Bad George and Other Blasts From the Past

A busy week it was. Hardly unexpectedly, I received a call from my former boss, asking if I would care to put in a few hours per month freelancing, since, without me, they're pretty much up to their ears in alligators. It's actually a welcome opportunity to keep doing a job I know and enjoy. Plus there's the extra bucks, which can't hurt. I also made considerable progress on Georgia: The Haunting of Tate's Mill. I can see the light at the end of this one.

A few new, local geocaches came out this past week, so I put in a couple of rigorous cache hunts — one in the dumping rain that so waterlogged me that I still have water in my shoes. Friend Old Rob and I shared in the first-to-find, so that made us both smile real big.

In Martinsville over the weekend, I discovered a couple of folders that contained scads of school papers and artwork by both my brother and me, which my mom had saved. I had no idea these existed. Some went back as far as kindergarten. The image you see upstairs there is a pen & ink rendering of my great-uncle Herbert's place in Gainesville, GA, which I drew sometime in the 1980s. My aunt Dot made it into the cover of a greeting card. Perhaps my favorite discovery among these treasures was an unfinished class drawing from second grade. Written on it was the following exchange between my teacher, Ms. Jackson, and me:

Mark: "Sorry I did not get throu. Goarge botherd me."

Ms. Jackson: "Please try to finish your work in the morning. You do not need to talk to George."

I remember George well. I haven't seen him since early in elementary school, but I did find him online. He is apparently an attorney over in Winston-Salem.

Many of my old drawings were plenty violent, with Indian massacres, knights battling on castle towers, dinosaurs and other monsters chowing down on innocent passersby. Some were a bit nicer. There were drawings of my family traveling in an airplane; a pretty decent rendering of my dog, Patty; and a number of reasonably well-rendered space rockets. Below is a drawing I made in third grade, which I thought was actually pretty cool.

On Saturday, I rode up to Rocky Mount to hunt a few caches. It was pretty chilly and very windy for most of the time I was out and about. The couple of hides I found at the Franklin County Parks & Recreation Center on Sontag Road proved simple enough. But at Waid Park, I turned a medium difficulty hike into a rugged and fairly risky venture by doing what I tend to do best: plow straight ahead from point A to point B, damning the torpedoes in the process. I ended up skirting a lengthy portion of the Pigg River, the banks of which were steep and treacherous, and from which a bad step would have had disastrous consequences. Fortunately, I managed to maintain my footing. Once past that little obstacle, I found myself negotiating some hairy inclines and dense, difficult woods. But again, I prevailed, and, soon enough, had the cache in hand. As one might surmise, I felt the effects of this little outing pretty severely a little later. However, once back at home, a fine dinner and some wine with Ms. B. made for a comfortable, relaxing evening.

This morning, friend Natalie (a.k.a. Fishdownthestairs) and I headed down to Siler City, where we knocked out a few entertaining caches we both still needed.

Ms. B. and I are currently working our way through Twin Peaks again, from start to finish. The craving was upon both of us, and it's been quite the treat, since I haven't watched it with her for about a decade. And she'd never seen the third season (The Return), which we just started this evening. She's not the devoted David Lynch fan that I am, but she's been enjoying it so far.

For the coming week, I'm hoping to reach the end of Georgia: The Haunting of Tate's Mill. I'm definitely ready to get this one out to the publisher and into the hands of readers.

All righty then. Get on with you. Peace out.

My first-grade rendering of a United DC-8, circa 1966

Cowboys and Indians having a bad time of it, from my kindergarten days

Fire at Camelot! One of my third-grade drawings

Hollering, GeoPutting, and The Stokers

Damned Rodan, Yoda Rob, Suntigres, and BigG7777, 2017 Piedmont Triad GeoPutt Champions
(Photo by Robert Isenhour)

Yoda Rob addresses the ball —
"Hellooooo, ball!" (Photo by
Rob Isenhour)

For me, this was another breakneck weekend, having to fit in serious caretaking on the home front while still getting in gatherings with numerous friends, including some geocaching. For the horror community, it was Stoker award weekend — the festivities being held aboard the Queen Mary in Long Beach, CA (which I've had the pleasure of visiting in the past) — and while I didn't win a Stoker Award, I was on the winning team at the 2017 Geoputt Event in Burlington, which involved some serious and very solemn hootin' and hollerin'.

It started on Friday evening, at the end of a long and ugly bout with a sinus bug that kept me out of work for a couple of days. I was scheduled to make a racket at the third Songwriters' Showcase at The Daily Grind in Martinsville, as I have at the past two. I felt a lot better, but my voice was about shot from several days of snorting and hacking. Regardless, I went for it and somehow managed to crank out three songs without choking. Dunno if it scared anyone away permanently, but the audience was loverly, and no one hurled nasty things at me. Score one.

Wailing on "Nova," one of the songs I wrote back in my college days (Photo by Kimberly Brugger)

Saturday, after handling necessary business on the home front, Kimberly and I headed down to Stonefield Cellers in Stokesdale to share some wine and tall geocaching tales with friend Suntigres (a.k.a. Bridget) and her S.O. BigG7777 (a.k.a. Gerry). The wine and company were great, of course, though the prodigious heat and humidity would have had a devastating effect on my hair if I had any. Ms. B. and I eventually made our way back home for dinner and a movie, and I would love to say this was all very relaxing — it actually was — but certain states of affairs about which I won't elaborate online have cost me countless hours of sleep in the past few months, and last night was no exception. Virtually no sleep. Very, very exhausting, it is.

The notorious Night-hawk,
Putt-Putter extraordinaire
(Photo by Robert Isenour)

But sleep deprivation cannot derail certain trains, and thus it was that Old Robgso, Suntigres, and the BigG met up this morning for a day of geocaching and the annual Geoputt event in Burlington. Our first destination was Siler City, where we put in a few miles of trail hiking — again in hair-curling heat and humidity — and snagged somewhere around twenty caches before heading to Burlington for the Putt-Putt event. For the big tournament, which brought thirty or so geocachers out from all around the region, I teamed up with Yoda Rob, BigG, and Suntigres. Now, back in the dark ages, I was an avid golfer — although Putt-Putt and golfing are almost mutually exclusive activities — and my team put in what appeared to be a pretty respectable showing. And at the end of it all, it turned out that we were indeed the winning team of the event. Woohoo! Wahaa! Hooooey! I even brought home a nice trophy for this astounding achievement. The notorious Night-hawk (a.k.a. Tom) won the individual best score, for which he was awarded an entirely too-small orange vest.

And that, ladies and germs, is why we play.

And in the horror fiction category, several authors of my acquaintance and of unspeakable talent took home their own haunted house trophies for superior achievement at the Bram Stoker award ceremony in Long Beach. The winners were:

Novel: The Fisherman, John Langan
First Novel: Haven, Tom Deady
Young Adult Novel: Snowed, Maria Alexander
Long Fiction: The Winter Box, Tim Waggoner
Short Fiction: “The Crawl Space,” Joyce Carol Oates
Fiction Collection: The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror, Joyce Carol Oates
Anthology: Borderlands 6, Oliva F. Monteleone & Thomas F. Monteleone
Non-Fiction: Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, Ruth Franklin
Poetry Collection: Brothel, Stephanie M. Wytovich
Graphic Novel: Kolchak the Night Stalker: The Forgotten Lore of Edgar Allan Poe, James Chambers
Screenplay: The Witch

My congratulations to the winners, all quite deserving of the recognition.

For me, tonight's aspiration to actually get a decent night's sleep, for it's going to be another long week. I do turn a whole year older on Tuesday, don't you know.

G'night.

One of the day's most intriguing geocache discoveries, all hand-knitted
and constructed by Sull427 (a.k.a. Jean)

"Go that way. No, THAT way. Dammit, ball." (Photo by Robert Isenhour)

Punkins19 and Skyhawk63 (Photo by Rob Isenhour)

Beating the Devil and Haw, Haw, Haw

Old Rodan at the Devil's Tramping Ground

Any weekend is a good weekend for geocaching, and on this one, the caching was good indeed. Lots of high-quality hides — from Siler City to Sanford to Pittsboro, from underground to far higher than folks rightfully ought to put their feet. Saturday, Bridget "Suntigres" Langley and I got together and headed south toward the Devil's Tramping Ground, not far from Siler City. Several years ago, I had gone there in what proved a vain attempt to make the cache there my 2,000th find, and again the following year to hunt a most excellent night cache ("Hell on Earth," GC1GZNP). My target, "Devil's Caching Ground" (GC1GKYR), missing when I had previously hunted it, had been replaced, and yesterday's hunt proved successful, making it find #6,499. Thanks to some ornery briers, I managed to shed some blood at Tramping Ground, so there's no telling what evil may result. Beware. After that, we targeted several other well-conceived hides, such as "True Love Always" (GC3CEMX), a very engaging multi, and "Sanford's RbC" (GC2BM3B), which allowed me to enjoy some deep, deep shade on a ridiculously warm December day.

No sleeping in this morning. Up before dawn to meet Rob "Robgso" Isenhour to head over to the Haw River, near Pittsboro, where we joined a group of about 18 folks for a hike along the rather rugged, exceedingly scenic river trail. Rob and I had gone caching there several months ago, along with Shoffner (a.k.a. Cupdaisy) but had been unable to find four out of ten bison tube hides along the trail. This time, with all those eyes and tactile appendages, we were able to find those and make a clean run of the series. The Haw River in this area is wide and very rocky, the west side oftentimes very steep and strewn with giant boulders. The climbing is strenuous, but the views are often spectacular.

One of the caches we visited involved walking across a narrow dam for fifty or sixty feet to reach an old pump house. Audra "Homestyle" Webb and her son, Zachary, were frothing at the mouth to undertake this particular terrain challenge, so off they went, accompanied by Lonnie "MBD" Drain for moral support. It took a bit of time, but they finally managed to find the cache, and they made the crossing both ways without ending up as fish food. Good for them, bad for the fish. Sorry, fish.

The hunt for what turned out to be my favorite cache of the day — "TowerLand" (GC235TA) — took us to an old fire tower just outside Pittsboro. Posting here that the cache is somewhere on the tower spoils nothing, as the cache page itself gives you a fair idea of the sort of challenge you face. The tower has clearly stood there for many, many years, and it's seen better days. Just getting to the level where we might begin our ascent in earnest required some serious effort, and a few of our number inadvertently provided some entertaining acrobatics both coming and going. After finding the cache, some of the crew continued all the way to the top; I opted to forgo this particular pleasure, mainly because, every now and then, MBD would give the tower a good shake, and I was never quite certain the whole construct wasn't going to come crashing down. At any rate, it was on our party's descent that the real entertainment began. A couple of the climbers, whom I will call Karen "e-bird67" Grigg and young Homekid, absolutely could not find their way off the tower. Coaching, coaxing, cajoling, pleading, and threatening proved ultimately useless. These poor souls may yet be up there, soon to become mere skeletons swaying in the breeze to warn others from undertaking such frightfully energetic adventures.

Do beware, and have a happy and safe holiday season.

Click images to enlarge.

"Mom! Uncle Rob is getting high!"

Can Audra be trapped in this prison drain forever? Let's hope not!

L: Audra and Lonnie make their way across the dam to find the cache. R: Rocking the tower!

Smile!