Velociworld

Return to the Hog Pen Road

The Hog Pen Road is writ large in the archives somewhere, I believe, but I'm too lazy to look, and too prideful to recycle. So a revisit is in order.

About 200 yards down the dirt road in front of our farm house the Hog Pen Road cut a swath through the swamps. It wasn't really a road, of course. Just an earthen dike backhoed through the middle of a primordial swamp. Barely wide enough to support the Ranchero, I'm sure a Suburban would have slid into the quicksands. A queasy ride on a dry day, it was a nightmare on a muddy one.

This swamp was the headwaters, the springs, that ran downhill a few hundred feet to the south to form what was known as Lake Number One at Griffin Lakes. This was a natural lake, if such it could be called. Cedar stumps and cyprus and water moccasins were the order of the day, but it was great fishing for the intrepid.

Lake Number Two ran just south again. It was the first attempt to take advantage, in 1930's technology, of watersheds, gravity, and hydrology, to create a recreational lake. It failed, ultimately, due to water table issues, more snakes, stumps that would pop up at will. No sane soul would swim in that thing.

And so the visionary Griffin (I suppose) built a concrete spillway, and dug even farther south, and created Lake Number Three. Now this one was okay. Large enough to waterski in, although most folks came for the weekend or the week like second generation Okies to camp on the banks, bathe, wash clothes, and baptize in the algaefied waters. I myself attended several sunrise services at Easter there. Interestingly, Number Three was fed by springs on the southern end, which was where the garbage dump for the community was, and I suppose now that algae was the byproduct of some seriously fetid seepage. I'm surprised we didn't all die of cholera.

But back to the Hog Pen Road. When I say primordial I do not exaggerate. Alligators and cottonmouths were the only denizens of note. Shorty Lamb told us gila monsters lived there, and went to great lengths to attest to their poisonous qualities, he having supposedly collected them in Texas, and we knew no better. To carry a cane pole down that dike, even with a Daisy pump, was whistling through the graveyard.

My brother and I hiked it a few times, but we were small, 9 and 7 maybe, and we knew if a gator got us our parents would never know what happened to us. It was mock bravery on our parts, but we did it a few times. We were Rat Patrollers.

A few years later my older siblings packed ten of us in a Beetle and made it from beginning to terminus, about 400 yards to Georgia 17, and that assuaged the fear a bit, but I dream about the Hog Pen Road to this day. And they ain't good dreams.

Post scriptum: and as far as metaphor goes, this is the best I can do.