I’m not happy to be looking at car payments again, but I’m glad I’m not somewhere down around the Georgia – Florida line. I’ve had a productive Friday and Saturday, although not in the way I had planned.
Friday afternoon, just about the time I was supposed to be heading over to Kentucky Lake for the first leg of my trip back home, I got a call from a fellow who thought he might have been a kid in some photos I shot back in 1966 or ’67. I’ve been chasing wild geese all week trying to get some leads on this. We made arrangements to meet at 5 p.m. After we decided he was going to help me track down a bunch of other folks on my next visit, I had some time to kill.
I headed down to see how much water had been pumped out of the cement plant quarry, but decided instead to cut down Old Hwy 61, which is east of I-55 and deadends at a boat ramp at the Diversion Channel. Yesterday was the first day I noticed that it wasn’t under water. It’s amazing what a few days will do. These fields had three or four feet of water on them when I hit town a month ago. (Click on any photo to make it larger.)
Ed and Melinda Roberts
Right after shooting this, I met Ed and Melinda Roberts of Jackson catching bait for their trotlines. We talked for a bit, then they invited me to go out the Diversion Channel and up the Mississippi River to set out the lines. I’ll be posting two days of photos from that excursion: one on them fishing and the other on the the beauty of the waterway.
CT lands in Cairo
Then, to top it all off, I got a Facebook message from CT, a reporter I worked with at The Ohio University Post, saying she was visiting her brother in Paducah, had become interested in Cairo after seeing my photos and was planning on a day trip there. I quickly made arrangments to meet her and her four brothers in town. It was the first time we had seen each other since the late 70s. I’ll have more on that reunion in the next few days.
(I call her CT because her real name is Carol Towarnicky, a name I could never remember how to pronounce when I was introducing her to a subject. It usually came out some variation of TwarkNarky or something equally awkward.) Her brother shot this with my camera. I may have half the hair I had when she last saw me, but I am, otherwise, twice the man (in girth and weight). She was kind enough not to point that out. I knew there was a reason I liked her.
All in all, it was a better time to be in Cape than on the road. Tuesday morning, though, I have to be at the Cape airport to catch a Cape Air flight to St. Louis at 5:15. It’s not like the old Ozark days when you’d call to ask when the next flight to St. Louis was and they’d answer, “What time can you make it?”
Ken, these posts are very habit forming, much like watching a soap opera, which I haven’t done since the early 1970s. Each one I read leads to the next one or even previous ones. Thanks so much.
Ken, if you haven’t left the area yet, I hope you got to experience RAIN again!! It poured down in Dexter today, complete with wind and thunder! Earlier today, I was thinking of how much I would love to hear thunder again!
It would be nice if you could just be able to take that one good memory with you!
It’s being trying to get up enough gumption to rain here in Cape, but I’m pretty sure we’ve been dropless unless it happened when I was napping.
If the rain falls on the just and the unjust, I guess I’m in that middle category that’s staying dry.
It’s good to see the face of the guy that has captured our admiration and facination with the view from his talented eyes and the engaging descriptions of his escapades in traveling about Cape and the surrounding area.
I hope to reconnect with you on your next return trip. It would be good to see David and Mark again, too.
Keith, thanks for the compliment. It’s a good thing I had someone to meet that morning or we’d probably still be talking.
I’ll let you know when I’m going to be back in late October / early November so we can do it again. We barely scratched the surface on this visit.
When you get your railroad built, I’ll swing out to KC to shoot it.
what the h is a trotline???????
Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about trotlines.
When I get a chance, I’m going to post a video of Ed and Melinda Roberts setting one out.
when i lived in columbus in the late 60″s and 70 i lived next door to fbi twarknarc is that sorta the same??