From the Bench

GOD, GRANITE, AND TURTLE STEW

Bill Scott is not a big man, but he has a huge heart…and a lot of stamina. When I met him, he was laboring over a ten-gallon vat of stew on a screened-in back porch. Two large fans were fighting a losing battle with the hundred-degree heat.

Two more stew pots sat on the floor. Bill ladled up a bowl, offered me a seat, and introduced me to his two co-workers. He introduced each of them as "the turtle man." Neither seemed too enthusiastic about the title, quickly deflecting it back to Bill.

The annual turtle stew men’s supper has been held at the Bowman Baptist Church for six or seven years, and Bill has been involved with most of them.

Summertime is not the best time to be standing over a hot stove. Time was, they held the event in October, but Bill teaches at Elberton High School, and fixing thirty gallons of turtle stew in the same time frame became too much. So they moved it to June.

It was hard to decide which was hotter, the weather or the stew. "The preacher likes it hot," Bill said. "We all do."

The preacher was Billy "Turtle Man" Owensby, who stood near the stove, chopping onions and crying. The third man, Doug "Turtle Man" Booth, sat on the step, quietly observing, now that the job was nearly done. Doug once raised cows, but has switched almost exclusively to chickens.

I learned a little about the process of making turtle stew. First, you have to catch turtles, which probably doesn’t surprise you. The best I could tell, this involves something similar to what we called a trotline in east Tennessee.

A line baited with several chunks of raw beef is thrown across a creek or pond. With any luck at all, you will end up with several turtles. This year’s batch of stew contained four, hardly enough for thirty gallons of stew.

The cooks explained that there’s more chicken and beef in the brew than turtle. It tasted like brunswick stew, which, as any true southerner knows, can vary widely in ingredients, texture, and taste.

Bill did not offer to tell me what all was in it, which was fine. I didn’t really want to know; however, except for the heat, it was delicious. If I hadn’t already had lunch, I would have had another bowl.

I asked Bill how you prepare the turtle meat. One method he facetiously described involves blowing hard to force the meat from the shell. I need not go into details.

The true method is to behead the animal, boil it, and extract the meat for further cooking.

From there, it is a lot like making brunswick stew, which generally means use your own recipe, or make one up.

We spent more time talking about granite than stew. Elberton is ten or twelve miles down the road from Bowman, and is known a "the granite capital of the world." Bill told me that Elberton sits on a seam of granite that is six miles wide, thirty-five miles long, and no telling how deep. They won’t be running out soon.

Bill Scott knows a lot about granite. He worked in the industry for a number of years, and then hired on with the high school to teach. "Not everybody is going to college, and some of our kids come right out of high school trained and ready to go to work," Bill said. "They don’t have any trouble finding a job."

Which is more than you can say for a lot of Ivy League liberal arts majors, I thought.

It was fascinating listening to Bill describe the processes for finishing granite. Drills, saws, and polishers were no surprise. What was, however, was his description of the computer programs and sandblasting they use to carve and engrave the stone.

One company donated a ten-thousand-dollar computer to the school lab. Bill invited me to come by and see it in action when school resumes.

The turtle stew supper is not only a social event, but also serves as an outreach for the church. Bill said that last year seven people accepted Christ at the service that accompanied the supper.

Bill Scott would probably be embarrassed by what I am about to say, for here was a doer, not a talker. But in his quiet, unassuming way, he is teaching not only how to make a living, but also how to live. And that is much more important than carving granite…or making turtle stew.

C2002 Dave Nelson

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