Blue Highways: Gassaway, West Virginia

Unfolding the Map

At a burger joint in Gassaway, William Least Heat-Moon (LHM) has to listen to a guy's fish stories.  The focus on catfish reminds me of how scary they seem to me.  And I don't even go into the fact that catfish includes a species kind that can kill a human with poison, and the notorious candiru, which has been known to swim into and lodge itself in...well, never mind...just never go swimming where candiru are known to live.  At right is the West Virginia commemorative quarter reverse from Wikimedia Commons.

Book Quote

"As I ate my hamburger, the fellow explained the best means of taking a catfish.  During the long explanation rivaling Izaak Walton's for detail, the man periodically formed a funnel with his index finger and thumb and poured salt into his bottle of Falls City.  'Used to could taste the beer in our country,' he said.  The angling method was this:  first 'bait' a catfish hole with alfalfa and pork fat for three weeks; then, the night before a rain, put a nine-lived Eveready in a sealed Mason jar and lower it into the water to hang just in front of the baited hook.

"'And it works well?' I asked.

"'It works sometimes.'"

Blue Highways: Part 10, Chapter 3

Elk Street in downtown Gassaway, West Virginia. Photo by Tim Kiser and hosted at Wikimedia Commons. Click on photo to go to host site.

Gassaway, West Virginia

Catfish have always frightened me, just a little.

As I related in a previous post, I have always had a slight fear of deep water, especially murky deep water where the bottom cannot be seen.  When I jump off a boat into a lake, for instance, or I am treading water where my feet cannot touch, I get a sense of vertigo.  When I'm swimming or treading water in such situations, I could be just inches from the sand below, or feet, or miles from anything solid.  It is as if I am flying half blind - I can see the sky above, but the earth below is hidden.

When you add the potential for catfish or other forms of life, swimming unseen below, then my hair starts to raise on end.

When I was a child, and we used to drive east from my hometown on a trip to another town or down to the city, we always passed a particular landmark.  My mom grew up in a logging camp in the forest, and the road now passes through Camp 19 at a place called McGuire's Ranch.  There is a pond next to the road that was always known in our family as "Man-Made Lake."  A small stream was dammed there and the pond was used for floating logs.  My mom said that she used to swim there, and when she did, the catfish "tickled" her toes.

As a child, I was fascinated by that story.  Why would catfish tickle her toes?  I thought about her swimming, legs below the surface, and a catfish taking an interest and putting its nose up to her feet.  The picture in my mind made me shiver, and made me vow to never swim in the pond, even if I got a chance.

The fish in the river near our property were always tiny - little minnows and trout a few inches long.  The minnows in our creek would occasionally tickle my toes as they flitted about them while I stood in the river, but that was cute.  A larger fish near my toes would seriously give me a panic.

Later on in my life, I began to hear the legends of the enormous catfish, lurking in the dark waters at the bottom of rivers and lakes.  These tails put the dread in me.  These catfish were always described as being the "size of a Volkswagen" or sometimes "the size of a motor home."  Usually, wherever a dam was located, you'd hear about the huge fish that lay at the base of the dam.  It was usually catfish - bottom feeders, they would grow large on the stuff that came down rivers and got deposited at the dam.  Just as goldfish, if you put them into a larger environment outside of an aquarium, would get really large, so too catfish, it was said, would grow in proportion to their environment.  In New Mexico, I recently heard of an old giant catfish said to be lurking at the base of Elephant Butte dam on the Rio Grande.

My leeriness of catfish didn't stop with my discovery of the sport of "noodling."  Noodling is such a crazy idea to me that I can't believe that anyone ever thought that it would be a good idea.  If you haven't heard of noodling before, I'm not making this up.  Noodling, a popular form of sport fishing especially in the South, consists of finding catfish holes in rivers, and sticking one's arm into the hole until the catfish bites it.  The fisher then engages in a tug of war with the catfish until the catfish is dislodged from its hole and caught.  The fishing can occur in shallow or deep water, and can involve injury since once the catfish bites it latches onto hand, wrist or arm.  People often sustain minor wounds, though some can lose fingers or get infected from the bites.

I've never even developed the taste for catfish on the plate.  I lived in Louisiana for four years and one item found in many restaurants, particularly those that serve Cajun food, is blackened catfish.  However, knowing that catfish are bottom feeders and vacuum up all kinds of things both benign and toxic, I was not really keen for the meal in the first place.  But I tried it to see if I would be pleasantly surprised.  After all, I drink Coke despite the things in it that aren't good for me also.  Yet the fish seemed bland except for the Cajun spices.  It just didn't grab me.

So, from images of huge Volkswagen size behemoths swimming under me in lakes and rising to either "tickle my toes" or actually swallow me whole, to scum-eating bottom feeders, to the object of a sport practiced by people who I think must be slightly deranged to let a catfish bite them by design, I just never warmed up to catfish.

Give me a good salmon any day.  Now that's a fish I can live with!

Musical Interlude

Here's an amazing blues song recorded around 1941 by Robert Petway called Catfish Blues.

If you want a more electric version of the song, listen to Jimi Hendrix' recording:

If you want to know more about Gassaway

Town of Gassaway
Wikipedia: Gassaway

Next up: Valley Fork, Wallback and Left Hand, West Virginia

Blue Highways: Bath, North Carolina

Unfolding the Map

Click on Thumbnail for MapIn Bath, we take a trip back to learn about an early to mid-20th century author and her contributions to American literature, stage and screen.  Click on the map to see the place that all of this is associated with.  Comments welcome!

Book Quote

"It was in Bath, the oldest town in North Carolina, that Edna Ferber went on board the James Adams Floating Palace Theater in 1925 to see a showboat performance - the only one she ever saw."

Blue Highways: Part 2, Chapter 13

Street signs in Bath, North Carolina

Bath, North Carolina

Why does William Least Heat-Moon mention Edna Ferber in the quote from Blue Highways?  He makes it a point to write that the only showboat performance she ever saw was on the James Adams Floating Theater in Bath, North Carolina.

Well, those of you who are fans of American literature and/or American musicals might know that Edna Ferber wrote the novel Show Boat, upon which the Broadway musical Show Boat is based.  That visit to the James Adams was very important to the development of the novel.  Three separate movies of Show Boat were made, in 1929, 1936 and 1951, with the 1936 film ranked by the American Film Institute as 24th out of America's best musicals.  But Edna Ferber's influence stretches farther than that.  Without Show Boat, we would never have heard the showstopping performance of Paul Robeson on the song Ol' Man River.  Robeson was African-American, a giant of American culture whose voice and presence on stage and screen transcended the wrong and unjust policies of discrimination prevalent at the time.  Unfortunately, he was persecuted in his life as well, labeled a communist (eventually exonerated), and died in seclusion.

But even beyond Show Boat, Edna Ferber wrote a novel, Giant, that was made into a panoramic movie of the 50s starring such iconic actors as Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and the ultimately tragic James Dean.

To say that Edna Ferber saw one performance on a showboat in Bath, North Carolina is almost like saying that Jack Nicklaus watched a round of golf on TV before going out and winning The Masters.  It is like saying that George Gershwin spent a night in a Harlem juke joint before writing the music for Porgy and Bess.  Or, for the more modern, it is like saying that Steve Jobs looked at a CD player once before creating the Ipod.

Edna Ferber herself was a distinguished woman of American letters.  She won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel So Big, which itself was made into a movie, but her lasting influence on America was through her novels Show Boat and Giant.  She had a knack for writing strong female characters at a time when discrimination against women was pretty common and routine.  She also made room in her novels for other ethnic minorities who, as written by her, routinely faced discrimination.  She appeared to especially have a soft spot for the underdogs, the people who weren't beautiful or who had flaws and therefore a life stacked against them.

She was also a member of the Algonquin Round Table, made famous by its host, the acid-tongued Dorothy Parker, and could hold her own against the strong personages assembled there.  When Noel Coward, a multi-talented person of letters and stage and who had a quick and acerbic wit, remarked upon her clothing by saying that she almost looked like a man, Ferber replied back "so do you."

I often wish I had a quick wit like that.  While I can pull out a few one-liners, and occasionally get a zing in on a friend or two, I'm usually just one step too slow.

I've never seen Show Boat, but I have seen the clip of Paul Robeson's performance of Ol' Man River.  The song was written by Jerome Kern, and is about as meaningful a song about America's life artery as any that has ever been written.  In the voice of Paul Robeson, however, it is a majestic tribute to one of the most distinguishing and distinguished features of America.  I couldn't stand next to the Mississippi River as it rolled past New Orleans when I lived there without hearing that song in my head and picturing first the slaves and later the predominantly poor African American dockworkers upon whose backs a significant portion of my country's wealth was built.

I have read the book and seen the movie Giant, and living in Texas gave me a perspective on that novel that I wouldn't have had otherwise.  Set just as America was becoming prosperous after the war, it shows the human side of our progress, a love triangle pitting the old ranching community against the new riches of oil.  Giant captures Texas, and the United States, at a point where significant decisions about our country's priorities were being made, and Ferber boils it down to two men and the woman between them.

Bath is the oldest town in North Carolina, and as such deserves to be recognized.  But it made a very important contribution to our culture by providing an opportunity for one author to seat herself at a performance on a showboat anchored there.

Ferber, who never married nor was known to have any relationship, once wrote "Being an old maid is like death by drowning, a really delightful experience after you cease to struggle."  She also said "A woman can look moral and exciting...if she also looks as if it was quite a struggle."  She certainly gave us all types of wonderful characters representing all walks of American life, both in her own life and her many works.

If you want to know more about Bath

Beaufort County: Bath
A Brief History of Bath
NC Historic Sites: Bath
NC Historic Sites: Bath and Edna Ferber
Wikipedia: Bath

Next up: New Bern, North Carolina