, they will turn to guns and violence. That is part of the deal and is the last line of defense in any constitutional debate. All politicians should understand this basic agreement and know that if they lose themselves to power, then people will be coming after them.

The fear that politicians and members of the media are expressing is that civility is how they gain their power. When people see that civility is being used against them to destroy their lives, as has been the case across the world over Covid-19, then their only recourse is violent rebellion. Everyone should give people credit for hanging an effigy and expressing their anger before actually going through with such a violent task. The warning should be appreciated, not demeaned. Breshear should consider himself lucky that the people of Kentucky gave him a warning before ripping his ass out of his bed at night to throw him out of office. Because honestly, the people of Kentucky have that right due to the gross violations to their constitutional sanctity. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Republican or a Democrat who committed the crime, people have a right to be pissed off about it, and what we do from here on out will make history. Because what brought us here is so bad, there is no precedent to reflect on. Compliance is not an option when politicians break the law, no matter how much for our own good they think they were acting. We didn’t elect parents to run our government, we elected representatives. But when those representatives start acting like dictators, well, that’s when things must change no matter what means is necessary to achieve it. Politicians need to stop lecturing us like parents and start listening as representatives. If people are that mad that they’ll hang such an effigy that should be a valued warning that all elected officials should pay attention to. There is no law to protect them when they go so far to step over the law to satisfy some desire for power at the expense of the people they are supposed to be representing.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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The River Link Scam: Louisville’s theft of the innocent through a toll bridge to depraved economic activity in Clarksville

What a scam I ran into in Louisville Kentucky! It was a few weeks before Christmas and my family was going south to celebrate early. This year my kids were going with their grandparents and cousins to a dinner theater over in Clarksville which was across the river from Louisville and just upstream from the Falls of the Ohio. My wife and I were going to watch their kids while my kids went to the show. So we dropped off everyone, kept the kids, then went back across the river to keep the little ones busy so their parents could enjoy the show. As we approached the 1-65 bridge over into Clarksville we saw signs indicating that it was a toll bridge, but I never saw a booth for collection, so we figured being out-of-town that the toll had expired some time in the past and that the local government hadn’t taken down the signs. That’s the way it’s worked in other places in the country, so we just went about our way doing our business and figured the issue was over. 6 weeks later, on the night of the government shut-down ironically, we received this letter in the mail from some loser outfit called River Link saying that we owed $16 for our use of that bridge that day which I thought was astounding. They sent an invoice with a picture of our car on it and our license plate demanding payment and my first thought was—where were the pricing indications so I could have made a decision? If I had known the price, I would have found another way across the river. But it was clear that this River Link organization with the politicians behind them meant to use that bridge as a revenue trap—and that their information postings were deliberately vague, because they wanted nice families like mine to do just as we did—and pay for the mismanagement of Louisville’s resources with a bunch of lazy losers who let intrusive street cameras do the work of toll collecting to satisfy their inflated budgets and scandalous activity politically over the years.

http://www.wdrb.com/story/30483478/louisville-area-toll-bridge-system-to-be-called-riverlink

My wife wanted to just pay the fee, and I imagine that there are many thousands, if not millions of people just like her who are willing to say “it’s only $16 dollars, let’s just pay it.” But I told her that we should shit in the envelope and send that to those bastards because what they did was deliberately deceitful and a practice which tells a story about our greater needs as a nation as we debate how to fund all our infrastructure projects. This River Link organization and the toll on that bridge is only a few years old as of this year of 2018—so it’s a very new thing this idea of a toll booth free collection racket. I suppose from their point of view its better than backing up traffic on a bridge, so the local government can pay for it. Such contemplations have been going on in Cincinnati where there is a tremendous need for a new bridge serving I-75 going from Cincinnati to Covington, Kentucky—and a toll has been one proposal for funding it. But the problem of stopping traffic to collect the toll is not attractive because of the volume of traffic that goes through that region. It was essentially the same situation in Louisville, the main artery north out of the city is the I-64/I-65 bridge. The bridge looked nice, but I was surprised how few people were using it—now I understand why.

While we were waiting for our kids to finish their show we had a lot of time to kill. We were getting hungry but didn’t want to miss the pick-up time so my wife and I drove around Clarksville to grab a bite to eat, and I was pretty shocked at how run down and swanky everything was. I could see downtown Louisville literally just a mile or so away yet there was nothing in Clarksville worth doing. We found a Hardees restaurant—which was the only place off the highway to eat for several miles and it was in such bad shape that we passed. For me that’s a big deal because I never remember passing on a good hamburger. The condition of the building and the look of the people inside sent enough alarm bells that we drove away hungry and happy to avoid the experience—and no the workers were not black. They looked like toothless Appalachians that had the sanitation of a dirty diaper. I couldn’t figure out for the life of me why several exits of a nice highway that is the main artery out of the city of Louisville didn’t have more to offer consumers. I mean wasn’t there a lunch crowd and dinner rush that would leave the city for a break? After I received the invoice from River Link I understood what the locals already knew. The toll to go across the bridge and come back into the city was too great—it would exceed the cost of lunch—so nobody was using the bridge or buying food in Clarksville—which is why there were so many undeveloped storefronts everywhere we drove.

When I picked up my kids we all had a laugh at what a dump the dinner theater was. It was pretty nice inside but on the outside, it looked like the whole building was about to fall over. Across the street was a campground that had a bunch of hippie losers sitting around a fire in the dead of winter so I had to ask if this was Louisville’s idea of “social life.” My wife’s parents live in a million-dollar home on the east side in Oldham County where a lot of horse breeders live. My past impression of Louisville was cast by that part of town, I don’t typically get to see the results of all the liberalism that has destroyed the inner loop of the I-264 band around the downtown area. But it was obvious going across the river and looking south back into the city and the results of the surrounding communities like Clarksville what had happened to them—liberalism had destroyed their opportunities and robbed them of a future. The hippies outside of the dinner theater where just one result—those people were reserved to give up on life and sit by the fire making smores on a Saturday afternoon ahead of Christmas—and that was all that was going on in Clarksville. My wife and I drove down to the river and along it and noticed several developments that had been attempted, but were left unfinished, likely because the toll bridge had destroyed their opportunities for profit. We drove down to the Falls, and there was still nothing, just a bunch of empty opportunities—an economy in decline.

To us, my wife and I, $16 is a typical tip for a dinner—but I remember very well when it was like a million dollars to us. On principle, I consider that toll to be a major rip off in Louisville. As I told my wife not to pay the fee I was certain that the issue could be fought in court and that my state did not have an agreement with Kentucky to collect such horrendous abuses of authority. Indiana and Kentucky have such agreements with each other, but Ohio does not as of yet. Fighting that in court however would cost more money than the stupid fee and that’s what these liberal toll collectors are counting on, nice people like us to just pay the fine and go about our business while they mismanage the undisclosed tax under the guise of “paying for a bridge.” What did they do with all their federal and state dollars which should have built that bridge without a toll? They wasted it is what they did. Louisville is a liberal city ran by liberal losers and those types of people are always starving for money—because they lack discipline and a basic understanding of value. To a liberal empathy is a value. To a conservative—its an emotion. Emotions don’t pay bills, value does. This toll across Louisville’s main bridge over into Indiana is a theft of value to fund those who don’t have it. It’s that simple. Clarksville is the proof and as long that toll bridge is in place—they’ll get more and more of the depraved conditions for which I have described.

Rich Hoffman
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The Ark Encounter: A real life Jurassic Park with a noble goal of saving its guests from eternal damnation

IMG_4753After visiting many Buddhist shrines in Japan and having direct contact with their national culture it has been very obvious that the United States has been deeply damaged by the loss of Christianity as the primary, unifying religion.  In Japan they have at least a basic understanding of culture as a nation which unifies them toward basic tasks successfully.  So I have watched what Ken Ham has been doing down in Kentucky for quite some time with a hopeful eye.  I’m not a “young earth” believer but as any reader here knows I love functional mythologies and think that often there are great truths in the stories of culture that point to important needs all human beings have—so a functional mythology is essential to human existence.  By allowing Christianity to be pushed from our culture as a solidifying force, it has harmed the United States politically, economically—but most of all spiritually.  So When Ken Ham and his organization opened the Ark Experience a year ago as of this writing I was very intrigued.  I have been meaning to go but have been very busy with travels around the world—particularly a visit to the Canterbury Cathedral and Stonehenge that were high on my priority list.  However, a day shy of its one year anniversary my wife and I took a midweek Thursday afternoon trip to see the recreation of Noah’s Ark in the Kentucky hillsides and were quite astonished by what we found there relative to our travels.

My primary objective in going was to compare the size of the Ark to the Zheng He treasure ships of 1401 AD which were just a bit smaller than the massive 510 foot long, 51’ high Noah’s Ark recreation at Williamstown, Kentucky—one of those previously lonely exists on I-75 about halfway between Lexington and Cincinnati.  After all, a ship that big would clearly show how ancient cultures traveled the world well before Christopher Columbus so I was able to visit the Ark Experience with a clear understanding that much of our sciences are still in their infancy and are not correct about traditional historic formulations.   People have been building ships the size of Noah’s Ark for many years.

One of the reasons that the Christopher Columbus and Mayflower voyages were so miserable was that the ships were just so small.  Water was hard to come by and living quarters were cramped.  Zheng he was able to grow food on the decks of his massive fleet back in 1421 as he was circumnavigating the globe showing off the wealth of the Ming Dynasty to the world.  But even better was the access to all the fresh water that the big ships captured from rain at sea. The large decks could sustain a massive crew for quite a long time allowing travelers to navigate long voyages for a sustained period of time without hardship—and that was the key to ancient travel around the world much earlier than European historians wanted to admit.   So Ken Ham’s Ark and the details of how it worked was something I was interested in seeing.

What I discovered was that The Ark Encounter was essentially the emergence of a real life Jurassic Park which was all I could think of while visiting—only the theme was not resurrecting long dead dinosaurs—which ironically are part of the Ark Experience—but it was in resurrecting the Christian evangelicals into a theme park of their own by dusting off the 2000 year old religion into a modern functional mythology.  It was an ambitious enterprise to say the least.  After just returning from Stonehenge the way that Ken Ham had the whole park set up reminded me of how the English Heritage have set up that classic site to tourists.  All have taken a page out of the Disney playbook at the Magic Kingdom in that you can’t get to their attractions on foot; you have to be transported there to separate you from the outside world.  In the case of the Ark Experience tour busses take you from the parking lot to the Ark itself over a mile long road that carries you to the destination.   After buying our $40 dollar tickets and noticing that the parking lot was filled at just 10 AM in the morning with cars from every single state east of the Mississippi River—and many cars from well west, it was obvious that something very special was going on.  The way that you got onto the buses and arrived at Noah’s Ark reminded me of the way John Hammond took visitors to his fictional Jurassic Park in the now famous book and movie.

In doing a little research for The Ark Encounter it was obvious to me that Ken Ham was very much like a John Hammond type of person.  I always liked the Jurassic Park movies but I was always impressed with John Hammond’s character in the novel—which was given great respect in the first Jurassic Park movie with the charismatic Richard Attenborough.  It takes a lot to start a theme park in the middle of nowhere—especially when the cost of entry is so high.   At least the fictional John Hammond character of Jurassic Park had dinosaurs to lure in visitors. What the real life Ken Ham has done was significantly harder—he endeavored to create a $100 million dollar evangelical amusement park about essentially recruiting people back to Christ.  Using the Ark as a metaphor to tell the story of God’s first attempt to save mankind from sin by picking the favored Noah to be all that saves life on planet earth from the punishment of mankind’s wicked ways—the third floor inside the Ark delivers the essential message—that Christ is the second ark and all you have to do to ride it is accept Jesus Christ as your savior and all is good in the world.  It was nothing short of optimistic but as I watched the presentation which was very carefully planned to overcome whatever modern opposition a visitor might have had from the outside world it was easy to like what Ken Ham was doing.

Like Jurassic Park the Ark Encounter isn’t quite finished–but they had what counts—the massive Ark which is the largest wooden structure on earth currently.  It is worth the price of admission just to see it.  Built by Amish craftsman to the kind of perfection they are known for, it became obvious quickly that the entire site serves to inspire people toward Christianity with overwhelming optimism.   The park itself had construction going on everywhere and was led by a charismatic president of the operation who narrated the arrival with the kind of fanfare only seen previously in fiction.  By only hiring people of the faith, there are no gay people or sour employees who were covered in body piercings and experimenting with atheism to muddy the experience, the whole place had a workforce much like Chick-fil-A where they wanted to be there and enjoyed the visit by the guests.   They currently have open the Ark—which by itself is worth the money, but they also have a nice little zoo and a few gift shops.  There is a zipline experience to help bring a little adventure to the park with obvious big ideas blooming later as the park matures.  But I think where the Ark Experience really shined was at their very nice restaurant called Emzara’s.IMG_4790

The gift shop was very impressive at the back of the Ark.  In it was a lot of material designed to be keepsakes, but I thought the best of it was of course the book selections.  There is a lot of reading material to delve into.  I don’t think it’s important at a place like the Ark Encounter for everything to be factual—after all, I’ve been to the actual Jurassic Park at Universal Studios and nothing they had there was real—but people suspended belief long enough to enjoy a functional mythology designed to get visitors to at least ask the “what if” questions.  At the Ark Encounter there is an obvious message of evangelical scholarship that is going on.  Nobody is force feeding anything but the opportunities are obvious and they most bloom from that short walk from the back of the Ark into the wonderfully spacious Emzara’s restaurant.

That place had a buffet style offering with abundant food to satisfy the sensibilities of southern expectations in America—and it’s big—designed to handle thousands of customers comfortably.  The building is two stories and also offers outside seating very spaciously provided.   That’s where my wife and I ate, away from the noise downstairs where things were a bit quieter on the second story.  It was up there where I saw several young people with open laptops off in the corner reading and doing Christian based research with their peers.  It was like church only at an amusement park with all the optimism that comes from such a place.  That’s where it was most obvious the brilliance of Ken Ham’s work there.   He has essentially created a Biblical refuge from the outside world where scholarship can be explored in the context of real scale to open up the thought process toward evangelical thinking.

Obviously, and it’s already happening, Ken Ham plans to make that 1-75 exit 154 an evangelical dedicated enterprise where the persecuted can gather to recharge together in the masses and return to the world to spread the word of God.  What he has created from nothing reminded me a lot of the early days of Disney World in Orlando.  It doesn’t take much imagination to see where things are going—rapidly.  The place is built to handle crowds and as I said, we were there on a Thursday afternoon just an hour after the place opened and the parking lot was full.  People were coming from more than 1000 miles in some cases to visit and I didn’t see a single beat up car in the parking lot.  The kind of people I saw visiting were good, hard-working people who were personally successful enough to have new cars to drive and families with two to four children who attend church regularly.  They were not the dregs of society let me put it that way–and they were willing to drive out of their way and spend a lot of money to see a life-sized Ark, shop at the abundant gift shop and eat at Emzara’s.  There is no pretense that you have to agree with Ken Ham’s “young earth” theories.  If viewed as a functioning mythology, there are a lot worse things for people to be thinking about.  But at least at the Ark Experience good people have been given an opportunity to spend some time around other good people with a soft sale of immortal enlightenment and let me tell you something folks—that’s a very powerful thing in our young American culture.  The Ark Experience is worth the trip, the money, and the hope it has for the soul of mankind and its “think big” massage is timely, and potent.  I predict big things happening in Williamstown, Kentucky over the next decade—and beyond.  And maybe, just maybe—we’ll find that America can find its national identity and return to a foundation rooted in Biblical scholarship which unifies our nation productively, and spiritually for the better.

Rich Hoffman

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