Viva
WE’RE ON OUR WAY to a nudist Christmas party in Vevay, but first, my tour guide, Andrea Kappes, wants to show me the Amish discount store and check out the grave of the town’s beloved mascot, a dead goat named Fred. Jon Charles Smith, executive director of the Switzerland County Tourism office, has kept my itinerary packed tighter than the gift basket he left on my bed. It’s winter. Kappes and I are dressed in layers of down. We are pretty sure the nudists will keep their clothes on, but as everything in this tiny town in southeastern Indiana is what Smith calls “funky, artsy, quirky,” you never know.
Kappes points out the Catholic church, which holds Mass, oddly enough, on Saturday afternoons when a priest comes over from Madison. The service is big hit with locals.
“They call it ‘The Quickie,’” Kappes says. “He gets in and out in 45 minutes, and they can get back to watch basketball games.”
As we pull alongside an abandoned house, Kappes recounts the legend of Fred the Goat, a white, hornless, 4-H runaway with a Houdini-like talent for escaping fences. Fred climbed trees, licked salt off the road, befriended deer and horses. People admired his spunk. Some claimed he looked at them with mystical intensity. Postcards were made. Media picked up the story. Then, in fall 2013, the regulars at AJ’s Diner worried they hadn’t seen Fred around. A search party was dispatched and discovered his remains inside his favorite ramshackle house. There was talk of taxidermy, but instead, a concrete statue of a white goat was placed on his favorite hillside. Kappes takes a photo for me out her window. She tells me Fred’s Facebook page has more than 1,000 followers.
I remind her Fred is dead. Death, seemingly, is a larger obstacle to Facebook fame than being a goat.
“Fred lives on,” Kappes says. “We post about things going on in Vevay, post Fred the Goat festival pictures, other goat-related stuff. Sometimes I narrate it like I am Fred. It has kind of taken off.”
So has Vevay. This hamlet of 1,700 Hoosiers nestled along the Ohio River made national headlines last year when celebrity tattoo artist Kat Von D announced she was leaving Los Angeles and moving here. Von D saw the town’s historic 35-room Schenck Mansion online, flew in, and purchased the Second Empire–style castle filled with antiques for $1.5 million.
“It’s official! Vevay, Indiana, here we come!” she posted on Instagram. Later, Von D teased: “I wonder if Vevay, Indiana, would mind if I opened a little tattoo shop up here…”
AT FIRST BLUSH, the idea that the goth goddess from LA Ink who started a cosmetics line, a vegan shoe company, and just released her first album, was moving to a town with a single traffic light, where the sign outside Cuzz’s, Indiana’s second-oldest bar, reads, “Where the good ol boys and gals hang out,” seems, well, crazy.
But spend a little time in Vevay, even a whirlwind weekend, and you’ll see that Von D is joining a community as colorful as she is. Fueled.
