My family moved to a small town on the Watts Bar Lake when I was about ten years old, to get away from Oak Ridge, perhaps to evade the nuclear threat looming over the city, but mostly to get to a great fishing area. Even the prominent fishing dock on the dike, built to keep the Clinch River out of the town, had sea planes to take folks to the backwaters of Watts Bar for fantastic fishing experiences.
This lake provided many good times fishing, skiing, swimming, riding the TVA river boat waves while swimming across the river, and many, many fish, that Dad and I would clean, and maybe enjoy then or freeze or even have a neighborhood fish fry.
But the fish guts were always a problem, right? Well, being raised on a farm, he would bury the fish guts etc in the area where we had a small garden, and the remains did wonders for the vegetables that followed. During one very hot summer he ran out of space since the garden was producing to the max, and every nook and cranny was used, and overflowing with ripe tomatoes, corn, beans, squash, and the flowers he would also raise, the daliahs being his favorite. He had the omnipotent green thumb.
What to do with the fish guts? He spied the other side of the yard, which had adjoined an old farm, where an old barb wire fence separated the properties.
Actually this entire hill north of the town, which later became mostly a residential area, was a huge farm during the 1800's and commanded a spectacular view where the Tennessee and Clinch Rivers join, named Southwest Point, a military fort during the Indian Wars of the early years. It was here on the fence line where he promptly dug a hole and deposited the fish heads, innards and other parts which were of no more use to us or the fish. He later learned a way to filet a fish so that you have the carcass as one piece plus two skins instead of head, skins and carcass separately. The old dead wood fence posts adjacent to the hole must have been there 100 years but had green sprouts in the morning. Must have been the fish tails.