By Neal Wooten
When I was a kid I was a tad gullible. I believed everything anyone told me. Thank goodness I’m an adult now and a whole lot smarter. Now I only believe 99% of what people tell me.
I was about 14 when I heard that a barge had struck one of the columns of the B.B. Comer Bridge in Scottsboro. I’m pretty sure that part is true since for years I could see the chunk out of the concrete. But it was the story that followed that really captured my imagination.
“Did you hear what happened? They sent a scuba-diver down to check the columns and he came back up and said there was no amount of money you could pay him to go back down there because there were catfish lying on the bottom around those columns that were big enough to swallow you.”
Yes, I bought it hook, line, and sinker. No pun intended. For years I tried to imagine what those huge fish looked like. I thought about them every time I drove over that scary construct. And of course I retold the story many times.
Years later I owned a gym in Montgomery. One day a member was telling me a story about Lake Martin. “They sent some divers down to check the integrity of the dam,” he began. “The divers came back up and said there was no amount of money you could pay them to go back down there because there were catfish lying at the bottom of that dam…”
Well, you know the rest. I was crushed. That was my story. Those were my fish. And up until that very moment, I still thought it was true. It was a lesson learned.
My dad once told me a gruesome story about when he was in basic training. One of the guys in his platoon was very afraid of snakes. During a live-fire exercise as the soldiers had to crawl under a cascade of bullets, this guy was right beside my dad and a snake crawled in front of him. The guy jumped up and the bullets cut him in two.
During summer break from Auburn one year I worked at Game Time. One of the regulars who worked there was a fellow everyone called Sarge. One day he told me the exact same story and once again the guy was right beside him and once again he was cut in two. Not “killed.” Not simply “shot.” Cut in two.
I guess stories sound much better if told from a personal perspective. And I guess the old adage is true: “Don’t believe everything you hear and only half of what you see.”
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