A Season of Visitations

The first weekend of June 1972, my daddy was going to Screven County and said he could help me put some things into storage if I wanted to drive out later after class. I’d started summer school with a lighter schedule, and again, would be forced to drop out, but on this pleasant Friday, I seemed to be holding my own. Clothes, books, and other possessions I’d abruptly left at the pond were now boxed and shuffled into the rear bedroom, and it was time to go through them. Daddy would be leaving after supper, but since the folks up at the farmhouse were just a local call away, I packed with the intention of staying a night, or two, depending on how I felt once I got out there.

Late spring was a special time in the country. It was already hot, but nothing like the steam furnace of July and August. The dirt lane through the field was dry and dotted with spindly weeds. The rows on both sides of it were ankle-high with corn and soybean plants. From the gate on, flowering chickweed, dandelions, and ripening blackberries lined the berm. The woods were lush with fresh undergrowth. The fragrant pines sported new cones. As you neared the pond, you caught only glimpses of the glistening water up ahead through the trees, but without a doubt, you could smell it.

As my car emerged, Sweetie was already running to meet it, barking loudly. Granddaddy hailed me with his boat paddle. Daddy waved and nodded toward a new aluminum storage shed he’d recently hauled in. He was talking about scheduling time to pour the concrete for a covered carport and thinking about adding a screened porch to the front of the house.

As usual, I parked my yellow Maverick near the door, and Sweetie followed me inside. Upon initial assessment, the stack of boxes in the rear bedroom might take time to clear, but the front bedroom looked the same. My tie-dyed linen curtains still hung in the rollout windows. The dayglow blues, greens, and sunburst reds and yellows, were as vivid as ever. Carolyn and I, and one of my trailer mates had hand-dipped them two summers ago. They’d turned out so well that we’d gone on to dip every cotton garment we could find, and much like the sand candles, the results were most gratifying. When I moved to the pond, the curtains went with me. When I left, they stayed for a while. Eventually, the trailer in town would also make it out, but for now, it was occupied by my daddy and my brother who was home from school for the summer.

Tossing my bag onto the bed, the dog and I walked outside to the dock. Daddy and Granddaddy had already caught a mess of fish, enough to fry for supper, so after a shot of bug-spray to keep the skeeters away, the dog and I set off on a quick hike to the far side of the dam. From there, you could see … and hear … everything. And if you sat quietly and waited long enough, above the sound of water falling into the spillway, you could catch all of the critters that went silent upon your arrival start back talking again. By dark, their conversations would drown-out everything else, but today was not the day to wait around to listen so we headed back to the house.

It was easy to sort through the clothes in the back bedroom. I wore the same ones over and over—jeans, jean shorts, tee shirts, tennis shoes, sandals,—most of which were already in town. But there were plenty of knickknacks and keepsakes to repack. And record albums, forty-fives, eight-tracks, cassettes, I’d been collecting since grammar school. Letters, cards, posters, and photographs, and stacks of hardcover and paperback books—textbooks, art and music books, how-to manuals, novels, and newspapers and yearbooks, and publications like The Great Speckled Bird, National Lampoon, Mad, Rolling Stone, and my college newspaper, The George-Anne. These had come directly from the trailer. I hadn’t planned on unpacking them until I had another ‘home’ in which to put them, but right now, it wasn’t happening. Besides, I had to get well first, and evidently, I’d succumbed to some mighty worrisome ailments.

As I sat cross-legged on the floor, I came across a little book entitled Thought Forces—Essays Selected From The White Cross Library written by Prentice Mulford and first published in 1913. My London friend, Chris, gave it to me the day before the Amesbury accident. I’d meant to give it back, but I never saw him again after I left the ward at Salisbury. Much like The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale, only written many years earlier, it speaks of the strong influence that personal thoughts have on physical and spiritual wellbeing, stressing the importance of learning to control one’s thoughts as a matter of life and death. These were ideas worthy of serious consideration—far more than I’d presently given them. Similar to what I’d done with clairvoyants like Edgar Cayce, and spiritualists like Mary Baker Eddy at the time, I’d cherry-picked the parts I liked and closed the book on the rest.

Growing up, I was tagged, “multitalented, impressionable, serious-minded, strong-willed.” More likely it was a polite way of saying I chose drawing, story-writing, playing piano, reading books, and daydreaming over solving word problems, or paying attention in class, and I used to be late, a lot. While my visual artistic gifts were especially distracting, music played a major part. By age three, I was singing and reciting narrations. At age seven, when my mama’s Aunt Mary left her upright Story and Clark at our house, I composed a little ditty and wrote it down note-by-note. My folks recorded me playing it on the piano, and sent it off to have it pressed into a record, but I played everything by ear—even after Mama took me to piano lessons, in fact, I didn’t learn to sight-read staff-music until I was in college. But when rock ‘n’ roll came along, learning and playing by ear, I jumped on board. It was the same with every other genre over the years—whether I ever managed to perform them or not, I learned them. Supposedly, righthanded, I played guitar upside down and backward, and when I played piano, my left hand always seemed to pick up what my right hand was still trying to figure out. Some might call it, “semi-ambidextrously impaired.” Looking back, I’d call it multi-minded, lacking in self-discipline, and maybe a center of reference. At any rate, no one direction seemed right.

My sweet mama was a music lover, and a singer. She sang at music club and church, and at times with local legend, Emma Kelly. At times, she sang with me,—at church, in local Kiwanis Kapers productions, and at various social events. She started working at the college when I was nine as Assistant to the President, and moved to the music department when I was ten. I recall her bringing home a xylophone. I had to slip outside to play it because we kept it covered on the porch—there was no place to store it in the old music building on campus. They’d just completed construction of the new fine arts building the summer I started college. My freshman class was first to set foot in it, but long before I got there, I knew a lot of music students, not to mention, Gran also worked at the college. She punched cafeteria meal tickets, knew many of us by name, and all of the house mothers were her card-playing friends, which meant there was no getting in trouble without the whole place knowing about it.

And my daddy did accounting work for everybody in town, and traded out services with many of his business clients including gas stations, clothing stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. When anybody in the family needed something, we just signed the receipt, and the amount was deducted from what the merchant owed. Of course, that allowed Daddy to keep up with everything I did. Some might also call it middle-class, small-town privilege, of which, for a season in college, not only was I ashamed, but did my best to personally disavow and condemn, much to my daddy’s consternation. See, he was what they used to call a “self-made man”—hardworking, resourceful, generous. As a youth staying with the aunties, he caught a ride to Dover every day to take the train back and forth to attend high school in Statesboro; worked at the movie theater as a ticket-taker/concession clerk on the weekends; and was awarded the title of “Best Dressed” his senior year with only two nice shirts, everyday trousers, and a dozen pairs of socks to his name. Believe me, my workaholic ‘daddio’ paid for every dime that I spent, and seldom complained when I took it for granted.

Nor did he complain too much when I failed to acknowledge that an honest protest movement with a message of ‘peace and love’ was fast devolving into a gospel of envy and strife. Blinded by sentimental idealism, I vehemently refused to even discuss the possibility that Marxism could masquerade as socialism until everybody got screwed. The day he tried to explain it to me, I accidentally slammed his hand in the door on my rush out of the house, but he was right, and the fact is, my friends and I could have never ‘played’ at being socialists without his financial contributions to our lifestyle. All I can say is he must have had the patience of Job and loved me a lot to put up with my foolishness.

Other books caught my eye. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had been given to me as a birthday present, as well as Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. I’d purchased The Book of the Law by Alister Crowley, and Lady Sheba’s Book of Shadows by Jessie Wicker Bell at a bookstore while researching the topic of witches for an American Literature class and a term paper on the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular, the short-story, Young Goodman Brown, a tale that first appeared anonymously in the April 1835 issue of The New-England Magazine, then under the author’s name in a collection published in 1846 entitled, Mosses From An Old Manse. When it comes to piercing the darkness, Hawthorne’s one of my favorite authors. He might have gotten to me as much as Ray Bradbury that quarter, had I not been so distracted. It’s a wonder I finished the paper.

In one of the publications I read on the modern-day practice of witchcraft, the writer had coopted a line from The Little Prince that reads, “You’re responsible forever for what you have tamed.” While I agreed with the concept of individual responsibility, I questioned the idea that anything could necessarily be tamed. I got the “Do what thou wilt” part, too, but had I ever found a coven to join, I’d have been more interested in communing with nature than controlling spiritual forces or mastering spells. I was into ‘vibes’ and herbs, not magic. Thrilled by the prospect of venturing into the unknown in search of hidden wonders, I used to make solo treks through the field next door to the house where I grew up, bold excursions into the woods across the way, and arduous after-school bicycle rides to the library for anything I could find in the ‘youth section’ that smacked of clandestine or scary.

In October of seventh grade after seeing the movie, Village of the Damned (1960), which showed at the local cinema in the summer of 1961, my friend, Marty, and I, ceremoniously, on Friday the 13th, wore black dresses, and carried red roses to school, and didn’t speak to anybody but our teachers even at recess. That afternoon, we lit a candle in her parents’ attic expecting something unseen to extinguish it, and vowed to let ‘witches out of our closets’ that evening. Since we decided they should be free until midnight on Halloween, upon arriving home after a full night of trick ‘or’ treating and fun at the school carnival, each of us stayed awake long enough to order them back into our closets and into the ether. Granted, we never told anybody about that part of the plan, but our silent black day at school was enough to raise eyebrows—no doubt our curious classmates thought we were “oddballs,” but we were dead serious. We figured, according to the law of appeasement, if you treat them right, witches will leave you alone.

Everybody laughed about it later. When the original pilot episode of The Invaders, “Beachhead” aired, our interests switched from invisible witches to invading aliens. We’d seen lots of movies like The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob, and T.V. shows like The Twilight Zone, but this one was different, in fact, it was the main reason for the switch. Strangely enough, though the date of the initial showing is disputed online, and I could be wrong, I distinctly remember seeing it on a Sunday evening in late 1961 or early 1962. My friend, David DeLoach, who sat behind me in class, saw it, too. We talked about it incessantly. The Quinn Martin T.V. series didn’t air until years later in 1967. Go figure.

Lucky, for me, in those days seventh grade teachers knew what to do with the overactive imaginations of their students. Not everybody got picked to decorate the hallways for the holidays, like I did, or allowed to write and direct a Christmas play for the school assembly complete with a student chorus in which everybody in seventh grade had a part. That May, I sat alone on stage behind a Mattel Magic 8-Ball portraying an old hag fortune-teller tasked with predicting a colorful positive future for each of my graduating classmates. The script took me a week to compose, and based upon my perceptions at the time, turned out to be generically accurate. It was a hoot at our fifth high school reunion.

The following October, when the grammar school asked me to run the fortune-teller tent for that same Halloween Carnival, I happily obliged, but now, being in eighth grade and all,—at a time when eighth-graders were considered sub-freshman and went to school with the ‘big kids,’—I was more interested in finding my way around in popular culture than dabbling with the unseen. From that time on, though churched and baptized, I had limited enthusiasm for whatever might be waiting to take me beyond my Methodist upbringing, or what I’d picked up in Girl Scouts, or International Rainbow for Girls. Any serious leadings along ‘spiritual lines’ had been temporarily and ideologically redirected.

Even growing up in Southeast Georgia, I was somewhat of a bohemian. I learned Johnny Mercer’s Moon River on the ukulele after Audrey Hepburn sang it in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My daddy loved Henri Mancini and Frank Sinatra. My mama loved Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. At one time, Mama’s closest friend was a vivacious, wealthy widow from Sausalito, California named Patricia Wofford whose late husband, Tatum, of the Wofford College family of South Carolina, built, owned, and operated the Wofford Motel, a stylish thirty-unit establishment on U.S. Highway 301 eleven miles south of Sylvania in the most unlikely of places,—tiny Cooperville. Before the interstate took most of the Florida-bound tourist traffic, the Wofford Motel was the most prestigious enterprise in this rural farming community,—that, and the Paradise Motel, located nearer the single caution light at the intersection where Old Louisville Road crosses the federal highway.

Tatum Wofford was also an Olympian diver. After his untimely death in a diving-board accident, Pat had continued to operate the business. Renaming it the Holiday Motel, she lived with their two daughters in the upstairs quarters above the dining room, and later, in a house next to the motel grounds. One of the most colorful, fun-loving characters of my youth, Pat was back and forth to California a lot and knew many of the popular musicians of the day including Buddy Greco and Buddy Rich. When she was in town, it was always a party complete with margarita mix and new hi-fi records for the console in our living room—Dave Brubeck, Stan Getz, and Miles Davis. That’s where I first heard Alfred Newman’s Ports of Paradise, and almost learned to samba, via João Gilberto. Talk about feeling grown-up, I was eleven when I wore one of Pat’s silk kimonos in the downtown Halloween Parade. It was black to match my Zorro mask with a cummerbund of pink and green lotus flowers.

In the early 1960s, I remember going with Mama to hear a college jazz trio at a make-shift “beat club” in town known as The Edge. Operated by students and promoted by the music department, it was located in the basement of an old hotel on South Main. I can’t remember the name of it, but later, during my college years, the same basement reopened as No Exit, a venue for aspiring theater students and political types. While it lasted, it served up all the on-stage antics, espresso Borgias, mocha coffee drinks, and pastries that any small space could offer.

My early high school years were filled with Peter, Paul, and Mary, and The Beach Boys, and I knew most Kingston Trio, and Dylan lyrics by heart. An avid fan of Gene Pitney, Bobby Vinton, James Brown, Ray Charles, Roy Orbison, and Smokey Robinson, not to mention Leslie Gore, Dionne Warwick, Barbara Lewis, and Dusty Springfield, I soon came to idealize The Beatles, The Byrds, The Zombies, The Animals, The Beegees, The Moody Blues, The Hollies, The Doors … and Bobbie Gentry, José Feliciano, and Otis Redding.

But when Buffalo Springfield came out with For What It’s Worth, I may have worn the latest British ‘mod’ fashions and my hair long and straight like Mary Travers, but the most I knew about the war protest movement was that people out in San Francisco had morphed from folk music Beatniks into free-wheeling Hippies, and were smoking dope, preaching peace, and encouraging people to turn on, tune in, and drop out,—basically, the counter-culture of the Beat Generation’s literary giants, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had morphed into the ‘flower power’ of Timothy Leary. But for the most part, the Viet Nam war was a distant drum to my 1967 high school graduating class. Little did we know.

By election day in 1968, not only had my life become personally stranger, many of the college students I knew were ready to vote for McGovern and angry about what went down at the Chicago Democrat Convention. Disillusioned with middle-class America, some may have idealized Students for a Democratic Society from afar, but hardly aligned with the Weathermen. They weren’t ready to call themselves revolutionaries just because they disagreed with how the government did things. Then, came “the draft.”

Frankly, the latter half of 1968 and much of 1969, I spent in latent depression going through the motions between the music and theater departments. Despite a role in an award-winning Masquers production of Archibald MacLeish’s J.B., and taking part in a Spring Break evangelism crusade in West Palm Beach with Campus Crusade for Christ, my head stayed wrapped in escapism. The soundtrack went from Debussy, Ravel, Chopin, and Gershwin, to Phil Ochs, Dave Brubeck, Richard Harris, Leonard Cohen,… and Judy Collins,… and Jerry Butler,… and The Temptations. I do recall a heart-felt conversation I had in the summer of 1969, with a couple of long-haired potential draft-dodgers outside the student center. At that point, however, it was the music that drew me. The cause came later.

I didn’t go to Woodstock that August or to the Atlanta Pop Festival the following week, but that fall, I marched by candlelight with a group of students in the October Moratorium to end the Viet Nam War, and attended my first pop music festival, a three-day event held outside of Hollywood/Palm Beach, Florida on Thanksgiving weekend. It wasn’t loads of fun getting soaked, muddy, and cold, and after finally crashing in a big tent with twenty other people, doused with DDT the next morning,—the music was great though. A similar billing of artists performed at each of those festivals, including Jefferson Airplane, The Rolling Stones, The Byrds, Janis Joplin with Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jimi Hendrix, Sly and the Family Stone, Johnny Winter, Country Joe and the Fish, Grand Funk Railroad, Richie Havens, et cetera. David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash also performed with the addition of Neil Young… Something was definitely happening that year. By the next, I was a full-fledged, no make-up, no bra, bell-bottomed, southern-fried “freak.”

But when word reached ‘the faithful’ about the tragic fate of Diana Oughton in March of 1970, I remember thinking, “What a terribly useless thing—to blow one’s self up making a bomb!” By then, I was also concerned about air and water pollution, and when the college offered their first environmental science course that Spring, I enrolled. In April, I helped organize the first on-campus Earth Day Observance. We marched peacefully as a group from the student center, around Sweetheart Circle, and back, wearing choir robes supplied by the Episcopal Church, and carrying a papier-mâché model of ‘Mother Earth’ in a coffin. When the shootings at Kent State took place that May followed by the song, Four Dead in Ohio, I was livid, even scared, but I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a part-time disciple of Che Guevara, and I certainly wasn’t out to hurt anybody… I cried the first time I heard, Wooden Ships.

Amid the tragedy and social upheaval of those years, my go-to artists were Joni Mitchell, Laura Nyro, Linda Ronstadt, Bob Dylan, Leon Russell, Van Morrison, and Paul Simon while the music of groups like Pink Floyd, The Band, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Traffic/Blind Faith, Eric Clapton & the Bramletts, Procol Harum, Fleetwood Mac, Blood, Sweat, and Tears, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, Quicksilver, Led Zeppelin, Spooky Tooth, and The Allman Brothers became the revolving soundtrack of my soul. But remember, it wasn’t just a season of Hair, or of Fonda/Hopper’s Easy Rider, or Arthur Penn’s Alice’s Restaurant, but of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Jewison/Trustman’s The Thomas Crown Affair, Sergio Leone’s Dollars Trilogy, Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, and Hiller/Segal’s Love Story. I’m pretty sure I related more to I Am A Child, Glad, and Moments of Soft Persuasion, than I ever did Volunteers.

When The Beatles finally came out with a ‘non-statement’ about the war, I listened. I’d lost close friends in Viet Nam, including David DeLoach. Some with low numbers, and some who had enlisted out of a sense of patriotism, were coming back with horrible physical and emotional wounds. Others were counting their lucky stars to have escaped the draft. So I spent what time and energy I could in opposition to the war, and in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental issues, but I didn’t destroy property, or riot, or get arrested, not to mention, I identified with Dark Side of the Moon, not the expanding drug culture. Eventually, it dawned on me that while youthful idealism and enthusiasm work to express outrage and expose injustice, only practical solutions can bring lasting change, and there’s a steep learning curve.

Incidentally, long before the draft ended in 1974 and the military moved to an all-volunteer force, the local college administration back home had lifted the on-campus curfew for female students and even Jefferson Airplane, reinvented as Jefferson Starship, was beginning to sound “commercial.” In their place were artists like The Eagles, Cowboy, The Doobie Brothers, Jessie Collin Young, and Jackson Brown. Soon I’d discovered Patti LaBelle, Jimmy Buffett, Walin Jennings & Willy Nelson, as well as Jesse Winchester, and by July of 1974, I was in Western New York where the summers were cooler than I’d known, but the locals were friendly, and The Paul Winter Consort was staging seasonal concerts up at Art Park across the Peace Bridge in Canada. I didn’t know about the genius of Bruce Cockburn until 1977, when I was, again, living in Atlanta, but he’s been an all-time favorite ever since. C’est la vie! He’s still touring, by the way, as is Van Morrison, another of my favorites, especially when he still produces music like September Night. God bless them both.

Speaking earlier of the Beatles, I should mention that one of the last items I came across that day in the back room at the pond was the single vinyl 45 rpm Apple recording of George Harrison’s Deep Blue released in 1971. It was on the flip-side of Bangladesh, but I first heard it on a juke box in a London pub with my friend, Chris, two days before the Amesbury bus accident. We’d just left a matinée showing of the Candice Bergan movie entitled Soldier Blue, a film I’d somehow missed a year earlier for which I was hardly prepared to view under casual circumstances in a British theater. Still, George Harrison was always my favorite Beatle, and this acoustic lamentation, sung with an air of uniquely captive melancholy only he could project, wasn’t My Guitar Gently Weeps, but it spoke volumes about the condition of the human soul, including mine, though I didn’t fully grasp it at the time. The week that I returned to the art tour after the accident, I happened to stroll into a tiny record store a block from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, Italy, and there it was. I still keep it in its original sleeve.

• * * *

Anyhow, I finished sorting the books and other publications and re-boxed them, then started on the papers, the photos, the what-nots, and the keepsakes. After deciding which albums, eight-tracks, and cassettes would come to town with me along with the portable stereo player, the Yamaha guitar, and the clothes, I rose to my feet. In need of a stretch, I walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of iced tea, and opened the back door.

As the dog dashed into the brush beneath the trees, I strolled to the circle of pines with the small holly tree just ten feet from the house. It was the perfect spot to sit in a folding chair, read, study, play guitar, or just listen to the woods, and I did so often. Crickets sang there during the day, and birds. There was plenty of sunshine and beams of filtered moonlight at night. How often I remember thinking that if anybody from the ‘other side’ were interested in getting in touch with me, they’d need look no further. A squirrel scampered by and the dog tried to catch it. Reclaiming the moment, I finished my tea, set the empty glass by the door, and walked around the house to report at the dock that I’d finished ‘re-packing.’

As evening approached, while I loaded my car with what I wanted to keep handy, Daddy carried the rest of my boxes to the shed and turned on the outside floodlights. He’d already cleaned today’s catch and set the deep fryer up near the dock. While Granddaddy mixed hushpuppy batter and salted, peppered, and floured the fish, I picked out several red-breasted bream, and ran inside to slice them apart and put them under the broiler as my new restrictive diet dictated. When I returned, the fishermen were busy chowing down. By the way, the broiled filets were delicious, but if you’ve never had fresh, cold-water, red-breasted bream, battered and deep-fried in old-fashioned lard, you’ve missed something,—even the crispy tails are special!

Sitting there eating, watching the moon rise over the far side of the pond, it was good to feel at ease. There was such a balance of light and dark in that place. It was all so mesmerizingly simple. Even if certain threats existed, nobody would have ever thought to entertain them.

My mama would later say that late one night during her brief stay, she saw lights moving through the woods across the pond and wondered who might be walking around over there. Granddaddy didn’t seem to know. Daddy dismissed them as swamp gas. But Daddy’s friend, Bill Williams, used to talk about “ghost lights,” (will-o-wisps, spook lights). Living up the highway, he’d seen them wandering the island of trees, an area of wetlands never cleared for cultivation located directly west of the dirt lane through the front fields that served as the boundary between two parcels. My daddy’s was to the east of the lane. The parcel to the west belonged to his first cousin, Charlotte. The next parcel over belonged to the B.H. Anderson family, and to this day remains under their ownership.

Though my friends and I had weird encounters driving through those fields along that lane, we never saw Bill’s ghost lights, and I never expected that anybody beyond our immediate family ever had. But recently, my friend Tom McElheny confessed that in the Fall of 1971—being country boys, —he, and a college buddy, and a local from Screven County used to drive around on full-moon nights looking for ‘pines to ride.’ He knew me from school, but none of them knew who owned the property across the river in the next county when they found the stand of saplings my daddy had planted at the back of the field …. On one occasion, Tom and his cohorts saw a light, much like Mama had described—not like the searching beam of a flashlight, but the solitary, floating glow of a lantern, bobbing through the trees at the edge of the field, as if someone were walking in the woods. That area is North of the pond, and well above the spring. Fearing they might be caught and charged with trespassing, Tom said they ran back to the car and never returned, but that the eerie light was by far the most ‘unnerving’ part of the experience. If it wasn’t swamp gas, was it Daddy, Granddaddy, or Eugene out there at two o’clock in the morning? … Pot-growers? Moonshiners? Elementary spirits? Orbs?

My sister, Carole, reminded me of a strange occurrence that took place that next December of 1972 after Daddy had moved the trailer to the pond. She and Frank were home from school—mostly, they stayed in town, but on Christmas Eve, the three of us were busy in the trailer, making candles and wrapping presents while Gran helped Daddy prepare food next door for tomorrow’s gathering. Around midnight, Frank left to go to sleep at the house. My sister and I slept in the trailer. I slept up front in my old bedroom; she slept in the bedroom at the rear. Speaking of rude awakenings, the next morning all of the furniture in the living area had been weirdly and quietly ‘rearranged,’ like somebody had ‘pranked’ us, and not Santa. With just the five of us on the premises eleven miles out of town, the trailer wasn’t locked, but it was never locked when we were there. It wasn’t just why it happened that puzzled us, but how it happened, without waking either one of us. Those interior walls were paper-thin and I’m a light sleeper. Given that nobody ever admitted doing it, it’s puzzling still.

Frank doesn’t talk about ghost lights or rearranged furniture. He talks about the night in August of 1973 that he and his friend, J.D., were staying at the pond and alone in the trailer, drinking beer, and listening to music, when all of a sudden the thing rocked like something big had hit it. The jolt was so violent, the player-needle jumped, and skidded across the record. Rather than step outside with a flashlight, he says they sat in dead silence waiting to see if somebody might come crashing through the door. Maybe the place sits on a fault-line, and this was a one-time tremor?

By the way, during the time the trailer stayed at the pond, our old friend, Pat Wofford, once told me that one night when she slept in its front bedroom, I visited her,—flew in, hovered over her, and said something that she didn’t understand; but she knew it was me because of the long hair, the smile, and the eyes. At first I thought she was kidding. I was never into bilocation or astral projection, never even pondered, much less practiced it,—at least, not consciously, or that I knew of. When I realized she was serious, I wasn’t at all sure how to respond but I suggested she might have imagined it. As I explained there was no way it was me, she seemed disappointed, even confused. Might something have been using my persona to play games with her? It was a disturbing thought at the time given that Pat was all about games. We didn’t speak of it again.

My granddaddy left the dock that June night with a covered plate for Eugene, saying he’d be back in the morning. Daddy and I picked up the supper dishes, and after I went inside, he cleaned the fryer, puttered around the shed for a while, then came inside to say goodnight. On his way out, he mentioned the gun by the hearth, and the shells under the counter. Not that he thought I’d need them; he just reminded me they were there.

Around ten o’clock, I called a friend in town—long-distance,—our conversation was brief. Afterward, I turned on the television, flipped through whatever channels I could find with the rabbit-ears until The Tonight Show  with Johnny Carson came on. Near midnight, Sweetie wanted out again, so I opened the back door and stepped a ways past the awning to wait. The air was cooler now. A little breeze swayed the pines—their tops were softly gilded with moonlight. The mercury lamp at the head of the lane only partially illuminated the front of the house. The floodlights were off, and though the stark fluorescent light over the kitchen sink afforded some visibility, I couldn’t hear much past the window unit air-conditioner except for the occasional zit of Daddy’s bug zapper, and the rattle of dog tags in the underbrush. Sweetie was stalking something. I called him, stepped back to the awning, and reaching inside the door, flipped on the porch lamp to keep the back side of the house from total darkness.

Once we were inside, again, I locked the door, and bolted it, turned off the T.V. and the air conditioner, and double-checked the main entrance. Walking to the front bedroom, I turned on my bedside lamp, rolled-out the windows to let the cool air in, and was instantly greeted by what I’d just missed outside while standing next to the air conditioner—a chorus of high pitched crickets, toad trills, chuckling Leopard frogs, tenor tree frogs, and baritone bullfrogs. You’d hear them in the winter, too, on milder nights when they emerged from the leaf litter and swamp mud, but their songs were never as loud with the windows closed. Now, it was as if they’d been channeled into the room with full surround sound. No doubt, they’d sing ’til dawn. It was part of the magic of being there, near the water, in that house, in those woods, in fact, one of the most comforting parts. For a minute, I stood at the front window listening. Then I pulled both sets of curtains closed, and after a quick shower, I climbed into the bed I’d left three months earlier with some non-descript magazine I’d found on the living-room coffee table. Sweetie was as content to have me near as I was to watch him settle into his familiar spot on the floor. With the cool nighttime singing, the bedside lamp burning, and the magazine open on my chest, I nodded off.

Sometime later, I awoke, and thinking to turn off the lamp, I rolled over, and glanced around. The magazine had slid to the floor. The dog was also awake. His tail wagged slightly, but otherwise, he didn’t move. He was listening, but to what, I didn’t know. Then, I realized the crickets had stopped chirping. The frogs weren’t croaking. Suddenly, in their place, came what sounded like the faint, slow, but steady, sliding-shuffle of heavy feet through the grass, one by one, growing louder, more distinct. A moment later, they stopped … right in front of the roll-out window,—a yard, and a half from the foot of my bed. The dog’s ears pricked forward, but still, he didn’t move, or make a sound. Relieved to have closed the curtains, ignoring a flash of gooseflesh, I sat straight up in bed, took a deep breath, and said, “Who’s there? Who are you?” I didn’t shout. There was no answer. I reached for the lamp, and clicked it off. For a full minute, Sweetie and I waited quietly in the dark until I finally raised my voice. “All right. I don’t know who you are, but you’d better leave, now. Do you hear me?” Again, there was no response, and another full minute passed before the sliding shuffle sounded again, only now, it was backing off, moving away from the house—slowly, steadily… Then it was gone.

I jumped up and quickly rolled in the windows, hurried to turn on all the lights in the house and the floodlights outside, and grabbed the shotgun. Near daylight, I fell asleep on the sofa next to the phone. My brave watchdog never barked. Had this simply been an intruder, Sweetie would have been right on it. He barked incessantly at strangers, and was as loud as he was fierce. Had it been Daddy, Granddaddy, or anybody he knew, he’d have alerted me, regardless. Had any member of the family needed to enter the house, they’d have used a key, or banged on the door. Even my former pond house mates or friends from town would have known to announce themselves. At that time of night, it’s a lengthy drive out to the country just to show up and shuffle around.

In the light of day, I wasn’t sure what to think. Had I ‘dreamt a dream’ last night, or suddenly awakened in my lamplit room to imagine, even hallucinate, the quiet dog, the silent pond, the slide of heavy feet? Of course, I was far from well, and I’d spent the better part of yesterday afternoon reliving ponderous memories, digging up skeletons, recalling points of conflict. Granted, my senses were off, … in overdrive, … overloaded. When Granddaddy came that morning, I decided to let it rest, and as I hadn’t slept, I cleaned up, packed up, and drove back to town. By the following weekend, I was down for the count, out of school, and in and out of the doctor’s office and bed, again. But, I rallied. I moved to Gran’s, started work, ended up back in the hospital, and fled to Vidalia to get well. Needless to say, I didn’t make it back to the pond until August and then it was only to get things out of the shed to take to Miss Irby’s house. Did I forget sitting in the dark with my dog wondering what might be standing at the window on the other side of those curtains? Nope, I did not, and I don’t imagine I ever will. I wasn’t raised to be afraid, but I was mighty stumped that night. Eventually, I came to view it as par-for-the-course given my state of mind at the time—like playing with matches; whistling in the dark.

That was the last night I spend out there, alone, and I don’t know what took place while I lived away—I never asked, but in the summer of 1976, there was another visit. This time, it was early evening, and still light outside. I was back home living in town with Mama, planning to be married in August, but according to Frank, my sister’s former husband, Chuck, had come out to the pond to pick up a television set, and J.D. was there to help him move it out of the trailer. Daddy and Granddaddy were on the dock, and Gran and Daddy’s second wife, Joan, were inside the house making supper. Joan’s Doberman Pinscher, Sammie, was with them in the kitchen.

Just as Chuck and J.D. were hauling the T.V. down the trailer’s wooden steps, there was a loud noise on the far side, and—Blam! Blam!—something banged on it, twice! Startled and confused, they froze, but the intruder took off, tearing through the woods like a galloping heifer in the direction of the old Opie place. As they hurried to get the T.V. on the ground without breaking it, Daddy, hearing the commotion in the woods, arrived with the shotgun. Oddly enough, he didn’t think twice as he fired into the thicket, but by that time, whomever or whatever it was, was gone. We know it wasn’t him, or Granddaddy, and by then Eugene was two years in the nursing home. So, was it a deranged local? A prankster? The swamp witch? The devil?

Back then, it could have been anybody that knew how to navigate, but those piney woods behind us were wild with undergrowth, and as remote as the area was, landowners didn’t take kindly to trespassers—meaning it’d be one thing to have ‘visited,’ another to have secretly lived there. I doubt either would happen today considering the current owner who purchased the property back in the early nineties cleared out the older forested areas to the west and south and had them replanted with timber to harvest, but that’s beside the point. It hardly solves the mystery of what went on in the years before.

The funniest thing is, I was so mystified by the unseen world—I’d heard things, felt things, sensed they were there—under the circumstances, I’d have never expected anything other than a traditional ‘haint,’ to show up at my window. At one point, I entertained the idea that I’d unknowingly summoned a demon from my circle of pines. I knew the unseen world was real—no question about it,—but not until credible witnesses from across the country started coming forward with similar stories about what they’d seen and heard, did it cross my mind that something physically corporeal besides people or familiar ‘critters’ might have roamed those woods fifty years ago. I’d never thought of that. Wasn’t looking for it either. Paradigm shift. So, are all these folks delusional, or just making stuff up, or have they experienced something tangible? Obviously, whatever’s here, is here, regardless of how it’s perceived. But was it here all along? If not, when and how did it get here?

In the past, if you wanted to supplement common knowledge or validate personal experience you spent days searching the library or the bookstore. Unfortunately, today’s information highway makes the process even harder. With biased cable and internet news, sensationalized click-bait, paid social media influencers, and A.I., it’s foolish to believe every story or accept every theory, but I must confess that nothing surprises me anymore. Recently, I heard that a couple from Statesboro driving home from a holiday display out Lakeview Road saw something cross the road in front of their car back in December of 2019, so I looked it up. The fact that someone local would file such a report is impressive, given that some might still be reluctant to do so.

The eye-witness report reads:

“My wife and I were returning from TMT Farms Christmas display when a bigfoot crossed the road in front of us. At first I wasn’t sure what I saw but my wife asked me if I saw that. It was a big creature, 7-8 feet tall, and crossed the road from left to right in 4 steps. It crossed the road and made its way into the woods.” —`Bigfoot Field Research Organization (12/20/2019)

Bigfoot? Good grief. According to the report, this happened near the former ‘hamlet’ of Blitch where Old River Road crosses Lakeview. A rural intersection just south of the bridge over the Ogeechee River at the Screven-Bulloch County line, it’s all but deserted now—the grand old Blitch-Lane house is still up on Lakeview, but not the Tubberville Store. Just west of that intersection, several of my family’s Jones, Young, and Henderson ancestors sleep in a tiny, gated plot on land still owned by Lanes. A few bends west of the bridge is Dover and the landing East of U.S. Highway 301 that used to belong to my great-great-granddaddy at Cameron. Coincidentally, it was on that same bridge that I saw the UFO in September of 1973.

But Bigfoot? Now, I’d heard about things coming up from those swamps on a regular basis, but had anybody told me a creature like the one in the Patterson-Gimlin film (1967) might really exist in the continental United States beyond the great Northwest, I’d have said they were crazy, especially in Southeast Georgia. Truth be told, it might as well have been the devil in my daddy’s woods. In those days, I could’ve related to that, in fact I’m pretty sure I did…

However, twelve years ago, an interest in the subject of missing persons led me to the work of former police officer, investigator-researcher-writer-filmmaker, David Paulides of the CanAm Missing Project, a group of law enforcement professionals “dedicated to researching, on scene investigating and generally understanding the issues associated with people who go missing in the wilds of North America.” 

For the past twenty years, Dave’s been exposing the details of these cases, most recently of those that take place in our national parks. Along with a string of books, documentaries, and hundreds of videos for his Missing 411 channel, he’s produced eye-opening films such as Missing 411: The Hunted, Missing 411: The UFO Connection, and American Sasquatch. He recently interviewed his friend, Ron Morehead, the last surviving member of the band of researchers who first recorded and studied the Sierra Sounds in the 1970s—talk about a testimonial to high-strangeness, and he’s got plenty of company, in fact, lots of folks are out there talking, not just about the kind of thing that Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin saw, but a wide variety of things that come in all types and sizes.

With every state in the lower forty-eight, not to mention Alaska, claiming to house a variation—Big Foot, Boggy Creek/Fouke Monster, Elkins Creek Beast, Grass Man, Hairy Man, Momo, Rush Monster, Swamp Ape, Wild Man, Wood Booger, et cetera, not to mention the tribal Celotic, Chiye-tanka, Tsonoqua, the Dog Man, Moth Man, and Lizard Man,—even with the known hoaxes, it’s no longer business as usual. It’s a cryptid cornucopia out there!

Some say Sasquatch is an evolutionary throwback, a bipedal human hominid, or a Gigantopithecus, an ancient genius of great ape. Others argue all such creatures are offspring of fallen angels or demonic entities in possession of corporeal bodies. Still others revere them as spiritual guardians of the woods who manifest at will. They’ve also been described as “liminal” beings—part spiritual, part physical—trans-dimensional NHIs (non human entities), existing between dimensions. Ask former Navajo ranger, Jonathan Dover, or Bob Gimlin, himself. He’s 94 now, and not mincing words. Then there’s Todd Standing, and Les Stroud of “Survivorman.” Unlike Todd who claims to have seen the creatures many times, even interacted with them, Les is in search of a physical being he can capture on film to go with the footprints and the whoops. He suspects there’s something out there, but hasn’t yet pinned it down.

Considering what we don’t know about all God’s creatures, great and small, flesh and blood, or otherwise,…. if we add the UFO connection, there’s a realm of possibilities beyond the discussion of “little green men” and orbs. Another interview that Dave Paulides conducted was with A.J. Gentile of The Why Files. For the record, A.J. calls himself a Bigfoot skeptic, but admits there’s more here than meets the eye. Government experiments? Abductees? Clandestine agency assignments? Simulations? Portals? Interdimensional beings? Bigfoot on UFOs? Spiritual Hitchhikers? Tricksters? Sounds? Lights? Orbs? Orbs facilitating entries and exits? By the way, Dave’s interview with Ron Morehead, deals with the role of Quantum Physics not only in relation to Bigfoot, but to all of the above. Makes perfect sense given that the very act of observation affects the properties of the subject observed. So,… who’s observing whom?

Computer scientist, astrophysicist, Jacques Vallée suggests that while entities have been contacting us all along, such encounters have been viewed through the lens of time-period and cultural worldview. In essence, we’ve gone from supposed interactions with nymphs and fairies, to aliens, NHI inter-dimensional beings, UFOs, UAPs, USOs; even some A.I. conversations are suspect. Pick an era and watch the phenomena morph into whatever form it chooses,—to accommodate our beliefs, feed our fears… Again, to quote Stephen Stills, “Something’s happening here. What it is ain’t exactly clear.“ Am I surprised? Nope.

In one of the interviews Dave didn’t include in his film, American Sasquatch, famed UFO researcher author filmmaker, LA Marzulli, insists there’s enough mitochondrial DNA and historical evidence to prove the existence of biblical, terrestrial ‘ancient aliens,’ but much like the DNA samples Dave Paulides has presented on Bigfoot, the proof is vehemently disputed by academia. Marzulli also talks about genetic tampering, interdimensional hybrids, and therionic beasts that pop in and out of our commonly recognized sphere of reference at will. Of course, if you happen to sight something,—my lying eyes—and attempt to get it on film, it’s like a game of Whac-a-Mole—lights, camera, snap! Maybe, you catch it. Try validating it.

Here’s a thought: Go looking for unseen things, and you’re bound to find them. In other words, be wary—they’ll make an appearance to validate themselves, soon enough. It’s also possible to imagine something, rather than witness it. As for cryptic beings—spirit, corporeal, or any combination thereof,—modern science says the verdict’s still out, but modern science says a lot of things. All it takes is one credible witness to substantiate a rumor. Like I said, whatever’s here, is here. It’s the qualifying that’s problematic, not the proof, or the point of view. As for what happened on my daddy’s land fifty years ago, it’s still up for grabs. The reader’s free to speculate.

Fifty years ago, my granddaddy used to talk about the critters of the ‘Geechee’ like they were his old friends, but like I said, Granddaddy’s tales were told with a twinkling eye and meant to delight more than frighten. Were times different back then? Like whistling down the river,—never mind the gators and the moccasins,—was he onto things he wasn’t talking about? I’m sure he was, … but it didn’t keep him out of the woods, nor did it Eugene, nor my daddy. Though my rambling consolidated recollections can never do them justice, their mortal remains rest in a peaceful little Screven County churchyard beside generations of family members—gone, but not forgotten,—and in the here and now, regardless of what “was, or wasn’t,” I’m left with priceless memories and ageless gifts including the freedom to ask questions of a Heavenly Father that never sleeps in whom there’s no shadow of turning. For this I’m eternally grateful.

And while I value the experiences of those youthful years— the gift of family and friends; the music; the art; the travel; the education;—I’m pretty sure the best gifts come as lessons learned—the ones that seem old-fashioned, but stand the test of time, the ones we grow into, that ground and anchor us, that teach us to pay attention, to guard our hearts and minds,—that enable us to explore creation without undue fear of the esoterica, … or the unconventional details of stranger-than-fiction truths yet to be revealed

After all, how else do we learn to appreciate what’s out there and see it for what it is? My advice? Buckle up. Pray up.

Happy Father’s Day!

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Thanks for reading!

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