LETTERS FROM HOME: ALMOST TRUE STORIES AND 500-POUND CATFISH

July 18, 1996

Dear Ken

DC and I went to a cocktail party last weekend. Except that cocktail parties long ago became wine and cheese parties, which not only sounds nicer but seems to have cut down on the gin-soaked Virginia Woolf dramas.

The new university president was there, being very amiable. Introduced himself to our small group. Asked each of us what we did and made small talk. As he was taking leave, DC, attuned to the one-sidedness of the conversations, moved to his side and asked, "And what do you do?"

To his credit, he smiled and said, "I'm in academics."

Surely there's a reason I married a woman who ignores the media. Some lesson for me about perspective.

DC gets her news firsthand, from the people it happened to. Or their first cousin.

Never mind that most of what she hears is rumor unadulterated by the duly accredited gathering of facts or checking of sources.

These are true stories, whether they really happened or not. Sort of like what you find on the lnternet.

In Garberville she came home from Rotary Club meetings with stories about illegal logging and fresh wildcat sightings, stories that weeks or months later would find their way into the newspaper.

Recently she told me about some bad things that were happening in Tamms. Some people at her clinic blamed the trouble on gang members. What would gangs be doing in Tamms?, I wondered. Maybe it has something to do with the state work camp, she said.

Then the Chicago Sun-Times broke the story about gang members who'd become prison guards so they can make life easier for their incarcerated brethren.

We're checking it out.

I was in a sporting goods store a few days ago, just to touch the titanium drivers, when the sales clerk for some reason began telling me a story about a 500-pound catfish.

Seems some scuba divers from Kentucky had been in the store. They'd been employed recently to search for a car that had run off the road into a lake. While underwater, the divers happened upon a different car. Must have been a bad turn topside. So they checked out the license plate and discovered that the car had been missing for years.

Here's where the sales clerk's tale got a bit muddy. He didn't say whether the car was hauled out of the lake or whether the divers simply got a better look inside, but he said they found a 500-pound catfish in the car. Apparently the catfish had feasted upon the victims and had grown so fat it couldn't get out of the car.

Must be a children's story with an uplifting moral here somewhere.

"Catfish don't really bite you," the sales clerk said, perhaps trying to take the edge off the horror in his story. "They just kind of suck on you."

The catfish even sucked away the seat covers, he said.

The divers told him they've encountered some similarly huge catfish just below the dam. "They spend their whole lives there on the bottom just feeding," said the sales clerk, a defensive lineman-sized lad who seemed admiring of the lifestyle.

This creepy fish story left me too stunned to be a reporter. I didn't ask what became of the fish or the car. I just wanted to get out of there.

Maybe the sales clerk was waiting for me to ask those questions. Maybe then he would have delivered a punch line. But since I can't think what the punch line could possibly be, I'm left with the possibility that this story is somewhat true.

Don S., who I think of as our resident outdoorsman because he occasionally camps, opined that a catfish could possibly attain that kind of size.

The whole thing smacks of the kind of story you'd hear around a campfire late at night. Or at the Rotary Club.

You just happened to hear it here.

Love, Sam

~Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.