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Red Clay Diary entry
Long, long ago, my brother Ronny and I drove deep into Cottondale, Alabama,
to do some time traveling:
UNCLE ADRON AND THE 160-ACRE BEAVER POND RIDE
My brother Ronny and I are just about ready to give up trying to find Uncle Adron’s 160-acre property in the middle of which sits the home we know he and Aunt Annabelle live in.
“I remember some of the road, so I know it’s around here somewhere,” says Ronny, who was last a visitor here some forty years ago.
Truth is, we are almost lost and not quite found in our search for the old homestead in Tuscaloosa County. Dirt roads and narrow-laned asphalt roads and orange washboard roads run this way and that, and the car I’m driving enters a different time and place and era every few minutes. Mobile homes perch on concrete blocks near century-old breezeway houses, and a little further along there’s a 1950’s ranch-style house with dirt bikes and pickup trucks in front–in back of which an old out-house and shambled barn still struggle to defy the gravity that is soon to pull them down. As we turn from blue road to red clay road, a shack with a satellite dish smugly hides its mysteries.
We finally give in to the 21st Century and whip out a cell phone to get Uncle Adron or somebody to tell us how to find the homestead.
And there it is–deep in the forest, there’s my cousin Harold and some of his brood, and sitting on the front porch in laconic meditation is Uncle Adron, who greets us as though we are dropping by for the second time this week.
There are no strangers in Uncle Adron’s world of family and kin.
As we talk and tour the old wooden house, we feel as if we’ve never left. In some ways, visiting Uncle Adron and Aunt Annabelle is like coming home after a rough day at work and finding out that work and everything else that occurs away from this place are fleeting and paper-thin.
Ronny knows which room he spent the night in 45 years ago, I know where Aunt Annabelle served up chicken and dumplings 50 years ago. We both know that this place in the depth of the countryside is as vivid and timeless as a cool drink of water from an old wooden bucket.
I step outside to clear my head of all these memories that are so sweet and compelling that at any moment they might bring with them a sadness that can’t be swept aside like a spiderweb.
Harold shows us the enormous prefab building where he runs his RFD business, and we look down the lane to see where grandkids live nearby.
“Can you show us around the property?” I ask Harold, certain that a nice brief hike in the woods would be therapeutic.
“You want to see the land?” Harold asks, as if he can’t quite believe that a city slicker would condescend to tour his front and back yards, the yards he sees every day.
“Sure, I’m serious,” I say.
Harold says, “OK,” and I start walking toward the trees.
“Where are you going?” he asks.
“Isn’t this the way?” I reply.
Harold starts getting into his large four-wheel vehicle. “You want a tour, don’t you?”
I have trouble believing that anybody would actually drive around their yard, rather than walk. Maybe it’s Harold’s bum leg. I get into the truck and yell for Ronny to join us.
Within seconds I understand why we’re trucking rather than walking. Uncle Adron’s property is enormous, and we’re about to see all of it.
Three country dogs appear out of nowhere and start running ahead of the vehicle, not behind it. They know the route, even though there is no visible road.
Harold takes us into deep brush, the car rocks side to side into and over century-old ruts. The limbs and leaves splat against the closed windows and we lose sight of the sun.
Looking behind us, I see no sign of where we’ve been. Ahead, only Harold and the dogs can tell where we’re going to wind up.
What if the truck goes dead? Will we survive out here in the compass-less land that nobody outside our family traverses?
We dive deep into small valleys, pop up into sunlight over brief hillocks, go through a scratchy meadow past natural-gas pumps, and wind up in the completely quiet forest near a beaver pond.
Harold turns off the motor and we roll down the windows.
To a city boy like me and a city boy like Ronny, there is silence. Our silence consists of hearing nothing we’re used to each day: airplanes, cars and trucks, horns, car alarms, shouted invectives, whirring air conditioners, boom boxes.
The silence of the forest takes over and overwhelms us. Insects communicating. Water lapping. Dry grass crunching under dog paws. Panting, wet dogs, frolicking in the pond.
The noisy silence of a million invisible insects going about their work-day, punching in, doing their shifts, living and protecting and procreating and dying in ways we cannot see.
“Sometimes, we come out here and just sit and watch the beavers and just be quiet,” Harold grins.
The dogs play in the water, swimming and snorting and acting like puppies.
And that’s where we remain for a long time, my brother Ronny and I…and that’s where we remain embedded in memory, long after we’ve made our respective treks back to Houston and Birmingham
© Jim Reed 2018 A.D.
http://www.jimreedbooks.com/podcast