Suuuuuuure You Are.

Here's a weird tale of my high school years that was triggered by something someone mentioned online:

When I was in high school this new "kid" showed up. Supposedly a junior. Short guy--maybe 5'4" or so. But I and everyone else realized he was no teenager. The guy was easily 22-23 years old. This shit never did compute for any of us. Everyone who met him commented on the fact that there was no way the guy was a teenager. We didn't shun the guy or anything, but it was so freaking obvious that he was not a teenager. However, there he was--enrolled in classes, making friends. We just all shrugged and said 'what the Hell'. What else were we going to do?

Neither I or any of my pals ever did figure out exactly what was going on. We'd hear stories, but nothing concrete. He had screwed up his life with drugs and straightened out and was given a chance to go back to high school. He was a narc. He was going to marry a girl with a rich father who was trying to instill a sense of purpose in him. All kinds of strange yarns.

This was a very small town--in fact, it was the town upon which James Dickey based his novel DELIVERANCE--Ellijay GA. Keep in mind that Ellijay in those days was just a freaking weird-ass place. Cut off from the rest of the world and kept in some kind of bizarre 1950s-stasis during the 70s when we lived there. This new guy also dated the daughter of one of the town's richest men, so we all assumed this had something to do with that. He showed up as a student AFTER he started dating her.

One thing that I recall is that he wanted to join the football team. I was heavily involved in sports in high school and I remember that he wanted to go out for the team and that the coaches refused to allow him to do so. After this, we all realized that he was far older than he claimed to be--any game would have been forfeited if the outside authorities discovered who he was and how old he was.

It remained a mystery of my high school days. I don't remember if he was around during my senior year--I didn't pay a lot of attention to the guy because I thought the whole situation was creepy. (And, yes, this was long before the '21 Jump Street' premise--but the thought has since crossed my mind that it could have been something like that . Small town though Ellijay was, it was not immune to criminal activity.)

I keep thinking about writing a novel of the things I saw in that town when I was a kid. But of course if I did there would likely be contracts taken out on me to have me killed.

Class photo. 16 years old. Right.

Lake Conasauga

On the day we planned to go kayaking on the Coosa River, the weather did not cooperate. Weird as it sounds, kayaking in the rain is not fun. So we ended up not doing that.

Instead, we turned the truck toward Ellijay in Gilmer County. I lived in Gilmer County all of my high school years. It was a weird and wonderful place. It is also the setting and inspiration for James Dickey's novel DELIVERANCE. For good reason. In those days it was full of inbred, violence prone, ignorant, hateful monsters. Much like the USA, only cubed. But I've covered that angle here before, and I may do so again in the future, but not now.

It had been more than forty years since I had seen Ellijay. It is indeed a changed place. Today, it's a huge tourist destination for people who hail from points south in Georgia. Most of those drive up from Atlanta, I suspect. The old stores that were there when I was a teenager are gone, replaced by antique malls and art shops and ice cream joints and restaurants and boutiques of various types. And the people are not the ones I recall. The inbred monsters have been replaced by entrepreneurs and their non-inbred families. Hispanic people live there now, and even black people! The old Klan creeps who dominated the Ellijay of my youth must have shriveled in horror (the county was 100% white when we lived there).

But we were not there to see the shops and tourist boutiques. We were just passing through, on our way to visit Lake Conasauga high in the Cohutta Mountains north of Ellijay. We made it through the busy downtown crawling with curious Atlantans up for the weekend and headed north to the Forest Service roads that would take us to the high country and to Lake Conasauga.

Again, it had been forty or more years since I had seen the Cohutta Mountains. The last time I'd visited I wasn't yet twenty years old and so homesick for the north Georgia mountains that every curve in the gravel roads that took me to the ridge tops brought tears to my eyes. My heart was aching and I hardly knew what to do with myself. Then, I had only a couple of days to revisit the beauty of the mountains of my childhood and then I knew that points south and flat were calling to me of responsibility. It was sweet and it was horrible.

The drive to Conasauga was fourteen miles of rough, rocky Forest Service roadways. We climbed from roughly 1,000 feet above sea level to 3,300 feet above sea level, passing through forests of hardwoods and pines and dying hemlocks. At about 2,500 feet the mountains met the clouds and we were socked in by flowing mists and the temperature plunged from the low 80s in town to the 50s on the ridges. Carole had not brought a jacket and I had to give her mine.

Our secondary plan had been to unload the kayaks at the lake and paddle around there and enjoy the peace. But it was too cold and wet up there and you literally could not see more than ten feet in any direction, so we decided just to sit on the shore of the misty lake and have lunch and listen to the silence that was multiplied by the cloaking mists.

Spider web capturing the droplets of mist and rain.

Bear country. There are lots more bears there now than when I was a kid.

One of the nice picnic shelters that they've constructed at the lake.

Everything muffled by the pea-soup mists.

There was no view of the lake, at all.

Lake Conasauga is the highest lake in Georgia. About 3,300 feet above sea level, as I recall.

Part of the trail around the lake.

Ferns.

I had to use a towel around my shoulders to keep warm. It was really chilly. We had a good time eating lunch by the shore of the lake.

Two Projects

In the past, I have worked on more than one project at the same time. Quite often, in fact. I have

been invited to contribute of anthologies when I was working on a novel. Or I have been toiling away on a short story when the opportunity to write comic book scripts has come up.

One thing that I've never done (with any success) is trying to write two novels at the same time.

James Dickey often worked on many projects at once. In the days before word processors, he would keep typewriters in several rooms in his house, each with a different poem on the roller.


A couple of times over the years I have tried to work on two novels at once, but what has generally happened is that one overwhelmed the other and I just ended up putting the weaker of the two aside until I could give it the attention it needed. In some cases, I saw this as a true and fatal weakness in the lesser work and killed it off.

The upshot is that I think I'm going to take a stab at working on two novels simultaneously. Both of them are fantasies, but one will be set in my mythical Iron Age world of Mangrove, and the other will be set in modern times. I'll see how it goes. It may work, this time.

Living with Vermin

Between the ages of 15 and 18 I lived in the north Georgia mountains in a place called Gilmer County. The nearest town to where we lived was a village named Ellijay. The foremost fact about this place that I often relate is that it was the inspiration for James Dickey's novel and film DELIVERANCE. For good reason, too.

However, we didn't actually live in Ellijay. My dad had purchased a tract of land of 120 acres and subsequently picked out a home site and had a road bulldozed down to it where he had a house constructed. When I tell people about the place they generally don't believe me. But here are the facts:

Our driveway was almost exactly one mile long. From our house the driveway led to a dirt county road known as Log Round Road. (I'd always thought the name was Log Ground Road, but when I finally saw the name in print, it was Log Round.) To get to the nearest paved road you had to hang a left on Log Round Road and drive roughly three more miles to get to a road that was actually topped with asphalt. Our nearest neighbor was two and a half miles distant. The nearest phone was about five miles from our house. (Recall that this was in the days before such things as cell phones.)

As far as the human inhabitants of the county, see DELIVERANCE. Both the novel and the film.

But this brief entry isn't about the folk who inhabited the land, but the bugs. And, in particular, a species of arachnid with which we were soon to become quite well acquainted: the scorpion.

Almost on my first visit to Gilmer County I found a scorpion. While dislodging rocks beside a road cut searching for fossils, I moved some slate to find not fossils, but living scorpions. I was only a kid at the time, no older than nine or ten, and had never seen a real scorpion, but I knew what they were. And I fled in horror.

The scorpion species that thrives in the mountains of north Georgia is not terribly dangerous. It can give you a nasty sting that I would equate with that of a big wasp or hornet. But it won't kill you. Over my time living in Gilmer County, I became familiar with the little bastards and discovered exactly what it felt like to get stung by them.

The first time one nabbed me I was sitting beside a stack of lumber my dad had put on the summit of the highest point of land on the property. Originally, he had toyed with the idea of building there, but later changed his mind when he considered the depth of the well he might have to have drilled. The views there were good, but on the mountaintop there was no ready access to water. But we were there one day and I settled down beside the lumber and leaned back, putting my hand on a piece of wood--probably a 1X6. As soon as my hand settled down I felt a sting and reacted. Pulling my hand away I saw that I'd put it down directly on one of the little brown scorpions and he had nabbed me in the web of flesh between my third and fourth fingers. It hurt! I reacted quickly and without really thinking I balled up my right (unstung) fist and used it to crush the little bastard.

I had already heard that they were not deadly so I wasn't too alarmed. Just pissed off.

Later, after our house went up at its location at the far end of that driveway down in the deepest valley on our property, we began to notice them around the house. Sometimes they'd be dead and just drying up in light fixtures. Or sometimes we'd catch one crawling across a window ledge. Then, as the months went on and they became more and more comfortable with our home, we'd find them in truly troubling spots. Sometimes when making the bed I'd peel back the covers and find one hiding in the sheets or under a pillow. Yes, that was sobering.

One morning I woke up and put on my shoes. As my right foot lodged solidly in my boot I felt a burning sensation. Yep. I immediately knew I'd been stung by a scorpion who'd thought it was a good place to hide. I quickly threw off the shoe and was able to find and kill this latest little bastard.

Over the years we lived there I was stung probably six times. When you're a teenager spending tons of time hiking and backpacking, forever under the big blue sky, you get used to being stung by everything that flies and creeps through the forest. You lose track of those little painful events.

But one time was special. It was my senior year in high school. One evening I'd gone to sleep and was snoozing along, resting comfortably. But then, suddenly, I was wide awake. I knew immediately why I was awake, of course. I was in pain. Specifically, my left upper arm was burning like fire. In the night I had rolled over on a scorpion and with the full weight of my body it had slammed its stinger home in the unprotected flesh of my arm.

I leaped up and swept back the cover, searching for the fucker. At first I couldn't find him, but knocking my pillow aside I saw that he'd retreated there. My arm still burning as if it had been seared by a hot iron, I took my rage out on the hard-shelled shithead. I crushed the damned thing until it was in many pieces.

Unlike the other times I'd been stung, this time was different. Because I'd actually rolled over on the arachnid, and my full weight had been pressing down on it, the thing had emptied the entire contents of its venomous glands into my muscles. Over the course of the next two weeks the point where I'd been stung swelled slightly, then crusted over like a bright orange scab. I kept it washed and swabbed with alcohol, waiting for it to heal. Then about fourteen days after the event, the crust crumbled away like white chaff, leaving a pale pink dot about the size of a quarter that slowly faded to match the rest of my arm as I went about my life.

My old pal, Vaejovis carolinianus

After that, I never got stung again. But it wasn't because they didn't try. I was just lucky after that. Toward the end, right before we moved away from the place, I pulled a shirt out of the clothes hamper and put it on without buttoning it all the way. Going to the kitchen counter to see about making a sandwich, I caught a movement in the periphery of my vision. I looked down at my chest to see the pincers of a scorpion sticking out of my shirt. This meant that the little shitwad's stinger was pointed directly at my stomach. Cold hilarity ensued as I first froze, then carefully used a butcher knife to flick the damned thing into the sink where I killed it with scalding water, boiling it like a lobster in a pot.

Sometimes I still miss that place.

Working the Words

Writing is probably the most inexact art form.

As a writer I have an image in my mind, or an emotion I wish to convey. I go to the keyboard and attempt to translate these images and ideas into the written English word. It's tough work.

Depending on the strength of the subject I can hope for something approximating what's going on in my mind finding any success in the translation. I write pretty much every day, and every time I work on my writing I find that I'm constantly struggling to make these ideas find their translation from thought to the page.

I'm a better writer now than I was at any point in my youth. I'm a better writer now than I was when I was in my twenties. I'm a better writer now than I was yesterday. But that doesn't make it any easier.

Over those years I've found that I use less words to convey my thoughts onto the page. At times, it seems that I've been slowly making the transition from short story writer to poet. Save for the fact that I enjoy working in the novel form, I would probably have long ago turned my hand exclusively to poetry. Those guys seem to have achieved what so many novelists can only fail to prove.

Once, I heard James Dickey say that poetry was the highest calling to which Mankind can aspire. At the time, I dismissed that sentiment. But now I think that he was right. To crystallize an emotion into a handful of words is something unique and beautiful. The longer I live the more I find myself admiring the writers who struggle with a few lines to convey the things foremost in their minds.