Whitewater Creek

I wasn't Baptized in Whitewater, but Bunny and Katie were.   Most recently,  my great niece, Anna, was Baptized  there last Sunday.   I have pumped a lot of water out of Whitewater on crops including but not limited to peanuts, collards, cabbage, turnips, squash, sweet potatoes, peas, and corn.    My Daddy was pumping water out of Whitewater in the late 1950s.  I have moved irrigation pipe through the middle of that swamp when it was 100-plus degrees, and a breath of air was precious.  I have jumped in that creek, been thrown in, and fallen in.  I bet my Daddy lost 50 pairs of dime-store reading glasses leaning over while working on an old Red Seal Continental in-line six-cylinder engine.  I have seen him pick up one of the large cylinders of propane, hoist it over his shoulder, and head down a path through the swamp to that engine.  It was just below the old bridge on Highway 19.   The people who lived down there initially complained about the noise from the old un-muffled engine.  Later, they admitted they couldn't go to sleep without the roar of the engine wafting through the swamp.

A hundred years ago, my Granddaddy made moonshine whiskey a mile or so up the creek from where the bridge is now.  He told me, with tears in his eyes, that he quit moonshining when he was headed to his still one day, across a plowed field, and he looked back and saw my Daddy, who was five or six years old, struggling to step in his (Granddaddy's) tracks to follow him.  That would have been about 1917 or 1918.   Various members of the Harris family have farmed those sandy fields on the banks of Whitewater for a while.   I caught my first fish in a little fishing hole on Whitewater about 55-56 years ago.  A few years later, in the early 60s, I decided I was going to wade Whitewater to fish.  I had been reading some outdoor magazines, and wading seemed to be the way that real, sho'nuff big time fishermen did it.   I was in a hole about 1/2 mile above the bridge, with my little short creek rod, when I looked down and a cotton-mouth moccasin swam by within a foot of my legs.  That was 50 years ago, and I can see that snake in my mind right now.  That ended my wading career.

In 1903, my Great-Grandaddy, J. R. Harris was one of the Charter Members who established Lebanon Baptist Church on the banks of the creek.  As we walked down to the creek for the Baptismal  Service after Church last Sunday,  I thought of all these memories I have of Whitewater.  I thought of all the Harrises and other Church members that had been immersed in that cold water.  I thought how, in the middle of this drought, Whitewater is still running a good flow, and the water is still cold.   I had two seemingly disparate and unrelated thoughts.  What a wonderful place for a Baptizing.  Granddaddy told me once he didn't like to walk through that swamp without a pistol.