Remember Brown County

“Remember the Alamo!” “Remember the Maine!” “Remember Pearl Harbor!” “Remember to call your Mother!”

~by Mark Blackwell

Remembering is a good thing. The philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Well, that particular word of forewarning is most relevant in those “Groundhog Day” situations where you might find yourself repeating the same idiot behavior that got you into the predicament in the first place. Remembering has a preventative effect—kind of an antidote to stupidity.

But that’s not memory’s only virtue.

Remembering how things were helps to keep a tally of progress—for good or ill. I find it instructive to think back over the fifty years that I have been acquainted with Brown County and the changes that have been made.

When I first came to the county, I came through Gnaw Bone where there was a big flea market and an old-fashioned sorghum mill. The mill operated by having a mule, tethered to a horizontal pole, walk in circles hour after hour to turn the mill that crushed the cane to extract the sorghum syrup.

Back then, I found that mule to be a potent metaphor for a life to be avoided at all cost. I knew that I didn’t want to be tethered to a monotonous life, turning the mill of somebody else’s fortunes. But in the time it took for me to shake off that vision of the future, I turned north onto the Van Buren Street portion of Highway 135. The intersection at the time was occupied by a Dairy Queen and just up the street was McDonald’s Chevrolet dealership.

This was memorable for two reasons. One, was that Nashville, even though it was smaller than it is now, somehow supported a new-car dealer. The other reason is that in the show room window sat a 1954 Corvette. It was one of only 3,640 built, and there it was in little old Nashville.

I remember the old “Ferguson House” shop on west Franklin Street because of the guillotine on the front porch. It was owned by a rather eccentric lady who stocked the shop with antiques, brica-brac, stuffed wolves, and a skeleton in a coffin. The skeleton would on occasion sit up to entertain unsuspecting customers. I remember the smell; it was akin to what the writer Ray Bradbury called “mummy dust.”

Nowadays many of the places and things that I remember are gone. But Brown County is not just Nashville. It is the woods, and parks for hiking and camping, and lakes for boating and fishing.

I like to think back on camping and canoeing with my daughters in Yellowwood State Forest. One time in particular stuck in my mind.

It was in the latter part of the last century, on a sunny summer weekend. The two youngest of my three daughters and I decided to take the canoe down to Yellowwood lake and go camping. We spent that Saturday canoeing, cloud watching, and playing with lily pads. As the afternoon wore on, we landed the boat at the rally campground and proceeded to set up the tent and put together a campfire.

After supper was done and cleanup completed, we ended the day watching the sun go down and treating ourselves to s’mores. With the last of twilight, as the fire began to dance, I decided to tell the girls about the monster catfish of Yellowwood Lake. This was, I thought, a clever ploy to keep the girls close to camp during the evening before bedtime.

The basics of the story are that there is a catfish in the lake that has never been caught. He is very old and very big. He weighs more than 90 pounds and he’s more than 9 feet long with barbels that span more than12 feet. During the day he sleeps in the deepest parts of the lake but after sundown, he wakes and he is hungry.

Now, most catfish do their hunting and feeding at the bottom of the lake, but not this monster. A fish his size has a hard time finding enough food in the lake to satisfy them, so this fish has learned to launch himself up on shore. There he uses his catfish barbels like tentacles, probing the dark beach for campers. Then, upon sensing an unwary camper, the fish would wrap one of its barbels around their legs and back into the lake dragging dinner into the depths.

Well, I’m here to report that the story worked and the girls kept the campfire between them and the lake. I believe it must have been around two or maybe two-thirty in the morning when I was awakened by my youngest daughter saying, “I have to go pee.” I said, “Okay, you know where the outhouse is.” And she said, “I can’t go by myself.” So I said, “Wake your sister up and she will go with you.” But the little darling said that wouldn’t work. I asked,” Why?” And she said that her sister was not big enough to fight the catfish and she had to go right now.

There it was, I was being punished for telling a good story. Of course I had to leave my nice warm sleeping bag and trudge out into the moonlight on a mission of mercy to save my daughter from a catfish that I had invented.

And that is just one of thousands of Brown County memories that I keep in a little storage barn in the backyard of my mind. I advise folks to come on down and make some Brown County memories of your own.