Hill Country Living
PROTECTED CONTENT
If you’re a current subscriber, log in below. If you would like to subscribe, please click the subscribe tab above.
Username and Password Help
Please enter your email and we will send your username and password to you.
By Coulter Fussell
I would say that the giant, headless dead deer carcass that’s been laying in Town Creek at the end of Young Street since last Thursday night is gross, but it’s not nearly as gross as the person who left it there. What in the world kind of person leaves a giant dead deer to rot in the dead (no pun intended) middle of our town for all of us to smell and observe? Each day this week on my morning walk to Crawford Sports Complex, in an otherwise lovely little town, I cross the bridge between Young and Blount streets and a full-on time lapse nature show about flesh eating insects is taking place on the creek bank. The smell is so awful that it stings your eyes. Your eyes, folks.
And I know the deer didn’t just randomly run there and die because it’s missing his whole head. He couldn’t run into the creek without his head. And I assume that the deer didn’t die of natural causes on the creek bank and then someone hiked down the rocks to cut his head off because that would be an entirely random place to die. He’d probably find somewhere more comfortable to pass on.
There’s a chance that someone hit the deer with their car, it stumbled into the creek and then they went down there to cut its head off like a weirdo who can’t hunt right and left it there out of laziness. There’s also the chance that someone shot the deer in the woods behind the creek and houses, removed its head and then rolled it down into the creek bank for reasons known only to him and a judging God.
Whichever scenario, the smell is a crime. I feel bad for everyone on Young Street. This is a town. Not an open field in the middle of nowhere. We don’t need giant rotting corpses putrefying for days on end mere feet away from children’s backyards, restaurants and city sidewalks. Lord have mercy, even the buzzards seem wary of this scene.
Moving on but still in the reign of post-apocalyptic scenes I obverse on my morning walks, I saw that a house on the Blackmur end of Simmons Street burned up. It was smoking and smoldering when I walked by and had clearly burned in the night. I always liked that house. It seemed like it might have been an older home. From what I understand, there was no one home. I’m thankful that no one was hurt and that the fire didn’t spread to the surrounding homes. Good job to the fire department and various responding crews.
On a brighter note, homecoming looked like a blast! I wasn’t in town for it but I saw the videos on social media and y’all Water Valley graduates do not hold back on homecoming raucousness. The tent section is always rowdy. I saw that someone brought a deep fryer and was frying catfish. That just really ups the ante! No homecoming festivity can be complete now without freshly fried catfish. I heard that later on the catfish guy was making freshly fried French fries.
Really makes you wanna be a WVHS graduate if you’re not already. Oh, and congrats to the football team, as well!
