When I was a boy, my grandparents lived down in the mountains of Kentucky, and visiting them was a normal weekend activity for my family. However, getting to their place presented many challenges, Little Caney Creek being the last one. Right before you drove across—well actually, drove through—Little Caney Creek to get to my grandparents’ house, just about a mile up Miller’s Branch, the first holler south of Elkatawa (pronounced El-ca-toy) in Breathitt County, you had to pass Preacher Sam Watts’ house, his church, his store and his saw mill. By local standards, Sam was a rich man.
Sam’s saw mill, like the church and store, was a small operation, one that produced low-quality, rough-cut boards, mostly for local house and barn construction. Along with the boards, it produced a great pile of saw dust that constantly grew into a light brown pyramid, reaching perhaps 30 feet high sometimes. Before the days of “helicopter parenting,” no one minded if I played in it when the mill was not busy cutting logs into boards—not my parents or my grandparents or Sam, either. That said, all the adults warned me not to dig tunnels in it, because it would surely collapse and bury me. It was the same warning I got about venturing into the abandoned coal mines that dotted the hillsides all around my grandfather’s house. I never did even consider for a moment going into a mine, nor did I dig a tunnel in the saw dust pile, but no one said I couldn’t use the saw dust for other purposes. It became my building material for making dams across the Little Caney.
The Little Caney wasn’t much of a creek in normal times. It wasn’t seasonal, because I never saw it completely dry, but it did get down to 6 inches deep and 3 feet wide on occasion. It also got up to 4 or 5 feet deep and 20 feet across in a flood. When it got that way, you were stuck on whichever side you happened to be on until it went down, unless you were up to wading, because it was a ford, after all. There was no bridge or even a culvert across it then, so anyone visiting up where my grandparents lived, got their car wet when they arrived and again when they left. But the bottom of the creek was good solid sandstone, so there was no danger of sinking down in mud and getting stuck as you crossed. Getting your car flooded out if the water was high and you tried to cross anyway—now that was another matter entirely.
Sam was my kin somehow, but then everyone in Breathitt County (and the eastern half of the state of Kentucky, probably) is kin somehow or other. The first thing the people who live down there ask a stranger is, “Who’s boy are you?” trying to figure out your clan. Sam was one of two rich men—well, rich by our standards anyway—who lived on Miller’s Branch. The holler was named after the other rich man’s family, the Millers. Roy Miller, the current Lard, owned a hardware store in Jackson and a lot of bottom land on Little Caney Creek, but Sam’s property was much more interesting to a boy of 10 than Miller’s was.
Sam’s riches came from his personal empire: some small coalmines, the saw mill and a small general store. As wedding presents, he had given two of his kids, Charley and Betty, plots of land farther on up a side holler that joined Miller’s Branch, where they could build themselves houses using wood from his saw mill. Their houses were just down the hill from my grandfather’s house and provided a never-ending supply of kids for me to play with. Sam himself lived in a good-sized, two-story white house close to the saw mill and store, very opulent for the area in the 1950s. He was rich enough that he had an elevator put up in the house for his wife, Patty, who had trouble climbing stairs. By way of comparison of relative richness, my grandparents’ house, just up the hill from, not only did not have an elevator; it didn’t have an indoor bathroom or even running water. But no one really thought of Sam as rich or envied him in any way. After all, he was just another cousin, and Patty was important to everyone in Miller’s Branch.
You see, we kids—even her own grandchildren—firmly believed that Patty Watts was a witch. She was a “white witch,” a good witch, but a witch, nonetheless. Witch or not, Patty was not scary at all to us kids, even if she did have limp and a huge, purple port-wine stain over half her face. For one thing, she was grandma to all the kids in the holler except me. For another, we all knew she only did good things—never anything bad to anyone, ever. One winter night while playing in Papaw’s sitting room when I was about 4 years old, I fell against the red-hot coal stove that provided half the heating in the house, burning the inside of both my arms. Instead of taking me to a doctor, they took me down the hill to Patty so she could “blow out the fire,” that is, remove the burn in Kentucky mountain language.
I was not afraid when Patty took me into a back room for the “procedure.” Even right afterward, I didn’t remember what she did, but when I left, I wasn’t burned. Power of suggestion? Not really burned? I don’t know, but I do know that when Patty died, Sam Watts remarried and slowly lost everything. The coal seams in the mines became too thin to dig. The saw mill was no longer profitable, and when it went, Sam’s little general store just across the road from it went, too. It seems that a white witch’s magic lasts only as long as the witch does. But Patty the white witch was kind to the end, because Sam’s things went slowly, and he was never in any financial difficulty.
Besides being a small-scale capitalist, Sam Watts also was a preacher in the Church of God. Just to the west of the saw mill, up Little Caney Creek a bit, was his church: a simple, small white one-room building with a steeple and a bell, like nearly all the churches up the Kentucky hollers. He built it for the small congregation, mostly his family, in Miller’s Branch. We never went there because my grandfather, Francis Marion Deaton (aka, Preacher Deaton to most all the adults in the county, and to us kids, Papaw), had a church of his own over in Lee County, next door to our Breathitt County. Besides, we were Church of Christ, not Church of God, a matter of some major theological importance, although to this day I do not really understand what the difference was. We almost never heard the bell on Sam’s church ring because we would be off at our church, while Sam conducted his services at his. Once, when my cousin Bert was down from Middletown, Ohio, we shot the church bell with a BB gun he brought with him. It made a nice little “ping.”
Sam’s house appeared to sit on an island in Little Caney Creek, but it really only had water on two sides. It looked like it was an island because there were two small bridges across the creek from the road up the holler into Sam’s yard. Like the land surrounding most houses in Breathitt County, it was truly a “yard” of hard-packed dirt—not a lawn—with too many kids playing on it for grass to grow. On one side of the yard was Sam’s small store. I don’t think the store actually had a name; it was just Sam Watt’s store to everyone. It sold canned meat, small household and mining essentials, some tools, and, most importantly to a 10-year-old boy, candy.
“Mining essentials” had a special meaning in the 1950s. Once, when I found a nickel in the driveway to Papaw’s house, I immediately ran to Sam’s store to buy a piece of candy. As I was eating my prize, I picked up a green stick of something from a wooden box on the counter and was casually tossing it into the air and catching it. The man behind the counter calmly said, “You might want to be careful with that, son. It’s dynamite.” Shocked, I set it down carefully. Coal miners had to buy their own dynamite then, and since Sam’s mines were in the hills up above his store, he made it easy for them to buy what they needed right close to where they needed it. Besides, even us kids knew that new dynamite wasn’t all that dangerous. Now, the blasting caps—small copper tubes that you stuck one end into the dynamite and put the fuse in the other end—would go off easily and were always to be left alone. They were very dangerous, as readily apparent in former miners with missing fingers from premature explosions of blasting caps. Blasting caps were kept behind the counter where curious boys couldn’t get to them, but anyone who had the money could buy them.
Things were indeed different in the 1950s in the Kentucky mountains.
As I mentioned, my people were from the mountains of Kentucky, but my family had moved north to just across the Ohio River in Cincinnati. There were few jobs in the mountains, and many to be had in Ohio at the steel mills and car factories, so a number of the young families migrated north. That didn’t mean that we didn’t go back to “The Home Place,” my grandparents’ house, because we did nearly every weekend. For as long as I could remember, nearly every week, my mother would have us all ready to go when my father got off work at 5 p.m. on Friday. She and us three kids would climb into whatever car we had at the moment (a ’49 Chevy, a ’52 Chevy, a ’49 Cadillac limo—loved that one, and yes, my father worked for General Motors then) and head down U.S. Highway 27, joining the solid stream of transplanted mountain folk headed south. There was a joke years later: Why can’t “Briar Hoppers” (derisive slang for mountain people, fighting words if you use the phrase and you aren’t one of them) be on the Space Shuttle Program? Answer: You can’t go home on the weekend.
Since the home place was nearly 200 miles away via two-lane road with heavy traffic, the trip could take as long as eight hours. Often, we would stop and eat twice—the first time about an hour into the trip. Since left as soon as Dad got home from work, dinner was an hour into the trip at the Dinky Diner, a converted trolley car on the roadside, just outside of Falmouth. The second time was a coffee and dessert break in Campton, about an hour before we got to Breathitt County. Dad was pretty tired by then, so Campton was a good place to stop, because just beyond, the road twisted around and up the mountains, instead of remaining mostly flat like it was in the Bluegrass plains.
Of course, as soon as we got to my grandparents’ house after midnight, Mimmie (my grandmother) would get out of bed and cook something for us to eat before we went to bed. Mountain people, like the Army, always feed you first thing when you arrive, whether or not you are hungry. You must eat, whether or not you are hungry, because not to do so would be an insult to their hospitality, and you don’t want to insult mountain people. There usually would be at least one, sometimes two or three, of my mother’s eight siblings and their kids there when we arrived, so the adults would sit in the kitchen and laugh and talk after putting us kids to bed. I was usually up at dawn and down to Little Caney Creek as soon as I could escape after breakfast.
My saw dust dam building was a solitary pursuit. The three bunches of kids who lived in the holler (Sam’s younger ones, Sam’s son Charlie’s kids, and his daughter Betty’s kids) were all kept on a short leash by their parents. No leaving their yards for them, not even the 200 yards down to Little Caney, even if it was right next to their grandfather’s house. Since the norm for the people who lived in the mountains then was a kid a year for the first 10 years or so of marriage, there were always lots of kids to play with, even if they couldn’t help me with my construction work. Of course, it meant you had to play in their yards or under their houses (nearly all the houses were built on stilts, leaving lots of fun room to play under them). I suppose it was because there were so many kids, if they started wandering off, the parents would lose track of them. In any case, none of the dozen or so near my age ever joined me as I shoveled the saw dust from the pile into the creek.
I could only make dams when the water in the Little Caney was low because, if it was up at all, it would wash away the saw dust before I could get the stream completely blocked. The first part of dam building was to begin by laying down the sides of the dam, saving the middle and most critical part till last. I would put a huge pile of saw dust on each side, just adjacent to the center, so that when I was ready to finish the dam, I just had to push the piles on each side into the remaining dam wall, and, ta-da, instant lake! As soon as the water began backing up, I would run to the pile for more shovels-full to re-enforce the center.
Sometimes, working in a frenzy, I would make three dams in a row, about 20 feet apart. They had to be so close together, because my only digging tool was a single shovel, greatly limiting the amount of saw dust I could move quickly. If only I could have found a wheelbarrow somewhere! The idea was that each succeeding dam would be bigger than the one immediately upstream. That way, when the preceding dam ruptured, the rush of water would not immediately overwhelm the next dam. I would watch as the water approached the top of the first dam and then, after topping it, start to cut into sides, until in short order, the water rushed toward dam number two. As it filled dam two, I worked as quickly as I could on dam three. I considered four dams once, but could never do more than three, because it was too far from the saw dust pile to get it all in place quickly enough before the water overwhelmed it.
When I put the last shovel full of saw dust in the first dam, my lake would begin to form. If I wasn’t building multiple dams, I would then sit and watch as the water rose and imagine that, if I had a boat, I could cross it. Sometimes, I would imagine a rowboat, sometimes a canoe, sometimes a sailboat, but the lake was pure ephemera, washing away in a few minutes, leaving only the remains of the sides of the dam along the banks. Even if I could have made it bigger, it could never last long anyway, because the three families that lived up the gravel road—my grandfather’s, Charlie’s and Betty’s—had to drive through the creek to get to their houses. My dams made it too deep to drive through without the risk of stalling the car’s engine, so if a car came, I had to break it myself so they could drive across. They always smiled and waved at me as they passed, not minding my constant playing in the creek.
Driving across the creek was problematic anyway when the creek was up from heavy rain or snow melt. As with my dams, when the water was too deep to drive across without the risk of stalling out your car in the middle, you were stuck on whichever side you started on, or you could try wading across. No one waded unless it was a real emergency, because the water would usually go down quickly, so you usually had to wait only an hour or two. Once, my Uncle Charlie, being the teenager he was then, decided he was going to town: Jackson, the Breathitt County seat and the only place with any social life for a teenager around the area, high water or no high water. He drove slowly down the road until he was about 100 feet back from the creek, and then he floored Papaw’s green four-door 1959 Chevy BelAir and hit the water at about 30 miles an hour. I had come down to watch, and to me, it appeared to be Moses splitting the Red Sea. His momentum carried the car across, but no farther. Once he was safely on the other side the motor died, flooded out for sure. Uncle Charlie left the Chevy there, and with great dignity, he walked the remaining half-mile out to the main road to hitchhike to Jackson. By the time he got back that night, the water had gone down and the car had dried out enough to start again.
Because I did not leave a spillway next to my dam to let the water continue to flow while my lake filled, for a short way downstream the water in the Little Caney Creek would completely disappear, leaving the few minnows and crawdads high and dry. Sometimes I would run and gather them up for use as bait in some of the bigger pools in the creek. For a pole, I would cut a stalk of cane from the side of the creek. With a fishhook on the end of a bit of string and a small stick as a bobber, I would fish in the deeper pools of Little Caney Creek for sunfish. The fish were tiny sunfish, but it was the hunt, not the kill, that was the fun.
People thought that with all my dam building, I was going to be an engineer, but the products of my labors, my “lakes,” were not the end product for me. It wasn’t the dam, but the water view I wanted…
About the author:
Though Robert F. Curtis was born in Middletown, Ohio, he has strong Kentucky roots, as noted in this memoir. He is a pilot and decorated Vietnam War veteran, who, after leaving the military, worked in several positions, including helping to rebuild Iraq with the Corps of Engineers, as a senior advisor to the Commission on Wartime Contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan, and finally as a senior advisor to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.
Following retirement from Federal Civil Service, he became a full-time writer and currently has two books in print, Surprised at Being Alive and The Typhoon Truce, 1970, both published by Casemate Publishing of New York and London. In addition to books, he also writes for magazines and journals.
He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire.