OVER THE RIVER

Two road trips in one week. We leave Wednesday for DC, this weekend Mimi and Gabe were excited to come down with me to Loogootee in beautiful Southern Indiana.

Came down here for a visit with mom and to get her lawn equipment sorts out for eventual spring.

While down this way we will have no choice but to go 30 minutes farther south and visit my nephew in Jasper.

While in Jasper we will have dinner at Schnitzlebank; it's a German restaurant in very German town.

A lot of smaller towns seem to be dying on the vine. Jasper has a large industry and looks to be doing quite well.

As I said Jasper is a very German town, so much so that there are Hitlers living there. People with that last name, can you just feature that?

George Hitler, Billy Hitler, Heather Hitler. I just made up those first names but I'm sure there are comparable first names.

While down this way we can take in the local sights. I want to take them by Hindostan Falls. Just slightly downriver from the falls is Flatrock. Hindostan was a thriving area in the 1800's.

On Flatrock you can see carvings in the stony surface that held the foundation of a large grist mill.

In those days the river was the transportation and lifeline of many towns. Some survived the transportation transformation, many didn't.

Hindostans' fate was not controlled by the industrial revolution, it died by more sinister hands, the plague.

Hindostan is just about 5 miles from moms place here in Loogootee. My father grew up a couple towns away in Newton Stewart. I wrote about that towns demise a while back. It died by the hands OT The Army Corps of Engineers when they dammed up Patoka Creek to produce Patoka Lake.

History class used to bore me to tears in school, well to be more accurate it bored me to sleep.

There are ways to bring history to life, and it fascinates me to stand in the remnants of these little ghost towns and try to imagine what life must have been like.

Some died with a bang such as Newton Stewart, some died with a whimper. Such was the fate of Hindostan.

Standing on Flatrock looking toward the toward Hindostan Falls, I wonder I wonder if that town would have made the cut and survived had not the tiny micro-oganism invaded the inhabitants.

Dirt roads, rickety buildings, main streets and grist mills come and go.

But the large flat rock and the falls survive, they both disappear and then reappear again when the river rises and falls. 

There's something profound about that. Don't ask me what it is.