Pell Switch, Second Trip

The piece ran in June. Volunteer fire department in Pell Switch, Kentucky, buys a used pumper with fish fry money, two Fridays a month at the Odd Fellows hall, catfish and hush puppies, eight dollars a plate and five for kids. The truck is a 1988 Ford with a Darley pump on it, bought off a department in Ohio. The chief told me they paid nine thousand four hundred dollars.

The Wire runs anything over five thousand past a paper source before it goes in the quarterly. That is the rule and it is a reasonable rule, so I drove back.

Three hundred twelve miles. US 68 most of the way, then a county road with a good crown on it and no stripe. The Crown Vic turned 413,206 outside Maysville. Breakfast at the Dixie was two eggs, toast, and coffee for three dollars even, and the cook came out to ask where I was headed.

The county seat is Cade. Courthouse annex, second floor, deputy clerk named Wanda Prine who did not make me fill anything out. Fire district purchases over five thousand go into the district's annual filing, she said, and she went and got the box. Fire District 6, Carrow County. The filings run clean through 1994 and then they stop. Nothing after.

I asked if the district had dissolved. She said no, they file the insurance certificate every January, it comes in the first week, she puts it in the same box. She showed me this year's. It is a standard certificate on a state form and it carries a district number in the corner.

I called Frankfort from the hallway. The state fire commission has a phone tree and I got through it and then got transferred twice. A man named Estep looked up the district number and told me it belongs to a district two counties over that consolidated in the eighties, and that Carrow County shows no districts on the state roster. None. I told him the county roster shows two. He said I should call the county. I said I was standing in the county. He said then I probably had better information than he did, and asked me to send him a copy of the certificate, which I said I would.

Both numbers are in the notebook. Neither office was rude about it.

Drove out to the firehouse in the afternoon. Chief is Dale Tolliver, runs the hardware store, has the department's paper at his house in a shoebox because the firehouse floods. He had the cancelled checks. Three of them, made out to the Ohio department: four thousand, four thousand, and fourteen hundred, dated across nine days in May. I photographed them on his kitchen table with his permission.

The bank stamp on the back is Farmers Deposit of Cade. Farmers Deposit merged into a Louisville outfit in 2003 and the branch on the square is a dollar store now. The checks are stamped and cleared and the balance in the department's ledger moves the way it should. Tolliver writes the ledger in pencil and keeps it current.

So the number stands. Nine thousand four hundred, three checks, cleared.

Tolliver said the next fish fry is the second Friday. I told him I would try to be back for it.