A Stream of Dreams

I carry in the open front pocket of my memory the sights, sounds, and smells of a creek that is as dear to me as Mark Twain's muddy Mississippi River or Herman Melville's blue water oceans of the world.

In many ways Graham Creek, located in Jennings County, and several other counties, in Southern Indiana, was like a later day Eden to me in my years between seven and twenty. A few, all too short, visits have been made over the years of adulthood. Having passed the Biblical three score and ten age I painfully wonder if my last visit was indeed my last visit.

Many a happy moment was spent dreaming of doing a photo rich book about the Graham Creek during all seasons of the year. Time and distance has put a permanent halt on this ambitious plan.

Though it flows for miles, I doubt if I every covered more that five miles of its rocky cliffs and tree lined shore. I think I was in a boat on this stream of dreams only once. I waded large stretches on several days and even a few nights.

My love and fascination with flowing waters, great and small, is perhaps an inherited DNA trait from my maternal grandfather in KY, the place of my birth and early rearing.

The famous Green River in KY was the training laboratory where I was introduced to fishing with long cane poles and trot lines that caught catfish and turtles. Interestingly, my grandfather pronounced turtles as "turkles."

The trot lines were baited with large minnows (pronounced "minners" in KY), small panfish, frogs, baby birds, and even lye soap.

On one run of the trot lines a large turtle was hooked and thankfully came unhooked just as my grandfather attempted to lift the bushel basket size reptile into an 8 foot flat bottom boat. I guess my unexpressed glee cancelled out his extreme and vocal disappointment.

My grandfather caught several 5-10 pound catfish and could clean them either by skinning or scalding the skin off with a tea kettle of boiling water.

He once remarked that a channel catfish would stay alive in a wet gunny sack located under a shade tree. I never saw this attempted.