THE POND HOUSE – Part Three

Southside-view of the house with the new screened porch – Summer of 1973.
(The pond is off to the right.)

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, though again, I’d 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 farm house were just a 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 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 water up ahead through the trees glistening in the afternoon sun—without a doubt, you could smell it.

From the dock they heard the car. Barking loudly, Sweetie ran to meet it. Granddaddy hailed me with his boat paddle. Daddy waved and pointed to a new aluminum storage shed he’d hauled in. He’d scheduled a time to pour the concrete for a covered carport and was thinking about adding a screened porch to the front of the house.

The Dock And The Pond – June of 1972

As usual, I parked my yellow Maverick near the door, and Sweetie followed me inside. Upon initial assessment, I figured 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 plain cotton shirt we could find, and much like the sand candles, the results were most gratifying. When I moved, the curtains went with me. When I left, they stayed for a while. Eventually, the trailer in town, now occupied by my daddy and my brother, would also make it to the pond.

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 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 hear all of critters that had gone silent upon your arrival start-up talking again. By dark, their conversations would drown-out everything else, but today was not the day to wait around to listen.

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 ForcesEssays 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 before I left the ward at Salisbury, but I never saw him again. 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 thought-life as a matter of life and death. These were ideas worthy of serious consideration—far more than I’d presently given them. I’d cherry-pick the parts I liked.

Thought Forces – Prentice Mulford – Twenty-Seventh Impression, First Published in 1913, Second Selection by G. Bell and Sons, LTD, London

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. Drawing was a special gift, but music played its 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, I jumped on board, and 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. Guess you might call me, “somewhat, semi-ambidextrously impaired.”

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 that we kept covered on the porch because there was no place to store it in the old music building on campus. They’d just constructed the new fine arts building the summer I started. My freshman class was first to set foot in it, but long before I got to college I knew a lot of music students, not to mention, Gran also worked at the college. 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. On the other hand, my daddy did accounting work for everybody in town, and traded out services with many of his business clients including clothing stores, movie theaters, and restaurants. When I needed something, I just signed the receipt, and the amount was deducted from what the merchant owed. Some called that small-town privilege, but believe me, my workaholic daddy paid for every dime and seldom complained when we took it for granted. I still think about that, a lot.

Anyhow,.. other books caught my eye. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry had been given to me as a birthday present. 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 came to piercing the darkness, Hawthorne might have gotten to me as much as Ray Bradbury, had I not been so distracted that quarter. 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, and as fascinated as I was by the occult, 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. Besides, beyond my Methodist upbringing, or what I’d picked up in Girl Scouts, International Rainbow for Girls, or even Campus Crusade for Christ, any serious leadings along ‘mystical lines’ had been temporarily and ideologically redirected.

Down in Southeast Georgia, I was in high school when Buffalo Springfield came out with For What It’s Worth. An avid Beatles, Dylan, Beegees, Blind Faith, Otis Redding, and Moody Blues fan, I may have worn the latest British ‘mod’ fashions and wore my hair long and straight like Mary Travers, but the most I knew about the latest protest movement was that people out in San Francisco had morphed from folk music Beatniks into free-wheeling Hippies, and were running around with flowers in their hair, smoking dope, carrying signs, and calling for peace. For the most part, the Viet Nam war was a distant drum to my 1967 high school graduating class. Then, came ‘the draft.’

By election day in 1968, many college students I knew were ready to vote for McGovern and angry about what went down at the Chicago Democrat Convention. Some of them 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. Frankly, late 1968 and much of 1969, my life was a fantasy of latent depression with DeBussy, Ravel, Chopin, Richard Harris and Judy Collins between the music, art, and theater departments. I didn’t go to Woodstock in August of 1969 or to the Atlanta Pop Festival the following week, but I did attend a three-day music festival held outside of Hollywood/Palm Beach, Florida on Thanksgiving weekend. It was loads of fun, finally crashing in a big tent with twenty other people and getting doused with DDT—the music was great though. A similar billing of artists performed at each of these 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, and the next.

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 yourself up making a bomb!” After the shootings at Kent State, and 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, and Van Morrison. Groups like The Band, The Doors, The Rolling Stones, Traffic/Blind Faith, Procol Harum, Fleetwood Mac, The Eagles, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Grateful Dead, and The Allman Brothers were steady favorites. Remember, it wasn’t just a season of Easy Rider, 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 agreed. I’d lost close friends in Viet Nam, and others were coming back with physical and emotional wounds. I was pretty sure though 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. So I spent what time and energy I could in opposition to the Vietnam War, and in support of civil rights, women’s rights, and environmental issues, but I didn’t destroy property, or riot, or get arrested. I loved the music scene, not the expanding drug culture. 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 curfew restrictions for female students and even Jefferson Airplane, now Jefferson Starship, had started sounding “commercial.” By that time, however, I was more into Cowboy, Jackson Brown, and Bruce Cockburn. C’est la vie.

“Deep Blue” – George Harrison – Summer of 1971

Speaking of the Beatles, 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. We’d just left a showing of the Candice Bergan movie entitled Soldier Blue—a film I’d somehow missed the year before for which I was hardly prepared under casual circumstances in a British theater. Anyhow, George Harrison was always my favorite Beatle. This acoustic ditty wasn’t My Guitar Gently Weeps, but it spoke volumes. The week that I returned to the art tour after the Amesbury bus 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.

Once I’d sorted the books and other publications and re-boxed them, I 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 nearby. Not ten feet from the house, this 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.’

The Circle of Pines – June of 1972

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 front yard 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 cook 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 cold-water, fresh red-breasted bream battered and deep-fried in old-fashioned lard, you’ve missed something—even the crispy tails are special!

Waning Pond Moon – June of 1972

Sitting there eating, talking, watching the waning moon rise over the far side of the pond, it was easy to feel at ease. There was such a balance of light and dark in that place. No doubt certain threats existed, even as we lingered, but at such times, nobody thinks to entertain them. It was all so mesmerizingly simple.

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. It was located in the field directly west of the dirt lane which 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. Still does.

Though my friends and I had some weird encounters along that lane, we never saw Bill’s ghost lights or any others, 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, 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, and that the experience was eerie enough to be ‘unnerving.’  Was it Daddy, Granddaddy, or Eugene out there at two o’clock in the morning? … Pot-growers? Moonshiners? Orbs?   

My sister, Carole, reminded me of something that took place that December in 1972 after Daddy 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 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 strangely 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 J.D. were alone at the pond inside 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 he says the player-needle jumped, and skidded across the record. Maybe a tremor? Maybe the place sits on a fault-line? 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.

Evening at the pond house – Summer of 1973

Granddaddy left the dock that night with a covered plate for Eugene, saying he’d be back in the morning. I went inside with the dirty dishes to wash while Daddy cleaned the fryer. After puttering around the shed a while, he came in to say goodnight, and as as usual, 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 turned on the television, flipped through the channels, and found some Prime-Time movie I can’t recall 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 lightly gilded. The floodlights were off. The mercury lamp at the head of the lane only partially illuminated the front of house, and though the stark florescent 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 television 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 the 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, grabbed a quick shower, and climbed into the bed I’d left three months earlier with a magazine I’d decided not to pack. Sweetie was as content to have me near as I was to watch him settle into his familiar spot on the floor. With the bedside lamp burning, and the magazine still open on my chest, I nodded off.

Eastern (Front) Roll-Out Window – June of 1972

Sometime later, I awoke. The magazine had slid to the floor, and thinking to turn off the lamp, I rolled over, and glanced around. The dog was also awake. His tail wagged slightly, but otherwise, he didn’t move. He was listening—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 feet through the grass, one by one, growing louder, more distinct. A moment later, it 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, 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. “I don’t know who you are, but it’s time for you to leave. 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 Daddy, Granddaddy, Eugene, or 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 had I imagined it? After all, I was far from well. 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, 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 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.

Except for events I’ve already related, I don’t know what took place in my absence, but in the summer of 1976, according to Frank and J.D., we had another visitor. This time it wasn’t in the wee hours of the morning. It was early evening and still light. My sister’s former husband, Chuck, was helping J.D. move a television out of the trailer. Granddaddy and Daddy 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.

My Brother Frank on the dock with Sammie – Summer of 1976

As Chuck and J.D. were carrying the T.V. down the steps, there was a loud noise on the far side of the trailer, and—Blam! Blam!—something banged on it, twice! Startled and confused, they froze, until the assailant took off in the direction of the old Opie place, tearing through the woods like a galloping heifer. Chuck and J.D. hurried to set the TV on the ground without breaking it then ran to get Daddy. He arrived with the shogun and fired into the thicket, but by that time, whomever or whatever it was, was gone. For real, it wasn’t Daddy, or Granddaddy, and Eugene was two years in the nursing home. So, was it a deranged local? The swamp witch? The devil?

Back then, it could have been anybody, but as those piney woods behind us were wild with undergrowth, they’d’ve had to know how to navigate. The current owner who purchased the property back in the early nineties cleared out the old forested areas to the west and south and had them replanted with timber to harvest. Up until recently, I’d have never seriously considered the possibility that anything, beside humans or familiar ‘critters,’ might have roamed those woods fifty years ago. Even so, it’s one thing to have ‘visited,’ another to have lived there … especially without anybody knowing about it.

These days, I’d have probably never thought to ask, if others hadn’t started coming forward with what they’ve seen and heard—and not just fifty years ago, So, I’m curious, considering what we don’t know about God’s creatures, great and small—flesh and blood, or otherwise, is there more to the story? Do the dots connect to form a bigger picture? What if there’s a spiritual element, or at least a technically supernormal one? Some are beginning to think so, if they entertain the idea at all. Safe to say, whatever’s here, is here, whether we recognize it or not. How to qualify it is the real question. In the past, if you wanted to supplement knowledge or validate experience you spent days in the library or the bookstore. Unfortunately, sometimes I think the internet makes it even harder. With YouTube, pod-casts, social media, and A.I., it’s foolish to believe every story or accept every theory, but I must confess nothing surprises me anymore. Recently, I read 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.

Lakewood Road on Jones-Lane Bridge over the Ogeechee River
(Bulloch/Screven County Line facing South)

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? According to the report, this happened near Blitch just south of the Ogeechee River. That’s just a few river bends West of Dover and the landings East of U.S. Highway 301, one of which used to belong to my great-great-granddaddy’s family. It’s also where I saw the UFO in September of 1973. Years ago, despite the weird things that took place up from those swamps on a regular basis, 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.

But thirteen years ago, an interest in ‘missing person’ cases led me to the work of former police officer, researcher-writer-filmmaker, David Paulides, and 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.” Along with a string of books and documentaries, and hundreds of videos for his Missing 411 channel, Dave’ has produced eye-opening films such as Missing 411: The UFO Connection and American Sasquatch. With every state in the union claiming to house a variation of Big Foot, Hairy Man, Grass Man, Swamp Ape, or Wood Booger, it does make you wonder… Ask Bob Gimlin—he’s 94 now, and talking.

Speaking of, 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.

Maybe, he was onto something...

Thanks for reading!

The Northeast Bank Near The Spring – 1972

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Copyright ©2024 – 2026 Cynthia Farr Kinkel. All Rights Reserved.

THE POND HOUSE – Part Two

North Shoreline – Winter, 1972

A Season of Rude Awakenings

Though I didn’t always appreciate it, one of the nicest things about attending college in the same small town where you grew up and your parents still lived was whether it was a matter of convenience or of necessity, you could usually go home. At least that’s what I thought in March of 1972, when I spiked a fever over Spring Break, and went to the hospital in severe abdominal pain. Consequently, I ended up at my parents’ house in town, didn’t make it back to Screven County for Spring quarter, and the friends who’d been staying at the pond with me had to find another place to live. I had signed up for classes but by the middle of April, I had to withdraw.

This might be a good time to mention that in late August of 1971, four months before I moved out to Screven County, I’d joined a group of students between quarters on a college-sponsored tour known as “Art Studies in Europe.” Orchestrated by the department’s art history instructor, this two-week whirlwind overview of cultural sites and museums for fine arts majors began with an afternoon at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City and ended with a three-hour final exam that was taken on the flight home for which upon passage, we received full course credit.

The first seventy-two hours of the trip, my eyes never closed. After arriving in London, we visited local exhibit sites like the British Museum, the Tate Gallery, and the National Gallery during the day, and at night my room partner, Elizabeth, and I met as many locals and discovered as much night life between Piccadilly Square and London Bridge as physically possible. By day four’s Sunday visit to Westminster Abbey, and outing to Winchester, and Salisbury Cathedrals, and Winsor Castle and the town of Winsor on the Salisbury Plain, I was exhausted, in fact, once we finally got to Stonehenge, after wandering around in awe of the ancient circle, I lay down on the flattest horizonal stone I could find and fell fast asleep. When our instructor discovered me and excused me to go to the tour bus, the long rear seat at the back seemed the best place to continue my nap.

As the lumbering vehicle drove the Amesbury Expressway back toward London, a compact car carrying an elderly couple and their two grandchildren crossed the line and we plowed into them, head-on. I awoke as my head hit a large metal ashtray, then I dropped four feet onto the divider in the foot-well. The grandparents and one of the children, a small girl, died at the scene. A second child, a little boy, was taken in the same ambulance that transported me, the bus driver, and our art instructor to Salisbury Infirmary. I don’t recall ever knowing what became of the boy, or the bus driver, but our instructor, who’d been sitting up front was treated for minor cuts caused by shattered glass and released the following day. I was admitted with a hairline-fracture, a mild concussion, and sharp pains in my lower back and left side. Due to the concussion, they gave me nothing for pain. I was already sleep deprived and since my only relief was sleep, I slept so much the first two days they feared the concussion was causing it, and kept me for close observation. The other students, though badly shaken had escaped injury, so the tour continued on to Paris without me.

I was four days in a communal ward with a clear view of the gleaming spires of Salisbury Cathedral before I was up and walking around.  On day six, they determined me ‘well enough for release,’ and with help from the British consulate and a Londoner friend named Chris whom I’d met at the Wimpy hamburger shop located across from our motel, I was able to fly to Paris and rejoin the tour for its duration. Fully rested and youthfully resilient, I made it through France, Germany, Italy, and the exam on the way home without a problem. I had paced myself, but I was far from over it.

We arrived back in the States just as Fall Quarter was beginning, and life at school went on as anticipated until right before Christmas break when my parents announced they were ‘separating.’ As a young adult living across town, it came as no surprise, just a big disappointment, and in some ways, a relief—they’d been heading in that direction since the Spring of 1968, even before then, some say. But for my younger siblings—one, off at college in Athens, the other attending high school in North Georgia—this Christmas would be a double-dose of reality.

During my Freshman and Sophomore years at college, a staggered load of one-to-five-hour courses had often required me to be at school all day and many times, at night. At first I lived at home and commuted, but at the beginning of my Sophomore year, I was allowed to move into a dormitory located right next door to the fine arts building at my parents’ request. By my Junior year, I was able to transfer to the Honor’s Dorm. It was reserved for students with high-grade-point averages or unique schedules that called for late hour courses and rehearsals including visual and performing arts majors, and as close to being off-campus as the college would allow. But in the fall of 1971, I’d long qualified to reside off-campus, and was living five minutes away in a trailer park in a trailer that my mother had talked my daddy into purchasing. With three bedrooms and a bath and a half, it had been cheaper to share with two rent-paying roommates than to pay the cost of on-campus housing or off-campus boarding elsewhere, only now the situation was quickly escalating into “fruit basket turn over.” Come January, while Mama would remain at our home in town, Daddy would move into the trailer.

In truth, my desire to finish what I feared might be a useless college degree was waning. After securing living arrangements for the upcoming Winter quarter, my trailer mates packed up and left for the holidays, but when I suggested I might drop out for a while—join the Peace Corps, apply for a job at Delta, or somewhere local,—and rent a place of my own, Daddy mentioned the pond house as a temporary solution. Bless his heart—he wasn’t about to let me quit school. While Screven County seemed worlds away, I loved the place, and decided to take him up on the offer. As long as I could keep my canary-yellow 1969 Ford Maverick running back and forth, I was up for it.

Thankfully, one of my fellow-students came to my rescue—my dearest hometown friend, Carolyn, offered to help me pack. Three days before Christmas, neither of us had money to spend on gifts, so we collected milk cartons, bought food coloring, vanilla extract, cloves, cinnamon, and a large box of paraffin, and gathered all the plain white tapers we could find, and after repurposing the wicks, we slaved the night away in the trailer’s kitchen making layered sand candles for each of the members of our families.

Christmas Day in 1971 was on a Saturday. My parents, my siblings, and I, ignoring the elephant in the room, opened presents together at our house in town. Everybody liked the candles. Later, we drove out to Screven County in separate cars. Daddy and my brother, Frank, picked up Daddy’s mother, “Gran,” and Mama, my sister, and I picked up Mama’s mother, “Grandma.” Grandma’s younger sister, our great Aunt Mary, who never wed, was an avowed follower of Herbert Armstrong. She lived with Grandma, but didn’t celebrate Christmas, and didn’t join the festivities.

Both Gran and my granddaddy had lived with the aunties in the Screven County farmhouse at different times as had my daddy in his youth. Born in the late eighteen-hundreds after the Civil War, originally, there were five sisters and one brother in that household. Now, with great-great Aunt Lottie ten years gone, only Granddaddy lived there with our great-great Aunt Mary, the youngest and last surviving of the sisters, along with her seventy-two-year-old nephew, Eugene.

The Aunties’ Welcome Side Screened Porch – 1974
Great-Great Aunt Mary Amanda Henderson Overstreet – 1960s

As best I can remember, Cousin Eugene had always lived in the attic. A gentle soul who never married, reserved, and slight-of-build, he dressed as if he were always headed to town or to church. He didn’t talk much, and even after the aunties’ single downstairs bathroom was fitted with indoor plumbing and running water, he preferred to use the outhouse in the chicken yard. “That’s just his way,” great-great Aunt Lottie would say about her nephew. “Eugene keeps to himself.” It made good sense to me. I didn’t understand who he was—for a long time, I thought he was my great-great uncle, not my aunties’ nephew, like my granddaddy was, but it didn’t matter. Eugène was a walking enigma—not exactly a “Boo Radley,” just an unassuming eccentric, a smiling bee-charmer, content to share a slice of honeycomb with me at the farmhouse counter.

For many years, a deep well adjacent the farmhouse kitchen provided fresh water for washing and drinking, first by crank and bucket, then by a powered pump. As a child I remember thinking how even in summer, the handy faucet anchored above the porcelain sink yielded some of the coldest water I’d ever tasted. Enclosed by a window with folding panes, the well was perfect for storage, and over the years the shelves that lined its inner walls continued to keep food from spoiling when space in the electric refrigerator was limited. The well’s outer structure still braced the back steps leading up to the kitchen door.

Eugene Gray Evans – 1994

The last time I saw Cousin Eugene was in October of 1974, three months after great-great Aunt Mary died. He was standing on those back steps looking much the way he’d always looked. He let me snap the above photo. As usual, I’d gathered with the family at the farmhouse that past December for Christmas dinner, but had moved to Atlanta in January, and was in Western New York State when the news came of great-great Aunt Mary’s death a few days into July. But arriving home that October—a new person, after a life-saving stop-over at Carolyn’s in Atlanta—I was seeing things with new eyes. When I learned that great-great Aunt Mary’s property had been placed on the market, I grabbed my camera, drove my favorite back road, East to Screven County, taking photographs of the Ogeechee and familiar landmarks of Cooperville along the way, and stopped by the farmhouse in route to the pond.

It was beyond strange, being there without great-great Aunt Mary. The last time I saw her was in early January before I left for Atlanta. Oddly enough, I was headed to the pond that evening, as I slowed in the twilight to make the right turn into the field, I spotted her on the left, standing at the end of her driveway near the cattle grate, just a ‘hollerin’. When I stopped the car, and went over to investigate, she told me she was worried about Granddaddy. He hadn’t shown up for supper, and it was getting late, in fact, she and Eugene had been searching for over an hour. We agreed he hadn’t gone far since his green Chevy Impala was parked under the big magnolia near the old garage, so I walked her to the house, gave her a hug, said I’d go looking for him.

Just past the middle of the field, my Maverick’s headlights fell upon a figure crawling around on all fours. Good Lord. It was Granddaddy, and had I been paying less attention, I’d have run him over. I slammed on the brakes, and threw the car in park. With blurry eyes, he looked up, squinted in my direction, and slurring the words, cried, “I can’t find my glasses,” and reaching around to pat the grass, he mumbled, something.

I jumped out to join the search, and after finding them in a rut nearby, I helped him into the car, but as I began backing out toward the highway he tapped the wheel. “Where’re you going?” he asked. “To take you home,” I replied. He shook his head, and frowned. I knew he must be lonesome with a lot on his mind, so I took him with me to the pond house, called great-great Aunt Mary to let her know he was okay, made us a strong pot of coffee, and before I dropped him off at her house on the way back to town that night, had a truly sobering, but totally memorable visit with this gentle, reticent, and somewhat bedeviled old man that was my grandfather. Worried about my daddy’s health, and troubled about the divorce, he wished that my parents had worked things out, though he and my Gran never did. That’s why she lived in an apartment in town, and he lived out of his car. He still referred to Sweetie as mine, though he was the one who’d taken care of him after I left, but lately, instead of sleeping at the pond or in the woods, he’d been spending his nights up at the farmhouse. Evidently, the land didn’t feel as welcoming to him as once it had. I felt bad for him, but given the situation and the choices he’d made, I knew he was resigned to stay.

Nine months later, the old homestead was quiet, and in the stillness of fallen oak and pecan leaves under the blue October sky, an eerie solemnity had settled over the place—as if frozen in time, but about to change forever. Grandaddy, Eugene, and the feral kitties were there. The house, the barn, the chicken yard, the scuppernong vines … all looked the same. The lightning-stricken, unrooted and tilted pecan tree I used to climb still stretched to the smoke house. The only thing missing, besides great-great Aunt Mary, was the huge live oak that had faithfully shaded the west side of the yard. Granddaddy said it had also been struck by lightning, and had to be taken down, then he told me that Sweetie had been missing for a month, that he’d searched for days and feared he might have been snakebit. A second dog was also missing, a stray black female that had showed up at the pond whom Granddaddy had adopted and called “Lover.” Knowing how much I regretted having to leave ‘our’ dog with him, he shook his head and smiled. “That Sweetie Pie had a happy life, Cyndi. He missed you, but you don’t pen-up a good dog once he’s been running free, and that dog was about as free as any good dog could be.”

Granddaddy with Bags of Pecans – 1974

This time, Grandaddy didn’t ask to ride to the pond with me. He gave me a hug, waved goodbye, and went back to picking up pecans. I’d spend the next six months back in Western New York State, and see him when I got home the following Spring, but not Eugene. Eugene went to live in an ‘old folks’ home after the farmhouse sold and died on October 28th, 1981. As I drove across the cattle gate that day for the last time with a glance over my shoulder and a camera roll of photos, it wasn’t with a heavy heart, just a sense that an era was ending. The harvest was almost in. A door to the past had closed.

The Aunties” – Surviving 4 of the 5 Henderson Sisters in 1945
(L. to R.): Annie, Mary, Lottie, Emmie

But looking back on that Christmas Day in 1971, despite the news of my parents’ pending separation and ultimate divorce, the gathering at that farmhouse was as merry and bright as ever. The old kitchen now sported an electric oven, but its original vented wood stove continued to function as a backup which meant you pretty much smelled what was cooking as soon as you arrived. The cousins from Jesup were already there. Others from Dover and Cooperville would be stopping in to exchange season’s greetings. Some would stay for dinner. Except for Sundays, holidays, and special occasions, the formal rooms of the house were normally closed off during the winter, but now they were open with oil furnaces burning. A cedar wreath with red holly berries graced the entryway and mistletoe hung in the central hall, but there were never any electric lights on the tree in the living room. Usually a cedar or pine, sometimes a holly, it was decorated only with colorful glass ornaments and silver strands of garland.

Living Room Christmas of Yester Year at the Auntie’s Farm House (1958)

The long hardwood dining-room table was dressed in fine white linen, its candled centerpiece sported crimson camellia japonica blossoms and green magnolia leaves that were shined with watered-down buttermilk. A sideboard cornucopia of traditional southern fare included a roasted turkey stuffed with cornbread dressing, country ham from the smokehouse, red-eye gravy, mashed Irish potatoes, sweet potato soufflé, steamed yellow squash, baked macaroni casserole, butterbeans, fried okra, field peas, hot biscuits, fresh-churned butter, scuppernong jelly, and bee-tree honey. Beyond the main course, there were side-porch delights such as pecan, coconut custard, and lemon meringue pies, banana pudding, chocolate or traditional pound-cake, and fresh-fruit ambrosia. After the table was cleared and the leftovers covered, the furnaces were lowered, the rooms in the front of the house and the hallway were closed off again, and the dirty dishes were washed in the residual warmth of the kitchen. While the spryer men went hunting, everybody else retired to the sitting room at the rear of the house to watch TV, play Chinese checkers, or nap by the fire. In my younger days I might be searching the pages of great-great Aunt Lottie’s December McCall’s magazine for the Betsy McCall paper dolls, or scouring for cut-outs that I’d overlooked in previous issues. By the way, though the farm folks liked my candles, I don’t think they ever lit them. Granddaddy said they smelled too good to burn.

After Christmas Dinner in the Auntie’s Sitting Room – 1958

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Those last few days of December 1971, I spend in town at the trailer to finish packing, and on the evening of the thirtieth, my candle-making friend Carolyn accompanied me to Screven County. It was misting rain and chilly as we hauled my belongings across the threshold. We didn’t stick around. As described above, I celebrated Christmas with family, as did she, but New Year’s weekend found us partying in town with friends. After I took the last load of boxes out to the pond myself on Sunday, January second, I settled in and started unpacking. The day of Winter quarter registration, I ran into a couple still looking for off-campus housing. Daddy agreed it was a good idea since I’d be twelve miles out in the woods, and they moved in that night… Not long after, I was given a three-month-old Labrador-shepherd puppy who soon grew into a super watchdog as smart as he was friendly. Daddy and Granddaddy were always dropping by to check on us—Daddy had left his loaded rifle over the fireplace and made sure the extra shells were where I could find them.

North Shoreline – Winter, 1972

As the quarter progressed, we adjusted to life in the woods. Each of us had managed to schedule afternoon and evening classes which made the time and distance more manageable, (even with late nights by the fire). The idea that we may have attracted a few ‘supernatural oddities’ along the way only added to the venue’s mystical appeal. Just when it seemed that everything favored our rural endeavor, some of the masked injuries I’d apparently sustained during the bus accident in the U.K. suddenly began to surface, and a flock of debilitating symptoms sent me to the Emergency Room over Spring break.

Initially, I was diagnosed with severe ulcerative colitis, prescribed antibiotics, put on a restricted diet, ordered to bed—Mama insisted that I come home with her. Spring Quarter had already begun, and after a week of bedrest, I tried to attend class, but I was in and out of the doctor’s office unable to keep any schedule, and had to drop out. So much for returning to life in Screven County anytime soon. I hoped to be well enough to attend summer-school to make up for lost time, and was resigned to continue the current situation of recuperation ,  … but even that was about to change.

Toward the end of April, my parents decided to sell the house in town to go their separate ways. They wanted to be out of it by the Fourth of July. The new plan was for my sister, Carole, to continue at college in Athens that summer, my younger brother, Frank, soon to be home from private boarding school, would stay with Daddy at the trailer, and Mama would move out to the pond house. I was welcome there, too, but all I wanted was to remain in town and get well enough for school in June, … a notion I had to abandon. Two weeks after enrolling I relapsed and had to withdraw, again. Luckily, I rebounded, but school still had to wait.

By the time my parents’ house went on the market that July, Gran had offered me the sofa hide-a-bed at her new apartment until I could make other arrangements. With school out of the question, I thought maybe I could at least manage a part-time job, so I’d applied for a serving job at the local Holiday Inn just a block away from Gran’s place. A week later, however, I collapsed in the kitchen of the restaurant—all of the symptoms were back with a vengeance, accompanied by fever, cramps, nausea, muscle weakness, and a strangely increasing tingling and ‘pulling’ sensation in my right arm and right leg. The doctor didn’t even mention colitis, but said he suspected that a large uterine cyst might have ruptured and caused a serious low-grade infection. That didn’t explain the nerve-related issues, nor did anyone seek to address them. I left the hospital with more antibiotics, and went back to the hide-a-bed at Gran’s.

That weekend, I was still feeling awful, when another friend, a fellow music-major and Sigma Alpha Iota fraternity sister named Susan who’d recently graduated, found out where I was staying and stopped by for a visit. She took one look at me and said she was packing my bag and taking me home with her, to see—of all people—her chiropractor, whose office happened to be next door to the apartment she was renting fifty miles away in Vidalia, Georgia. I’d seen a local practitioner in the past for headaches and ‘pinched nerves,’ but her “doctor of chiropractic,” a nutrition-centric graduate of Palmer College, turned out to be a miracle-worker. Like my friend, Susan, he was also a committed Christian.

A thorough review of my x-rays was shocking! Even the images of my upper spine were nothing like what I recalled from the x-rays taken by my local practitioner three years earlier. The new images revealed that from the atlas and axis vertebrae through the lower lumbar regions of my spine, the alignment had been dramatically altered—crimped toward the top, bent in the middle, and generally and overall, shifted to the right. When I mentioned the bus accident and how I was thrown forward and dropped onto the floor-well, Susan’s doctor said I was blessed to still be walking.

My treatment began with two adjustments a day. By day four, it was one. The following week, I was completely out of pain. I kept up with the exercises prescribed to strengthen the corrections, and by the middle of end of July, my spine was straight, I was maintaining a healthy diet including a supplement for GI support, and the debilitating symptoms were gone and never returned. My friend, Carolyn, was also greatly helped by this same chiropractor that summer. For the sake of convenience, we both stayed at Susan’s apartment to undergo treatment, and by the end of July, I was well enough to rent an upstairs room at Miss Irby Franklin’s old house on South Main Street back in town (without my tie-dyed curtains,… but that’s another story). In September, I resumed classes for what would finally be my last year of college, and though I still carried some emotional baggage, my health had been restored.

Pond House with New Screened Porch – Sweetie and Lover – December of 1973

In retrospect, Mama didn’t stay at the pond house long. She rented an apartment in town—the same apartment Gran had vacated to move into her new one. It belonged to a lady with whom she regularly played Canasta. While I was off getting well in Vidalia, my daddy and Frank continued to live at the trailer park until Frank went back to school. My sister, Carole, had an apartment in Athens and stayed away that summer. After our former happy home sold, Daddy spent most of his spare time at the pond implementing a plan to finally add a screened porch to the front of the house. Again, Bill Williams helped.

The Christmas get-together at the farmhouse was a ritual feast for which all the usual suspects gathered, minus Mama and her side of the family. That’s when it finally hit me how quickly things can go sideways in slow motion, but I wasn’t looking to assign blame or pass judgement. I was well, again, and thankful for it, and as I drove back into town to see Mama, I was determined to cope and move on. New Year’s Eve found my friend, Carolyn, and I enjoying acoustic music with the locals at our friends Benji and Sally’s rustic farmhouse on the outskirts of town. Afterward, I drove home to Miss Irby’s alone.

“Quiet Place” – Watercolor (Statesboro, GA/GSC, March 1973)

From January on, I concentrated on finishing my degree. I’d almost accumulated enough credits to graduate in music. My friend, Susan, had graduated in music education and was now a high-school choral instructor. But I couldn’t picture myself as a teacher, and as there didn’t seem much for a theory major to do but to perform or write music professionally, I finished that June with a bachelor’s degree in fine (studio) arts and a minor in music. During those long winter evenings on the final stretch, I set my easel up in my room at Miss Irby’s, and when I wasn’t busy at school, working on the third floors of the Foy Fine Arts Building, I’d steal downstairs to one of the music department practice rooms to bare my soul on the piano. I saw my family—maybe, once a week. Some weekends, rather than stick around, I drove to Atlanta, which is where I might have been by Friday night, February 9th, had not my Maverick slid down an icy embankment into a ditch the evening before. It was the week of the Great Southeastern Snowstorm of 1973. Classes had been cancelled that Thursday, and I’d just left the Foy Building, where enough white stuff had accumulated on the roof of the forth-floor ‘walk-out’ for a bunch of gleeful students to be pitching snowballs down at passers-by below. Snow was a rarity, but I should have known better than to drive to that same rustic farmhouse on the outskirts of town much less to tarry there until it was almost dark. After a long cold trudge back through the slush to make a phone call, I ended up spending the weekend waiting for the wrecker to show. “Good thing, you weren’t stuck in Atlanta,” everybody said.

Meanwhile, Daddy had the trailer relocated to a different lot at the trailer park, and he and Frank continued living there. At one point, Frank also stayed with Mama before completing high school in town. Come Spring, however, Daddy moved to the pond house, and the trailer moved with him. He had it set up just yards away from the house, perpendicularly facing the water. Frank stayed in it that summer along with his best friend J.D., and enjoyed a month of swimming, waterskiing, and general carousing before he left for Athens that fall to join my sister, Carole, at the University of Georgia. Carole had an apartment in Athens. Again, she didn’t come home…

Sweetie Pie – J.D. Water Skiing – View Across Pond From Dock – Summer, 1973

After I graduated from college that June, I was as anxious to “get out of Dodge” as anybody has ever been. I was definitely “twenty-four and so much more,”  and Dark Side of the Moon wasn’t just another Pink Floyd album.. … Time was definitely slipping away. By August, when I was still hanging around, knowing how antsy I was to leave, Miss Irby allowed me to pay month to month.

Early that September, my college friend, Paul, and I saw a UFO over the Ogeechee River at Jones Lane Landing … Well, at least, I saw it. Paul was blind, so I described it to him in real time. It was dark as pitch that night. We’d left the car and were walking on the bridge when, out of the blue, a big ‘star’ emerged from the tree-line, hovered, and zipped off in the opposite direction. Everybody thought we were crazy until they read it in the newspaper. Evidently, they’d been reporting UFOs all over Coastal Georgia that weekend—at Fort Stewart and Hunter AFB in Savannah, and on Tybee Island. Ufologists now call it the Hunter Incident, and say the government covered it up. For sure, we didn’t hear much later, but I never forgot that sighting.

Hunter Airfield UFOs” – Savannah Morning NewsSept 8th, 1973

Also, that September, friend, Debbie, and I, and one of her Atlanta buds, made a weekend pilgrimage to The Farm, the large vegan commune near Summertown, Tennessee founded by Stephen Gaskin. author of Monday Night Class. It was a fruitful, eye-opening experience, and the dedication to community and spiritual connection was genuinely impressive, but none of us were ready to commit to austerity. We left after the weekend was over.

Though my three-year position with the College Union Board had ended at graduation, I continued in an advisory role to facilitate concerts and accommodate artists. I’ll never forget when Debbie and I took Z.Z. Top drummer, Frank “Rube” Beard, sightseeing after the group played the Hanner Fieldhouse on October 10, 1973. It was almost a full Hunter’s Moon—perfect for a late night driving tour of special county landmarks that only the locals knew about including the Mill Pond—in those days you could still drive over it, —and the Harville House, which after sadly falling into disrepair, had long been labeled the area’s most famous “haunted house,” much to the family’s distain. Granted, it was spooky, even in the daytime. All through high school, I remember driving out just to ride by—it might have passed for a horror-movie set, especially at night. The photo below was taken in 2014, but thankfully, a successful effort is now underway to restore the old home to its former beauty and grandeur!

Bravo, Harville House!

Harville House – Bulloch County – July 2014

The following weekend, Carolyn, our friend, Sheila, and I decided it was time to ‘go see the leaves.’ We hopped into Carolyn’s car, drove to Atlanta, stayed with her sister, Martha, in Roswell, overnight, then made a scenic, day-trip to Brasstown Bald and back. On the way, we paid a surprise visit to my brother at Tallulah Falls School. That was probably the most we talked all day. The spell of Autumn in North Georgia has a way of doing that to you, and in 1973, the colors were exceptionally spectacular.

Familiar with the local music scene and venues, I’d initially met and friended several members of the Atlanta-based horn-band, Stagecoach, when they played The Flame that summer. When they returned in late September, those friendships were rekindled. Toward the end of October, I traveled to Charleston, South Carolina, to join them on the road, but in November, when the flute/saxophone player that I fancied landed a high-paying job with Wayne Cochran and the C.C. Riders, it was like Waitin’ on a bus – Jesus Done Left Chicago followed by A Rainy Night in GeorgiaPavone for a Dead Princess. The money was excellent, and the opportunity was special enough that nobody in the band blamed him, but it put them at a disadvantage, and that wasn’t all. His hasty departure prompted me to rationalize a hasty decision. Overruling his objections—independent-minded, liberated feminist that I was—I was adamant. But it didn’t take long to regret it, deeply.

On the third of December I arrived home at Mama’s after driving fifty-five-miles-an-hour instead of my usual seventy to learn a musician friend whom I’d known since high school had died coming back from a gig. It was late, the highway was dark, and the band’s gutted school bus had hit a log truck. The band member who was driving the bus was also a long-time friend. He was in critical condition with a head injury. His recovery would be long and painful, but he would survive.

By December seventh, I was back in Atlanta to visit my friend, Carolyn. She had moved into an apartment with our friend, Sheila, and started a new job. She’d also started reading her Bible. She said the Lord had been speaking to her. I listened, but despite my current state of mind, I wasn’t that interested. Regardless, it was comforting just being there, and before I left, I stumbled upon an odd job painting decorations on the front windows of the corner gas station—it was a quick fifty bucks just in time for Christmas.

I’d given up my rental at Miss Irby’s, so when I got home, again, I slept at Mama’s, at Gran’s, or in the house or the trailer at the pond. Daddy had a new lady friend that lived in Marietta, Georgia, whom he’d started visiting on the weekends. Except for Christmas Eve, my sister and brother stayed in town while they were home Christmas break. Granddaddy, the dog, and I, might have had the pond all to ourselves had I cared enough to be there.

The day after Christmas, I met up my flute/saxophone player for a short trip to Biloxi, Mississippi, before the C.C. Rider regimen resumed. Now, I was even more determined to move. Most of my friends were already in Atlanta. By the end of January of 1974, I’d found a temporary place to stay in West End, and was chasing rainbows of my own, even applied for a job at the High Museum. I was a musician at heart, but my degree was in art. Go figure.


“Arid Road” – Acylic (Atlanta, GA – February 1974)

But I kept running into musicians that I knew; others, I met at clubs in Underground Atlanta, and by the Fourth of July 1974, still looking for rainbows in places I’d never even dreamed of visiting, I’d packed everything I owned and could carry into my Maverick, and by way of Dallas, Texas, a recent association with a band called Wild Bill and the Buffalo Yankees, and help from what I’ve always believed was an angel, I’d arrived safely in Western New York… At least I didn’t hitch hike—I had my daddy’s Shell card. Clearly, someone was praying.

That October, when I stopped in Atlanta on the way to South Georgia from Western New York, I learned the former lead guitarist for Stagecoach had recently wrapped his car around a tree. He didn’t survive. Neither did the band, and my flute/saxophone player, who’d long left the C.C. Riders, had long left Atlanta as well. That weekend I stayed with my friend, Carolyn—this time, we prayed, and when I opened her Bible, as if a finger had directed me to the verse, there it was—Psalm 51— staring me in the face. “Create in me a clean heart, O God,” I read aloud. “And renew a right spirit within me…” In an instant, the veil lifted, a light turned on, and I was changed forever. After a month in Georgia, I returned to New York, albeit age twenty-five a different person—a new creature!

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New Beginnings – October 1974

With plenty of room between the lines, I can honestly say, most of the baggage I carried from those days was rightly discarded. I never called the pond house ‘home,’ again, but I did stay there at times. When Daddy remarried in 1975, he remodeled it—adding a new kitchen and enclosing the screened porch to make it into a master bedroom with a full bath. At the time, I was working at his office. When I married in August of 1976, I continued working there until the birth of our first daughter. After my daddy’s second marriage ended in early 1977, later that year, my husband and I moved to Atlanta, but we came back for Christmas with the baby, and stayed with Daddy at the pond. That was the Christmas he burned the turkey, and most everything else that could go wrong, went wrong. He married again in 1978, the year Granddaddy died on July 27th. From then on, he spent less time in Screven County, in fact, he moved back across the river to his third wife’s home, taking the trailer went with him. Gran lived in it for a while, and when I visited with our little daughter, we slept in the rear bedroom.

Gran had told me years ago that Daddy’s case of rheumatic fever as a child had resulted in a damaged a heart valve. It kept him from active duty in the army, and caused a mild heart attack in the early sixties. In 1979, he went to the V.A. hospital in Augusta, GA, for a valve replacement operation. They botched the job, and the procedure had to be redone using a pig’s valve. The heart doctor in Savannah said it was a miracle he lived, but he was able to return to work, even without a pacemaker. Four years later, in September of 1983, the pig’s valve failed, and he had a massive stroke—a global aphasia that left him completely paralyzed on one side, blind in one eye, with only a minimal ability to speak.

 In July 1986, a month before he died, a listing for a 400-acre parcel of property in Screven County appeared in the local want ads—it also featured the pond and the house, —then—just like that, it was gone. His third wife had given up caring for him, sold everything he owned including the land, placed him in a nursing home, divorced him, and opened a business in Hilton Head, SC. But I need to add something here: In 1978 and during the ordeal at the VA, he’d started back going to church, and while there were medical bills and difficult outcomes to face without him, it’s worth noting that the two things out of his mouth during his last days on earth were, “God is good” and “Get to go!” —and he didn’t mean to Screven County or any other place on the planet, —he meant “home.” Thankfully, he never knew about the sale, and those of us who did dealt with the loss and moved on. Eventually, all that counted were the vivid memories of the special times we spent together as family. Forty years later, it still holds true.

Never the less, special people and places have a way of living on inside you, fueling the fires of the psyche, and inspiring introspection. But not all such reflections have to do with family, friends, or personal relationships. As I’ve suggested, some center around a place itself and raise recurrent questions. In this case, going back to 1972, there’s one particular incident that baffles me to this day. It took place at the pond house on the second weekend in June, a month before my parents sold their house in town… under a waning moon.

Waning Moon of June

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