The Spillway

Once upon a time, during the Great Depression, Pennsylvanians found themselves severely out of work. As a result, men who had lost their factory jobs were employed by the government to carry out a whole host of very important and worthwhile projects that would benefit their communities for decades to come. One such project was to pave the streets of Meadville with red bricks in order to give the people of Crawford County another reason to complain. As far as I am aware, this is the only purpose the still-existent brick roads of Meadville have served since they were created. Another project, a major source of income and tourism for the area, was the conversion of a swampland/onion field on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border into a 17,088-acre lake that would become one of the Commonwealth’s most popular attractions as part of its largest state park, Pymatuning. While the Pymatuning Reservoir and its surrounding areas boast excellent boating, fishing, camping and swimming, most people who have been there will tell you that its most memorable aspect is none of these — rather, it is the Linesville Spillway, “Where the Ducks Walk on the Fish”.

A few miles from the causeway that provides the (unfortunate) connection between Pennsylvania and Ohio, there is a section of Pymatuning shoreline notorious for its conglomeration of carp and waterfowl. Every year, tens of thousands of people visit the Spillway to watch one of the greatest interspecies battles ever arranged as the masses of fish (which outnumber the tourists) emerge from the depths of the lake and fight for stale bread tossed to their gaping mouths by the attraction’s visitors. On any given day people will come from across the country and from a few miles down the road to see the fish. The crowd is made up of everyone from grandparents to grandchildren and fish bread is purchased with everything from food stamps to Benjamins. The diversity that can be found at the Spillway is pretty astounding when the fact that the 2000 Census determined that average Crawford County resident was 35 and white with an income of $26,000. The number of outliers in both directions is pretty substantial when you attempt to fit Pymatuning tourists into any sort of bell-shaped curve, and I think there are three reasons for this: first, anyone can get his or her hands on a piece of bread. (If not, the fish aren’t picky. The only stuff they don’t like seems to be soda pop and corrugated cardboard.) Second, anyone can drop a piece of bread (or anything, for that matter) over a railing. But finally, and most importantly, humans seem to have a kind of morbid curiosity that leads them to seek out experiences which meet a certain point on the unpleasantness threshold. Seeing thousands of slimy brown carp with bulging eyes and round, smacking mouths flailing around at one’s feet seems to satisfy this underlying desire to a T.

Never in my life have I seen anything else so outrageously disgusting that I cannot, no matter how hard I try, tear my eyes from it. The Spillway casts a deeply disturbing spell on those who attend it and while you’ll have nightmares about carp for years afterward, I guarantee that you will not be able to resist a return visit. Usually on this second trip you will be accompanied by a skeptical friend who cannot quite grasp what you mean when you say “My vacation was great. I’ve never been so repulsed.” Whether you come back with a photograph, videotape or “CARPE FEED’EM!” t-shirt as a memento, people who have never been cannot and will not possibly understand what you’ve gone through. The Spillway is the first place I take people when they come to visit me and it is one of the last places I go when I know I’ll be out of town for a long time. It’s the kind of thing that somehow manages to really put life into perspective. If I ever feel my emotions start to get the best of me, all I have to do is think of the Spillway and I’m instantly back to my old, hard, indifferent self.