Sherry Chandler

I just picked this up from Bluegrass Reports – a certain irony in that, I guess – the C-J is going to close its news bureaus in Hazard, Paducah, and Elizabethtown next year.

“It will be a terrible thing. People need to know what’s going on,” said Bill Gorman, 81, the longtime mayor of Hazard. “I just think that it’s going to cause all of Kentucky to suffer.”

Gorman said the newspaper “has been such a part of the mountains. We have the holy Bible and The Courier-Journal.”

It was pretty much that way in my house, too, when I was a girl in Northern Kentucky. This is not good news.

you ever had?

We’ve just passed that time of year when driving to my mother’s backcountry Owen County farm is a bit like maneuvering through a combat zone – everywhere you look, men in camo with big guns.

I grew up among hunters, though there wasn’t much big game in Kentucky during my childhood. Mostly it was rabbits and quail, .22s and 12 gauges. Mama used to brag that she could shoot a squirrel out of a tree with a .22 bullet right through the head. But there’s something disconcerting about walking out onto her carport now and seeing three camouflaged strangers with heavy arms strolling through her pasture.

I don’t remember that ever happening before, but then back in the day it would probably have been a neighbor whose face and walk and purpose I knew or trusted. Nowadays, I guess Owen County has become a bit of a mecca for out-of-town deer hunters, as I learned reading Dave Baker’s “Deer Camp” essay in Of Woods & Waters (University Press of Kentucky, 2005).

I bought a copy of that book at the Maysville Book Fair mostly because it contains some poems and stories by local writers I admire. I am not much on any outdoor sport other than hiking. As for my mama, well, she’s 88 and tends to think of the deer who come to eat her pears more as entertainment than food. But I am learning things, among them that Dave Baker and friends on a deer hunt once camped out on an Owen County farm in a panel truck that had been used to haul ammonium nitrate. Not the smartest move, apparently.

“Overgrown hill country,” he called it. And so it is.

Big game hunting takes on a slightly different face down in Nicholas County where things are more civilized. Or so Charlie Hughes would have us believe. Check out the story of how he took his Trophy White Tail.