Every year, right around this time, something happens in Southeastern Indiana that doesn’t get nearly enough credit.
It doesn’t make the national news. Nobody’s doing a documentary about it. There’s no trending hashtag. It’s just a hand-lettered sign in a church parking lot, a folding table with a cash box, and the smell of something frying that you can detect from two blocks away if the wind is right.
Fish fry season.
And if you think it’s about the fish, you’re missing the whole thing.
I wrote last Labor Day about what church festivals mean to this part of Indiana — the fried chicken, the community, the way those late-summer evenings have a feeling that’s hard to put into words. Some of you told me that one hit close to home. Fish fry season has me thinking along the same lines again. Different time of year, different menu, same idea.
I’ve been to a lot of fish fries over the years — church halls, fire stations, VFW posts, Knights of Columbus halls. St. Martin’s out in Guilford. The New Point VFD. The Marion Township Fire Department in Millhousen. The Brookville VFW. Places where the tables are folding, the chairs are metal, and the room smells like it’s been frying fish every Lent since before most of us were born.
Every one of them is a little different. Different recipes, different sides, different levels of ambition when it comes to the coleslaw. Some places do hand-breaded cod loins that they take genuinely seriously. Some places offer baked as a concession to the people who will ask for baked. Some places have homemade pie that deserves its own column entirely.
But here’s what’s the same at every single one:
The noise.
Not loud noise. Just the particular noise of a room full of people who know each other. Conversations overlapping. Somebody laughing too hard at something in the corner. Kids running between tables because the adults have temporarily stopped keeping track. The clatter of serving spoons and folding chairs. The sound of a community in the middle of being one.
You can’t manufacture that. You can’t franchise it. You can’t download it.
Think about what goes into one of these things.
Somebody ordered the fish weeks ago. Somebody else picked it up. There are people who showed up this afternoon to start prepping, people who’ve been here since three o’clock getting the oil hot and the sides ready and the tables set up just so. There’s a woman — there is always a woman — who made the desserts at home and carried them in on trays covered with aluminum foil, and she will be quietly annoyed if you don’t take one, so take one.
None of these people are getting paid. They’re here because this is their church, their fire department, their community — and because somebody asked and they said yes. That’s it. That’s the whole transaction.
We don’t talk enough about what that means. In a world where everything has a price point and everything is monetized and your attention is constantly being competed for by something trying to sell you something — there are still people in this county who will spend their Friday evening standing over a fryer for strangers. And they’ll be back next week.
There’s also something to be said for the specific ritual of Lent in a place like this.
Catholic roots in this part of Indiana run deep — deeper than almost anywhere else in the state. The German and Irish immigrants who settled here in the 1800s built parishes before they built much else, and you can still trace those roots on a map by following the church names. St. Teresa out in Bright. St. Anthony in Morris. St. Nicholas in Sunman. The names on the old gravestones and the names on the church directories are often the same names.
Lent, for a lot of folks around here, isn’t primarily an abstinence from meat. It’s a season. It has a feeling. There’s something about a cold Friday evening in February or March, driving down a county road toward a lit-up parish hall, that has a weight to it — tradition, memory, belonging — that’s hard to put into words without sounding sentimental.
So I won’t try. I’ll just say: you know the feeling, or you don’t. And if you grew up around here, you probably know it.
I think about the people who’ve been doing this for forty years.
The guy who runs the fryer with the same method his dad used. The woman who’s been organizing the volunteer schedule since before some of these volunteers were born. The couple that always handles carry-out and has their system down so cold they barely have to talk to each other anymore — they just move.
These people are not famous. They’re not going to be on a list of community influencers. But if you took them away — if all the people quietly holding things like this together just decided it wasn’t worth it anymore — you would feel the absence in ways you can’t fully predict.
Communities don’t run on institutions. They run on people who show up. And the fish fry is just one of about a thousand places in this four-county area where that happens every week, in ways most of us will never fully see.
So here’s what I’d encourage.
Go to one. If you haven’t been in a while, go this Friday. Or next Friday. There’s no shortage of options — WRBI’s got the Fish Fry Focus running all season right at the top of the page.
But when you go, don’t just eat and leave.
Look around for a minute. Notice who’s working the room. Find the person who looks like they’ve been there since noon and thank them. Take a piece of the homemade pie even if you’re full. Talk to someone you didn’t come with.
The fish is good. It’s always good.
But what you’re really there for is the room.
And the room is worth the drive.
Brent Lee is the morning host at WRBI 103.9 FM. His column runs regularly at wrbiradio.com.