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The summer I was 14, my buddy Tim Blackwood showed me how to fish the middle reaches of the Paint Rock River, in the cool twilight just before daybreak, casting top-water “buzzbaits” for bass up against the high clay banks or drifting chicken livers in the shoals for blue cats and flatheads. In the middle reaches, the water is a clear green, fed by a hundred cold springs that pour out from a subterranean world inside the southern Cumberlands. I was used to fishing the muddy waters of the Tennessee River, or farm ponds where the algae lay thick on the surface through the summer, and I loved them, but I had always dreamed of fishing moving water, clear and cool, un-dammed and wild with life. The Paint Rock was all of those things, and it took me over.
One morning, when the fish had quit hitting, Tim suggested another trip. “You ought to see the Walls of Jericho where this river starts. Now that’s a wild place.”
It was the next year, 1978, before we made it there, 30 river miles upstream, past the Lick Fork, the Larkin, the confluence of the Estill Fork and beyond, deeper and deeper into the mountains. The final stretch of road was eight miles of truck-eating mudholes and boulder-filled creek crossings. This was in the time before ATVs had invaded every corner of the woods and begun killing and paralyzing the rural reckless, like us.
As I remember, Tim drove a dune buggy made from a cut-down Volkswagen, and I had my family’s farm truck. Mike Allen, an older boy, buried his two-wheel-drive pickup early on, halfway across a hole of hood-deep black slurry that he hit at top speed. We didn’t think about it then, but our off-road antics were why the road would eventually be closed, and stay that way for 20 years.
We made it to the end of the road by afternoon. In front of us, Turkey Creek ran like a trout stream, low and clear as ether, winding through a grove of sycamores and into the Hurricane River. We’d heard lots of stories about this place: that Davy Crockett had lived in this hollow, that it had been Daniel Boone’s favorite bear-hunting country, that the old house we had passed was filled with haunts, and so was the narrow canyon we could see upstream, framed by the yellow-white sandstone of the Walls of Jericho. In all of the spirit-haunted landscapes of the southern Cumber-lands, this was supposedly spook central. That felt about right.
We walked up Turkey Creek, side-hilling above a series of small waterfalls. The woods were hot and still and electric with bug noise. All along the rocky creek bottom, fantastic yellow poplars grew—3 feet thick and soaring straight up to the narrow band of sunlight above the canyon walls. The fabled swimming holes were suddenly below us, fed by a single waterfall. Above them, the narrow canyon made a long turn, and, unbelievably, the entire creek poured forth from a yawning bore hole in the wall. The river I loved was born right before my eyes.
I don’t remember how we spent the rest of the day, or how we made the trip out. Later I came back and found the bore hole was not the source of the creek, that it passed through the bend in the canyon, where another falls formed the upper end of the Walls.
I never saw any spooks, but I found the strange rock bass that live in the Hurricane, ferocious little fish with blood-red eyes that rush through the water to slam top-water plugs bigger than they are. To me, they, and those rivers rushing forth from under the earth, that shadowy valley a million shades of green, are as exotic as anything in the Amazon. I still feel that way.
—Hal Herring
