Confessions of a River Rat

Confessions of a River Rat

I remember distinctly the first time I was called a “River Rat” by anyone. The Carthage Owls had just tested themselves against the Cookeville Cavaliers on Overall Field in Cookeville. I was a band kid and as we marched out of the gate someone in the crowd who had been humiliated by their gridiron loss to a smaller town like Carthage began to chant, “River Rats, River Rats, River Rats.” The Carthage crowd was not to be outdone however and soon Owls fans began a competing chant of “Ridge Runners, Ridge Runners, Ridge Runners.” It was then that I learned that while as Julius Cesar said, “The whole of Gaul is divided into three parts.” the whole of the Upper Cumberland is divided into only two parts – Ridge Runners and River Rats.
Ridge Runners lived in places like Sparta, Cookeville, and Livingston, while River Rats lived in or around towns like Celina, Gainesboro, and Carthage. River Rats bore allegiance to towns that had been either steamboat towns like Gainesboro, Grandville, and Rome or had been places where the wilderness roads had crossed the Cumberland and its tributaries by ford or by ferry. Gainesboro, where I got my lackluster start, was a steamboat town while Carthage was both a major steamboat landing, a river ford just below the confluence of the Caney Fork, and boasted of both an Upper and Lower Ferry across the Cumberland.
There was no doubt about it, I was a River Rat. I was born in sight of the Roaring River seven miles east of Gainesboro, moving to Upper Ferry Road in Carthage in 1948, and living the greater part of my life within walking distance of one river or another.
I like rivers and have probably never lived further from one than I do right now but I am lucky enough to cross the Cumberland every day I go to my farm and to have a second home in Smith County where I can see the Cumberland from our sunroom.
I grew up with my daddy and other men snatching suckers when the big white fleshed fish rushed up river to “shoal” or spawn and one could only catch them with a treble hook which had a small white piece of cloth attached. The hook was placed six inches below a one ounce lead sinker and the line attached to the longest river cane pole that one could find. Crawling out on a limb that hung over a shoal deep hole and snagging the big fish with the three pronged hook, made visible by the piece of white cloth, was a sure way to produce the goods for a fish fry to which all the neighbors were invited. Crisply fried White Suckers, Corn Bread and plenty of it, sweet tea and coffee, (no milk – Mama said, “sweet milk will make you sick if you eat fish,”) and a couple of quart cans of home canned green beans and sour kraut along with sliced “home-fried” potatoes from down in the cellar made a meal fit for a king.
We also engaged in the sport of “frog gigging;” taking the big croakers from their cozy spots on the banks of the creeks and rivers with three prone gigs on the end of another long river cane or, when no one was looking, with a 22 hollow point to provide frog legs, which were considered a delicacy in many places, including in the kitchens of most River Rats.
If you were a River Rat, there was always something to do when the day’s farm work was done. Catching the big yellow “Cats” that cruised the bottom of the Cumberland looking for some morsel to suck up with their vacuum cleaner mouths, or running a “trot line” or series of “limb lines” tied to willow branches provide something to do in the cool of the night. Last month the brown eyed girl and I were on Guernsey Island in the English Channel and as I stood looking over the side of the dock where we had been tendered to from our ship, I stated with certainty to the group we were with, “Look at that bottle floating right down there, there is a fish on it.” Sure enough, in a few minutes the bottle streaked across the little bay like it had a motor attached. Fish on. Such are the learned skills of a River Rat.
Fishing the swollen creeks for the big black bluegills also provided a wonderful, if difficult to prepare, meal, not to mention an altogether pleasant pastime. Everyone up and down the river had a “johnboat” which had been hand made and pitched with tar as Noah had the ark and it was tied by a long tether to a tree far up the bank. The boat was not locked because some neighbor might need to borrow it to cross the river or check on a calf stranded on the other side but the chain or rope was long and the tree far up the bank to allow for the rise and fall of the river, for we knew with what fury the headwaters and backwaters could come down. I suspect I am not the only true River Rat who drove past the new Wall Mart on the highway 25 bypass in Carthage and shook their head saying, “someday the river will get in there.” Each of us still remembers a particularly high tide or “big river” when the water got to some spot to which no Ridge Runner could ever imagine it rising.
I suppose there are two kinds of people in the world also, and I don’t mean River Rats and Ridge Runners, or even men and women; I mean Believers and Non-believers. There are those of us who cannot imagine that this world with its intricacy of design and balance of ecology, atmosphere, and food chain could be by happenstance. Those of us who know in our heart of hearts that the level of design we witness demands a designer; that it is beyond comprehension that something appeared from nothing or that order came from disorder. Any of us who have ever had a teenager in our home knows with certainty that in our universe or in our home, “left alone, things tend to move from order to disorder.”
I am proud to be a River Rat and I am proud to be a believer and I recognize that while in many respects, “There but for the grace of God go I, (A Ridge Runner) being a Believer is a choice which the Eternal God has given each of to make. I pray that each of us will make the right choice and that you will have a blessed day. bob.chaffin@maplehillchurch.org