Chapter Six

"Headin' to the Hills"

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"Study nature, love nature,

stay close to nature.

It will never fail you."

Frank Lloyd Wright

It was the summer after my 6th grade year that Dad accepted a new job up in Marion, North Carolina.  With his being a career textile executive, moves were anticipated every several years, but this was to a new company in a 'foreign' land.  North from Columbus, Georgia we went, into the Foothills and mountains of western NC, where not only the scenery but 'life' and dialect were, shall we say, unique.


My 7th grade year began in a brand new junior high school, West McDowell...the second in the county, if that gives you any idea of the rural nature of things.  Counterpart to East McDowell, if that gives you any idea of the creativity of the local school board for naming schools.  The quintessential 'life in the slow lane', it was.


You know how it is...entering the 'teen' world, new location, new friends, new everything.  But among my richest of memories were the adventures I shared with who became a dear friend, Thomas.  From here on out, this chapter has nothing to do with school; rather, it deals with our myriad adventures into the wilds of McDowell County, and a deepening appreciation for nature.


If the landscape were vastly different, you can imagine the dialect would be even more so.  "Mount'in talk" came with the territory, and Thomas had spent his whole life in it.  To this day, mom talks about the first time Thomas called the house and said, "Is Bob thar?"  Let's just say mom didn't readily find it comprehensible at first.  I took to it like a duck to water, I did, and to this day if I'm in the right setting I'll feel it slip right back in, like a comfortable tennis shoe.


Thomas and his family lived in a small, nearby community called Pleasant Garden, or PG for short.  His dad ran the Lake Tahoma steakhouse where Highway 81 broke north from Highway 70.  Across the street was the vintage mobile home that's been home to "Dot's Dario" for who knows how many decades, set at an angle to a good ol' drive-in theater.  Their house was just a few miles up 81, a most gorgeous drive any time of the year as it heads up into the mountains, past picturesque Lake Tahoma, and crossing under the Blue Ridge Parkway.


Roughly paralleling 81 was Buck Creek, not big enough for a canoe the whole way in low water, but big enough for some great fishing and hellacious tubing after heavy rains.  If you've never been tubing down a raging mountain creek, you are missing one of the most fun-filled times to be had for no money other than the cost of a used truck tire tube.  Our favorite run was to put in below the Lake Tahoma dam and tube down behind his house.  I have no idea how far it was, but it was an hours-filled adventure with occasional lazying stops.


I remember after just putting in that I got snagged on a large boulder in the middle of the raging creek.  It's not as easy as you think trying to get a solid footing on the slick algae-covered rocks, holding on to a large inner tube that the creek wanted so badly to take out of my grasp.  But with one big lunge I got onto that rock and looked for a good place to put back in.  I was not alone. 

Sometimes you just 'know' when someone is looking at you.  Or some thing. Yes, I love nature.  Yes, I respect all animals.  Yes, I prefer to keep twenty feet between myself and a snake, and the quickly calculated three feet wasn't gonna hack it.  Too, it's one of those situations I didn't feel compelled to sit and analyze, going through the mental catalog of species distribution.  I did what any of us would do: I screamed, grabbed the tube, and jumped like a jackrabbit back into the water. 


I have to say the most humorous, unsuspecting tubing situation happened just after a particularly fast set of rapids under a bridge, leading into a deep still area...at a small church...where they were having a traditional baptismal ceremony in the pool, complete with white robes.  So here come Thomas, myself, and another friend or two, hootin' and hollerin' coming through the rapids...only to have myriad pairs of serious eyes staring a hole through each of us.


What do you do?  What do you say?  We kept floating and gave a little wave with a sheepish 'hello!' and were glad to get around the next bend.  Part of me wanted to throw in a "Praise the Lord!" just for the heck of it, but it was such a surprise that I basically clammed up.  Probably a good thing.


Those same waters offered fun fishing with ultra-light gear.  Quarters were tight with all the streamside vegetation, so you would never cast a great distance.  You'd pick and choose good looking pools and structure, and occasionally deal with catching a squirrel (read 'bad cast' that ended up in a tree).  We rarely kept the fish, releasing them if at all possible.  The joy was in being in the great outdoors, wading through the waters, and jumping a mile in the air when a crawdad found the big hole in my right tennis shoe.


The better fishing holes were upstream from Thomas' house, and we often rode our bikes up Buck Creek Road to get to them in a more timely manner than hoofing it.  Before the road starts climbing, there are a couple of long, straight, flat stretches in the valley.  We'd have our fishing rod in one hand, a small tackle box in the other as we held the handlebars, lazily cruising in the sunshine, riding side by side and 'chewing the fat'.


Ever wonder how two ships can collide in the wide open sea in the middle of a sunny day?  That's always baffled me.  One day as we were riding on one of our finned forays, we were in the middle of the last straight stretch, with far away cars at either end heading towards us.  How we did it, I have no idea, but Thomas and I veered directly into each other and wrecked.  Right there in the middle of the road.


We weren't going fast enough to get hurt, outside of a few road scrapes that come with falling on asphalt at any speed.  Moving ourselves and our bikes off the road would have been easy enough...but we had a real pickle on our hands with little time to act.


It must be one of the natural laws that when a tackle box is dropped on a road, that all 47 pieces will spread themselves out as far and randomly as possible.  Entropy was alive and well as we rushed to pick up all we could, laughing hysterically at our predicament. I couldn't help sensing a glimpse of what road kill must feel like before acquiring that name.


We lived there only three years before the next move, three years of endless adventures.  It was the ensuing school year after I finished my 9th grade year that I was enrolled at Woodberry Forest School, another chapter in itself.  While it was tough getting used to life at a boarding school, pastoral rolling Virginia countryside surrounded that incredible campus...with all the memories from Marion reinventing themselves anew.  

When I'm not connected with nature, I'm simply miserable.