David Toczko
John McGinnis
On Aug. 17, 2017, it was official. The tropical wave that had formed off Africa’s western coast was now a tropical storm. By Aug. 24, the storm named Harvey had intensified into the third hurricane of the year. Within hours, the churning Gulf of Mexico monster grew into a Category 4 and made its first landfall on Aug. 26 in Rockport, Texas.
On Aug. 27, NBC Nightly News tweeted this dire warning from the National Weather Service: “This event is unprecedented, and all impacts are unknown beyond anything experienced.”
Before Harvey’s fury was spent, it made two more landfalls, dumped more than 30 inches of rain in many locations, destroyed thousands of homes and businesses, caused nearly $200 billion worth of destruction, and snatched away the lives of nearly 100 people.
Professional forecasters and officials along the Gulf Coast had no way of knowing that Harvey would weaken and intensify many times. They had no way to foretell the system would stall out in certain areas, spin off tornadoes in other areas, and impact millions of people.
But God knew. In fact, God had been preparing one Kentucky man for this very occurrence for more than 45 years.
David Toczko
Wetting a Line
Grayson County resident John McGinnis tells of his childhood in Spring Lick, where he was raised by his grandparents. McGinnis was like just about every other boy in the early 1970s in rural Kentucky. He ate food his granny, Martha Elizabeth Bates, raised and cooked; learned about the Lord from her gentle, weathered lips; and tried to be fair about sneaking off to go fishing.
Caney Creek beckoned him from beyond the railroad tracks behind their home. It was a draw he couldn’t resist—something he claims to be in his DNA. “I could take a cane pole and a hook and come back with dinner. I thought that was the greatest thing in the world,” McGinnis says. He slips into storytelling, and in his words, the land, the water, the people come alive.
“I remember this one time I snuck over there,” McGinnis says. “I come back with a big mess of fish, and Granddaddy said, ‘Boy, we’ve been looking all over for you.’ ”
His granny warned him he was going to get “a whooping” for sneaking off, but, he says, she also told him, “That’s a good mess of fish, and I’ll get them cleaned up and cook them after a while.”
He recalls she just barely spanked him, and they ate their fill of fish that night. “It was just … Granny knew it’s who I was. I never understood people, but fish …” his voice trails off for a moment. “Fishing, I think, is just a way of prolonging your experience with the water. Now, you can be with what God created in the water, and you can catch fish, too.”
He lets out a laugh that would make even the most curmudgeonly souls among us smile. McGinnis tells of eating tomato sandwiches and hoping there was mayonnaise enough for all of them, of how he enlisted and served his country in the Army from 1989 to 1991, and of how he moved from fishing the waters of Caney Creek to professional bass fishing across the nation for 10 years.
“I just believed every cast was a fish, and most of the time, it was,” he says. “The Bible says faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. When you go fishing, you are hoping to catch fish, and you can’t see none of them. We live our whole life believing in something we can’t see. That why it’s so easy for fishermen to believe in God. We have proof after proof after proof that there is stuff that we don’t know about, that we can’t see, but it’s still there. Ain’t that awesome?”
On the night of Aug. 29, 2017, all his granny’s lessons, all the years spent casting, believing and reeling in, came to a head as he and Stephanie, his wife of 19 years, were getting ready for bed. They watched the news of the Houston flooding.
“I know about water,” he says. “I’ve been in a boat for 30 years, so I knew them people was going to die. It really troubled me. I rolled over and tried to pray it away. That’s what we do when stuff bothers us; we try to pray it away so it will leave us alone. I said, ‘God, you gotta help these people.’ And God said, ‘Why don’t you?’ ”
McGinnis got up and did just that.
David Toczko
Fishing in Trust
McGinnis, who owns a construction company, speaks plainly, throwing into his speech the colloquialisms that helped to shape his faith and his life philosophy. “When we was little, you heard those stories. Old man Knickerbocker broke his leg, and the whole family got together and went and got his harvest in and never took a dime. You heard those stories,” he insists. “That’s who we are. In the end, the only thing we can keep is what we give away. My granny taught me to love and help people. That’s just Kentucky. That’s what we do.”
In keeping with “what we do,” McGinnis hooked up his trailered 21-foot Ranger bass boat to his white Chevy pickup and, with Stephanie’s careful packing, headed south and west within 15 minutes of his initial prayer and God’s clear answer to it. Ahead of him was a more than 13-hour journey.
About 177 miles from Houston, his Chevy petered out. “I’m on the edge of the hurricane. This truck just quit for no reason. I ease off the side of the road, and there’s a board with nails in it. It flattened my boat tires,” he says. “I started questioning everything. ‘What am I doing? What am I going to do if I even get there? Where am I going to stay?’ Then, this cop pulls up behind me. I tell him I’m trying to get to Houston.”
“I got a buddy,” the officer says. “Let me call my buddy.”
“He calls this guy named Roger at R&M Towing in Henderson [Texas]. He comes and loads my truck on one truck and my boat up on another truck and takes it all the way to his shop,” McGinnis says. “He has four guys work on it for three hours, puts new tires on my boat trailer, and when he gets done, he says, ‘There ain’t no bill, son. I can’t charge you nothing. God told me to help you.’ ” McGinnis takes a breath and eases past the emotion that wells up within him. In a half a minute, he continues his story.
“I’m going on through, and I see water in the ditch. The top of this car is exposed, and I see what looks like a hand hanging out of it—right beside the interstate. I pulled over, and the current was so bad, they couldn’t get their door open. I got on the other side, pulled the door open, and there was a woman and a baby and a husband in that car,” McGinnis says, and he tells of pulling them to safety. “That lit my fire. After that, I knew what I was doing. If my truck hadn’t broken down, those people wouldn’t have been there. If I had been there one minute later, the water would’ve been over top of them. God knew what He was doing. I thought my truck broke down, but He just put me on pause for a minute so He could bless somebody else.”
Over the course of the next seven days, McGinnis traveled in the wake of Hurricane Harvey from Houston to Beaumont. He put his boat in wherever he could, sometimes backing it into flooded subdivisions. He fished men, women and children from floodwaters and took them to safety. He put in over and over and over. He declines to say how many, even though he may hold their count deep in his heart. It’s a number he says is between him and God.
He also declines to count himself a hero. “I don’t feel like I’m doing my part unless I’m helping people,” he says. “God didn’t put me here just so I could go fishing, or go live my life. He put me here to help somebody else.”
To McGinnis, the life he lives is just a “country boy” thing. He listened to God and impacted the lives of hundreds of people. But it’s also a Kentucky thing.
“Most Kentuckians are like me. Everybody else wanted to be there, too,” he says. “They saw someone just like them that did go, and that made them feel like a piece of them was there. That’s what’s so beautiful.”
In the days and weeks to come, McGinnis plans to spend as much of the winter months as possible in Texas, helping folks rebuild their homes and their lives. He will tell them of how God answers prayers and how God deserves all the glory. He will build hearts of faith, ever ready to cast a line in the direction of the voice of his Lord.
Photos by David Toczko
David Toczko
Many of the people McGinnis will be helping to rebuild in the Houston area did not have insurance. To assist in purchasing building supplies, you can make a contribution to John McGinnis, P.O. Box 427, Clarkson, KY 42726.