MEACHAM LANE MEMOIRS/Kentucky Dam-Tennessee River 1958/The Rock

 


THE ROCK

Photo by the author 2023

It’s just a rock.  Or is it?  When does an inanimate object breach the precise laws of nature and the universe and become something more?

Perhaps some of the time it intersects with some life form--an animal--a bird--or a child-- in a way that elevates it to a vault of memories-- or alters the course of a life.

I first came to sit on this rock--this limestone composite here beside the swirling waters below Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River--at possibly no more than 12 years of age. 

Anyone that has ever chanced a heart attack and made the descent to fish the periphery of the swift waters below Kentucky Dam on the Tennessee River knows the location of the pile of boulders at the bottom left of their journey down the steep stairway from the parking lot. 

My mother, God bless her, drove to Grand Rivers from our Meacham Lane home in McCracken County, KY every couple of weeks in the summer beginning around 1958 to have her hair done by good friend and fellow member of the Southland Baptist Church, Lois Anderson.

Every trip was an occasion for me to take my rod and reel and a box of redworms from Scotty's Bait Shop on Paducah’s Southside on Highway 62 and to maneuver down those steps to the old round fishing pier and the rock that bordered its crossing.

It wasn’t easy then to secure a place to cast a line with baited hook.  Especially for a skinny kid with white t-shirt, blue jeans, and well-worn tennis shoes carrying a beat-up relic of a metal tackle box and a cheap rod and reel.

The rocks along the river were never empty then, with fishermen often elbow to elbow on a Saturday morning, casting yellow or white nylon do-jigs (dude-jigs), as they were called at the time, into the swirling currents for white bass--locally called "stripers" in the 50's and 60's--yellow bass, and crappie. The area surrounding my rock was often a flurry of the flailing arms of older men, and the hum of lines unfurling on their long casts. They were not especially gracious to a scrawny kid seeking a place among them. 

 

Original photo I believe from Life Magazine

Patience was required to find an opening, and at that particular time in my life I was not blessed with an abundance of it.  It was necessary to find an alternate source to cast a line on more days than not, at least until the rock pile had an opening. 

Often the day was begun with crossing and finding a place on the large round slab of the concrete pier dividing the current, amid a number of fishermen with large metal dip nets dipping time and again for the relentless school of shad and skipjack that were pushed against and around the structure. These were men with boats intent on getting bait to satisfy the appetites of the hungry blue catfish deep in the main channels of the waterway.  A small boy had to choose his spot carefully, to drop his line off the edge of the pier in hopes of catching a blue himself, or maybe a freshwater drum, or striped bass.  

But, one eye was always on the rock. If a void of 20-30 feet around the rock opened, it was always an instantaneous flurry of gathering up gear and making a dash to fill the vacancy.    And once attained, it was never surrendered. The rock was mine. It was a “king of the hill” moment. It was my happy place. Anyone approaching it from then on was greeted with my most ferocious grimace.

The eddy resulting from the swift waters colliding with the concrete pier made a perfect place for a boy to stand and cast a bobber over a worm-baited hook.  I was never disappointed and filled countless stringers with chunky, feisty bluegill, yellow and white bass--intercepted in their shad chase--plenty of drum, and other rough fish.  When bait ran out, I would tie on one of my jigs or-- sometimes having had enough saved to buy a rooster tail spinner, usually feathered in white from Uncle Lee’s incredible tackle selection--and catch even more for the frying pan, crappie and more striped bass.

I always hated it when I looked up to the top of the cascade of rocks by the steps and saw mother waving that it was time to go.

The climb back up was always a lot harder, not just because of the steepness and number of steps to be negotiated, not just because of the tackle box and rod and reel, but because the additional weight of a full stringer of fish was almost more than my bony frame could manage.

I was always tired when I reached the top, seldom in those days resting for even a moment in my ascent--breezes smelling of dead baitfish caught and guillotined in the turbines below the dam--yet sweet with a cool touch on my sun-flushed skin not possible on the rocks by the waters of the canyon below.  

And on attaining the goal of surfacing at the top of the steps, feeling heroic in my Mother’s glance at the stringer of wriggling fish-- I always had to look back--look back at the rock. My rock.

I always knew there would be a next time.  Until there wasn’t.  But the rock is forever a part of my soul, my memories, my innocence, and what it meant to be a boy that loved to fish in1958--in a different time and place from that which we know today, a place now lost in the passage of time, in a different America.

All that remains is the rock.  And of course, my memories. The latter will quickly fade in my declining years.  The former, of course, will remain for many human lifetimes, and somewhere in time, may intersect and become part of another journey, another memory. And maybe, another 12 year old’s “happy place”.

It may not be a rock for you.  But you most likely had a "happy place", too.  In your 12 year old mind you can see it still.  It is a part of you. I hope the recall from memory, the journey there, means as much to you, as the rock does to me. 

  

You can see the outline of the concrete fishing pier just out from the bottom the steps, under water at the time of the snapshot. The "rock", more appropriately the rock pile, is still above water just to the left at the bottom of the steps. Original photo by the author.

 

Copyright by the author, Keith W. Ragan


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