Day: January 26, 2024

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.