Month: January 2024

I still walk the river many nights in my imagination…….

I start off walking towards the river. It has always been there. I don’t know how many centuries it has flowed its current course, but likely it has been many. The center of the little town grew up around it’s flood plain, copying the footprints of the Cherokee who lived here and the mound builders who preceded them.

More than likely, even older Paleolithic people inhabited this area over 10,000 years ago as exhibited by Russell Cave in Alabama and the artifacts found there. I think there may have even been some Clovis points found in this area.

I like the spirituality of the land and its lay. This area is one of the most Geologically stable and least changed in this country. Things are much as they were in terms of the land for these past many centuries now. I feel this as I walk.

I imagine a time when the rivers were filled with gar and sturgeon, and even occasionally a bison would wander this far south. When bear, puma and wolf roamed here. When huge trees grew uncut and blocked off the sunlight to the forest floors. I wonder at how the progress of mankind has shaped those bygone days into what I now see on my walks.

Oh I can imagine that life was extremely harsh for humanity in those years. A day was filled with the immediate needs for survival. Food and shelter…clothing. But by and by things got better. There was agriculture, There were the beginnings of government amongst the red man. Especially advanced with the Iroquois nation. What might have developed from these beginnings I often wonder?

I have read in history where the natives of this country were of much more robust and good health than the first Europeans who came here. They were just not resistant to the diseases which came with the white man and between measles, smallpox, and other contagious sicknesses 8 out of 10 of them perished within the first 100 years of contact. The rest were swept aside like dust on a clapboard floor.

Sometimes now as I walk along the bank of the Chattooga river I hear faint voices on the wind whispering “Why, why?” For that question I have no answer.

COTTON TOWN

The first thing I remember about Trion, Georgia is the smells of the cotton mill. I was somewhere between two and three years old when Daddy got out of the Navy, and we all moved into a little old house on sixth street, and Mom and Daddy “set up housekeeping”. I’d been living in Blue Ridge with my Mom and Grandparents, and Mom’s little sister who was 11 years old when I was born. Daddy finally got out of the Navy in ‘52, went to Riegel Textile and got a job, rented a house, and moved us in. We were officially Trionites.

But, back to the smell of the mill. I had no complaints as a three year old. I’d been used to smelling the smoke from a wood burning stove, the scents of bacon frying, cornbread baking, biscuits in the oven. I don’t know if I ate any of it, but I was used to olfactory stimulation. The smells of a cotton mill became familiar quickly. There was the slightly musty, but pleasant smell of bales of cotton. They had an earthy odor, accentuated by the pungency of the burlap they were wrapped in. I found out later how huge they were, passing by them sitting out on the open cotton docks like huge marshmallows that had been half way toasted in a fire on the end of a wire coat hanger.

There was that smell which was sort of like the one that occurred when Momma would iron blue jeans with a hot clothes iron. Kind of on the edge of burny, extremely hot cotton having the wrinkles pressed out. Found out later on, it was cloth being sanforized. I never really realized what that process entailed until many years later when I worked in the mill as a supervisor in the denim finishing department where denim was being sanforized. I learned that the cloth was run through this huge machine, wet down first then partially dried, and run under a gigantic rubber belt that was tightly pushed up against a steel roller. This process pre shrunk the denim, which kept it from shrinking once it was made into blue jeans and sold. It ran over a gigantic steam wheel to totally dry it out, and the exhaust fans above it carried that smell that I’d smelled so many years earlier out into the night air.

There was also the briny, and very stinky sulfuric smell of the bright dye runoff coming from the printing department. At the time I was a child, they just dumped that excess dye after they were finished into a little creek that ran under the mill and out into the Chattooga River. I used to stand at the little bridge above where the stream ran when I was little and marvel at how beautiful and colorful that water was. I had no idea it was polluting the river something awful, and killing the fish. Back in the fifties, it wasn’t that big an issue.

So, I played out on the front steps and in the yard on sixth street. In the bright summer sunshine and during the cold of winter with my heavy coat on, making roads in the dirt for my tootsie toy cars, and pretending to drive all over town. All the while smelling the smells of a Southern cotton mill town wafting through the air.

A Seventies Memory- The Death of a Stranger

Paula and I went to Canton, Georgia today to take the two Cocker Spaniels to the lady from the Cocker Spaniel of Georgia Rescue group. Instead of going down I-75 and cutting across on Hwy 20 we went the “old” way on Hwy 140.

This is kind a trip down memory lane for us, as we used to come this way quite often between 1970 and 1974 when we lived in Athens. We didn’t really care for the ride on the Interstate back then so we sought out several more “scenic” routes to travel from Athens back “home” to Trion. This drive takes you through Waleska, Georgia where beautiful little Reinhardt College is located. What a pristine and pretty little campus, plunked down right in the center of rural outback Georgia. Even now, Waleska is much as it was back in the 70’s. Can’t say the same for Canton though.

At one time, the entire ride from Athens to Trion or back using these old “back road” routes was pretty much like an extended ride in the county. Canton use to be a tiny little mill town like Trion, before Atlanta crept up on it from the South like a tortoise who comes on slowly but surely and in the end wins the race. Canton is much more like a bedroom community for Atlanta now, with even the old Canton Cotton mill building turned into apartments. Wow….things really have changed.

We used to sometimes come this way in the evenings after work when we were coming home. It was beautiful back then….so starkly dark you could spot “shooting stars” from inside the car at night. The roads are mountainous and curvy and I always was careful and took my time, even as a “young an’” back then. One night as we were going up the first big hill outside of Canton a little red sports car came flying around us on a double yellow line. “Dang,” I said “If that guy don’t know these roads he’s liable to get killed” Prophetic…and quickly so.

As we drove on, just another couple of miles we saw a huge flash of light up ahead lighting up the night sky. “What the hell…” I muttered. As we rounded a steep curb we saw the reason. The little red sports car hadn’t mad the curb and had overturned and slammed into the harsh mountain rocks sticking out from the curb. The car was fully in flames…so hot that we could barely stand the heat even from the other side of the road. We could see the guy in the upside down car, immobile and burned in the driver’s seat. “Oh my God” my wife said.
It was a lonely and desolate Friday night and there was not much traffic on highway 140 back then. No other cars passing to flag down. No cell phones back then. I didn’t have anything resembling a fire extinguisher…and even if I had I could never have gotten close. We decided to go as quickly as possible to the next house, which was a new trailer on the right hand side of the road about a mile away. We frantically knocked and told them what had happened and they called the sheriff’s department. We decided not to stay. It wasn’t that we didn’t care, but there was nothing that we could have done. We didn’t know the driver, we were not actual witnesses of the accident, and we did not want to go back to that horrific scene. My wife especially, did not. I gave the people at the trailer my name and my folk’s phone number and told them to tell the police if they needed us to call. They never did. I’m guessing my explanation to the owner of the trailer was sufficient to what they found.

We went back that exact same route today, and relived that day. We talked about it again, and how so much time had passed, yet that memory was fresh. The same trailer was still there…had been built onto several times over the years and looks well lived in, now 40 years later. Forty years. Yet I still have that image in my head of that man or boy’s body in that burning car. I can still feel the heat at that curve and feel a little uneasy looking at the rocks there, which bore the blackened marks of fire for many years. My wife remembers jumping up in the bed at my folk’s house several times that night when the gas heater would light up.

I’ve never witnessed that happening again during my entire driving career from that day til now, and I hope I never will. Somebody’s son died that night. Maybe somebody’s brother. I believe it was a young man, so he could have been a student or someone just starting out in a working career in life. Wasted, because he had a red sport’s car that he couldn’t control going around a curve. I never tried to find out who it was. I didn’t want to know. I still don’t. I feel some sense of guilt because of what I said as the driver passed us going up the hill…..

For some reason I dreamed about going fishing last night. It’s strange, because I haven’t thought about fishing lately. I should, I guess because it used to be my Daddy’s favorite pastime….as well as all of my Uncles. I can understand how fishing was a skill which was perfected by a lot of kids and adults too who lived through the Great Depression of the 1930’s. A good fisherman could help feed their family, and food was not easy to come by back in those days.

I remember one day when I was about four years old…maybe closer to five, my Daddy took me with him down on the Chattooga river to go fishing. I was still too little to fish, but I liked to play around on the shore with the rocks, and splash in the water. We went up by the dam to a spot where Daddy usually had good luck. There was another man fishing there at the time, a man with dark, curly hair. Daddy put a lead head on his line and started casting.

After a while the man with the dark hair walked over and said:

“My name’s Roy Huston and I’m pastor at the Trion First Baptist church, and I was wondering if you are going to church anywhere?” “Nope” my Daddy said.

“Well,” said the preacher “I’d like to invite you to come and visit on Sunday”

“I’ll think about it” said my Daddy

I don’t think we went that week, but that preacher was persistent and came to our house up on the end of Simmons street and visited us a couple of times after that. In a few weeks, Dad and Mom gave in and went to the visit that church. They kept on going, and in a few weeks, joined the church and Daddy got baptized. A few years later, when I was eight or nine years old, I got baptized too. I continued to go to that church for many years after that, and took my own children there.

I guess that the pastor was fishing for more than fish the day that we met him on that river. He was doing what Jesus commanded him to do, and become a “fisher of men” Preacher Huston loved to fish though. He was once bass fishing on a little lake on highway 100 just out of Summerville and was catching Bass like mad. You could hear him holler “Praise God” as he was reeling in a seven pounder! Pastor Huston never got to see me get baptized though, as he died at a young age from a heart attack a couple of years after he and Daddy had met on that river. My Mom got a phone call one day from someone while we were at home and went to her knees in shock when she found out that he had died.

Pastor Huston was a man who was doing something that doesn’t seem to be going on as much nowadays as it has in the past. He was a witness. He not only witnessed by his words, but by his example. He grew the attendance of the church in which he pastored by just asking that simple question to everyone he saw that he didn’t know. “are you going to church, anywhere?”

I guess the dream about fishing last night, triggered that memory and I just wanted to write about it. I have gradually shifted my beliefs over the past ten years or so, and I don’t expect I will be changing too much. I am happy to have met that one man way back then though. If nothing else, he taught me at a very young age that your actions speak louder than your words. My Dad attended that church pretty much for the rest of his life, and I certainly also learned that lesson from him to. If you say you are going to do something, then do it. If you say you are going to do something, then do it. Don’t lie. I’ll tell you….that was one of Daddy’s cardinal rules. I got the worst whupping I ever got for lying to my Daddy. He told me that he might be mad at me for doing something I shouldn’t have done, but if I told the truth about it, then I would be in a WHOLE lot less trouble than if I told a lie and got caught in it. It only took me that one time to learn that lesson.

A lot of things have changed since those days in the early 1950’s. This country as a whole has changed, and in my opinion not really for the better in many ways. Maybe we need to look backwards just this once, at this point in history and remember how we were.

I remember very well when I lost the majority of my voice. It was in 1982, and I was working for Zee Medical Service selling first aid supplies. It was July, and the company was having an “event” in Atlanta at a hotel. I got an unusual sore throat which quickly developed into the worst pain I had ever had in the throat. Felt like I was being stabbed in the vocal cords with a needle. I got hoarse and then totally lost my voice. The pain lasted a couple of weeks, but the hoarseness in my voice lasted months. I didn’t think it would ever get back to normal. I could talk, but if I tried to sing it was terrible. No higher register, and cracking all the time.

I couldn’t sing, so I started writing songs. I worked out a melody on the guitar and recorded it on a little cassette player so I would not forget them. Words once written are in stone, but melodies are as elusive as butterflies on the wing. So I “netted” them and once the song was finished I kept the hope in my heart that I could find someone to sing them on a demo for me. My daughter was really coming along on her singing and I had an idea that she could do it.

One day early in 1985, I was riding down the road singing along with the radio, and I was able to carry a tune again. Gradually I regained part of my voice. I was able to sing again and went on to sing on some of the demos I occasionally post here. What you hear is about half of what I once could do.

I finally went to a specialist in 1999 when my voice started bothering me again. He found a big lump on one vocal cord, and was pretty sure it might be cancerous. I had surgery, and he found that it was a big lump of scar tissue. Having messed with it again caused me almost another year of being unable to sing, but I eventually got my singing voice back…but again further diminished. I am convinced that whatever I had in 1982 caused that scar.

Nowadays, if I talk a lot or sing a lot it’s somewhat painful and it takes several days to make a comeback. Back when I was going to Church they always wanted me in the choir, and I would sometimes go…but I guess nobody realized the problem I had even though I made it known. I have some days or weeks now when the old singing voice is ok, and some weeks when it is weak.

Much as I wanted to be a singer and still love it, I just couldn’t take the strain of a run at “America’s Got Talent” even assuming I was good enough. Quite honestly I give thanks for the ability to sing along with old Bing Crosby, or Keith Whitley from time to time. That’s still a pleasure and I’m danged happy with that as things stand.

What is certain to be a divisive and decisive year in the political system of America continues. Honestly, I try to be open minded and see if I can discern the things which work from both sides which would be of benefit to all Americans. There are fewer and fewer people will who try to stand in the center and find common ground. If you try to do it, you are targeted by both extremes.

The country is like a big old piece of “Turkish taffee” with two big strong kids pulling on either end. The middle gets thinner and thinner, and pretty soon it’s gonna break and there will never be a chance to put it back together again. It happened once already 150 years ago, and we’re still feeling the effects from that.

Buy up canned tuna, bottled water, blankets and sterno and stay alert. Either that or drift on back by the middle sometime and see if we can’t get together on some stuff and move forward. There must be compromise because every single person can’t get every single thing they want.

I wonder if anyone has people from their childhood whom they hold in high regard? People who were not your parents or other kinfolk.

Were there people in the background of your childhood who you would hold up as examples of respectible citizens to your children or grandchildren?
What was it about them that led you to respect them?

Did they holler and scream profanities? Did they tell you to hate other people, or that other people should be hated because they were different in some way from you? Did they let you get away with doing that to other people?

Instead, did they share things with you? Did they counsel you in a calm way about the way life should be lived? Did they live their lives as examples of humanity which you wanted to follow, and want to emulate?

Did you love them and respect them for their kindness, their morality, their stalwartness in the face of stubborn problems, and life’s bumps in the road? Did you admire them for the way they could solve problems between others without getting all “red in the face” or threatening to go get a gun and shoot somebody? Did they cook you a meal when you were hungry? Did any of them come by your house with hand me down clothing that their kids had outgrown because they knew your family could use them?

I remember a lot of people like that around here. Teachers, coaches, millworkers, neighbors, store owners…lot’s of others. I could start naming names, but those of you who grew up around here know the ones I’m talking about. They were here both male and female. They were Christian and non Christian. They were black and white.

I have to wonder, when we have those people to admire and to revere, and to hold up to high esteem because of their character…..why would we want people of lesser quality to “represent” us as leaders in our country? I cannot figure it out.

“When you’re weary, feeling small….when tears are in your eyes, I’ll dry them all.” “I’m on your side…”

It’s important to remember, who’s on your side. Because in this life you must choose a side.

Bridge Over Troubled Waters, by Simon and Garfunkel was the first song I heard on the radio back in 1970 as I was driving home from the hospital after my daughter died. It has both haunted and encouraged me for well over forty years now, most especially that one line: “when you need a friend, I’m sailing right behind,”

…. and I have these days when I have done nothing to be a friend, or very little, but in some odd coincidence I hear this song on the radio driving home from dropping off a very wonderful little baby, and I’m encouraged that tomorrow will be a good day.

Remember I’m on your side, and I’m sailing right behind.

If you are looking for a purpose in life and cannot find one, perhaps you need to look in a different direction.

I’ve looked in a lot of directions during my life.

I’m kind of like Forrest Gump who told the little old lady at the first of the movie: “I’ve worn a lot of shoes”. I’ve done the same thing. Worn a lot of shoes, and looked in a lot of directions.

I’ve tried to do and be many things, and I’ve never been a wild success at any of them. I’ve written songs and sung, I’ve taken photographs, I’ve written essays and themes, and just general writing. Those are the things I love to do. None of them were things I did “as a career”. For that, I’ve been mostly a “jack of all trades”. Doing this, that, and the other, while raising my children and helping with the grands.

I’ve been frustrated at times about success, but I’ve finally just about come to the point where I believe that “success” is in the eyes of the beholder….and of those who behold the beholder. (Got that?).

It’s not that complex really. Not as complicated as I’ve made it out. The old John Lennon quote holds true that “life is what happens while your making other plans”. It is. It does. You have to realize those spaces in between “your plans” can be your happiest moments.

For the vast majority of us, being rich and famous just isn’t in our destiny. We weren’t in the right place at the right time, or we were not single mindedly driven to the point of ignoring all other things, in order to be successful at just one.

Being happy is what you make it, and the frustration sets in when you can’t accept that some goals you set may never be achieved.

I still have things I’d like to do, but having a good, loving day with my family is now one of my most sought after accomplishments. Getting some nice pictures of the world around me, and sharing those, or writing just a line or two that encourages other people is something that brings me joy.

You can’t beat yourself up about the past, or you’ll be bloody ever dang day. I’m not going to do it….at least I’m going to try not too. Hope you will think about it, and do the same. Being bloody ain’t worth it.

If we all knew what the future held in store, then there would be no need in living out our lives. If everything were preordained, what would be the use in trying?

I believe we have the means and the ability to change the future….our future, we just need to venture ahead with the knowledge that nothing is written in stone. No outcomes are already decided.