Brown County Indiana

I really like this place ...

I live in the Hills of Brown County Indiana, “my”¹ land bordering the Hoosier National Forest. Copying some factoids from the Web (with my additions in italics), Brown County started out as a Faming/Subsistence/Artist Colony and is:

• the second-least populated county in Indiana, almost 90% covered with forests;

• it’s largest town and county seat, Nashville, has a population of 803. But it’s not a one-horse town, even if it does roll up its sidewalks at sundown:

  • We have ALL the 3 the traffic lights in the country and you can see them all from one corner (Cindy [Our Brown County] told me that);

  • We have a Two Window McDonalds and Two gas stations one open 24/7 right in town;

  • We also have some great restaurants, wineries, distilleries (and good moonshine — Brown County is of those places where you pump the sunshine in and the moonshine out), and more live music venues per capita than probably anywhere in the U.S.

  • And, like, how many places in the middle of no-where have an authentic Filipino restaurant with deep-fried Spam-wiches??? (See picture below). I recommend the Cod Sandwich but think I’ll try the rice bowl tomorrow.

  

• Brown County State Park is Indiana’s largest and most-visited state park. It dates from 1931.

• We have lots of deer, coyotes (and now that Nashoba has passed, and Bobby’s dog has a new home, I can enjoy being surrounded by their howling at night), turkeys, and rattle snakes and copper heads, turtles and tortoises, owls and bats, beavers, the birds and the bees, eagles, and in full disclosure, ticks and chiggers (for which I have finally found the solution), and our county used to even have at least one wolf, Nashoba.

I bought my place here in ‘85 while working nearby in Bloomington at the I.U. Cyclotron Facility. Back then Brown County was my “bedroom” community. My life and most my friends were in Bloomington.

When I left this place in ‘94 to work in Michigan, I didn’t sell it. I figured if I ever found a more beautiful place to live, well, then I could sell this place. I never did. (And this place, left empty for over a decade, except for a maybe a weekend or so a month, was never bothered by no-one no-way! Bobby, Tom [Little Man] and Jim [is he still my neighbor or not?] were GOOD Neighbors and watched out for me). And, when living away, I always missed this special place. After quitting work in early ‘08 in Michigan, I gradually moved back down here, and with the Cyclotron closed down, most of my former friends had moved away, and I began to slowly move my life from Bloomington to Nashville. I’m now beginning to really appreciate this place; I’ll probably die here.

And Brown County is a little Island of Freedom. If I were to venture into Bloomington today, I’d get chased out of any establishment for not wearing a muzzle. In Nashville, we’re muzzle-less (though I wear a garlic bulb around my neck because I’m a Scientist)² and I loved the sign I saw on a café in town: “We Love Seeing your [Smiling] Face”. I hope we stay this way!

And, going south from here on a 3 day motorcycle trip, I saw exactly 2 muzzled people. So, there’s many more freedom-loving Hoosiers out there! Of course, going south from here through the National Forest, neglecting the few cities (Evansville and Louisville) which I avoided, there aren’t any cities, and most of the “towns” don’t even have a gas station — which can be a problem when your cycle only has a 4 gallon tank, and depending upon how you drive, you might only get 30 miles/gallon. (Here’s a good one: I stopped at a General Store in a small town that still operates on the Honor System: the gas pump [ethanol-free, so I wonder how old that gas was, and the bike maybe did run a bit rough] had no input for a credit card; rather you just picked up the nozzle, turned on the pump, filled up your cycle, and then walked inside to pay with cash money — and I got a freshly-made sandwich, some grapes, and dark-chocolate-covered pretzels). I LOVE southern Indiana!

And while on my short trip, I was the only person wearing an organic heirloom garlic bulb around their neck, so not not all Hoosiers are quite as “with it” as I am. On the other-other hand, we Smart Hoosiers are still at least like a hundred thousand million times way more “with it” than those Dumb Kentuckian hillbillies whom we love to hate, especially when they beat Indiana in basketball.

1. Read Hametreya by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

2. There are no scientific DATA to support Muzzling: 15 RCT’s (Randomized Control Studies, the Gold Standard in Medicine) all say they have no, or negative, effects as summarized below (so I figure, wearing a garlic bulb around my neck is at least as effective and scientific):

Editorial (Continued)