When You Reach the End of The Road

There is always a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning is always the same. You come into the world and wonder what the hell is going on. You start with a clean slate. What you write on that clean slate is what you do with your life. The end comes quickly, and you are always surprised, and everyone asks: How did the end come so soon?

You wake up each morning with a second gift from God. The first is the breath of life.  The second gift is when you open your eyes and then the day is up to you. You can go to work, go fishing, mow the lawn or waste time. There is a heartfelt song by Otis Redding called “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay.” A significant end of the line is “wasting time.”

As important as every moment of your life is, you sometimes don’t put those moments to use because when you are young, you feel as if the moments allotted are endless. But one day you wake and look in the mirror and ask yourself, how did I get this old and where did the months and years go?

Well, I can now feel the sand running out, I can see the time I wasted. Reality sinks in and I know I can’t go back and do things differently. At an early stage of my life, I began to love music and songs. I know that the songs tell a story of happiness, love, lost love, lost chances, and heartache. Some of the songs dwell on happiness like Roger Miller’s “Walking in the Sunshine” or Buck Owen’s “Loves Gonna Live Here” There is Frank Sinatra’s “I Did it My Way.” There is Merle Haggard’s “Today I started Loving You Again.”  There are songs of Regret like Gene Watson’s “Farewell Party” or the song “It’s My Party or “Turn out the lights, the parties over” Unfortunately, a lot of the songs are about misery. There is a song for every mood you might have. There are good old gospel songs like “Amazing Grace” and “How Great Thou Art” . “I’ll Fly Away” is both a happy and a sad song. “Peace in the Valley” is a hopeful song that will one day come true.

I became a workaholic and did not focus on the important things in life. I was raised poor and proud. I had an unforgettable family. My Daddy was a strong man with strong opinions, but he taught me to help someone when and if you can. I have tried to help,  and I have succeeded and sometimes failed. My sister Estelle loved the Bible verse about the good Samaritan. A rich man whose chances of getting to heaven were as slim as his ability to pass through the eye of a needle. I bet he is there. My Mama grew up poor and she and her sister Lola (nicknamed Monk) was courted by my Daddy and my Uncle Robert. Daddy made whiskey with my Grandpa Edmond Chapman who married my grandmother Ethyl who used snuff and was sometimes known to take a sip of whiskey to chase a cayenne pepper she had just eaten raw. My preference was always a pickled cayenne  with a bowl of soup beans and corn bread. My brother Charles was the best fisherman in Frozen Creek until my brother Michael took away his title. My Daddy had several witty sayings, and one was: “I thought fish was brain food, but Charles proves that wrong” Charles wrecked his Harley Davidson Motorcycle and had to wear dresses until his skinned hide grew back.

My brother Edgar loved Science Fiction books and beer. He loved music also and often asked me to play “My Favorite Memory” and “Picking Flowers on the Hill” My brother Gerald loved the song “Listen to the Rhythm of The Falling Rain” Charles loved “White Silver Sands” and “Wildwood Flower”  My brother Harold loved “Now and then There’s a Fool Such as I” My brother Michael and I used to sing “ Thinking Bout Things” My Sister Estelle’s favorite song was “When Will I Be Loved” My sister Vonda loved “Satin Sheets” and “I’m Not Lisa” along with “Life Turned her That Way” Howard loved the song “White Lightning”. My brother Brian loved the Southern Rock Bands “Alabama and Oak Ridge Boys” My sister Thelma loved the old Gospel tunes such as “ Further Along” and “Amazing Grace” . Mama loved the instrumental tunes and put up with my first song “Tom Dooley” which I played until everyone was sick of Tom Dooley. My Daddy loved old ballads such as: “Knoxville Girl” and “Hangman Hangman” “Keep on the Sunny Side” “Cheer up my Brother” and one of my favorites, “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” He often sat on the back porch and sang those old songs.  My sister, Sis, loved songs by Billy Joe Royal and Mel McDaniels. She has such an amazing talent as an artist. I hope she does not cut off one of her ears.

It took me several years to get over my Mamma’s death. I just could not believe that I had lost the one person who I knew for sure loved me. I was stuck in grief for many years/ That is why I don’t want any of my family to grieve over me and go though the customary rituals of a funeral or a stone on the hillside. I want my family to accept my wishes when my time on earth is over. My wishes are to be cremated quickly and my remains given to the Navy to be scattered at sea.  A simple Military service and one rose will do. My belief is that when you are born that God gives you your first breath of life and when you die, your last breath releases and frees your spirit. I hope that my spirit will soar after death and be able to travel this world in the blink of an eye. If someone wants to have a memory of me, just look up and wish me fair winds. I don’t believe in family members having any obligation to visit a marker in a cemetery and feel sad. My Daddy sang a song, “Don’t send for me no flowers when just a rose will do” If anyone wants to have a ritual, visit the sea, and toss as rose into the brine. Hold on to only good memories cast away any bad ones. Don’t grieve me. Hopefully, I have left a good memory for you  to think back on. Don’t spend too much time as the song “Sitting on the Dock of the Bay” says “wasting time.

I hold such dear memories of growing up, traveling the world, and plucking on my old guitar. My regret is I did not spend as much time with my family as I should have. I never believed in the word “Love” when I was younger but when I was younger, I was foolish.

Live your life to the fullest and help others when you can. I hope my daughter, Margaret Rose will read the verse “There is a Time for Everything”  when I go. I want my son, Kyle Edward, to think of all the good times we had together, especially the horse track and our laughs together. We loved our jokes and our puns.

If I am able, I will check in on everyone now and again.

 

With Love,

Carl

GROWING UP ON FROZEN CREEK

 

MEMORIES OF GROWING UP ON FROZEN CREEK

 

I dug up a Prince Albert Tobacco tin full of worms up by the corn crib and walked across the foot log crossing Frozen Creek. I trailed the creek down toward Buren Morgan’s place and found a deep hole where my brother Michael had caught a 14-inch rainbow trout. Well, to hear Mike tell it, the fish was a good 18 inches. Mike has been known to exgaggerate.

I sat down on the creekbank in the long wheat grass and unwound my fishing line from my favorite alder pole. I had an old treble hook on the leader, so I changed it out with a brand new Eagle Claw hook that I had bought that morning at Gerald Burch’s little country store about two miles away on highway 64. Once I got the triple wound knot tied on the leader, I sacrificed a worm and tossed the line with two small sinkers into the creek. The current took the bait to the center of the hole where I hoped the big one was resting.

As I sat there on the creekbank relaxing, my gaze settled upstream on a cottonmouth snake gently swimming down the middle of the creek. As it got closer, it opened its mouth and I realized why they call it a cottonmouth. Two sharp fangs dropped from a blanket of snow-white flesh. It was obviously preparing to bite down on something. There was plenty of creatures for the moccasin to bite in Frozen Creek. We had muskrats, big water rats, hog sucker bottom feeder fish and unsuspecting bare feet of those who chose to walk the creek.

The sun was warming up the day and my eyes were growing tired. The gentle gurgling of the water was slowly putting me to sleep. Since it had happened before that I dozed off in such a serene setting, I had prepared. I had cut a forked branch from a willow sapling to hold my fishing pole. So, I leaned back and was just dozing off when a crack of thunder caused me to awaken and look at the sky. The sun was now gazing through a dark cloud and I could tell that it was going to come a rain. I got up from my comfortable position and made my way back to the corncrib. In my rush, I almost slipped off the foot log. Just as I approached the corn crib, the rain came down in torrents. Slipping through the open doorway of the corncrib, I settled down on a pile of hay over the corn cobs. The tin roof echoed the sound of the initial burst of rain. The thunder settled down and the rain became a gentler patter on the tin roof which slowly put me to sleep.

The hog in the pen next to the corncrib bounced off the walls of the pen and woke me. I took my time getting to my feet and looked out on the return of the sun shining through the haze of the clouds. The rain had stopped. I jumped down onto the wet ground and made my way back to my fishing pole.

As I pulled the line in, I realized that a beautiful sun perch had made a lunch of the sacrificed worm and the sharp Eagle Claw hook had latched on to the perch’s upper lip. The perch was nice and fat with very sharp upper fins. I cut a small branch and run it through the bright pink gills as I unhooked the perch. It was about 6 inches wide and 10 inches long. To avoid a jab of the perch’s fins, I held the fins back with one hand as I removed my hook. I took my camping knife and scraped the scales into the creek and cleaned the fish. It was tasty with a piece of Mama’s corn bread and a bowl of soup beans with hot sauce and onion. This was a typical dog day afternoon growing up on Frozen Creek.

 

 

A GLIMPSE INTO MY LIFE

I went to Navy boot camp in September of 1964. I joined with a high school friend, Henry McDevitt, on the buddy program. The buddy program allowed me and Henry to be stationed together after boot camp.

My fist airplane trip started in Columbia, South Carolina and ended in San Diego, California. A bus took me to the Naval Training Center where they started yelling at me and calling me a maggot. I was assigned to Company 522.

After 12 weeks of carrying around a rifle and marching all over hell and half of Georgia, I graduated somewhat the worse for learning how to fight fires and survive being gassed with tear gas. I qualified with the pistol and rifle. I even learned to throw a grenade as far as I could and get my ass low to the ground.

Well, Henry got orders to Naval Air Facility, Phoenix Arizona. My orders read the same. The Naval Facility was in a small town known as Goodyear or Avondale. I was advanced 2 weeks leave after graduating. I took my Navy pay that the Navy kept for me and bought an Airline ticket to Asheville, North Carolina. I landed in Asheville on a Sunday. I got a ride with an old geezer from the airport to downtown Asheville. I asked him where I could buy a beer and he looked at me kind of funny and said: “Son, don’t you know that today is Sunday?”  I walked the streets of Asheville for a while and found a Café that served coffee and grits and eggs. The cook was an old black man who gave me a big plate with a slab of pork tenderloin. Grits never tasted so good. I told him I wanted a beer, and he told me of a place din the bad side of town, a house, where I could pay double for a cold beer. It was a run-down house with a window that was open. I bought my beer and asked how I could get from Asheville to Rosman. The beer salesman told me to either hitchhike or ride the bus to Hendersonville. He gave me directions to the Greyhound bus station. I bought a $3.00 ticket to Hendersonville. The bus stopped at every crossroad to let people on or off.

When I got to Hendersonville, I walked to the edge of town and hitchhiked to Brevard. I walked to the edge of Brevard and hitchhiked to Rosman. In Rosman, I stopped at the Company store and bought a chili dog and a pint of chocolate milk. Then I walked the four or so miles to Frozen Creek Road. I walked about a mile up Frozen Creek Road and cut across Frozen Creek on a foot log. I walked up past my Daddy’s corn crib, up past the spout branch and entered the house by the kitchen door. I saw the familiar pot of soup beans (pinto beans) on the woodstove. I walked into the living room and there was my Mama. She jumped up from her chair by the wood heater and grabbed me and called me a little devil. That hug from my Mama was more valuable than gold. She had tears in her eyes as she welcomed me home. I will never forget that greeting.

REMEMBERING MY CHILDHOOD AND MY DAD

 

What was my Dad like when I was a child? He was the same when I was not a child. He was very consistent.

 He was a product of growing up poor in the Appalachian Mountains. He, like his father, Sherman Owen,

had ridgid values and standards. He took a man's handshake or promise as valid as a written contract. He believed that a man's name and reputation was only as good as his word. He believed that hospitality was extremely important even to the extent of showing hospitality to an enemy. His attitude was to trust until he had reason not to. Sort of like fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, not very likely.

He subscribed to helping someone in need if you have the opportunity. He and I loafed (a southern tradition) often around the County. Oftentimes, we would see someone broken down. We changed tires,  pulled people out of snow or ditches, gave rides, shared food, drink or gasoline and did what we could to help. I  adopted  that philosophy as my own and have only regretted it a couple of times over my lifetime. He stressed to me that I should be skeptical with people who displayed actions of being dishonest or inconsistent. He said to me "always be aware of what is real and what's not and know your enemies.

 He stood tall at 6'3 or 6'4 and was a very strong man. He told me to not be afraid of hard work. Did he have shortcomings? Yes, everybody does. I guess one of his shortcomings was that he liked the taste of his product maybe a little too much. When he sold a bottle of whiskey, the buyer would take the cap off, smell the whiskey and then hand the bottle to my Dad. My Dad would take a drink and hand the bottle back. A few years later, I asked him about the ritual. He said it was sort of traditional. If a man won't take a drink of whiskey he is selling, the buyer has no confidence in the quality. After a good day of sales, my Dad wobbled a little when he walked. Sometimes he would take a drink and chase it with a drink of pickle juice. Try it, you will like it. 

My brother Gerald, who until he was older thought his first name was Dammit, pulled a shitty on Dad. He kept a snuff glass about half full of whiskey in the refrigerator alongside a half glass of cold water. Well, we drank the water and replaced it with whiskey. My Dad came in after a hard day's work in the woods and took out the two glasses and downed them one after the other. Well, he could not get his breath and he stumbled around in the kitchen holding onto the table and stove to stay upright. Gerald and I vacated the premises at a fast pace. 

 We lived on 8 acres. Half in corn fields and half in mountain property.  We harvested the corn and turned it into a liquid product called "moonshine" or just white likker.  On the mountain property, he had several stills over the years and produced many gallons of top notch whiskey . He sold some wholesale in gallon Coke jugs. The rest he sold out of our house in half-pints, pints, quarts, and half-gallons. He grew up alongside Diamond Creek pretty far from civilization. He attended a one-room schoolhouse and finished the 5th grade. At that time high or higher school was 6th grade through 12th grade.  By the way, I was born a young child and while I was young, my Dad worked in the woods either logging pulpwood or helping with his family business of making moonshine.

We mostly lived off the land. We had a vegetable garden which provided fresh vegetables in season and canned vegetables in the fall and winter.  We walked the roads and picked polk salad. Not too many people know that Polk Salad is toxic. To make it edible, you cook it in water, rinse it off and cook it in a frying pan with some fatback or what is called side pork or salt pork along with some scrambled eggs. We raised our chickens both for eggs and eating. We hunted squirrels, rabbits and deer.

My Uncle Robert raised hogs. Every fall, we would go to Uncle Robert's and slaughter several hogs for the extended family. The huge hogs were called white russians and their bristles were long and sharp. We used a homemade block and tackle to raise the hogs in the air and then dunk them in a huge black pot of boiling water. then we would lay the hogs on a door and scrape the bristles and hair off. Then we would dunk them again and wash off the dirt that we did not get off when we scrapped. My Grandma and several other Grandmas would take the heads and make hogshead cheese complete with gristles. You can buy this product in delis today. (Not nearly as good but edible). The good thing about a sandwich of hogshead cheese was that you got your exercise chewing the gristles. My grandma would also make lye soap and lard from the hog fat. She cut the hog skins into pieces and fried them. She would put them in her cornbread and we called the bread cracklin bread.

We collected berries from all over, blueberries, blackberries, sugar berries , huckleberries, gooseberries, mulberries, and so on for jams and jellies. We picked grapes for jelly and jam and sometimes a good grape wine. We only went to the store for staples like flour, sugar and salt. I grew up eating grits and eggs, cornbread and biscuits and pinto beans. Sometimes someone would ask my Dad how many kids he had and he would take off his fedora hat, scratch his head and say: Well there's quite a few of them. When my Dad got too old to trapz the mountains and haul stills in and out, he hired my  first cousin Willy B. to make whiskey for him. Willy was working the still when the revenuers raided the still. They handcuffed Willy B to a small sapling while they used axes and large hammers to wreck the still and furnace. Willy B. clumb  (southern word) up the sapling until it bent over and he escaped. He came off the mountain into our backyard yelling Uncle Fred, Uncle Fred.  My Dad got off the porch and asked Willy B, "what the hell are you making so much noise for? Of course Willy B. closed his eyes while my Dad took a double bladed ax and cut off the handcuffs. It took two or three weeks for us to get a new still in a different mountain stream and get a good whiskey mash going.

I remember Willy B telling about the time (years later) when he came into my Dad's stillplace and saw the muslim cloth over a mash barrel sunk douwn into the whiskey mash that he called beer mash. He said as he pulled out the cloth, out came a dead possum. Willy B said it appeared that the possum had drunk himself to death. I asked him if he dumped the mash and he looked at me as if I was crazy. He said he used the mash and roasted the possum. My Dad loved Willy B and I did too. Someone asked Willy B what the B stood for and he said no one ever told him.  Willy B's Dad was my Uncle Avery who was killed in a knife fight over a poker game. According to what I have been told, the black poker players who sliced up my Uncle Avery sort of disappeared one by one.

My Dad always displayed a gruff exterior but he had a big heart and was a push over when someone gave him a sad story. I remember once we were down by the French Broad River at my brother Mike's house. My Dad had sold a cow to an old farmer on credit. My Dad had my sister Thelma call the guy up and when Dad took the phone, he told the guy that he could use the money for the cow. The old man told my Dad that the cow had died. My Dad held his hand over the earpiece of the phone and told us: "that son-of-a-bitch said that the cow died". He then put the phone back up to his ear and said: "well if the cow died, I guess it's ok then. When he hung up the phone we told him that he covered the wrong end of the phone and the guy heard what he said. He replied well I don't give a damn.

My Dad was a fountain of knowledge and a lot of my ways were his ways. I miss him.

Hey somebody, we are out of paper here. Anyone, Toss me a corncob.

The Devil's Courthouse

 

DEVIL'S COURTHOUSE

 

The mountains around Western North Carolina have been the setting for several movies. The most famous was Thunder Road starring Robert Mitchum and featuring Toxaway falls. Another was the Last of the Mohicans. My mother would alternate when she was mad at her 12 kids sometimes calling them Mohicans and other times referring to them as Ethiopians.

 

I grew up in those mountains fishing hunting and just exploring. I walked a lot of old Indian trails and found caves and arrowheads. I fished the rivers and streams, wandered about the canebrake, hunted squirrels, rabbits and deer. I gathered moss from old chestnut trees and found ginseng, wild flowers, Indian paintbrush, and picked mountain ivy and mistletoe.

 

The Blue Ridge Parkway is a big tourist attraction for visitors to Asheville and surrounding areas. One of the favorite hiking destinations is a place high on the Parkway named Devil's Courthouse. The Department of Interior placed a granite slab with information about the Devil' Courthouse. Legends and rumors abound in the mountains of North Carolina. There is hardly a mountain stream that has not fed water to the many whiskey stills in Western North Carolina. My Dad and my brothers had many whiskey stills in the Transylvania and Jackson County and Buncombe County areas. I hesitate to admit my involvement since I don't know the statute of limitations.

 

Devil's Courthouse  is located at the Western edge of the Pisgah National Forest about 10 miles northwest of Brevard. Cherokee legend has it that the Devil used to hold court on the large rock outcropping. There was a Cherokee story about the cave underneath Devil's Courthouse where a slant -eyed giant Jutaculla lived and danced  in the cave chambers. I don't know much about this giant except when I was younger and drinking high proof moonshine, I sometimes came across him. He carried a tomahawk on his leather throng belt and a knife larger than Jim Bowie's. He could not speak English and I could not speak giant talk but we got along O.K and we shared a few bottles of my Dad's 100 proof moonshine. We swapped some tall tales together and had a few laughs.

 

Devil's Courthouse is a mountain in the Appalachian Mountains of western North Carolina in the United States of America. The mountain is located at the Western edge of the Pisgah National Forest about 10 miles northwest of Brevard and 28 miles southwest of Asheville. Located at milepost 422.4 of the Blue Ridge Parkway, the Devil's Courthouse has a moderate/str…

In Cherokee lore, this cave is the private dancing chamber and dwelling place of the slant-eyed giant, Judaculla. The Cherokees call Jutaculla or Judaculla

 Tsul'kălû' which is hard to pronounce unless you have had a few drinks.

As you can expect,  one or more of the Owen family in Western North Carolina often turn up in places like Devil's Courthouse .  There was a murder at the Courthouse of a girl called Wendy Owen which is another story for another time. Judaculla was allegedly spotted around Haywood , Jackson and Transylvania Counties. Legend has it that he liked to spend a lot of time at Tanasee Bald.

I have never figured out why the Devil had to hold court because by the time he gets a hold of you, your are already guilty. Maybe he watched the Judge Roy Bean movie with Walther Brennen. My favorite scene from that movie was when the Judge asked why a man was brought before him and he was told the man stole a horse. Roy Bean said to the man: "I sentence you to die at daybreak" Oh, by the way how do you plead." That scene always reminded me the Brevard Courthouse.

If you do travel up the Blue Ridge Parkway to Devil's Courthouse , do it in the daytime and be careful. Around dusk is usually when the slant eyed giant is wandering about. If you do happen to see Judaculla, ask him if he remembers our drinking bouts.

See Picture below.

Hurdles

HURDLES

Life will hand you hurdles. So, you might ask: What are hurdles? Basically, hurdles are challenges to test your ability to survive until you die. Another way of looking at hurdles is to view then as obstacles. If you have served in the military and run an obstacle course you are aware that when you reach a hurdle or an obstacle that you can's just stop and starve to death. You have to find a way to jump over, go under or around or figure out how to remove the obstacle or hurdle.

When you start out as a small child as I did, usually your Mother will handle the hurdles for you but sooner or later, you have to handle them for yourself. If you are the kind of person to take the road less traveled, you will quickly become familiar with hurdles.

I was born a young child without a lot of responsibilities. I did not have to ask for hurdles as they were handed to me. Before long, I was hoeing the garden, chopping wood, hauling water from the spring, feeding animals, churning milk to make butter, chasing down chickens for supper, watching for poisonous snakes, picking grapes, blueberries and blackberries, beans, pulling up onions, carrots and fishing or hunting for squirrels, rabbits, deer and other wild animals to help feed the family. 

The things I learned to do as I grew up in a large family with 12 brothers and sisters gave me a head start on surviving and overcoming hurdles. I joined the Navy at 17 and I was amazed when they gave me two pair of shoes and free clothes to wear. I remember lying in my bunk at night and hearing other 17 or 18 year old recruits sobbing and regretting volunteering . I was already pretty fit from working on a farm but I did gain some muscle weight from the constant marching and running with a rifle all over the Navy Training Center in San Diego. I enjoyed the shooting range. I did not enjoy the gas chamber where they subjected me to tear gas. At first I thought that my four year enlistment would be like boot camp but when I graduated and received my first set of orders to Naval Air Facility Litchfield Park just outside of Phoenix, Arizona, I was pleasantly surprised. I was treated as a human being instead of as a maggot. I was assigned a job in an aviation warehouse where I managed receipt, storage and issued aircraft parts to repair aircraft. At that time, my base was the winter home for the Blue Angels. They flew the McDonnel Douglas A4 Attack aircraft. 

NAF Litchfield Park was pretty easy as far as hurdles went. Every morning I would get up, shave and shower and go to breakfast. The chow hall was close to the barracks so I would stop and have a breakfast before walking to work at the warehouse. I could order eggs, pancakes, toast, bacon, sausage or whatever struck my fancy and I did not have to pay for the food. One of my favorites was the chocolate milk dispenser. I also enjoyed the fresh fruit, especially the oranges and bananas.

I was pretty much in hog heaven at my first duty station. I was scheduled to go to Memphis, Tennessee to attend Aviation Electronic School but just before I was scheduled to leave I was in an Automobile accident where I suffered severe lacerations and a compound fracture of my left leg just above the ankle. I had a hurdle at that point as the doctors wanted to amputate my foot as there was no bone holding it to my leg, just some tissue and muscle. I told them if it rotted off, I would deal with that but if they tried to remove my foot, then there would be hell to pay.

At any rate, they saved the foot and took skin from my thigh and did skin grafts to cover the open bone. I still just have skin over my lower leg but I got over that hurdle. However, when my school date started, I was hobbling around on crutches. I was told that I missed my opportunity to become an Aviation Electronic Technician. I was pissed about that but around that time I saw a notice on my work bulletin board encouraging sailors to volunteer to go to Viet Nam. You guessed it, I signed up to volunteer and was sent to Lemoore Naval Air Station in California. I was assigned to Attack Squadron 125 for training purposes to become a plane captain. The days were long and hard. I learned to wash, fuel and lubricate several types of aircraft and how to pre-flight the planes prior to take off. Litchfield Park Naval Air Facility was a walk in the park compared to my new 12-16 hour work days. I finally was certified to be a plane captain for A4 aircraft and was given orders to my favorite attack squadron, Attack Squadron 144. Our mascot oddly enough was the Roadrunner.

 

THE BEAR AND THUNDER ROAD

I have regaled you with some of my childhood memories growing up in the foothills of the Great Smokey Mountains. As you know I was born a young child with a full set of teeth and a full coat of hair. While Davy Crockett killed him a bear when he was only 4 years old, my encounter with a bear was at the tender age of 3. I was hunting squirrels for supper with my Dad's 22 rifle. He would give me three or 4 shells and tell me to bring back 3 or 4 squirrels. If I brought back less, he wanted to know what happened with the extra bullet. Anyway to the bear. I came around a giant oak tree about a mile from my Dad's whiskey still and tripped over a black bear napping behind the tree. As you can imagine, we were both surprised and startled.  We became entangled with each other and since we were on a slope, we started rolling downhill asshole to elbow, each holding to the other. As we neared the bottom of the hill, nearby observers (other hunters) spread the story that I was wrestling with the bear. We collided with a Sassafras tree which stopped the downhill tumble. The bear got up and stood on its hind legs and so did I. He reached out his paw and I shook it and we went our separate ways. Some might tell this story differently but I was there and I know that it was, for the most part, an innocent encounter. No blood was shed. At any rate, you will just have to believe what you will. 

My first cousin Willy B tells a story where he run into a bear while in the woods. When asked why he didn't shoot the bear he said: "I did not have a gun and it was not loaded." Willy B was known to stretch the truth from time to time.

Now, nine years later in 1958 my sisters, Thelma and Estelle asked me to drive them to Lake Toxaway since neither of them had a driver's license. My Dad was in his liquor still working so I  short wired his 1941 Chevrolet coupe and away we went. Now Lake Toxaway is best known for its spectacular waterfall called Toxaway Falls. 

In 1958 Robert Mitchem was starring in a movie called Thunder Road and they were filming a scene where Robert Mitchem with a full load of moonshine "left the road at 90" while being chased by Revenooers. The movie showed his car going off the road and down the Toxaway Waterfalls. When we got there, Robert Mitchem was having lunch with some of the camera crew and of course my sisters went right up to him and asked for his autograph. I was busy checking out the blonde girl at the lunch cart. She smiled at me and darned if it didn't look like she had all her teeth. She motioned me over and gave me a sandwich and a bottle of coca-cola. We talked and she asked me for my telephone number. I sheepishly told her that I didn't have a telephone or a number. She smiled and said: "I guess I will just have to send you messages by smoke signal." I never saw her again but every once in awhile over the next few years, I looked toward Toxaway Falls just in case she was sending me a signal.

For those of you who have not seen the movie Thunder Road, I would recommend it. It does stretch the truth a mite but it still depicts the way of life in Western North Carolina in the '50s.  Course none of the cars we used to haul moonshine for my Dad would go 90 miles an hour and we just hauled the hooch in the trunk of the car in one-gallon coke jugs mostly at night time.

Note: 

Thunder Road is a black and white 1958 drama–crime film directed by Arthur Ripley and starring Robert Mitchum, who also produced the film and co-wrote the screenplay. With Don Raye, Mitchum co-wrote the theme song, "The Ballad of Thunder Road." The film features Gene Barry and Jacques Aubuchon. The film's plot concerns running moonshine in the mountains of Kentucky, Tennessee, and North Carolina in the late 1950s. Thunder Road became a cult film and continued to play at drive-in movie theaters in some southeastern states.