Life by rheotaxis, part 2
By Wesley Houp
George Wesley Houp II was born in 1897 in a nondescript but cozy shanty located just up Cedar Run, an unremarkable, spring fed stream that rises near the crossroads community of Burgin in Mercer county and falls precipitously, as do most streams in the palisades section of the Kentucky, emboldened by the clear waters of several more significant springs, to its mouth in the shadow and downstream eddy of High Bridge.
As a child, Wes (he would later add an extra “s” to his signature) had a front-row seat to what was, undoubtedly, the most monumental makeover in American railroad history: the widening of High Bridge from single to double-track. With minimal disruption to rail-traffic, the Southern Railroad Co. completed this herculean feat in 1909 (a year engraved and still visible on the southernmost pier). The old bridge remained intact and was slowly subsumed by a new exoskeleton.
For many railroad and engineering enthusiasts, the new structure represented a certain loss of grace and delicacy with which the old bridge spanned the chasm of the Kentucky. For all those familiar with the original structure, the new one effectively shrank the scope of the river valley, its giant iron girders and supports visually pulling the palisades closer together—an optical illusion of modern proportion. The new dwarfed the old and to a large extent bled all sense of wonderment from this 19th century engineering marvel. For years afterwards, residents and sightseers alike, including young Wes, sighed in disgust—a kind of nostalgic gag-reflex—on sight of its oafish form.
But rebuilding the bridge was only the first of several monumental changes the new century delivered. Of far greater consequence was the damming of the Dix River four miles up from the confluence and construction of the area’s first hydroelectric power plant completed in 1927.
When Wes was just still an infant, construction on Lock and Dam 7 commenced just downstream from High Bridge. By the time he was a young man, the community of High Bridge had become a primary tourist destination for rail and river travelers alike. On the weekends, steamboats would bring revelers up from distant, downstream cities such as Frankfort and Louisville (on the Ohio) for a few days of sightseeing and a few nights of dancing.
Wes gained a reputation as a dapper-dandy, a soft-shoe peddler, arms opened and humming with some kind of confounded magnetism, rough yet refined. The ladies would pass, then suddenly wheel about as if fashioned from irresistible steel (surprising even themselves with their newfound carelessness), landing flushed and dizzy in his embrace. On more than one occasion, as the story goes, he bumped his face against the clinched fists of some slighted beau and slighted the tight jaw of more than one tender whelp himself. But ever-nimble on foot and wit, Wes never lost his cool…completely…never had to be carried off the deck or off the boat, always hit the gangplank upright and of his own accord.
Dancing on the Falls City II must have been the highlight to an otherwise humble, quiet life. Later on he married Maggie Savage, a potently dour woman from upriver in Estill County, who sported a bonnet and chewed tobacco for most of her 97 years. Whether or not the life they made together was satisfying to either of them can be left to conjecture. In 1953, after raising four children, Wes walked out of the cabin one morning, crossed the road, and wound down the path to “Whispering Springs,” a familiar watering hole for local farmers. No one knows why, but he laced a dipper-draught of spring water with Paris green, drank it down, and was dead by nightfall.
The Fur-Trade
Two years after Wes’s death, his grandson, Ronald E. Houp, (or “Peanut” to all the old-timers from High Bridge), enlisted in the Marine Corps at the age of seventeen. He was a well-mannered, even-keeled young man, mostly unenthused with human company and given to day-long meanderings across the rolling fields, deep woods, and lush gorges around High Bridge. He’d grown up working in his grandfather’s tobacco patch, along side his older cousin, Thomas “Snake” Houp, whose daily complaint concerned Peanut’s preoccupation with the details of tobacco patch ecosystems. “Papaw, don’t send Peanut to the spring. It’ll be an hour before we get our drink of water ‘cause he’ll be catching whirligigs, doodlebugs, or craw daddies.” Snake was right. Peanut did in fact have a fascination for the insect world and the spiral of worlds issuing ever up and out in increasing molecular intensities.
After his stint in the crotch, he returned to High Bridge, knocked around doing this and that, grease-monkey, tobacco-hand, assembly-line worker. He familiarized himself with the seedier bars on the south side of Lexington, Bolivar Street and the old train station, 1958.
In the fall of ’59 he immersed himself wholeheartedly in the Kentucky River fur-trade. He’d learned to trap along the river as a boy, mainly muskrats. It took him several seasons before he trapped his first mink, the wiliest species of Mustela. Apparently, with each traversing, the mink picks up on the smallest of alterations, a broken twig, a heavy footprint, even a leaf out of place, and most often will abandon that particular route in favor of another. It’s like you have to float in on the air, set your trap from a state of suspended animation, and hold your breath. For a kid, bagging a mink was a pretty big deal, and back then in the early fifties, a mink pelt brought 35 dollars, serious knocking around coinage.
But in the fall of ’59, he had his sights set on a different level of commitment: he would run his traps, but more than that, he would live out the winter and spring on the river, a small v-hull aluminum boat with a piecemeal 10-horse Mercury his only mode of transport. Granted he came to town from time to time to stock up on provisions, gas for the outboard, batteries for the flashlight, but for the most part of four months he moved in river-time, filling mornings and afternoons with exploration of the watershed and the numerous, isolated hollows, running traps by night on a sixteen mile stretch of the Kentucky and the Dix.
He slept in a tent and on the ground beneath the stars, and on particularly nasty nights took refuge in either one of two established fish-camp shanties upstream (one, still standing, across from Bowman’s Bend that Georgie Horton built in the late ‘40s, the other across from Handy’s Bend and the Fox Bend farm that Sprout Horton built in the early ‘40s). Up the Dix, he had a small cabin and a small bookshelf with works by London and Hemingway, narratives befitting a man alone with his thoughts in the unlikely wilderness of his home place. For four months commitment, he showed around 50 fox pelts, mostly grays with some reds, twice as many muskrats, and several dozen minks and ermine.
He continued to trap, even after I (his youngest son) was born some ten years later, and sell fur pelts until a game-changing encounter with a big sow coon. She’d sprung a trap set for muskrat along a remote bank on the Kentucky. Her determination to be free wrecked the ground around her, the earth furrowed by her tiny claws, and she finally settled on gnawing off her own leg.
He found the trap with the gnawed-off leg still attached and, peering over the high bank, located her distorted, ragged body tangled in the roots of an ancient basswood and drowned at the river’s edge. “I’d had enough killing for one lifetime,” he later told me, and at that moment in the early 1970s he resigned from trapping and hunting altogether.
Young, Married, and Living By
In 1993, after six-month’s honeymoon in the Glyndon Hotel in Richmond, Kentucky, Laura and I moved to 1325 Dix Drive, which, at the time, was the fourth house from the end of the road, a non-descript split level, all above grade, with a deck, some whiskey barrel halves, and a stretch of riverfront between two giant water maples primed for the human equivalent of an otter slide. We were just downstream and across the river from Slade’s Hollow, a small rivulet casting an even smaller towhead forming the southern boundary of Bowman’s Bend on the Garrard County side (and where George and Amanda Horn—yet another set of ancestors—succumbed to the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918-1919).
At the end of Dix Drive, a nine acre plot pinched the upstream bank past two springs and narrowed to a beech leaf-littered slope inhabited only by ghost-men…river rats from the distant past like “Pigtail” Anderson, “Fuzzy” McGuiness, and Georgie Horton, men who still loom large overhead in the foggy palisades of my childhood, smiling, rowing handmade johnboats, drinking clear liquor from mason jars. The lot at the end of the road was mostly cleared, with a few mammoth poplars, reminiscent of some earlier river-scape that today only shimmers, unarticulated, in the gene-pools of Daniel Boone and John Harrod. This little Eden was, and is still, owned by one Roy Lee Barns, the unofficial official mayor of Dix Drive, a quasi-retired river-rat who acquired his dead-end paradise for peanuts in the great postdiluvian riverfront sell-out of 1978.
Ever the mindful neighbor, Roy introduced me to the art of “poaching” trout in the tail waters of Dix River. Two miles up from the confluence, a sign on the Mercer County sides announces to all would-be anglers the beginning of the “artificial bait only” section that continues all the way to the earthen dam below Herrington Lake. The sign is large enough to shoot at and small enough to miss. I’ve done both.
From Roy, I learned the art of tying night crawlers, halving them, looping the slimy, squiggly sections on a gold #2 Eagle Claw, and leaving an inch or two to writhe and flirt in the current. Deadline was the preferred method of choice, a couple of Gremlin split-shots biting the line several feet above the hook. It’s my firm conviction given a long weekend and sufficient supply of live bait, a man could catch every trout in Dix River.
And why not? They’re certainly not a native species, and besides the “trout-truck” would just reappear with its sloshing load and re-up the river. No harm done. Plus, I’ve always gotten a kick out of pissing off the fishing elite, fuckwits from the pages of the Orvis catalog who blather on about purity of form and catch-and-release—two phrases that carry little truck for me up the Dix and certainly none on the Kentucky. If you’re a purist, take your shiny, new Gheenoe, thousand dollar fly rod and reel, overpriced waders, vest, hat, and dry-fly box out west and fish the native populations.
For me, it’s always been “catch-and-relief”—from hunger. During the lean, between-jobs-summer of ’95, Dix River trout and Idaho potatoes accounted for, well, our entire diet. We had trout on the grill, trout on a stick, trout casserole, trout and bean soup. Smoked, barbequed, pan-fried, deep-fried, baked, broiled, and roasted. I took on the smell of trout and couldn’t wash it off in the shower. Our tiny freezer was jam-packed with bags of trout. On the weekends we’d have friends over for trout and wine, and in the mornings we’d have trout and eggs. In the words of Stephan Porter of the Bald Knob String Band, “The trout truck’s a-coming, there’ll be a fish-fry tonight!” And tomorrow night, and the next night, and…
Honestly, I have nothing against fly fishing or trout. Rightly done, casting flies is an art form, a choreographed (and perhaps deeply personal) expression influenced by the physical characteristics of the riverine and streambed topography and the various contingencies moving water makes possible. And trout, in their native habitats are beautiful, as in Richard Hugo’s poem:
Quick and yet he moves like silt.
I envy dreams that see his curving
silver in the weeds. When stiff as snags
he blends with certain stones.
When evening pulls the ceiling tight
across his back he leaps for bugs…
…Swirls always looked one way
until he carved the water into many
kinds of current with his nerve-edged nose.
Of all species, trout are positively charged by rheotaxis. Of the native fish fauna of North America, they’re tops in terms of striking coloration. Nothing over the top like some tropical discus, but simple, dramatically appropriate to its habitat, its skin and patterning an artful interpretation and reflection of its place.
But the fact remains, trout were never native to the Dix River. Never. They survive only, here and elsewhere in Kentucky, because of the cold water pulled from the murky bottom of some man-made lake. And they’re enthusiastically stocked each year with little thought to how their presence impacts aquatic species that are native to the region. Maybe this is all a grand rationalization for breaking the law, but I see no harm in dispossessing the Dix of this foreign introduction with live bait, no matter how many Trout Unlimited members I offend.
Tune in next issue for the thrilling conclusion to the High Bridge Trilogy, as the author poaches wildflowers and secures bootlegged spirits, all in the name of local community.
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