Layers of Learning

(Regular readers of this Blog will recognize a sharp shift of subject and perspective.  This will occur more often.  My most precious critic  admonished me that the Vlog was cursung the darkness very effectively...but that we were not lighting enbough candles, so here goes !)





When I was about 10 or 11 we used to roam around in  what we called "The Tarzan Woods; behind my granddaddy's house. Half the area was roofed with kudzu vines, and the rest had once been pasture, with a nameless creek at the bottom of the map.

 

One day when we weren't swinging on the kudzu or rasslin' , or shooting Blue Jays,   James Tapp, W.P. Locket and I would go to the pasture and  hunt for snakes and shoot our  BB guns at pigeons from a nearby barn.

 

One steamy July day about 11 o'clock in the morning we sat down on the bank of a  shallow gully shaded  by pines and scrub oak.

 

We were bemoaning the fact that there weren't any good materials for building a hideout in the Tarzan Woods.

 

W.P  advised that we were sitting on the side of a potential hut and raced to get a sumac sapling that he lay across the gully's width.

 

He didn't even have to elaborate. In a couple of squirrel tail shakes, we were all three, crisscrossing and basket weaving sumac sticks and pinetops across the gully ... And pretty soon we had our hidey-place.

 

For a week or two we would huddle in that suffocating little pine-smelling camouflage.  I remember a boy named Ezzard  Sammons was visiting in town and he came to the woods  with us and helped us find some "blue mud"----very rich and trustworthy clay base.

 

Just at the entrance to our dark place we hacked a square hole from the bank and lined it with clay and "fired"  it to make it into a kiln. This was Ezzard's idea and we marveled at it. We made ashtrays and amulets and we tried to sculpt  squirrels and bears and deer with stick antlers.  There was not a Rodin or a Praxiteles among us...

 

But the ashtrays and bowls worked out very good.  All our folks bragged on all of this especially on our two-tone efforts with plain old Georgia  red clay "accents"

 

Sometime before the second weekend when we started thinking about Ken Maynard, Buck  Jones and the Dick Tracy serial at the Capes  Theatre, we got bored and left  our gully shack.  It started raining after the movie Saturday night and rained all day Sunday.

 

 

 

On Monday James and I were headed for W.P.'s house with our leaky Ked tennis shoes  squishing.  

We looked up the woodsy hill... And there was no brush-roofed hidey-place there.  No sign of it. No fireplace, no kiln...(Well there was a sliver of smoky gravel where our baking place had been.

 

You know how "country folk"  rank rains:  frog strangler... Mold maker... Horse swallower...

We were the beneficiaries of a GullyWasher. I say beneficiaries, because we got an immediate lifelong lesson that the Sunday school teachers would have never gotten into us with parables about building on sand. Our science teachers later, talking about "construction on the floodplain would have failed, too.

 

All kinds of lessons danced around us. The innocent looking gully--- and its purpose--- had been there a long time before we had a brain flash.

 

Who knows what-all life changing and saving ideas flowed from this great tragedy ?

 

The girl  I met about 10 years later and married for 57 years had a Perfect  motto when she was 16-goimg-on- 30 :

 

"What IS....IS !!!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When I was about 10 or 11 we used to roam around in  what we called "The Tarzan Woods; behind my granddaddy's house. Half the area was roofed with kudzu vines, and the rest had once been pasture, with a nameless creek at the bottom of the map.

 

One day when we weren't swinging on the kudzu or rasslin' , or shooting Blue Jays,   James Tapp, W.P. Locket and I would go to the pasture and  hunt for snakes and shoot our  BB guns at pigeons from a nearby barn.

 

One steamy July day about 11 o'clock in the morning we sat down on the bank of a  shallow gully shaded  by pines and scrub oak.

 

We were bemoaning the fact that there weren't any good materials for building a hideout in the Tarzan Woods.

 

W.P  advised that we were sitting on the side of a potential hut and raced to get a sumac sapling that he lay across the gully's width.

 

He didn't even have to elaborate. In a couple of squirrel tail shakes, we were all three, crisscrossing and basket weaving sumac sticks and pinetops across the gully ... And pretty soon we had our hidey-place.

 

For a week or two we would huddle in that suffocating little pine-smelling camouflage.  I remember a boy named Ezzard  Sammons was visiting in town and he came to the woods  with us and helped us find some "blue mud"----very rich and trustworthy clay base.

 

Just at the entrance to our dark place we hacked a square hole from the bank and lined it with clay and "fired"  it to make it into a kiln. This was Ezzard's idea and we marveled at it. We made ashtrays and amulets and we tried to sculpt  squirrels and bears and deer with stick antlers.  There was not a Rodin or a Praxiteles among us...

 

But the ashtrays and bowls worked out very good.  All our folks bragged on all of this especially on our two-tone efforts with plain old Georgia  red clay "accents"

 

Sometime before the second weekend when we started thinking about Ken Maynard, Buck  Jones and the Dick Tracy serial at the Capes  Theatre, we got bored and left  our gully shack.  It started raining after the movie Saturday night and rained all day Sunday.

 

On Monday James and I were headed for W.P.'s house with our leaky Ked tennis shoes  squishing.  

We looked up the woodsy hill... And there was no brush-roofed hidey-place there.  No sign of it. No fireplace, no kiln...(Well there was a sliver of smoky gravel where our baking place had been.

 

You know how "country folk"  rank rains:  frog strangler... Mold maker... Horse swallower...

We were the beneficiaries of a GullyWasher. I say beneficiaries, because we got an immediate lifelong lesson that the Sunday school teachers would have never gotten into us with parables about building on sand. Our science teachers later, talking about "construction on the floodplain would have failed, too.

 

All kinds of lessons danced around us. The innocent looking gully--- and its purpose--- had been there a long time before we had a brain flash.

 

Who knows what-all life changing and saving ideas flowed from this great tragedy ?

 

The girl  I met about 10 years later and married for 57 years had a Perfect  motto when she was 16-goimg-on- 30 :

 

"What IS....IS !!!"

 

 

 

 

 

Bill AllenIN THE ERA OF CORRUPT TYRANNY TRUTH IS REVOLUTIONARY INSURRECTION !http://www.blogspot.catodepot.com