A rainy search for Monkey's Eyebrow
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By Bill Wundram | Sunday, April 06, 2008 |
(Wundram has been meandering the southland, poking around places that most people overlook. Here’s one of his dispatches.)
I was determined to find this town called Monkey’s Eyebrow. It’s said to show up on a few maps as somewhere along the Ohio River, not far from Metropolis, Ill. Sunday afternoon, I set out to find Monkey’s Eyebrow.
“It’s over there, somewhere across the Ohio River,” motioned a deputy sheriff.
“Over there” was not very helpful, so I asked a man just getting out of his car if he had ever heard of Monkey’s Eyebrow.
“Oh, yeah,” John Croch said. “It’s over by Possum Trot, but you’re in Illinois and Monkey’s Eyebrow is in Kentucky. You’ll have to go back on Interstate 57 to Exit 3, take a hard right and ask some of those hillbillies at the gas station.”
“Oh-h-h,” said the serious clerk behind the counter at the gas station. “You want Monkey’s Eyebrow? I don’t think it’s there.”
A customer debated whether it was near Bandanna and to the side of Oscar. But these towns weren’t on our map. This gobbledygook worsened when I was told that you could never tell when you’re in Monkey’s Eyebrow because there were no city limits.
There are legends about Monkey’s Eyebrow, and there is a Web site for it under Joe’s Place, a cryptic title. I was going to find it, but tarnation, I had an idea that Joe’s Place was a place in someone’s moonshine dreamland.
The Web site claims that the western end of Kentucky, bounded by the Ohio River, looks like the profile of a monkey’s face, and Monkey’s Eyebrow was so named by early residents because it was where the monkey’s eyebrows topped a brushy hillock.
Never mind that the rain was wetting me down to my socks. I was told to keep going on county Route 996 to Granville, but “996” kept going without end. For help, I stopped at a place with a big sign that said “Home of the $1 Baloney Sandwich.” It was a place where deer can be butchered and another sign said, “The Buck Stops Here.” It was closed. Still lost, I asked a woman leaving Harmony Baptist Church, carrying a casserole dish, about Monkey’s Eyebrow.
“Hi,” she said, in that wonderful y’all accent. She was no help and fetched a man from inside the church. “There’s nothing left of that town but the name,” he said with a somber look, and hurried back inside to escape the drench.
My patient wife said, “This would be pretty country if it wasn’t raining so hard.” We were able to see, though, a dazzling butter-yellow forsythia bush that was big as a truck.
Forever we drove, almost two hours, once directed to Route 473, said to be Monkey’s Eyebrow Road. But whenever I asked, I was told deceptive tales of how there used to be a plank building there that sold canned goods, but that the building fell apart.
In the middle of nowhere, I spotted a dozen or so men in camouflage. They had no inclination to talk, except one said he was from Minnesota and another was from Indiana. Inside a small building, a woman offered me a sandwich for $3.
“What is this all about,” I asked. “Why are you here?” One man said, “We train dogs.”
“Is this Monkey’s Eyebrow?” I asked. The guys shook their heads, like they didn’t know what I was talking about.
The rain was a torrent. The windshield wipers had trouble handling it. I headed for the interstate, giving up on finding Monkey’s Eyebrow. I’m not sure it even exists. I think it’s a myth, like a state of mind. On this day, it was a sodden state of mind.
Bill Wundram can be contacted at (563) 383-2249 or bwundram@qctimes.com. Comment on this column at qctimes.com.
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